Trivun said:
It's the cheapest, most n00bish tactic ever, and the only people who ever use rushing as a tactic in an RTS are those who have absolutely zero skill at the game whatsoever. Personally, I enjoy the long, drawn out hour-long or two-hour-long battles against people with equal or superior skill to me. It means I have a fun game where the opponent and I are evenly matched and you have to actually think and use skill and strategy (as the genre wants you to, it's in the name, dumbasses) to win.
So yeah, rushing is bad. Anyone rushes me, I usually beat them anyway because I prepare for it just in case. Then I annihilate them with a proper, well built army and proper tactics, as the game is supposed to be played. Then I insult the player and their mothers, and never play with them again. Their loss, right? It's one of the reasons I love the Total War series so much too, you have the armies on the ground at the same time and you're forced to use proper tactics, rushing in a game like that just means you get wiped out instantly...
Rushing isn't un-tactical. But we have to notice that Total War and Starcraft are very different games, to the point where merely describing them by genre, that is as RTS'es, will fail to describe them at all. In Starcraft, tactics and strategy is a different thing from what they are in Total War. Some will like one way, others will like it the other. Rushing is not a n00b strategy however - it sounds more like you don't understand the way Starcraft works. Which is perfectly fine, since I have never played Total War, and would probably be completely flabbergasted by that, and then beaten into a pulp when it turns out I suck at it.
Rushing is not n00b-ish. It may look that way to the outsider, oh, and sure, there ARE a lot of n00bs that put all their ressources and faith in a rush. Then, yes, it's a n00b-ish strategy, since it's incredibly bad, strategigally, to just copy off what a guide tells you to do and leave yourself with no backup.
But you have to rush a little. Not in the sense that you should hope to crush your opponent as quickly and cheesy as possible, but because in RTS'es like Starcraft, controlling an army is not all there is. Just as strategic and important is ressource gathering, and being able to adapt on the fly. Therefore, the rush, when not done as an all eggs in one basket thing, serves a different purpose - it is an early guerillia attack that can set your opponent back economically, and let's you see what he is currently building. When you don't do the super cheesy rushes, you will most likely not crush your opponent. You will rush a bit later, which means you will most certainly loose the troops you attack with, because of the later attack time, plus the time it takes to reach your opponents base gives him more time before the attack, effectively giving him the advantage in army strenght for that first early clash.
But what you CAN do, is use it as a tool to ignore his army and hunt his workers. Will you be slaughtered? Yes. But you will have struck a strategic blow against him, and you will have information on what he is doing. This leads to further strategic actions - your army building. A skilled player doesn't just rush. A skilled player sacrifices some troops in order to harrass his opponentand gather intel. See the difference? It's not so much blitzkrieg, as it is actual tactics that you would see in real life. Bar the sacrifice part of course. When you know what your opponent is doing, you can start building counters for the real clashes. Instead of building a huge army and hope that it matches his, you will actually take care in teching in the direction that is best suited to take on what your opponent is doing. You will have to think fast, build correctly, and constantly adapt as the situation changes. Starcraft is very big on that every unit is effective against something, but fares poorly against other stuff. That early rush is the strategic move that secures you the upper hand for later in the game.
Of course, I speak from the perspective of one that enjoys Starcraft, so my argument and conclusion is, to say the least, pretty jaded. But I have to say, no, it's no n00btastic, it's a platform from which real strategic thinking can develope.
Yes, there are those that use the infamous 6pools or cannon rushes, and yes, they are being cheesy and n00b-ish. But thing is, you don't find that among the players that have gotten the grasp of the game. They are not viable tactics, once we are done learning how the game works, so they shouldn't really detract from the game or the genre, since they are not used beyond the lowest league.
