I'm going to start making a list of TB-tard arguments:
Ok let's go
"TB can't cope with large combats, therefore large combats suck anyway. All combats should be mid or small in size because it doesn't matter if you give up on modelling necromancers summoning undead hordes, demon-portals, or getting into a fight with an entire enemy fortress when you're discovered trying to sneak around."
Except it can, and when appropriate large battles can be cool. All I said is "trash mob encounters for the sake of trash mob encounters are shit" because you went all "oooh a whole dozen wow so very much" at the example I brought of an actual encounter my DM provided in one of her sessions. Well duh,
this was the perfect number of enemies for that particular encounter. I just used it to illustrate that certain simple and effective methods exist to make combat with many units in TB quick and not a drag. Yes, combat with more units can also be done well in TB. Up to 100 units even. Just play a good turn-based strategy game as an example. These exist. Try Battle Isle, maybe, those tend to have huge unit numbers. Thing is, these kinds of mass encounters have to be done well or they'll end up as a slog rather than fun, regardless of whether your game is RT or TB.
In an RPG, you play as a group of adventurers or a single adventurer. Party size is usually between 1 and 6, sometimes up to 8. If you have your 8 characters face off against 100 enemies, you need to design the enemies in such a way that they become threatening without being overwhelming, which is tough to design when it comes to such huge numbers. It's simply a question of practicality. If you make the individual units too weak, it will be a slog where you slay one enemy after the other while they chip away at your hitpoints. If you make the individual units too strong, it will be an unbeatable encounter. Although it would be legitimate to have a scenario where the player has to escape from an overwhelming horde before his characters die, sure. That could be cool.
Thing is, in RPGs the player controls between 1 and 8 characters, and you're supposed to keep your entire party alive throughout all the encounters. In strategy games, both TB and RT, you're supposed to lose some of your own units, too. When you send 100 guys vs the enemy's 100 guys the balance is very different to your 8 guys facing off against 100 enemy guys.
Then, of course, there is the issue of control. You say "moving groups of enemy units as if they were single units" is a workaround. It's not a workaround, it's a sensible decision for controlling larger amounts of units without it becoming a clusterfuck. It is also a thing in real time games.
Look at Total War and how you control formations of soldiers, rather than every single soldier separately. In Age of Empires 2, you can group units with hotkeys to more easily control them, and you can control up to 40 units at a time. In Cossacks, an RTS with very huge numbers of soldiers on the field, you can form your soldiers into formations to more easily control them. Grouping units like that isn't a workaround, it's a necessity when unit numbers reach a certain size, in both RT and TB. It's just a matter of practicality. Compare something like Age of Empires, where units only have simple ranged or melee attacks and micromanaging them is all about maneuvering them and focusing on targets, to Warcraft 3 where every unit has special abilities and you micromanage most of your units individually. Warcraft 3 has a much smaller population cap compared to Age of Empires 2, because it's more focused on the microing of single units, while AoE is more focused on the macro of building larger armies and performing tactical maneuvers with larger bodies of units.
RPGs are all about micromanaging a small group of units where each individual unit has a range of special abilities to choose from. The very concept is made for low to mid size battles, rather than huge 1000+ unit battles. It doesn't mean that large battles aren't possible, it just means they are for the most part impractical and should be the exception in most RPGs, regardless of whether they're TB or RT. It has nothing to do with RT vs TB, it's just a pure issue of scale.
"It's fine for TB games to be incapable of large combats because P&P is too, and videogames should of course obey technical limitations that no longer exist."
Again, nobody said TB is incapable of large combats. I can point you to several TB strategies again. Panzer General. Fantasy General. Steel Panthers. Heck, there are even tabletop wargames with hundreds of units on the field.
Did you ever hear about a thing called Warhammer? I heard it's pretty popular.
Or maybe one of those many historical tabletop wargames that exist.
Whoa look at those unit sizes shit must be unmanageable:
How do people play this it must be impossible?????
"I can't play RTS to save my life, it can't be because I'm bad, it's because I don't have 400 APM which is all those games are about anyway."
I have over 500 hours on Age of Empires 2 in Steam and my ELO is in the mid-1700s, which means I'm a halfway competent player. Your argument is invalid.
"RTWP is a clusterfuck because I'm too slow-witted to comphrehend what's going on in a game that has a dozen autopause options and which I can pause at any time."
RTwP is a clusterfuck because it marries turn based concepts (rounds) into real time gameplay, which creates a horrible abomination that doesn't play very well. Instead they should just go with a proper real time system that doesn't measure actions in """rounds""" and add a pause function. You know, like the Total War games do, except on a smaller scale.
I don't hate real time I just hate RTwP the way it's usually done.
