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Your guide to walls in real-time strategy games
10/7/2008 5:53 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

In some games, walls are great for cheap perma-scouting. Just build little wall bits around the map and you'll get a notice when enemies attack them. Even if they know enough not to attack bits of wall, you can still enjoy a little advance warning on the mini-map when enemies pass the wall bit's line-of-sight.

But the biggest pitfall is that I've never met an AI player that could deal with walls. Especially building them. Until walls are something that computer players can respond to effectively and use themselves, walls won't be a fully supported feature. Here's where I shake my head sadly and say, "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't make an AI that builds walls..."

Wall hall of fame

Electronic Arts Los Angeles deserves credit for trying to do some clever stuff with walls, even if it never quite worked. The original The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth gave the good guys walled cities, while the bad guys were stuck out in the open, naked and unwalled. In the sequel, good factions (and Isengard, natch) could manually build walls, but they had to begin from a player's main fortress. As EA fumbled around trying to balance The Battle for Middle-earth II, walls were variously crucial and superfluous. This sort of see-sawing game balance usually marks a failure at the design level. Although I still play it and love it, I'm not sure The Battle for Middle-earth II ever achieved any sort of equilibrium for competitive players. In its current state, walls are pretty effective as mid- to late-game flies in the ointment. When you look down and see that your army is full and you have 15,000 Middle-earth bucks, you might as well throw up some walls, which can upgrade into quick and easy defensive positions.

My favorite use of walls was in Age of Empires III, but not for anything inherent in the design. Age III is a very fussy economic RTS, with lots of options for base-building. These include walls that can be upgraded as part of the interplay among units, buildings and artillery. But they're still typical walls, more often neglected than not.

When Age III first came out, I was playing an online game with one of the guys from Ensemble. He obviously knew the game well -- he helped make it, duh! -- so he was going easy on me while I fumbled around trying to get an economy going. I had lost my Explorer to, I dunno, monkeys or something. Explorers are units everyone gets to explore the map and gather treasures, and they often die in ignoble circumstances. But a dead Explorer can be revived by sending an army to do a corpse run. To help remind you where your deceased Explorer lies, a despairing thought bubble loiters over his dead body.

When I eventually went to get my Explorer back, my opponent had built a tiny prison around his body from wall segments. Of course, you can just ransom your Explorer's body, but it didn't matter. This was the most awesome thing I've ever seen done with walls in an RTS. It was a way of saying, without malice or mockery, "I'm better at this game than you, so I'm just going to take a little time out to construct an impromptu prison around your Explorer as a way of saying 'Hello.'" In fact, the only thing better would have been if he'd built walls to spell out the word "Hello."