The RTS genre is being held back by fans

written 2025-08-06

The real-time strategy genre is being held back by fans who oppose quality of life features.

RTS games need more quality of life features than other genres, because they have much more complicated controls and many more things that need to be controlled.

But often the need for such features isn't obvious until you've experienced the feature. I played Age of Empires 2 as a kid, and I loved it. I didn't notice it was missing any essential features. But after playing Definitive Edition, I was introduced to:

The ability to queue multiple commands for a unit by holding shift. Previously, if you wanted a unit to do 2 things in series, you had to wait for it to finish the first one and then give it the second command.
An "attack move" command, which tells units to move somewhere while attacking enemies they encounter along the way. Previously, if you ordered units to move somewhere, they would keep going even if they got attacked along the way.
Being able to bookmark units, assigning them to number keys so you can jump back to them easily. Previously, you just had to remember where everything was and move the camera back to it if you wanted to give it a command.
The ability to place farms in the closest spot around a building by holding the mouse over the building and holding shift. Previously, you had to move your mouse to each place you wanted to place one, and it was hard to place them precisely, since you often want to build several farms quickly.

Now that I've experienced these things, RTS games without them are unplayable. These were great innovations.

But they got me thinking, what else are we missing? And I thought of a few other quality of life features, most importantly the ability to tell a building to keep producing units as long as you can afford them. Currently, you have to jump back to each of your production buildings every few seconds to add another unit to the queue.

Some RTS games actually do have that feature (Beyond All Reason), but the reason it's not in Age of Empires Definitive Edition isn't because the devs haven't thought of it. Every time someone proposes it on the forums, an army of dipshit fans complain that it would "remove skill from the game" or something like that.

Well, it *would* remove a skill from the game: the skill of remembering to press each of 5 different buttons once every 20 seconds. But is that the skill the game *should* be about? The genre is called real-time strategy, not repetitive task simulator!

Removing this skill from the game would not leave the game shallow. It's incredibly strategically deep, and removing the need to spend so much time managing repetitive things would allow players to focus more on that strategy. It would make the game much better.

It would also make it much more approachable. I watch a lot of low-skill RTS gameplay, and sometimes those players ask what they did wrong, and I feel bad because the honest answer is "you forgot to keep pressing the create villager button every 20 seconds so nothing else you did mattered". Making this muscle memory takes a long time, and it is *so* important that until you do, strategy doesn't really matter, games are won based on whoever is better at remembering to keep pressing buttons at regular intervals. I think that's bullshit.

Automating unit production is by far the biggest example, but there are many other quality of life features I've seen proposed for these games, and every time they're shot down by dipshit fans complaining that it removes skill. These people are veterans who have climbed this mountain of building muscle memory, so they feel entitled to be rewarded for that, and are offended by the thought of other people not having to climb that mountain.

They are wrong. RTS games should not continue to suck because some people are used to them sucking.