Turtles in RTS. Best tactic?

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Toaster Hunter

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I fight very defensively. I have tons of defenses, so I let them break themselves on them until I launch a counteroffensive when they are weakened.
 

TerranReaper

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Depends on the game and what you mean by turtle. The way I see turtling is just building static defenses in your base while building up units and not expanding. If you do that, you will lose most of the time because of this and will be overwhelmed. However, you can play defensively and still win.
 

ploppytheman

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I know this thread is kind of dead but I thought the people here would be better at games than they are. If you play a game at more than a casual level you play a different game. Playing an RTS vs AI is useless and easy. If you reference any strategy to playing an AI its void because the AI in RTS are absolutely horrible. Only by playing a human opponent, who is also skilled do you play the real game. If you are playing an AI you can do almost anything and win, which is why most single player games need story to not suck. There may be 100 strategies vs an AI but only 50 versus a casual human. Versus a skilled human you may have 10, and I'm talking about someone who plays the game to win. In fact if you lose a few workers in starcraft, a key dropship gets shotdown, a pylon powering your gateways goes down, or some speedlings run into your worker line because your zealots left your choke for 3 seconds YOU LOSE. The professional players play at up to 400 APM, which is actions per minute. That is insane and is 6+ actions every second. I currently play at around 100APM average and spike to near 200 in micro battles, and its very intense. You are building, teching, mining, scouting, and the whole game is extremely fast paced after the first minute. At my skill level, which isn't even high, the awareness factor is way more than any other game I have played and I love it. Multiplayer RTS requires such skill, awareness, and precision it is unlike any other game. Go watch a starcraft pro playing from first person and you'll see how lightning fast they are and how they switch camera to multiple spots and multi-task like nothing else in gaming.

If one key unit dies or something is just slightly out of place it will be abused. One small error can end a game in an instant, although this games can last a long time (up to 45min). Things such as turtling don't exist because it doesn't work. Sure some matchups like Terran mirrors are more tank defense wars but it is NOT turtling as they actively expand and rely on units rather than defensive structures because a few too many defenses and their units will be too small to hold. That is RTS. Having turtling being a viable strat will never work in a good RTS because defenses that auto attack and require little thought once placed are the antithesis to RTS multi-tasking and awareness.

If you do not play an RTS online with people at least 4 hours a week and try to get better you aren't even playing the same game. And if you do spend a lot of time and are turtling you are either lucky, terrible, or all the bads who die turtling in Starcraft moved to those games.

TL:DR
"He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere" - Art of War

And if you turtle you defend only a small area and will run out of resources. The immobility of defensive structures versus an armies ability to be defensive, offensive, harass, contain, etc is what makes turtling not viable. In real war supply roads will get cut as well so you will starve while they take the rest of your land unless your lucky enough to have severe terrain advantage around your entire nation, aka Britain. But the Nazis made rockets that could bomb England from Germany. And the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. America bombed Japan. And even the Greek Spartans eventually lost because of the Persians macro.

I was reading some old battles and there was a city on a hill and the army built a ramp and got in! Alexander the great made an island a peninsula and his siege towers went right up to the wall! Defense are to DELAY and DETER not to stop an army. Its like this in RL and games, except in games it would be stupid to have both sides sit in castles for a long time while they starve or spend hours to beat something that took zero skill and effort to do. If you like defense play a defense game or custom maps, real RTS is about offense and insane multi-tasking/awareness.
 

ploppytheman

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Toaster Hunter said:
I fight very defensively. I have tons of defenses, so I let them break themselves on them until I launch a counteroffensive when they are weakened.
A good player will see your defense with a scout and take the entire map and crush you with an army 10x your size or that specifically counters what you have, or watch you starve to death.
 

Roland07

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ploppytheman said:
Roland07 said:
My RTS experience is pretty much limited to Blizzard (including SC2) but assuming the general tactics are roughly the same for most strategy games, I just let people turtle. It limits their economy by definition, so while they're hunkered down, snickering about steam-rolling me to themselves, I try to ensure I have double their income, and can completely reverse it on them when they push out. Keeping a scouting eye on them is obviously important to ensure they're not doing some sneaky cheese like a mass drop or something, but turtles often destroy themselves just by hoping you don't out-macro them.
QFT. Oh wait I think thats not allowed here. This is how RTS is played. Just because your strategies work vs terrible noobs that are even worse than you does NOT mean your strategy is good. As skill level increases your options decrease. For instance in Arena I can often get a quick CC or chain mana burns on a bad, while the same tactics would be useless vs someone with any competence. RTS has the highest skill cap of any game and when you get to be decent probably 50% of your "strategies" won't work anymore. I know because I went from silver to platinum and things which would win me games in silver barely scratched platinum players. This goes for all games but is most evident in RTS or other high skill cap games.
I'm in platinum too... by definition if someone is turtling they're limiting they're macro. Rather than trying to find a way to beat them where they're strongest, in defense, its virtually always better to wait for them to come out and attack you, where you can have the advantage because you've had 100% map control the whole game.
 

Crazyshak48

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ploppytheman said:
Turtling isnt expanding, or going offensive for a long time, its building static defenses and staying in one area to try to mass an army. There is teching and playing defensive but turtling is pretty much 100% sit in your base. Otherwise its called a timing push or teching.

Ok then, apparently I don't really turtle then haha. Because I do play defensive and tech up, but I have no compunction about expanding or going offensive. So I guess I'm a defensive techie. That's ok, it sounds better than being a turtle :D

In that case, I would agree with most of the arguments made: Turtling is largely ineffective on its own. It can be used as part of a team as the "meatshield" (i.e. soaking damage while the other players work over the other team). Otherwise, you can make the mightiest superfortress out there, but eventually you'll run out of resources, and eventually the tides of enemy units will topple you.
 

thatstheguy

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When I play RTS, I can never turtle. No matter how good my defense is, I always managed to fuck something up and cause half of my infantry to be destroyed. I can play a decent defense, but without the offense, I'm fucked. As for other people, if you're good at turtling it can be a worthwhile tactic. Though, I don't see many use it as a permanent tactic throughout the entire round.
 

Jacob Guevara

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You have clearly never faced an Atriedes Turtle. Minos plus Mongoose plus Snipers plus enough resources and scouts to basically cover the entire map.

That aside, we have more things to consider before we declare "Turtling" a "non-viable strategy no matter what".

Multi-Player free for all games can reward Turtling, since you preserve forces while enemies weaken each other in battle.

Early civ games were eventually dominated by Turtles who built up cities and then their capital exponentially with trade caravans and rushed projects (remember, even if a Turtler only controls part of the map he/she can tech. Teching in some games adds resources. )

In Generals Zero Hour I once won a 4 hour game against Stealth General GLA. The guy spread all over the map and cloaked ALL his buildings and almost every single one of his units inside his cloaked tunnels. Going out there with an army, instead of Turtling would have meant I was ambushed at every point, and furthermore, I would have to waste time, being so exposed, trying to find every cloaked building one by one and hope my spotters are not taken out by demo teams or hijackers appearing out of nowhere (the enemy had cloaked bomb/explosive barrels too scattered around). By the end of the game he controlled 3/4ths of the map, however eventually I had enough Drop-Sites and WMDs to quickly nail him with the Super-Weapons general. So if you have more technology but fewer numbers, Turtling can be the way to go. Also if the opponent has some sort of unfair advantage which lets him/her quickly take and secure most of the map with impunity, Turtling may be the way to go.
 

Thedutchjelle

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In Starcraft 2 turtling is often a recipe for defeat. When my teammate and I notice someone is turtling, we simply grab map control and more expension sites for higher income. Then suddenly the turtler is severely disadvantaged due to the lower income and lower resource in general.

Still, sometimes a Terran refuses to leave and hides behind walls of tanks and turrets. Simply sieging it with similair weapons or throwing stuff at it until it breaks works well. If you expanded and he did not, you can afford to lose units whereas he cannot replace his.
 

JaceArveduin

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Turtling in BFME2 is a bad idea. You give up map control, and map control is resources. (for those of you who haven't played, you build resource buildings pretty much everywhere. The more you have, the more resources you have, the better off you are)

But yeah, if you can manage to turtle up with one of the good factions, you might win out in the end, really depends on the skill level of the players