Clash Royale, and StarCraft

I am a long time StarCraft 2 player, with over 2000 games played and consistent placing in 1v1 Diamond. While this isn’t that impressive in the grand scheme of things, I do have a decent understanding of the game through this playtime and my involvement with StarCraft 2 eSports. Earlier this week I downloaded Clash Royale after the Bombcast and a young cousin coerced me. And I was struck by how well it distills the essence of a good strategy game while maintaining mobile hooks that let it remain accessible. I just wanted to write a quick post about how I feel it is a strong game, and solves many problems that the only competitive RTS (StarCraft) with a real following faces.

Form Factor and Lack of Stress

As a mobile game, Clash games last 2 minutes. This addresses the two of most fundamental problem with RTS games: ladder anxiety, and where the fun in the games lie. In RTS and strategy games there is very often a skill gap between one’s opponent and themselves, and even if the players are evenly matched it is not infrequent for one player to play poorly, make one mistake or lose to chance and get crushed. In StarCraft loosing is not fun. Often you get behind in a StarCraft game because of one mistake, and while you have not lost, there is a 10% chance of winning. It feels lame to quit, but stupid to stay in the game. This makes losing 70% (or whatever) of your games not fun at all. Much like a DOTA game, you are delaying the inevitable. The very close games are much more fun to lose in, but due to the nature of lowish level play, in that skill disparity can be so immense, these games happen less often than crushing wins in either direction. The form factor of Clash gets around this by making the games so insignificant. You still get the feeling of victory and intelligence from winning, and the fun from close wins or losses, but without the frustration of loosing 30 minutes of your life to a game you had very little chance of winning. I think that this is important to making the strategy genre more accessible. This also works around the anxiety and stress that many RTS players feel when playing competitively. By making the games less significant, they become more fun.

RTS Mechanics Without the Mechanics

In a true RTS such as StarCraft, Warcraft or C&C, at the highest level all players have perfect/very good mechanics. By this I mean they can produce units constantly, understand where their workers need to be, move their units efficiently and so on. This means that professional games of RTS come down to positioning, unit compositions (the units that one includes in their army), trading efficiently, and decision making. Units are just a representation of the games resource mechanics. In StarCraft, the units are just gas and minerals. In WarCraft, gold and lumber. And so on. Clash distils the mechanical side of RTS into a VERY simply resource mechanic, and allows the player to focus on the aspects that are interesting, the aspects seen in high level play. For a budding StarCraft player, 99% of their losses were because they had bad mechanics. They didn’t make enough workers, they didn’t build enough units, they move their army into a stupid location. In Clash, the losses come from positioning, composition, decision making. These are the interesting aspects of RTS that a player is not likely to even understand let alone be capable of experiencing without dozens of hours of practising their mechanics. Because of this, I feel that Clash offers a very easy foray into the interesting aspects of strategy games with ease. The stripping of complicated resource mechanics, movement control and macro allow for the player to make meaningful decisions without extensive practise.

eSports?

Fundamental to the concept of a strategy game is eSports. Clash has already had a few tournaments I don’t have a lot to say here aside from this: Clash is boring to watch, in my opinion. I’m sure there is enough players to fill seats, and I do think that there is skill to be found here, but without the mechanics of a real RTS I think that there isn’t enough there to allow for consistency at the highest level. You need APM checks (just raw speed of play) to allow professional play to consistent, otherwise build order, rock-paper-scissors losses inevitably occur. Of course lucky losses also lose you games in StarCraft, but with complex and difficult mechanics a highly skilled player has the ability to clutch wins still.

Free to Play Hook

I think that Clash Royale is an great strategy game, and the one of the best (if not the best) RTS adaptations for mobile. This said, the business model is holding it back from being a good game. It takes insane lengths of time to get cards needed to progress, 4 chest slots mean that playing without paying is almost useless. I think a quest system along the lines of Hearthstone would massively help this game to become less terrible. Say 3 quests that grant gems or card levels? Especially if they wish to pursue eSports, they will have trouble unless the business model changes. Without a way for players to achieve what the pros are doing in a relatively speedy way that doesn’t take $500, the competitive community will remain small. I firmly believe that mobile games should have a time spent playing OR money progression, not a time waiting around OR money progression. I really wish I could spend $60 and just get all of the basic cards or something. I mean, I’m babbling, I don’t have a solution, but I do think that something needs to change here.

Hope this was an interesting enough read (if anyone reads it), and I apologize for any spelling mistakes, I banged it out really quickly.

Cheers!

@aiomon