Microing units isn’t as demanding as Terran Marines in Starcraft, but a player actively putting their healing pigeons in the back and their badger tanks in the front is going to get things done. Throwing your units at your opponent with little remorse will be punished by superior tactics. You still need to position your units gain advantages of high ground and sight. Tooth and Tail finds beauty in simplicity of mechanics to deliver complex design choices which don’t intimidate the player. The rules of RTS still apply here: gather resources, build an army, command that army using your general. Once a deck has been selected it is time to put that plan into action. The drafting before a match hasn’t been done in RTS before and is akin to many CCGs like Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, or Netrunner. If my deck gets completely out drafted by an opponent, the next game I can swap out a owl for a wolf and completely change my strategy. You think you’re getting mole rushed? Counter with a low cost unit like drunken squirrels or comrade lizards to push back the tide. You want to zerg rush? Bring the engineering moles into the deck and hit the opponent fast and hard before they have time to react. The unit design is so smart and each of the recruits comes with their own thoughtful art, sound, and tactics. Drafting a deck is a genius method to teach players how to think about larger strategies before the match even starts, but also gives them a chance to learn the unit interactions on a smaller scale. There are four tiers of units with five units in each tier (20 total) and players choose any combination of six for the match. One way Pocketwatch has changed this for Tooth and Tail to make it more accessible is having players draft their army into a deck before every match. Learning how all the units work in an RTS is a basic principle, but also a huge mountain to conquer. Collecting resources, building a base, creating an army, and battling your opponent these are the foundations of any strategy game and probably haven’t changed much for a reason. These pillars established the genre and have paved the way for future titles, but nothing has drastically changed the way RTS is played. When I describe real time strategy to people, it usually comes with blank stares until I mention something like Starcraft, or Command and Conquer. Pocketwatch has removed many of the barriers of entry for the genre such as a reliance on actions per minute or complicated unit management and has made an accessible strategy game. The team at Pocketwatch Games previously stole our hearts with Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, and they are back with their take on ‘Popcorn RTS’. Tooth and Tail is a real time strategy game set in an eastern European anthropomorphic rodent revolution.
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