In Defense of Hard Counters in Real Time Strategy Games

I feel like hard counters get a bad rap in RTS games. There are a lot of arguments out there both for and against such systems, but I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately and I honestly wanted to try to lay out a clear case for why I think they’re an affirmative good in real time strategy games, at least from my perspective. As per usual, I think nuance is going to get in the way of things a little bit, but let’s give it a try.

As always, I’m going to start by defining my terms. In an RTS, a ‘hard counter’ is an interaction where it is practically or actually impossible for one unit or army composition to defeat another unit or army composition. I want to mostly talk about unit hard counters rather than army or strategy hard counters, but the two are related.

So, just as an example: in an hypothetical real-time strategy game, we might have 2 units: one is a ground-based infantry unit which can only attack ground targets. The other is a flying unit which can attack ground units but not other air units. In this situation, whether or not the flying unit is designed to effectively kill infantry units, the air unit is a hard counter to the ground unit in this example. The ground unit cannot hurt the air unit in any way, and the air unit can hurt the ground unit. This relationship is based on innate and immutable differences between the two unit types.

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