Cold Take #36 - Bounding the Strategic Triangle

Strategic freedom is a fragile thing, yet the feeling of devising your own plans is something that many games try to instil. The issue is that, as players explore and refine their strategies, the space of viable strategies can narrow down to a few options. This is usually seen as a problem with competitive multiplayer, but singleplayer games are not immune. Any game that offers strategic exploration and mastery risks revealing itself to have only a single best approach, and if the challenges become great enough, players will resort to it. This problem is never fully solved, only managed, but there is still quite a bit in the managing.

This post is on some concepts that help tackle the problem above: strategic RPS (rock-paper-scissors) and the strategic triangle.

Strategic RPS is a simple model of strategy that reduces decision making to one of three approaches: offence, defence, and economy. These approaches form a natural counter relationship where offence beats economy, economy beats defence, and defence beats offence. Many players have an intuitive understanding of strategic RPS, as it is common knowledge that defensive play is beaten by investing in economy and eventually overwhelming the defences.

The power of strategic RPS is its generality, at least if we define it broadly enough. This requires a brief detour into the idea of economy. The standard economy of RTS involves extracting resources such as metal, ore, or minerals, then spending it on units and more economy. But the economy part of strategic RPS encompasses more than that. To start with, it is useful to think of construction capacity (buildpower in Zero-K) as a form of local, unstockpileable, resource. We can go further though, as the cost of anything can be converted into the time taken to assemble its prerequisites, which suggests treating travel time as a kind of cost as well. Many games have resources in the most general sense, but what sets strategy games apart is the ability to make choices that dramatically increase your resource income.

We will call income-increasing decisions "economic investment", and the term encompasses all ways to reduce your strength now for the promise of greater strength later. This covers building metal extractors and power plants, but also covers actions such as research and increasing your tech level. An upgraded unit is a more efficient unit, so upgrades are roughly equivalent to generating extra income that can only be spent on unit production. Local actions can be economic investment too, such as moving a constructor to a better location. The constructor trades the work it could be doing now for the ability to do work in a more advantageous position later. It takes more time to "produce" a constructor far from your factory.

It is worth taking a closer look at the relationships between the three aspects of strategic RPS. In doing so I want to demonstrate the strategic RPS is something intrinsic to strategy games. Once you have economic investment, you have strategic RPS, and it takes extra work to downplay or remove. It all hinges on economic investment, so we will start there.

Offence beats economy because economic investment leaves the investor vulnerable to attack. RTS needs offence because otherwise there would be nothing to stop players funnelling all their income into more and more economy. Strictly speaking, a game with absolutely no offence would lack a win condition, as even the most economically focused strategy needs to turn its overwhelming resource advantage into a way to kill the enemy. This is how economy beats defence: if both