But I’m trying to be precise here, so bear with me. Ok, so what do I mean when I say “permanence of investments?” The term may sound a little overwrought, I suppose. Economics Across Time: The Durability of your Investment The Bastion is one of the most durable units in the Goo faction’s arsenal in Petroglyph’s 2015 RTS Grey Goo What is the importance of ‘permanence’ in RTS games, what types of thing in the genre are typically ‘permanent’ investments? And what can and does permanence add to competitive strategy games? That’s what I want to look at. One that’s consistently fascinated me is the decisions designers make around the permanence of a player’s investments. Games as different as AirMech and Supreme commander show us a large and diverse number of complex design permutations in many areas. Ranging from broad concepts like: fog of war, unit acceleration, physics-based weapon firing, or gross economic models to more precise and minute ones like unit weapon reload type, unit aim time, unit animation backswing, or how long a harvester takes to gather a resource and how many resources it makes in a trip.
There are a tremendous number of factors that designers can tweak when creating a strategy game to shape gameplay.
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