Rush, Boom, Turtle: Naval Gazing

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"No water maps!"

That's not an uncommon refrain when you're setting up a multiplayer game of Age of Empires III, Rise of Nations, or Supreme Commander. If you end up with a naval map, particularly one that puts you and your opponents on different land masses, the dynamics change. Sea change scares people.

But in an RTS with a good naval subgame, water is nothing to be scared of. Most contemporary RTSes with navies are designed specifically to include water. Dehydrating the map partially gimps the design. Insisting on no water maps is like saying you can't play a certain faction, you can't build cavalry, or you can't attack on the left flank.

Supreme Commander is an excellent example of an RTS built around water. Along with air and land, the sea is a third of Supreme Commander's world. The developers have modeled sonar, underwater units, torpedo weaponry, walking destroyers and awesome experimental ships, all carefully built for how they interact with air and land units.

Of course, it wasn't always this way in RTSes, so you can hardly blame people for being afraid of the water. Before water was done right, it was just a sideline. Building a navy was often a waste of resources, and it pulled your attention in a whole other direction with minimal payoff. There wasn't really any reason to be out there, splashing around to no effect. Water was just something you crossed. Your navy was a way to get units from one island to another, laboriously loading them onto transports and then unpacking them again on the other side. RTS stood for "real-time stevedore," and navies weren't navies so much as elaborately micromanaged ferry systems.

Many developers simply don't bother with the wet work required to do a naval subgame. Navies require their own terrain, and therefore their own units, and therefore their own rules. In the scheme of RTSes, it's harder to float than to fly -- and even then, the "no water maps!" crowd will never see the results of all that work.

Earlier games like Red Alert 2 and Age of Mythology invested some real creativity at sea. The balance among subs, destroyers and battleships is nearly as clichéd (i.e. intuitive) as the archer/infantry/cavalry triangle. Red Alert 2 folded into the equation mind-controlled giant squids that crushed ships and specially trained dolphins that drove away the squids. As you aged up in Age of Mythology, among your choice of minor gods was almost always one with cool naval powers. There's nothing quite like a monster turtle or a kraken to complement your triremes. Age of Mythology was based on the juxtaposition of the historical and the fantastical, at sea and on land.

Everything changed with Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations, which began an era of naval reform in RTSes. Big Huge redesigned the naval subgame from the seafloor up. The first thing to go was the pain in the butt of ferrying. Instead of building transports and cramming in your little dudes one at a time, you simply gave your units a destination. If it involved crossing water, they automatically loaded themselves into boats, represented by the unit converting itself into a transport. Of course, if you wanted to actually defend the transports, you had to build a conventional navy.