Real-time tactics

Real-time strategy games de-emphasize realism and focus on the collection and conversion of resources into production capacities which manufacture combat units thereafter used in generally highly stylized confrontations.

[citation needed] For instance, GameSpy described Axis & Allies (the 2004 video game) as a "true RTS", but with a high level of military realism with such features as battlefield command organization and supply lines.

[6] A developer for Close Combat said their game never aspired to be an RTS in the "classic sense", but was rather a "real time tactical simulation", lacking such features as resource collection.

[9] In the context of strategy video games, however, the difference often comes down to the more limited criteria of either a presence or absence of base building and unit production.

[11] In an article for GameSpy, Mark Walker said that developers need to begin looking outside the genre for new ideas in order for strategy games to continue to be successful in the future.

According to Toronto, players' awareness that their only way to win is militarily makes them unlikely to respond to gestures of diplomacy; the result being that the winner of a real-time strategy game is too often the best tactician rather than the best strategist.

[10] Wargaming with items or figurines representing soldiers or units for training or entertainment has been common for as long as organised conflicts[citation needed].

Chess, for example, is based on essentialised battlefield movements of medieval unit types and, beyond its entertainment value, is intended to instill in players a rudimentary sense of tactical considerations.

Since most established rule sets were for turn-based table-top games, the conceptual leap to translate these categories to real time was also a problem that needed to be overcome.

In 1997 Firaxis Games' released Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, a detailed and faithful recreation of some of the most significant battles of the American Civil War that introduced large scale tactical battlefield command using 3D.

In 1997, Bungie released Myth: The Fallen Lords, which introduced radically larger battlefields than ever before [citation needed] and included a realistic (at the time) physics engine.

In 2000, Creative Assembly created Shogun: Total War, taking map sizes to even greater levels, as well as introducing historical and tactical realism until then unheard of in real-time computer games.

Games set in the future and combining elements of science fiction obviously are not constrained by historical accuracy or even the limitations of current technology and physics.