Hard counters?

[Arbiter]

Do hard counters make sense in strategy games - yes, no, maybe so? Which games benefited from them or the opposite?

 

[ValeVelKal]

Do hard counters make sense in strategy games - yes, no, maybe so? Which games benefited from them or the opposite?

Of course they make sense. SAM is an hard counter against airplanes. Modern ATGM is an hard counter against tanks.

Wargame : Red Dragons has the best examples of hard counters given it is really terrain, units and "information situation" dependant. Your Apaches are hard counters for anything armored, two dudes with a MANPADS behind a bush are an hard counter for your Apache, and pretty much anything else is an hard counter for your two dudes with a MANPADS.

 

[Arbiter]

Do hard counters make sense in strategy games - yes, no, maybe so? Which games benefited from them or the opposite?

Of course they make sense. SAM is an hard counter against airplanes. Modern ATGM is an hard counter against tanks.

Wargame : Red Dragons has the best examples of hard counters given it is really terrain, units and "information situation" dependant. Your Apaches are hard counters for anything armored, two dudes with a MANPADS behind a bush are an hard counter for your Apache, and pretty much anything else is an hard counter for your two dudes with a MANPADS.

In terms of game balancing, don't strong counters give huge advantage to players who aggressively scout their enemies?

 

[Beowulf]

Do hard counters make sense in strategy games - yes, no, maybe so? Which games benefited from them or the opposite?

Of course they make sense. SAM is an hard counter against airplanes. Modern ATGM is an hard counter against tanks.

Wargame : Red Dragons has the best examples of hard counters given it is really terrain, units and "information situation" dependant. Your Apaches are hard counters for anything armored, two dudes with a MANPADS behind a bush are an hard counter for your Apache, and pretty much anything else is an hard counter for your two dudes with a MANPADS.

In terms of game balancing, don't strong counters give huge advantage to players who aggressively scout their enemies?

It's a balancing act - not taking risks slows you down. If you want perfect information you might lose the battle in Wargame. Spending too much on scouts will leave you vulnerable in other areas, and recon by force might end badly.
But, speaking strictly about that series, with some experience you generally know what to expect, given the deck construction restrictions for nations and rather limited map pool with known hiding spots.

Sure, every now and then someone might surprise you in with some gimmick strat, outside of the established meta, but more often than not it will end badly for the person trying to do that.

 

[Poseidon00]

Sure, every now and then someone might surprise you in with some gimmick strat, outside of the established meta, but more often than not it will end badly for the person trying to do that.

I hate all strategy games that rely on a strict meta. It's not even a strategy game at that point. It is "follow these simple rules to win". No thought, no creativity, no nothing.

 

[Beowulf]

Well, if every player follows the same general meta and picks the units currently seen as the best, it will be a matter of skill anyway.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Sure, every now and then someone might surprise you in with some gimmick strat, outside of the established meta, but more often than not it will end badly for the person trying to do that.

I hate all strategy games that rely on a strict meta. It's not even a strategy game at that point. It is "follow these simple rules to win". No thought, no creativity, no nothing.

The "meta" is so complex in Wargame that it boils down to skill. Following the meta is going to give you maybe a 5% or 10% advantage, no more. I mean, except if you handicap yourself on purpose by taking just the Poles or ANZAC or Japan.

 

[JarlFrank]

How hard is a hard counter tho?

I like Age of Empires 2, and it has a pretty well balanced set of counters. But you can still overwhelm counter units with the units that get countered provided you have
a) a civ bonus that buffs those units
b) upgraded your units more than the other guy
c) numerical advantage
d) really good micro skills

Most prominently, the spearman line is supposed to defeat cavalry, and it does so by having massive bonus damage against all cav units. But I've seen games where people engaged in scout vs spearman matches and their scouts won due to good micro, having armor upgrades, and slight numerical superiority. Paladins, the highest upgrade of the knight line, can defeat halberdiers, the highest upgrade of the spearman line, one on one easily. So if you bring the same numbers, paladins will will against their direct counter. But they're much more expensive to recruit, so part of the spear line's counter is that they're super cheap to mass and get bonus damage against the way more expensive knight line.

Does that make spears a hard counter against cavalry, or just a soft counter?

 

[ValeVelKal]

How hard is a hard counter tho?

I like Age of Empires 2, and it has a pretty well balanced set of counters. But you can still overwhelm counter units with the units that get countered provided you have
a) a civ bonus that buffs those units
b) upgraded your units more than the other guy
c) numerical advantage
d) really good micro skills

Most prominently, the spearman line is supposed to defeat cavalry, and it does so by having massive bonus damage against all cav units. But I've seen games where people engaged in scout vs spearman matches and their scouts won due to good micro, having armor upgrades, and slight numerical superiority. Paladins, the highest upgrade of the knight line, can defeat halberdiers, the highest upgrade of the spearman line, one on one easily. So if you bring the same numbers, paladins will will against their direct counter. But they're much more expensive to recruit, so part of the spear line's counter is that they're super cheap to mass and get bonus damage against the way more expensive knight line.

Does that make spears a hard counter against cavalry, or just a soft counter?

For me an hard counter is something that does not simply inflicts more damage, like in your paladin/pikemen example - this would be a (soft) counter.

A hard counter massively defeats its opposition with no or neglectable losses when equal numbers are fighting.

Typically AA hard counters planes (except Wild Weasels), but yeah if you bring 10 bombers the AA will go down and maybe it will only shoot down one plane. But bring 10 AA and depending on the micro only one or two planes have the time to destroy an AA.

 

[Norfleet]

Does that make spears a hard counter against cavalry, or just a soft counter?

That'd be a soft counter. A HARD counter is when the thing in question shuts the other thing down COLD, like, say, flying ranged unit vs. melee infantry, helicopters vs. tanks, jets vs. helicopters, etc. Each of these basically has the ability to slay the other with near impunity, with the hardness of the counter increasing depending on the level of impunity. Hard counters aren't things with 10%, 50%, or even 100% advantages. Hard counters are things with like 1000% or more. If you end up dividing by zero trying to figure out what the level of advantage is, you've got the hardest counter, where the existence of even a single unit of something can kill an effectively infinite number of the other with not a damn thing they can do about it.

Also, generally, a thing has to be of comparable weight class or lower to be considered a counter. A nuke bomber might always be able to obliterate spearmans, but these things are so widely separated in weight class that nuke bombers should not be regarded as counters for spearmans. It's not a counter unless you are of similar or lesser weight class than what you are defeating.

Hard counters are rarely about bonus vs. and more about some mechanical reason why the other unit stomps you flat. Something that is faster and has better range than the other thing tends to be a hard counter to that thing, for instance, because speed + range advantage = ability to attack without the enemy having the ability to respond.

In terms of game balancing, don't strong counters give huge advantage to players who aggressively scout their enemies?

Hard counters give huge advantages to players who have informational superiority. How this superiority is obtained is immaterial. There is not necessarily scouting in a given game, there may be no hidden information and the game is played with perfect information...but if the one player has a clear informational superiority in that he can predict the other player's moves or has a superior understanding of the mechanics, he will crush that other guy like skull of pig.

Disclaimer: Pig skulls are not actually that easy to crush, I have tried it.

 

[Joggerino]

Of course they make sense. SAM is an hard counter against airplanes. Modern ATGM is an hard counter against tanks.

Airplanes can also counter SAM.

 

[spectre]

Well, you can always play the "what if" game. For example: sure, walls hard counter cavalry, but what if the cavaly encircles the settlement and prevents communications and supplies.
The point is, the presence of a hard counter prevents normal deployment of the countered element (because the losses would be unacceptable). It can resume after it's eliminated or supressed, but this requires recon and specialized tactics.

 

[Johannes]

Sure, every now and then someone might surprise you in with some gimmick strat, outside of the established meta, but more often than not it will end badly for the person trying to do that.

I hate all strategy games that rely on a strict meta. It's not even a strategy game at that point. It is "follow these simple rules to win". No thought, no creativity, no nothing.

Yeah, like in chess you can win by following the simple meta of "don't hang your pieces". Banal, shit, boring.

 

[spectre]

Well, most of the time, the meta is making sure you're not bringing a knife to a gunfight. There's going to be a meta in each competitive game, because people tend to gravitate towards shit that works. If doing X gives you an immediate 2% advantage, why deprive yourself of it?
It can be a problem in a game context when meta invalidates the majority of choices that would otherwise be possible to make in a game, or when retarded groupthink comes into play and you keep seeing people do the same shit over and over again.

Just to sperg a bit over the chess analogy, I think a better one would be "pawn to e4." A lot of people will do it automatically. Some just ape what they've seen good players do. Others know the theory that it gives you the best board position.
Following an opening strategy doesn't mean the game now plays itself, but what you're doing is eliminating empty moves that have known outcomes and fast forward the game to the part where it gets interesting.
Of course, if you manage to spot a scrub who plays by script, you can go off the beaten path and make them uncomfortable, but you won't get many of those in a high stakes game.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, you can always play the "what if" game. For example: sure, walls hard counter cavalry, but what if the cavaly encircles the settlement and prevents communications and supplies.

That's because walls DON'T hard-counter cavalry. They're not a counter at all, they're simply a stalling tactic.

 

[spectre]

There's not a thing you can do on horseback with a melee weapon versus a guy standing on a wall. More importantly, fortifications prevent cavalry from charging (i.e. cavalry doing the cavalry thing) and restrict its maneuvering.
If cavalry can't do the cavalry thing, that sounds like a pretty hard counter. But of course, that depends on how you understand it, as far as we can have a formal definition for something used informally in online gaming.

 

[Norfleet]

There's not a thing you can do on horseback with a melee weapon versus a guy standing on a wall. More importantly, fortifications prevent cavalry from charging (i.e. cavalry doing the cavalry thing) and restrict its maneuvering.
If cavalry can't do the cavalry thing, that sounds like a pretty hard counter. But of course, that depends on how you understand it, as far as we can have a formal definition for something used informally in online gaming.

That counters the specific TACTIC of cavalry charges...as you can see, it does not actually counter the cavalry themselves, which are still free to do another very important cavalry thing: Marauding. To function as a counter to the thing itself, you have to actually be capable of neutralizing the actual thing. Since there is no way for a wall to give chase to and drive off the cavalry, they only counter the cavalry charge, which is just a single aspect of the cavalry, not the entire cavalry.

The hard counter to cavalry, for instance, seems to have been the automatic rifle. Since the widespread use of automatic rifles and machineguns, cavalry has no longer been employed on the battlefield, with remaining "cavalry" troops becoming dragoons (mounted infantry) instead. Being up on your high horse in the face of automatic gunfire is a recipe for a quick death.

 

[Joggerino]

M&B taught us that in the event of a siege cavalry can turn into infantry.

 

[Norfleet]

I seem to recall you could dismount your knights in Total War, too.

 

[spectre]

M&B taught us that in the event of a siege cavalry can turn into infantry.

Yeah, but is it still cavalry we're working with? I mean, xir can identify as such, but it's as though something is missing...

That counters the specific TACTIC of cavalry charges...as you can see, it does not actually counter the cavalry themselves, which are still free to do another very important cavalry thing: Marauding. To function as a counter to the thing itself, you have to actually be capable of neutralizing the actual thing. Since there is no way for a wall to give chase to and drive off the cavalry, they only counter the cavalry charge, which is just a single aspect of the cavalry, not the entire cavalry.

The hard counter to cavalry, for instance, seems to have been the automatic rifle. Since the widespread use of automatic rifles and machineguns, cavalry has no longer been employed on the battlefield, with remaining "cavalry" troops becoming dragoons (mounted infantry) instead. Being up on your high horse in the face of automatic gunfire is a recipe for a quick death.

Ok, but can dragoons be still used for marauding? If not, according to your own words, it's not also not a hard counter. So what was the hard counter? Motorized infantry? Yeah, that doesn't sit well with me.
I'm not too keen on arguing semantics like this, because I don't necessarily disagree. If something becomes obsolete, which is an extreme case, it's most definitely due to hard counters becoming widespread and easy to deploy.

I get what you're saying that fortification itself does not pose an actual threat to a horseman, but in a lot of situations making something undeployable is almost as good as actual casualties.
And there are few situations in actual warfare when you deploy a thing and the other side immediately loses and everyone dies (cue discussion about nuclear weapons, let's agree not to there just yet, K?).

Now, I was actually focusing mostly on hard-countering heavy cavalry tactics, and I'd argue that countering tactics is just as good as countering the specific unit, eventually it can drive it into obsoletion.
(it then becomes more a philosophical discussion - is cavalry dead, or only horseback cavalry? What about tank combat, can we draw any parallels here?).
On the other hand, marauding is more of a light cavalry business. That role seems really hard to put down, because harassment, scouting and high mobility will always be circumstancially useful.
Though I'll keep in mind to be more precise with this distinction in the future.

 

[Van-d-all]

Do hard counters make sense in strategy games - yes, no, maybe so? Which games benefited from them or the opposite?

Of course they make sense. SAM is an hard counter against airplanes. Modern ATGM is an hard counter against tanks.

Wargame : Red Dragons has the best examples of hard counters given it is really terrain, units and "information situation" dependant. Your Apaches are hard counters for anything armored, two dudes with a MANPADS behind a bush are an hard counter for your Apache, and pretty much anything else is an hard counter for your two dudes with a MANPADS.

In terms of game balancing, don't strong counters give huge advantage to players who aggressively scout their enemies?

Arguably it's the whole point; if the game tries to reflect reality. But the given W:RD example is somewhat exaggerated - there are grades of AA as there are grades of ECM - lousy manpads are hardly a deterrent for modern planes, but in principle, games trying to reflect military technology, will often have units being hard counters to other units against which they were designed to work against.

IMO the only situation where hard counters could be bad, are abstract games with rules too few or simple to accommodate the consequences. This means either completely abstract games like party board games (not to be confused with wargames obviously) or the more arcade RTS games where most units deal damage to most other units and high TTK mitigates potential blunders. That said, an abstract rule set could still incorporate hard counters just fine, RTS games used to obsess over rock-paper-scissors balancing after all.

 

[JarlFrank]

I seem to recall you could dismount your knights in Total War, too.

Depends on which Total War. Certainly not the ones with knights in them (Medieval 1 and 2).

Dragoons were introduced in Empire and Napoleon: melee cavalry that can dismount to become shooty infantry.

Dismountable cavalry remained in later games like Rome 2 IIRC.

 

[Norfleet]

Ok, but can dragoons be still used for marauding?

Yes, but dragoons are not true cavalry, in that they do not fight on horseback. Thus they don't count, nor does "armored cavalry", which fills a similar tactical role, but are cavalry in name only, being that they no longer use horses or any similar animal at all.

Curiously, dragoons are actually still in use today, having last been seen in action in Afghanistan. But true cavalry, mounted warriors fighting primarily from horseback, is basically out, entirely due to the ubiquity of automatic weapons.

Depends on which Total War. Certainly not the ones with knights in them (Medieval 1 and 2).

No, it was definitely one of the ones with knights. I forget HOW exactly you did it, but I remember that under certain circumstances, knights would convert into "Dismounted Blah Blah" and fight as heavy infantry.

IMO the only situation where hard counters could be bad, are abstract games with rules too few or simple to accommodate the consequences.

I would argue that more abstracted games with simpler rulesets incorporate hard counters MORE frequently, because the simpler your ruleset is, the less room there is for soft outcomes. If anything, hard counters dominate this particular type of game, simply because the ruleset is too few and simple to incorporate much in the way of states between "win" and "lose" interactions between pieces.

Rock-Paper-Scissors loops are, of course, very common as well in more abstract rulesets, where many lite-wargames tend to have a loop of swordsmans eating pikeneers eating cavalry eating swordsmans, whereas more fancypants wargames are more nuanced in how exactly things eat other things, like how in Total War, most things lose head-on to pikeneers, but most things win when flanking against the same.

 

[Arbiter]

I seem to recall you could dismount your knights in Total War, too.

Depends on which Total War. Certainly not the ones with knights in them (Medieval 1 and 2).

Dragoons were introduced in Empire and Napoleon: melee cavalry that can dismount to become shooty infantry.

Dismountable cavalry remained in later games like Rome 2 IIRC.

You can also dismount cavalry in Shogun 2.

 

[JarlFrank]

Depends on which Total War. Certainly not the ones with knights in them (Medieval 1 and 2).

No, it was definitely one of the ones with knights. I forget HOW exactly you did it, but I remember that under certain circumstances, knights would convert into "Dismounted Blah Blah" and fight as heavy infantry.

That was Medieval 2. "Dismounted knights" were their own separate unit with similar stats to the mounted knights but fighting as infantry. You couldn't convert mounted knights to dismounted knights or vice versa, they were completely separate units that just happened to have a similar name.