Glen Atwell
Shaun InguanzoA Real Time Strategy Guide Pt4
April 20th 2006 02:41
Category: No Category
Today we look at the hedgehog strategy.
The Hedgehog
This strategy seems to be a favourite of many people; possibly because it is the least stressful. This is due to the principle behind the strategy being to sit behind massed defenses. Another reason why people like this strategy is that it provides a long and oft times enjoyable game with a large interplay of technologies. Some of my favourite games have been against a player adopting this strategy. An example of this happened when I was playing a game of Total Annihilation some years ago where I was part of a team of three facing a like numbered team. We were playing on a large metal islands map and succeeded in taking down two of our three adversaries and the last went onto the defensive. We had a situation where we were surrounding his island with defenses of our own, warships and fighters/bombers. All our attempts to actually remove him from the island met with failure; ships were counter bombarded from his own ships and costal batteries; planes were shot down and any landing attempts were thwarted by heavily defended chokepoints. We finally defeated him with massed missile strikes followed by huge air and land assaults.
Ok so let’s look at the mechanics behind the hedgehog. As always, a strong economy is desired, especially when building your defensive works. Use of terrain will be highly advantageous to your defense; especially when it involves natural chokepoints. A good knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of your defensive structures and units will also be advantageous. What you hope to achieve with this strategy is to build a very well defended base of operations and then proceed to: win a war of attrition if a large amount of resources are available within your defensive ring; or, switch to another strategy now that you have a good base to launch it from. A word on constructing defenses: rather than building huge amounts of structures or units in solid lines, it is far better, and cheaper, to group small blocks of mutually supporting structures and units in overlapping fields of fire. The gaps will make your opponent indecisive about what to target, thus killing more of his troops before they can react, and will also mean that if one area is overrun another near to it can continue to attack with relative impunity.
That is how you can conduct a hedgehog strategy, now let’s look at how to pull one apart. Firstly, a very important note to be made is that when using a hedgehog strategy it is very easy to grow complacent and due to this it is also very hard to change to a more aggressive stance; use this to your advantage by regularly changing the way you strike at their base and also by constantly attacking – keeping the pressure on is the best way to prevent your enemy from moving into an aggressive stance of their own, it also keeps them pinned doing one thing while you have much more freedom to strike them. Things to remember: often, your opponent’s proper base, where all their construction and often resource gathering take place, are undefended. This is because their defensive works will be, most often, at least slightly removed so as to limit collateral damage to their base from fights around the defensive works and to take advantage of terrain. What this means for you is that if you can bypass your foes’ defenses in some fashion while their main army is away from their base you should be able to destroy or at least savagely maul their base. You can just overwhelm their defenses with shear numbers; most games defenses will only be able to handle so many units before they are overwhelmed. If the rts you are playing is one where buildings are required to power defenses the obvious solution is to somehow get behind your enemies defenses with a small force long enough to destroy these structures and then attack with your main army. Pinpoint strikes by high tech level units against defensive works can be a good idea, especially if they outrange the defenses they are attacking, once a hole is made in the defense then you can funnel your attacking units through. A final option would be to conduct a war of attrition by making it as difficult for your opponent to actually go outside his base to expand it or establish resource gathering bases; in this way you will control a larger portion of the map and all the resources within it.
A final point to be made is that some rts games make it very difficult to adopt a pure hedgehog strategy due to relative unit to defensive structure strengths; this means you will have to adopt another strategy along with the hedgehog in order to maintain it.
Next time we will be looking at infiltration and pinpoint strike strategies and tactics and how to counter them.
Alskreek, out.
The Hedgehog
This strategy seems to be a favourite of many people; possibly because it is the least stressful. This is due to the principle behind the strategy being to sit behind massed defenses. Another reason why people like this strategy is that it provides a long and oft times enjoyable game with a large interplay of technologies. Some of my favourite games have been against a player adopting this strategy. An example of this happened when I was playing a game of Total Annihilation some years ago where I was part of a team of three facing a like numbered team. We were playing on a large metal islands map and succeeded in taking down two of our three adversaries and the last went onto the defensive. We had a situation where we were surrounding his island with defenses of our own, warships and fighters/bombers. All our attempts to actually remove him from the island met with failure; ships were counter bombarded from his own ships and costal batteries; planes were shot down and any landing attempts were thwarted by heavily defended chokepoints. We finally defeated him with massed missile strikes followed by huge air and land assaults.
Ok so let’s look at the mechanics behind the hedgehog. As always, a strong economy is desired, especially when building your defensive works. Use of terrain will be highly advantageous to your defense; especially when it involves natural chokepoints. A good knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of your defensive structures and units will also be advantageous. What you hope to achieve with this strategy is to build a very well defended base of operations and then proceed to: win a war of attrition if a large amount of resources are available within your defensive ring; or, switch to another strategy now that you have a good base to launch it from. A word on constructing defenses: rather than building huge amounts of structures or units in solid lines, it is far better, and cheaper, to group small blocks of mutually supporting structures and units in overlapping fields of fire. The gaps will make your opponent indecisive about what to target, thus killing more of his troops before they can react, and will also mean that if one area is overrun another near to it can continue to attack with relative impunity.
That is how you can conduct a hedgehog strategy, now let’s look at how to pull one apart. Firstly, a very important note to be made is that when using a hedgehog strategy it is very easy to grow complacent and due to this it is also very hard to change to a more aggressive stance; use this to your advantage by regularly changing the way you strike at their base and also by constantly attacking – keeping the pressure on is the best way to prevent your enemy from moving into an aggressive stance of their own, it also keeps them pinned doing one thing while you have much more freedom to strike them. Things to remember: often, your opponent’s proper base, where all their construction and often resource gathering take place, are undefended. This is because their defensive works will be, most often, at least slightly removed so as to limit collateral damage to their base from fights around the defensive works and to take advantage of terrain. What this means for you is that if you can bypass your foes’ defenses in some fashion while their main army is away from their base you should be able to destroy or at least savagely maul their base. You can just overwhelm their defenses with shear numbers; most games defenses will only be able to handle so many units before they are overwhelmed. If the rts you are playing is one where buildings are required to power defenses the obvious solution is to somehow get behind your enemies defenses with a small force long enough to destroy these structures and then attack with your main army. Pinpoint strikes by high tech level units against defensive works can be a good idea, especially if they outrange the defenses they are attacking, once a hole is made in the defense then you can funnel your attacking units through. A final option would be to conduct a war of attrition by making it as difficult for your opponent to actually go outside his base to expand it or establish resource gathering bases; in this way you will control a larger portion of the map and all the resources within it.
A final point to be made is that some rts games make it very difficult to adopt a pure hedgehog strategy due to relative unit to defensive structure strengths; this means you will have to adopt another strategy along with the hedgehog in order to maintain it.
Next time we will be looking at infiltration and pinpoint strike strategies and tactics and how to counter them.
Alskreek, out.
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