The RTS APM myth

last edited 2025-04-10

I've heard a lot of people who don't like real-time strategy games dismiss the genre for being largely about how fast you can input actions rather than strategy. (APM means actions per minute, a commonly measured statistic.) I've even heard some who *do* like the genre attribute their inability to improve, or their individual losses, to not enough APM. This is mostly a myth.

I've watched beginners play these games. I've trained them myself. I never see them struggling to click or press keys fast enough. What I do see is them just doing nothing, looking around, trying to decide what to do, or only looking at one part of the map while their units are idle somewhere else. In other words, it's not that they can't input actions fast enough, it's that they don't know what actions to input.

If you've watched experts play these games, you might've noticed they seem to have incredibly high APM. But what you might've also noticed if you look closer, is that *most of those actions do nothing*. I see them spam clicking on a destination to send their units there when one click would do, or spam clicking a button to buy something when they can see they don't have resources, because they expect the resources to come in any second. I've even heard pros comment on this phenomenon, explaining that it's a psychological thing, they spam actions to keep themselves alert. I even have my own psychological pointless actions sometimes, though for a different reason: in the early phase of an Age of Empires match, you're supposed to set a bookmark on your scout so you can jump to it later, so I have a muscle memory to do this after selecting my scout for the first time, and that muscle memory sometimes causes me to set the bookmark every time I select my scout even if it's already set.

The point is that despite the spam clicking and keypressing you often see while watching these games, you don't need above-average dexterity to be good at them, and dexterity is not the primary difference between skill levels.

I want to highlight that even micro is mostly based on decisions, not dexterity. I'll use some more examples from the game I'm most familiar with, Age of Empires 2:

There are multiple strategies for micromanaging ranged units in combat. Focus-firing single enemy units has obvious value for reducing the enemy's damage output faster, especially if their army is also ranged. But if you have way more than enough units to kill an enemy in one volley, then by focus firing you waste a lot of damage. So it might be better to use the stop command to interrupt your units' movement so they all auto-fire at whatever's closest to them. But that still means they all fire at the same time. If you have a real lot of overkill, it can actually be better to *not* kite and just let your units fight automatically as the enemy comes in range, so they fire at different times.

If you have a group of cavalry trying to kill a group of archers, an advanced tactic is to order some of them to move *past* the archers instead of attacking immediately, to surround them so they can't kite (ranged units can normally kite even if they're slower because they can reload while moving). The value of doing this depends on the number of units, and on the surroundings: if there's a wall nearby, you might prefer to corner them against that; if there's an enemy castle nearby, it's more important to stop them from retreating into it.

In castle/trebuchet wars, you have to decide whether your trebuchets should be shooting the enemy castle or the enemy trebuchets. This decision depends on too many factors to list, but one of them is which of you needs your castle more, since targeting enemy trebuchets will keep both castles alive longer.

None of these micro strategies require high APM. Deciding which is appropriate for your situation is where the real skill is.

To be clear, inputting actions faster definitely gives *some* advantage in these games, but it's much less important than inputting *good* actions, and it's very unlikely to be the primary reason you lose a game.