Real-Time Strategy

What it is. You command an army — not a unit. You gather → build → tech → army → engage, all in real time, against an opponent doing the same. The game is macro (economy and tech decisions) layered over micro (positioning a fight), with faction identity coloring every layer.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. “I out-thought them — my build read theirs, my army answered it, and the battle was glorious.” RTS is the fantasy of command: hundreds of units obey one intent, and a well-composed army crashing into a bad one is the payoff shot.

Pillars

Mass under command. Hundreds of units path around walls and answer orders as one. Flow fields (one BFS per goal tile, cached outside state) give wall-aware mass pathing cheaply — pathing is the genre’s hardest tech and its most load-bearing.
Asymmetry that balances. Factions are different, not reskinned — and still fair. Distinct rosters, one balance. This is the deep well; get it right and every matchup is a new game.
The intended line beats attack-move. Strategy is the balance test. A thinking plan (turtle → tech → counterpush) must beat brute attack-move, or there is no strategy — just a bigger blob.

The loop stack

Scale	The beat
Moment	Issue an order — a group micro (focus fire, retreat, flank); units path and arrive.
Encounter	An engagement: your composition vs theirs, terrain and positioning decide it in seconds.
Session	A match: opening build → scout → adapt tech to the enemy → the decisive push.
Meta	Learn each faction’s build orders, matchup counters, and timing windows.

Essential systems

System	Why it’s load-bearing
`system-faction-asymmetry`	The genre’s soul. Different-but-fair identities; the design of asymmetric balance.
`system-unit-rosters`	A legible roster of roles and tiers per faction — the vocabulary of composition.
`system-economy`	Gather/faucet-sink macro; the eco-vs-army tension every decision trades against.
`system-tech-tree`	The ramp of options and power spikes; branch choices commit you to a plan.
`system-enemy-ai`	The AI opponent (and unit behaviour): readable, beatable, order-obeying minds.
`system-counter-systems`	The NvN duel matrix that makes composition a real decision.

Strategic depth — where the game lives

Depth is the stack of layered decisions, each with tension:

Economy vs army. Every worker is delayed military. The eco/army/tech triangle (AoE ages, StarCraft supply timings) is the core macro tension.
Build order as a plan. An opening commits you — greedy-eco vs early pressure vs tech rush. Scouting is the info that lets you punish or adapt.
Composition as a puzzle. Counters (system-counter-systems) make army mix a rock-paper-scissors under fog. No unit is unconditionally best.
Timing windows. A power spike (age-up, a tech completing) opens a window where you’re temporarily ahead — attacking on-spike is the skill.
Positioning micro. Terrain, high ground, concave/surround, focus-fire. Same armies, different outcomes by how they meet.

Faction asymmetry — go deep here

The flagship difference. See system-faction-asymmetry for the full design; the genre-level rules:

Axis of difference	Example
Economy shape	One faction gathers faster but caps lower; another snowballs late.
Roster identity	Swarm-and-remax vs elite-and-expensive vs defensive-and-teched.
Tech philosophy	Wide/cheap upgrades vs deep/spiky ones.
Signature mechanic	One unique verb per faction (a build mechanic, a resource) that only they play.

Balance them not by making them equal but by making each strong at a different timing — asymmetry balances across the game clock, not within a single stat. Ground every faction’s fiction in world-faction-identity so the mechanics read as a culture, not a stat block.

Battle spectacle — the payoff shot

The reason to watch: two armies colliding must look impressive and stay readable.

Legibility first. Silhouette and color-code unit roles so a 100-unit fight parses at a glance — pattern-readability. Spectacle that can’t be read is noise.
Choreography is cosmetic. The sim resolves the fight; the view replays hit flashes, death animations, dust, screen-shake — all deletable without changing a sim bit (FUN.md law 6). Never let spectacle touch world.hash().
Scale legibly. Pooled sprites and flow-field movement keep hundreds of units cheap; the mass is the spectacle.

Content & difficulty model

Balance is the content. Matchups, not levels. The intended line beating attack-move (law 2 skill-delta) is the health check.
AI tiers = economy handicaps + better build orders, not stat cheats the player can’t see. See system-difficulty-and-dda.
Skirmish maps are the container; procedural or hand-made, they must be symmetric-fair (equal resources, mirrored expansions).

Signature-mechanic seeds

RTS but you ARE one hero in the battle (perspective) — Shadow-of-War scale flip; command from inside the fight, morale as your reach.
RTS but no base — the army is all you get (constraint) — one-loop attrition; every unit lost is permanent, forcing preservation micro.
RTS but time advances in pulses you trigger (structure) — semi-turn-based mass tactics; a bridge to genre-tactics at army scale.
RTS but the map is a living tide (theme + mechanic-swap) — terrain floods/regrows on a clock; positioning fights the map, not just the enemy.
RTS but one faction plays the economy and one plays the army *(perspective
- coop)* — asymmetric two-player command. Pairs system-coop-and-competition.

Common pitfalls

Attack-move wins. If a-move beats every plan, macro and composition are decorative — the whole game collapses. This is the first thing to disprove.
Reskin factions. Same units, different colors = no asymmetry, no replay. Differentiate the economy and roster, not the palette.
Pathing that clumps or stalls. Units that pile at walls or block each other break “mass under command.” Flow fields, cached outside state, are the fix.
Unreadable battles. A gorgeous fight you can’t parse is a loss for the player. Legibility gates spectacle.
Snowball with no comeback. A single lost fight ending the match kills tension — leave comeback vectors (defensive tech, eco recovery). See pattern-feedback-loops.

Anchors

anchor-starcraft — three rosters, one balance; the reference for asymmetry done right. Steal the “strong at different timings” balance philosophy.
anchor-age-of-empires — the eco/tech ramp and age-up power spikes; steal build orders and the economy-as-tension model.

Verify

Prove it in FUN.md §9 · RTS-lite: every counter edge wins its NvN duel, the commander/intended-line bot beats attack-move, a walled-off unit routes around, and ms/step holds at peak unit count.

Composes with

system-faction-asymmetry — the different-but-fair identities that give the genre its replay value.
system-economy — the macro tension every strategic decision trades against.
system-enemy-ai — the order-obeying, beatable minds behind the mass.