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Easy Communication: Difference between revisions
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** The second half of the trope is subverted in the case of units with the Impetuous trait (usually knights and similar elite units), who can decide to charge the enemy on their own. They invariably do so when least convenient to the player - isn't it just ''swell'' when the linchpin of your defensive line leaves a gaping hole in it in order to charge some dirty peasants halfway across the field ? [[Truth in Television]], too : that's pretty much how the French lost Crécy.
** Some units will also refuse to break off while pursuing targets, which can wreck things if you need those Feudal Knights to rush over and guard your archers from enemy cavalry, or you need to get your Scottish Highlanders around the enemy to flank those soldiers who are winning the battle against your dismounted knights.
* ''[[
** If you order peasants to build a building, and they are fired upon while doing so, they'll walk alway until they're out of range, then return to try to construct the building again. If you order a dozen peasants to work on the same building, often they'll be able construct the building before they all die. But if there's only one or two peasants, often they'll just walk back and forth, getting shot at, without ever doing any work on the building, until they die.
* ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' 7 makes the commander an entity to represent the player (but has a minor role and second playthoughs give the option to remove him entirely.) who can issue someone orders from any distance. The rest of the games simply make the player a [[Non-Entity General]] (though FE 4 has the oddity of units cross country coordinating)
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** The first ''Red Alert'' had an interesting case: most units would not auto-acquire targets unless set to "guard", and would never auto-acquire a building (although this is so they don't destroy anything you wanted to ''steal''). Worse, a particular elite unit, Tanya, could ''never'' be put into guard mode, and had to be directed for every shot - but, with her healthy range and high damage against infantry, she needed something to hinder her.
*** This will actually become extremely frustrating in one particular Allies mission, which is filled with fast-running dogs that come in packs. Hope you're a fast click or you'll be seeing that mushroom cloud quite a lot. Note that she cannot shoot through walls, no matter how close the enemy is.
* ''[[
** Mind you, a turn can represent anything between 1 to 60 years, so it's not entirely unreasonable to expect that some communication would occur in that time.
*** Well it doesn't make sense when you tell a unit to go out and explore only to recall them when they're halfway across the world.
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* ''[[Dominions]]'' probably comes as close to averting this as possible. Instead of commanding your soldiers in battle, you give orders (formation, battle plan, spells to cast, contingencies, etc…) to each unit in a region, and they then carry out the battle automatically whenever they attack or are attacked. In addition, if you want any information to strategize on, you must scout out a region, organize an attack, and hope your intelligence is still good by the time it launches.
** To get reliable intel is almost impossible without special spies that not every nation has access to or spells that costs valuable magic gems. Some scrying spells even risk your casting mage's mind.
* The non-responsiveness problem is heavily averted in ''[[
** The autoretaliation debuted in Warcraft ''[[Older Than They Think|II]]'', if not the first; it also had the feature of an attacking unit revealing itself through the [[Fog of War]].
** Also, Blizzard RTS games were some of the first to implement a "Hold Position" order, where a unit would stay in one spot and engage anything that came into range, but would not leave its position of attacked from range. This was useful if you were massing forces for an attack and didn't want them getting pulled into battle prematurely by enemy units trying to kite them into an ambush.
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* In ''[[Sword of the Stars]]'' Humans and Zuul cannot relay orders to fleets in [[Hyperspace|nodespace]] because the signals wouldn't be able to catch up to the ships in time. The Tarka need to research a specific technology before they are able to communicate with ships in transit. Inside of battles, ships often take time to respond to orders (though this is more due to physical concerns rather than delays in communication) and can be set to a number of stances that limit or increase their personal initiative.
* Interestingly played with in ''[[Achron]]'': giving units commands in the past or the future costs chronoenergy. This leads to an interesting game mechanic of assigning units commanders to create chains of command: you can minimize chronoenergy expenditure by just giving orders to commanders and letting them communicate your orders to their underlings.
* Averted ''[[All
* In a non-videogame example, this is mentioned in Tom Clancy's novel "The Bear and The Dragon" and explains why treating actual people in this manner is a bad idea.
* Optional in ''Fields of Glory'', a simulation of the climactic battles of Napoleon's Hundred Days campaign. Depending on the difficulty setting, units would take a certain amount of time to respond to your orders, which was explicitly justified on the basis that it would take time for orders to be relayed from the commander to the unit.
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* Justified in ''[[Starcraft]]'' for the Zerg and Protoss factions because it is explicitly a psychic link.
** Also might be justified for the Terran faction - the lower units like marines, firebats etc., who are brainwashed, drugged soldiers in power armors. The higher units like armors, fliers etc. are experienced and ranked. Actually, whenever you select multiple units, one of them (the one with the highest rank) is selected as a "command unit", which communicates with you. And it is in the future with rather few units (max 12 units get commands at the same time) - radio is quite fine for that, especially when you consider that there is hardly any cover and that taking cover with a ton heavy walking behemoth is not all that easy or practical for most cases. And for heroes... do we even have to go there? :)
** The Terrans use Adjutants to control their troops, so it's not infeasible that, in fact, the commander's interface literally looks like an RTS and the AI relays orders. For example, when the commander "selects" a marine and then "selects" an enemy to attack, what actually happens is that the Adjutant translates it into orders communicated through the marine's [[Power Armor]], via either voice or even by highlighting said enemy on the helmet's HUD. The real question here is who controls the units through the "RTS" overview screen in ''[[
*** Usually, missions with Raynor as a playable unit involve him personally leading a small unit. He could just be literally ordering his squad around verbally.
* Anything with massively advanced communications or [[Psychic Powers]] can be expected to use something like this.
* ''[[Total Annihilation]]'' and its [[Spiritual Successor]] ''[[
* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', the Formics were like this due to a [[Hive Mind]], and humans compensated by learning how to create instant communication technology. {{spoiler|Ender in fact commented on how the game he was playing was unrealistic because of the instant communication, when unbeknownst to him, it was actually real. Bean realizes the game is real for this very reason in later a later book, but never informs others}}
** It also ''does'' filter through a chain of command, albeit brief, once he started training with his squad leaders. This is ''usually'' not a problem...
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