Life Advice from RA2

(and other RTS games)

I’m a fan of the whole Command & Conquer RTS games from the 90s, and the cream of the crop was Red Alert 2. I’ve spent hours, days, playing it, and kept coming back over the years as an old favorite.

But it’s only recently that I realized pushing pixels around on a screen, with seemingly no impact on the real world, had actually taught me some very relevant lessons about life and money. While I write this about RA2, the comparisons also hold true for most other RTS, resource-management war games.

• Build a strong base, but not a HUGE one.
  When you’re starting, you have limited resources. Trying to acquire everything on your wishlist, immediately and all at once, is wasteful and doomed to failure. Instead, build up a stable, moderate foundation that can serve as the starting point for greater things in future.
• Explore and learn about the world to find opportunities
  The sooner you explore, the faster you find untapped resources and opportunities to exploit before others do. Stay in your little bubble, and when you finally do go out, you’ll find a crowded, depleted world crawling with competitors.

• Build up your tiberium supply capacity early
  Create a whole fleet of resource gatherers (income generators) that can establish a continuous income stream to power your growth and security

• Invest in a technology tree
  It’s not enough to simply expand what you have – you have to also learn new skills and technologies that can enable bigger, better, and more powerful capabilities, even if investing in that learning takes resources that could have been used in something else. Test new tech constantly to come up with innovative uses.
• Create alliances
  A ally will not obtrusively compete, and will refrain from attacking you at inconvenient times, leaving you free to focus on one enemy at a time. Also, in the end, alliances fall apart into enmity, but by now you’re ready to take them on.

• Avoid attacking until you have a strong defense
  An attack usually invites a swift reprisal; an experimental effort could, if failed, create a backlash. Having a secure position to fall back on ensures you survive that mistake and can go on.
• Restructure your forces basis what went wrong
  Learn from your mistakes. Sometimes, a foray into the world fails because you used the wrong tools or methods. Keeping a keen eye on what went wrong and why, will help you structure the next attempt in a different way, not repeating from the same mistakes. Learn from history.
• Structure your attack basis the enemy’s defenses
  Don’t simply build a massive capacity and walk into a fight blindly, it’s wasteful and high-risk. Spy out your enemy, see his defenses, and build a plan that can attack his weak points.
• When capturing territory, defend it well
  Captured territory is open and vulnerable. Having resources ready to deploy in defending it is critical – do not commit 100% of everything in mere acquisition, but have a reserve ready for consolidation.

• After repelling an attack, rebuild defenses and refineries
  A strong setback leaves you in a desperate, low-resource situation. Dispose of everything that is a further drain on them, or a distraction, even if they are things you spent effort in acquiring; the focus has to be on survival and re-establishing a growth plan. Nice-to-have can come later.

• A small force of elite troops is more effective than a mass of conscripts
  If you have a good team, give them opportunities to upskill and gain experience. Defend them in hard times and do not risk them unnecessarily. They will be worth far more than ten times their number of raw, untrained freshers.
• When attacking a powerful base, combine multiple attack vectors
  Going up against a larger, stronger opponent requires careful planning, time to prepare and position your forces, advance knowledge and plans, resources at the right points, and careful coordination and timing.

• Set up a secondary base
  Before committing to a high-risk action, it’s a good idea to have a seed capacity squirreled away out of the line of fire. If everything collapses catastrophically, you have a second chance to fall back and rebuild.

• Superweapons attract invasions
  Having high-visibility vanity structures that attract a lot of attention, can also set you up for attack. Sometimes a low-profile, under-the-radar conventional approach, working for you, may be more effective in achieving your aims than a flashy, expensive, and ineffective activity.