Red Alert 3 is classified as a Real Time Strategy game, implying that it's about strategy in real time, whatever that may mean. In this article, we're going to discuss strategies from the perspective of design, as in how the game was originally intended to function, and explore why things just didn't pan out that way.
Strategy First off, it's fairly important to define what we mean by strategy within the context of this discussion. Strategy can mean lots of things, but what we mean by the word 'strategy' within this article is a fairly broad, high level decision and concept as to how you intend to allocate and use your resources, such as credits, units, time and attention, in order to beat the other guy. More specifically, we're going to discuss the concept of the strategy, which I would describe as a fairly broad idea that can essentially be summed up in a single word.
Now, Red Alert 3 was designed with three possible strategic concepts in mind: teching/expanding, harassing and defending. The original plan was for expanding to beat defending, harassing beat teching/expanding, and defending beat harassing in a rock/paper/scissors arrangement. This is nicely illustrated in a diagram visible in a photo from Greg Black's design blog posting.
This was the original plan on how the game would work. Players would have pursued a strategy with one of these concepts at the heart of it, whether they knew it or not, and these concepts are broad enough that almost all strategies in the game can be classified under one of them. To make sure we all understand what we mean by these concepts, I'll try to elaborate on their meaning.
The first thing to note about all these concepts is that they mainly apply to the early game phases, as they tend to be about how the player's initial resources are spent. As the game goes on, these concepts become less relevant as player resources increase so that they no longer have to be chosen between, and in some cases, are no longer possible to achieve to a further extent.
Teching/Expanding Teching/Expanding is basically investing for the future, either economically in pursuing more resources or improving your options with better tech. This prevents you from expending resources on things to pressure your enemy or defend yourself with. This is weak against harassing strategies because it lacks a significant defence and the actual act of expanding leaves expensive units highly vulnerable to attack. It is strong against defending because the extra resources or better tech allow you to overwhelm or break through the defences.
Harassing Harassing is about attacking your enemy in order to either force him to stop doing he wants to do to get rid of you or, if he doesn't, damage his ability to fight you. Using your initial resources primarily for an attack leaves you with little defence of your own and without enough to invest in getting more, at least for a while. This is weak against defending as the harassment is unable to disrupt plans or destroy anything valuable, so that the resources spent on harassment attacks achieved nothing. This is strong against teching/expanding as teching or expanding creates a lot of valuable targets without much in the way to defend them, allowing the harasser to destroy them at great cost to the expander.
Defending Defending is essentially spending resources on units and defensive structures in order to prevent any enemy attacks from disrupting later operations in teching/expanding or harassing. This means that credit and perhaps more importantly time resources are spent on entirely passive measures that prevent you from rapidly expanding, teching or attacking. This is weak against expanding because the expander has free reign to acquire enough resources so that the defences cannot keep up with his attacking forces. It is strong against harassing because it prevents the harasser from achieving anything useful with his initial resources.
Now that we all understand what we mean by these terms, let's use them to explore how the game works.
Factions and Strategies I strongly suspect that each of the factions was intentionally designed with a slant towards a particular strategy. The crane and retaining ground control around buildings means that it is easy for Soviets to build expansions and defend them. The highly versatile, mobile units and buildings of the Empire allow them to attack from all kinds of unexpected directions and put lots of pressure on their opponent very quickly. The lack of any requirement to reach Tier 2 and the ability to place buildings complete instantly without any exposure during construction allows the Allies to defend very easily.
While this may not be a particularly deep or sophisticated faction design paradigm, it is still what has happened. And while the factions are slanted in a particular direction, there is nothing to prevent a player of a certain faction from pursuing any one of these strategies. Their success, or the lack of it, is dependent on the other player's actions.
