Mike Ybarra teases Age of Empires on Xbox

[Chazore]

endimion said:

Barkley said:

Selecting units with a mouse is a lot faster and more accurate. In a PC rts game you will be able to select and isolate a singular unit that is surrounded by hundreds of other units, with a gamepad you will have a large innacurate cursor. In a console rts units are less likely to be many individual entities and are most likely put into larger groups.

Basically you'll probably be controlling and building a few squads of units, rather than many individual units, that's the main thing. There'll be less micro management when it comes to moving units on a gamepad-friendly rts.

you worry for nothing even if console might be the target... It would take about half an afternoon to dev moise friendly control scheme... Especially since there already hundreds of RTS out there already using exactly the same one...

what you are saying is like saying a racing game targeted for PC with K/m controls won't work with a pad or a wheel...

Majority of RTS games use K+M for the reasons he stated. With consoles youget either the very old style of clicking a button and dragging a mouse cursor (which in those days of old C&C was slow as hell and innacurate to boot) or the command wheel which C&C went with: 

The downside to the wheel was that you had to click to pull up the menu and then go through the wheel list itself, toggle the stick to the building and then click again to select it, then use the stick to guide a place to set it down and click again. All in that time I can click a single key to bring up the structures tab and then another key for that building and single left click to place it down, that alone shaved time fof for me.

Look at how Starcraft 1-2 play as well. Those just wouldn't gel well with the gamepad setup at all, not with the micro management and decent level APM needed for the competitive matches. If RT games truly worked extremely well on gamepads and consoles, then you'd be seeing all of them leaping over from the past decade, but that hasn't happened because they don't work well with consoles let alone the crowd.

Also Red Alert 3 had unit limitations, same with other RTS titles, on PC there wasn't for Red Alert 3 since PC could handle more units at a given time than the 360/PS3 as well as visuals.

 

The reality is that K+M is objectively better than the gamepad when it comes to RTS games, just like with FPS. Just like how the racing wheel is more accurate than the gamepad when it comes to racing games or a gamepad for platformers.