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[Histidine]

Calling Starsector an RTS without caveats (and worse, drawing parallels to C&C) completely glosses over several huge differences:

• A player-controlled ship can expect to do twice as well by many metrics as an otherwise identical AI-controlled ship with the same skills, many more times for high-end "twitch-type" ships (Hyperion et al.)
• The player spends at least three quarters of their time looking at the direct control screen rather than the command screen
• The player-controlled ship involves much more manual control than an identical ship not currently being piloted (you steer, aim the guns, point the shield and select weapons manually), a mechanic completely absent from most games classified as RTS (C&C included)
• The player issues maybe 2-3 commands a minute to non-piloted ships on average; Starcraft wikia describes 150 APM as the productive average for a proficient player
• Replacing lost units in SS is most definitely not as simple as selecting the relevant builder/factory and clicking a button

[sycspysycspy]

@goduranus

[Thaago]

Hey now, no need to be hostile to goduranus. I don't think he's trolling, I just think we have a disagreement.

... RTS ...

...

• The player issues maybe 2-3 commands a minute to non-piloted ships on average; Starcraft wikia describes 150 APM as the productive average for a proficient player
...

I love Starcraft, but it annoys the hell out of me that they call it a strategy game when proficiency requires that rapid of actions. It falls (very, very) firmly into the category of tactics, not strategy. While there is strategy in Starcraft, players usually only make 4 or 5 actual strategic decisions in the course of a match (and sometimes only 1).[/list]

[ValkyriaL]

Having played Starcraft myself back in the day, I dont really see inhuman APM necessary, I was beating people with several times my APM because all they do is spam the ground with units for "better control" or click the map, buildings several times just to keep the APM high, but they don't actually do anything for the most part, keep your actions relevant, not numerous.

Last Starcraft grand finals or semi finals or whatever that went on yesterday, proves my point, where Hydra with 200-300 APM, completely crushed Masu, who possibly has the highest ever APM recorded of 700(WHUT?)

Starcraft is very much a "Strategy" game, tactics is something you execute, which are part of a strategy you have planned out ahead of time, the strategy may change depending on what needs doing, with different tactics to achieve said strategic goal.


As for Starsector, I give like.. 1 or 2 commands per battle, the fights are usualy over in minutes, mostly achieved from the POV of my flagship, very little thought goes behind any of my actions.

And as such, Starsector is an Open world Top down space shooter with some extra flavours, not an RTS, as mentioned above.

[TaLaR]

But 200-300 apm is already fairly ridiculous.
Even most basic things like pathfinding need to be constantly microed in SC in real-time. That's why I've never seriously played it past single player campaign.

It's not that I'm against micro itself - I play a lot of tactical games, but only if they have active pause or are turn based.

...Anyway a few command points that you have in SS, simply do not afford anything like that. Orders are fairly general, you can't order anything to same level of precision as you can execute yourself. SS is obviously focused on action, command layer is there to serve as background.

[ValkyriaL]

It is pretty high yeah, but he was nowhere near as fast as the person he fought, and still won flawlessly, so he obviously used those 250ish APM for more important things than the guy with tripple his actions.

I myself probably had like 80-120 APM and sometimes higher, because the game kind of forces you to keep this pace to be even remotely competetive, same thing with company of heroes, I felt myself really picking up the pace after a while during matches, because the game forced me to, made your arm and fingers hurt after just 1 game.