Any game where 1-2 strats (oftentimes early games ones at that) are "optimal" and pretty much crush most anything else is just lazy game design.
"Lazy" game design? That seems a little arrogant. You can't predict what will happen to your game once it gets out into the wild. You can do all of the testing you want, but that can't compare with potentially millions of players hammering on the game for months on end.
All a game developer can do is put mechanics and rules into the game; they can't control which strategies turn out to be viable and which ones don't.
Well, they can patch the game to re-establish strategic balance. But even the latter can be wrongheaded due to metagame evolution. For example, in the professional StarCraft circuit, Terran vs. Zerg strategies for the Terran used to boil down to basically 2 builds: Marines & Medics, or Marines & Medics with some Siege Tank support.
Then the player by.fantasy came along and said, "screw that." He invented the "Mech build" (invovling Vultures, Goliaths, and Siege Tanks). Terrans have tried various Mech strategies before, but usually as a 1 out of 10 surprise strategy rather than as standard play. Now? A scant 4 months after by.fantasy's Mech build debued, it has now become one of the standard TvZ builds, alongside the M&M build.
Did Blizzard do anything to make that happen? No. That was one player who came along with an idea, took the time to make it work, and upset the balance. That's the metagame evolving.
If Blizzard had unwisely tried to change unit stats to encourage the development of other strategies, then they could easily have wrecked the game's overall balance. It was ultimately better for them to do nothing and let the players decide how the game is to be played.
It is vital as a game developer to know when to patch and when to let the metagame evolve. As another example, Team Fortress 2. The developers, during internal testing, went through several metagame phases. There was the "everybody's a scout" phase. But then, the non-scout classes figured out that scouts don't have many Hp, and balance was reestablished. There was the "everybody's a spy" phase. That lasted until pryos figured out how to use their flamethrowers on everybody; the people who burned were spies, and were now not only burning, but also in range of the flamethrower for more burning. And if they run from you when you approach... they're spies.
At no time did they have to patch the game to fix any of these apparent imbalances. Patching too soon can break a game just as sure as patching too late.
I don't like the zerg-rush 'strategy' prevalent on RTS games because you miss out on the base building, resource gathering, and defense aspects of the game that I tend to enjoy. I feel that the game fails if I don't get to at least try to build and research all the units and techs.
Rushing strategies must always be viable. If you know you're going to be safe for the early game, then you can tech hard. Which means everyone techs hard; it's always a reward and never punishment. You may as well chop off the first 5 mintues of the game, since you know how it's going to work out. Rush strategies make you pay for teching in an unsafe way.
Now, there is something wrong with them in one respect: it is usually much easier to execute one than to defend it. That means that, given two players of low, but equivalent, skill, the one who rushes is much more likely to win. By comparison, two players of high skill, a rush is more-often-than-not, not going to end the game. It may be decisive down the line, but very few are the rushes in high-skill play where an enemy is outright killed by the rush. The point of most high-skill rushes is to damage the economy, thus slowing them down more than you slowed yourself down to execute that rush.
But among low-skilled players, rushes can seem neigh-unstoppable.
Also, my observance is that with the introduction of the Zerg in Starcraft, developers of RTS games must balance units so that the attacker gets the advantage.
I don't know what StarCraft you were playing. Because in StarCraft, the defender always has the advantage. The defender's newly produced units have less far to go, and the defender can always pull his workers and use them as combat units/buffer. That's why rush builds only work if you don't know they're coming.
I would also point out that the Zerg aren't even the best at rushing in SC. There's nothing more likely to lead to an early-game GG than a 2-gate proxy Zealot-rush that went unscouted. The only reason why Zerg rushes entered the vernacular is because, before the 1.08 patch, Zergs could literally attack before the other guy could possibly have attack units of their own. The infamous 4-pool rush.
Instead, 'strategy' ends up being a rush to identify the optimal click-order to spam whatever unit is cheapest in terms of resource units and time to produce.
I've never seen high-level StarCraft play devolve to that. For some RTS's, sure. But not ones that are trying to have a competitive online community.
Presently all fun was squeezed out of the game in the interest of "balance."
I can't imagine what definition of "fun" you're using that includes losing through a random roll on some internal computer algorithm. If I'm going to lose, let it be because my opponent was just better than me or I screwed up, not because he got lucky.
Note that you won't see football or any other sport include a random, "you lose points because of a coin toss" event. At least penalty kicks involve the skill of players on the field.
Again and again I watched RTS games sink into the background noise level because of balancing the game for online PvP and losing the interest of casual players who mostly just wanted a good single player game with some scale and some sizzle.
I don't understand. If you don't want online play, why do you care what happens to the online portion of the game? Is online play balancing affecting the single-player portion of the game?
This simply does not fit the RTS format.
Yes. In an RTS game, you don't have a persistent character. You have yourself. You are the one who's supposed to be developing your skills, not a character. You decide whether you win or lose, based on how good you are at the game.
