With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe: The Tell-Tale Cheese
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be posting a little bit at a time about my ideas for an RTS.
Also mentioned in the previous post, an RTS with mobile bases would be difficult to balance. For me to explain why, I have to explain proxies.
Keep in mind that, unless otherwise noted, I’ll be discussing Starcraft: Brood War for most of my examples.
It’s an RTS with simple rules but incredible depth, and it’s the one I’m most familiar with. While games like Dawn of War have extra mechanics like cover, I plan to model my RTS after Starcraft, to a degree, because the simplicity of Starcraft’s rules has also led to that much more creativity. If you really feel unfamiliar with Starcraft, or want to find more information than the bare minimum I’m putting here, visit the Teamliquid Starcraft Wiki.
In Starcraft, you’re “expected” to place your tech buildings and your production buildings inside your base. That’s the safest place for them, and it consolidates all your stuff in one area so that whatever unit you’re using to build them won’t have to run too far out (unless you’re zerg, in which case your builder morphs into the building), and it lets you focus on one area of the map whenever you want to crank out another round of units.
The text below the page break is an enormous aside about proxies. If you want to read it really badly, click ‘more.’
Anyway, back to the main point. If you think a bunker rush is scary, imagine this. Your crawler is a colossal mobile unit with a passable attack. The current mechanic for it has it able to move, attack, and produce units at the same time. (This was not the mechanic used in C&C 4, though. There, your crawler would have to unfold into an immobile building with no attack while it pumped units.) So, you pick the faction with the units that are the fastest to produce. As you’ll see in my later posts about the available factions, this will be modeled heavily after the Starcraft Zerg. To avoid lawsuits, (Hah!) I’ll call this the Swarm. So you take your Swarm Crawler and march it toward the middle of the map, producing units all the way. As your units pop out, you send them to every part of the map to scout your opponent, who is likely teching to the next available unit (the poor sap, he’ll never see it coming!). By the time your hulking crawler makes its way to the enemy crawler, you’ll have a small but scary force of Swarm units, while your opponent has not made the best use of his production time. Your units outnumber your opponent’s, so your crawler’s HP will have a slight lead over that of your opponent’s crawler. Eventually, after a battle of attrition your crawler comes out on top. Your opponent’s only defense is to do exactly what you are doing, and that makes for a boring game.
I’ll admit, C&C 4 did a good job of preventing this sort of cheese. Since you have to turn your crawler into a building to create anything, this kind of rush is just out of the question. If your opponent tries to rush, you turn your own crawler back into its unit form to give your army the upper hand. However, this honestly feels a bit stiff to me. I want a crawler that can reinforce on-the-fly. If the crawler can move, but not attack, then you’ll run into problems when your units are produced piecemeal and lack the crawler’s support.
My favored solution is to have the crawler able to attack, but not move - or move really slowly - while it produces units, and be completely helpless when researching tech. This would force the attrition rush to be made with an inferior force, while the opponent would be able to flee if you insisted on parking your crawler nearby.
Rushing is still an option. If you gain an understanding of the timings of the game, such as when a certain unit is slated to appear, you can in theory create a large force and attack your opponent while he’s halfway through researching some powerful tech, forcing him to cancel his research to defend his crawler and delay his tech. Since time is the only resource in this game, it could be a major setback. The crawler’s function will have to be determined through extensive testing, but for now, this seems to be the option that can provide the most tactical possibilities.
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But sometimes, people will stick their tech or production somewhere else. This is generally only an option early game, and it’s often a form of cheese: an attempt to end the game early by catching the opponent off guard, since you’ll be at a disadvantage if the attack fails. I mentioned hiding tech earlier. Zerg can’t really hide tech that well since they only have one place to stick their buildings early game. Protoss and Terran can hide buildings, but they generally go about it differently.
The Protoss has two options to hide tech: the robotics tech tree, and the Ttemplar tech tree. With the Templar tech tree, you keep your gateways (production facility) and cybernetics core (basic tech) in your base, but you send out a single probe (worker unit) to some odd corner of the map, sometimes behind the mineral lines of an uncommonly-used expansion, and throw down a pylon, Citadel of Adun, and the only building you’re actually gunning for, the Templar Archives. Once that finishes, you pray you don’t get spotted and build Dark Templar-devastating units that can’t be attacked unless your opponent sees them with other special units. Then you use your invisible psionic alien ninjas to go kill everything in your opponent’s base, while there’s nothing he can do about it. If you get scouted and you can’t do enough damage, you’re pretty much doomed since you cut back on probes so you could get DT’s out faster.
The other option is the robotics tech tree. You do the same thing as when hiding templar, but you make sure that the odd corner is in an odd spot that is actually close to your opponent’s base, and put down a robotics facility instead. When that’s finished, you start building a shuttle (transport unit) from the robo and have a probe hide the robotics support bay somewhere in a corner of your base. When that finishes, you queue up a reaver (splash damage unit) at the robotics facility. The timing has the shuttle finish and the reaver start just a few seconds after the robotics support bay finishes, so you don’t lose much time by building a shuttle first. Then you have the reaver build scarabs (its explosive, specialized bullets), load it into the shuttle, and have some fun blowing stuff up as you drop it into your opponent’s base. If it’s not scouted, and you manage your reaver well enough, you’ll kill a lot of stuff in your opponent’s base. If it’s scouted, or your opponent just decides to build anti-air to be safe, you’re not as doomed as you would be if your opponent fended off DT’s, since you didn’t cut your economy and the reaver is still useful later on. But at the same time, your army is smaller than what it would have been, and you’re saddled with a building that’s hard to protect.This is closer to the proxy that I’m thinking of. Terrans can try doing something like this with Starports, but it’s not usually worth it, as the only Starport unit available, the Wraith, has a wimpy air-to-ground attack. Anything more threatening than that would require your buildings to sit there like a sitting duck. Hiding a factory is kind of pointless, since your opponent will be preparing for factory units anyway; they’re standard play. But the Terran can cheese. Oh, can they cheese. It’s not that their cheese is the fastest or the most effective - the fastest cheese is the Zerg 4pool, the only cheesy rush build, or just about any build for that matter, to become famous outside of its own game. Just go search for the Age of Empires “Yamato Cavalry Rush” and see what turns out. “Zerg Rush” turns up 300,000 results, plus images, on Google, while the Yamato Cavalry Rush turns up just 145,000. That’s respectable, but the truly hilarious thing is that the second result for the cavalry rush is on a TVTropes page titled “Zerg Rush.”
Anyway, in Starcraft circles, Terran is famous for their cheese mainly because of the audacity and the creativity of it. A famous cheeser was Flash. Now one of the strongest players in the game, he first became famous for cheesing a strong Protoss player out of a tournament with mass marines. I don’t have the video, and I don’t want to get into an involved description of it, but it was pretty audacious. Other entertaining cheese you can find includes iloveoov vs zeus, “Bisu’s ultimate proxy,” and a lot of stuff in the pimpest plays video. But the king of cheese is the emperor of Terran, Boxer. There is a video of “Boxer’s paratrooper rush,” where he proxied four barracks, floated them into a corner of the opponent’s base, somehow avoided being detected, and just cranked infantry out of four barracks until everything was dead. Another rush was against his student, iloveoov, when he built two barracks inside OOV’s base and streamed Medic/Marine until OOV’s base was gone. He lost the series to OOV, though.
Boxer’s most infamous rush was his bunker rush, times three. He destroyed NC_Yellow in the OSL by bunker rushing three times, finishing up the semifinals in under half an hour. The first game ran long, but the other two were finished in minutes. This semifinals match is actually more famous than the finals from the same tournament.
Today, Terran cheese usually comes in the form of that bunker rush. Against a greedy opponent of any race who goes for an expansion before producing attacking units, the Terran can scout, proxy a barracks, build a bunker right next to the expansion, and fill it with marines. It’s ruthlessly effective, and it can be very hard to defend.