Recently I have had a lot of matches after which my opponents have been saying things like “I should have won because I outkilled you” or “You had no resources, I should have won”. Now, this happens to me most often in Age of Mythology, but the concept below applies to any RTS with a traditional economy system, such as Starcraft 2, or even Halo Wars.





About K/D:

Not every game supports display of the value of kills. The important factor in K/D is not just the sheer number of kills, but also how many resources the affected player lost due to the unit losses. Let’s say that in AoM, I use 10 hoplites to kill 4 elephants. I lose 5 hoplites in the process. My opponent lost 720 food and 320 gold, but I only lost 250 food and 200 gold. This is an amazing trade for me. My opponent however now has a better K/D ratio numerically speaking - this statistic can be often misleading, as you see. While you are in game, it’s very difficult to keep track of this, especially when races are heavily asymmetric, such as Zerg and Terran. The Terran has to severely outkill the Zerg numerically speaking in order to get ahead. In addition, they almost always have to do that resource-wise too, seeing as Zerg is usually ahead in income, and can afford to trade somewhat inefficiently. The same scenario also shows up in Halo Wars, where the Covenant leaders must deal a significant amount of damage, heavily tilting the scales of kill counts in favor of the Covenant player when they play against the UNSC. If that is not the case in the early game, there must be a significant skill gap.

Income management and banking:

Although in most RTS this is largely known, I see this coming back in AoM far too often - when I have an income that almost exactly matches my spending, and thus I have low resources, people start being worried in my stream chat, saying I have no resources and I’m likely to lose. This is in fact not a bad thing as long as unit production can be kept up. Let’s talk a bit about income. Having a bank of resources is of course nice, but it comes at a cost. In AoM, and also SC2, a high worker count is required to create a bank. Workers cost population/supply, and thus limit the size of your army further. If I am confident I can keep up production with what I have, it’s a good idea to stop at a lower number of workers, as my army size will be larger - now I can win fights more easily. The risk factor is that I could get raided and lose my income, or I could lose my army - or even worse: both at the same time. Those moments hurt, but there is a fine risk vs reward balance to tread on, and there is always potential to establish a greater eco.

Generally speaking in RTS games, spending your resources once you can afford the thing you want is an indicator of great macro. Let’s say I have 50 resources in AoM or SC2, I can now buy a worker. This does not need to wait until I have 60 - that would be a waste of time, in which that worker would be contributing otherwise.

Banking a lot of resources does have its advantages, though. It means that you can afford to remake your army many times, but it also allows you to build offensively, and even sacrifice workers for a gain in map control or just for the gain in army size for that push. Banking will naturally occur when there is nothing to really spend on - such as when you have a maxed out army, and no more upgrades are relevant or available.

In the end, banking and low eco balancing both are valid styles of play, as we have seen both work well in many RTS games. It is largely down to players which way of eco management they prefer - sometimes a specific strategy benefits more from one than the other (for example almost all lategame styles in sc2 benefit hugely from a bank). Now however you are aware of these concepts, if you weren’t before, and as we all know, knowledge is power.