You sit down at your computer and load up a game of Littlewargame.

Across your screen and through an Internet connection lurks a mind that’s working furiously. Stop the Supply Block, drop the main, regroup to the natural, rally while macroing and shift-selecting your units, micro these few units because in ten seconds that person knows the game will be won or lost in a thousand little decisions their hands can create. They gather their forces, prespilt for the coming engagement, and their timing window seems perfect as all their advantages have added up to culminate in this one attack… the fingers glide across the keyboard as the army is sent….

… and you see waaaay too many units come into your base and kill everything. Your small army evaporates in a matter of seconds and you lose in crushing fashion. What the hell, the game just started! How long has it been? You check the game clock… three minutes? Five?

The first player might enjoy the win, but it’s not as visceral and meaningful as the long-fought and hard game all like them secretly look for each game. They love the challenge and proving themselves against a variety of ever-stronger opponents and tactics. This wasn’t what they were looking for, and yet they like the game. The second player was barely feeling out the controls and might have just learned that making more Workers is a good thing. Littlewargame represented a chance to play something new and unlike any other game for them, and yet their first experience is a smashing loss. What happened?

Clearly the first answer is the easiest: In a game of skill, both players mismatched against one another. This is a common thing in competition, as I’m sure Kobe above us could explain, and yet saying the difference was between player skill wouldn’t be a satisfactory answer. After all, isn’t Kobe Bryant vastly more skilled than the benchwarmers in the NBA? No, the difference isn’t in player skill, it’s in who the players are playing against and how they learn to score. Both are inextricably entwined within one another as an example will show.

Consider a first-person shooter game where the primary mode of multiplayer play is anything except 1v1 Golden Guns in the Archive… that is to say, everything made in the last decade. Whether it’s Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, or even an older game such as Day of Defeat, they all share the same facet of multiplayer: Whether a team game such as Capture the Flag or an individual’s game of Deathmatch, every player is limited in that they can not be all-knowing. Almost no matter their skill level, they’re going to make mistakes that will allow a less experienced player to kill them. The sum of the more experienced player’s skill normally allows them to finish the game round ahead in kills, Flags, or whatever the metric for success is in the game type, but newer players will also have scored their own points.

These aren’t as subjective as personal benchmarks or feelings or even recognizing what they did well in the game. The newest players in any game, video game or otherwise, don’t possess enough knowledge to recognize self-improvement benchmarks. What they do recognize are these points and moments where they felt powerful. After all, delaying an opponent’s expansion for a minute is less immediately thrilling than

To find that, look no further than everybody’s favorite benchmark: Kills / Deaths / Assists. As a person with horribly low skill in the FPS genre, I celebrate the incredibly bad 5/12/4 against bots… and yet I can point to those five kills and feel that I’ve had an impact. I can feel good even if I’m objectively terrible. After all, those WERE Recruit level bots. K/D/A gives me a way to compute score and determine how much better or worse I am than somebody else. If the top player in the game (xxL33TD3$trucT0Rxx) ended with 22/4/9, I can immediately get an idea of much more skilled that person is than I am. More importantly, K/D/A gives me solid benchmarks for how I can improve. If I play for a month I might still lose to xxL33TD3$trucT0Rxx’s 22/4/9, but I can look at my NEW K/D/A of 11/10/4 and remind myself that I’m doing better.

In Littlewargame, well, in Real-Time Strategy games as a whole, there is no substitute for K/D/A. The game’s resolution is binary: You win, or you lose. While there are hundreds of ways to improve in the game, it’s very easy to play and improve yet still never see the results of your improvement. This combines with the genre’s vertical learning curve with the natural results of people just leaving the game, be it Littlewargame or StarCraft2 or any other RTS. The primary problem is that the new player never feels a sense of mastery and rather than experience the thrill of seeing how much more skill they can gain, they experience the inverse of that: The crushing awareness of just how objectively bad their in-game skill.

This is compounded when players are competitively set against other players. Without ever having the chance to feel powerful, or indeed anything other than confusion, players leave their newfound game for something that may be just as objectively difficult to master, yet rewards their need for power and displays their small victories. Remember that this is in a competitive environment; while Dark Souls, Kaizo Mario, IWBTG, and Touhou games (and clones) are remarkably difficult, they pit you against an environment that is measured and to a degree predictable. A human opponent is not as comforting or as stable.



Pictured above: The reigning champions of making you feel good when you’re objectively bad.

But it’s not all gloom-and-doom. In recognition of these faults, more and more competitive games have tutorials that they’re specifically crafting for newer players. For a majority of genres, tutorials are a successful approach to the above problems. It creates an environment in which the player can feel powerful and have progression. It creates a stable environment that will create the same challenge for a progressing player to eventually dominate on their way towards becoming ready for the multiplayer world.

Yet among this success, RTS games have traditionally failed. They often presuppose a base level of knowledge progress in linear fashion. New item segues into new items segues into new item without a chance for the newest players to feel clever or to gain understanding of the tools. Another particular difficulty is that tutorials are often part and parcel of the campaign, and so the campaign’s difficulty ramps up as missions are completed until eventually the player is stranded in a story they can not complete because they’ve been asked too much too quickly. Still others leave players that finish them completely unprepared for their first games against human opponents or ingrain habits into their players that will actively harm them in a multiplayer game.

With all of this being said, another article will be posted soon on the path I have taken to correct these issues for Littlewargame and the common pitfalls of other RTS tutorials. I believe there is a way to incorporate Tutorials into an RTS game in a way that rewards players at multiple levels and prepares them for online play without bogging them down or advancing too rapidly. For now, you can play Tutorial Missions 1-5 by searching “Tutorial” under Singleplayer or Multiplayer Games. If you enjoyed this article or got something out of it, please leave a comment below.