Gamer Profiles

While reading about various games and game design, and who you have to think about when making a game, ultimately you have to consider who you're catering to. Quite a lot of people have written about the topic, but I think I shall too, with regards to RTS games in general and specifically my mod.

I might touch up on this later, but without further ado, player archetypes, using names of various sorts from the various other authors on the topic.

Power Gamer: This is the pro-gamer, and the kid who wants to be etc. I personally don't hold this sort of person in high regard, as they tend to follow trends and patterns with various patches. One thing I do respect is the reason they play, which is to win. Generally, methodology is flawed in that once a "winning strategy" has been found, they generally stick to that.
This doesn't necessarily apply to all power gamers, as many good ones can be imaginative and insightful.
To curb the 'winning strategy' idea, I have tried to make many paths to victory, and all of them have efficient counters, so long as you know your opponent is using them. Thus, no one single strategy should win you every game. Some are better than others, others are definitely worse (the sell-all building at the start of the game 'strategy' should never net you a victory).
Similarly, there is no such thing as a "one unit army". You should not be able to devise an uncounterable army made up of a single unit, even two units are fairly hard pressed.
Given that the 'power gamer' mindset is fairly prevalent, I would not simply lock them out entirely. The Rush team is effectively built around the pro-gamer ideal. During playtesting, Rush is very fast to attack. More importantly, however, is that the player is almost always doing something. There is hardly ever any waiting time for Rush. If you're not doing something, you're probably losing and out of money.
Rush is also all about micromanagement, which is also difficult, as they also have the largest numbers on their side. A pro-gamer may find himself comfortable with Turtle or Stealth, but Rush is specifically designed to cater to a pro-gamer style of play.

Casual Gamer: Everyone knows who this is. If you play computer games a decent amount, you'll run into a few of these as well. Their reasons for playing are mostly to destress and unwind. Winning would be nice too, but isn't necessary. Casual gamers prefer longer games. They also tend to play less, which means they often come away from their last game of the day thinking about something new to try.
The source of this inspiration is sometimes in the back of their head, based on something that happened during the last game (if only I had done...), something someone else did (that's really clever), or off the internet (forums or guides and the like).
While I think thinking about it is rather good, the behavior of casual gamers tends to be rather lazy. Generally, once the casual gamer has completed all of his things that he wanted to do during a game, he will generally be contented and happy that that particular part of his strategy worked.
Casual players will generally also enjoy playing against the AI more, and also enjoy 'comp-stomps', battles with fellow players allied against a dastardly and automated foe. Most likely the reason for this is that an AI can often be relied on fairly well to be predictable. While the casual player may not win against the AI, he may think about what caused him to lose, and try again next time. Not a good strategy for playing against thinking human players, who will also change strategies between games.
Turtle is definitely the casual gamer's team. A turtle is competitive in its own right, but is less aggressive than Rush, and not as tricky as Stealth. It requires less short term thought than Rush; a Casual gamer does not change his plans on the fly very well. However, it definitely requires a lot more long-term strategy than Rush, as its units are generally not very good strategic assets.
Because of a casual gamer's playstyle and ideology inherently has its own fairly large weaknesses, casual players will tend to lose more against human players. Hence having a team based around the casual gamer mindset is helpful in that it can make things challenging for a power gamer while still being beatable. The Turtle team is not helped by being able to micro fairly well, as their units do not respond quickly enough to receive a huge benefit from, uh, 'uber micro'.
A casual gamer may attempt to play one of the other two teams, but will generally be hurt by the massive number of things one has to take care of. With Stealth, one has to be mindful of everything, and with Rush, there are many things to be done and taking a short break will hurt them very badly (especially with their lack of automated defence).
Casual gamers also tend to like big, powerful things and flashy stuff, which Turtle probably has the most of. Awesome but whatever.

I can't really think of a good game for this, but in Magic there is a character archetype called "the Johnny", who likes customisation and personalisation above almost everything else. This sort of player will tend to have a favourite set of upgrades that they will go for first in RTS games. In games with mutually exclusive upgrades, they will only have those, and often try to get them to work rather than change.
To those players, I offer mutually exclusive upgrades. Especially with Rush, and partly with Turtle. While I suspect there will be some favourites, Johnnys who play those teams will definitely have their sets and their orders in which they get them. Stealth has this to an extent, but it can eventually get all upgrades by the end of a game. There will most likely be an order as people strive for their favourite units at the start of the game.
Rush has upgrades for its different units, purchasable through its upgrade system. There are 11880 combinations of upgrades, many of those combinations, possibly even most, useful in some way or another.
There is definitely room to move in there. Turtle has a whole 4 bits worth of combinations (16), and those too are pretty independent.

At this point it may be worth noting that archetypes can overlap. I do know at least one person who is a very casual gamer, and makes no qualms about being intellectually lazy, but these people are few and far between.

Hmm... Probably time to post now.