Page "Real-time strategy" Paragraph 20

In an article for Gamasutra, Nathan Toronto criticizes real-time strategy games for too often having only one valid means of victory — attrition — comparing them unfavorably to real-time tactics games.

Players ' awareness that the only way for them to win or lose is militarily makes them unlikely to respond to gestures of diplomacy.

The result is that the winner of a real-time strategy game is too often the best tactician rather than the best strategist.

Troy Goodfellow counters this by saying that the problem is not that real-time strategy games are lacking in strategy ( he says attrition is a form of strategy ), rather it is that they too often have the same strategy: produce faster than you consume.

He also states that building and managing armies is the conventional definition of real-time strategy, and that it is unfair to make comparisons with other genres.