Rush (video games)

File:Zerg rush.png

A "four pool" zergling rush against a zerg AI opponent in StarCraft who has not yet built a Spawning Pool.

In real-time strategy (RTS) and team-based first-person shooter (FPS) computer games, a rush is a fast attack at the beginning of the game. In this context, it is also known as swarming, goblin tactics or Zerging, referring to the Zerg rush tactic from StarCraft. It emphasizes speed in an attempt to overwhelm an unprepared opponent. It is analogous to the human wave attack in real-world ground warfare, in which overwhelming numbers of troops are sent at the enemy, disregarding tactics or casualties. In fighting games, this style of play is called rushdown. This also has a different meaning in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), where characters skip the usual progress path with the aid of others to reap benefits that are usually denied to them until a later time.

The alternatives to rushing are turtling and economic boom. These have a rock-paper-scissors relationship: a rush beats a boom, a boom beats a turtle, and a turtle beats a rush.

Zerging in computer games carries the connotation of being disorganized, too easy, and/or unfair, and players who employ this tactic are often considered inferior or cheap. There are few defenses against the zerg rush, one of these few being camping. Proponents, especially in realtime strategy games, feel that the threat of a zerging keeps their opponents honest, forcing them to play defense from the beginning of the match.

Strategy games

In strategy games, to perform a rush, the attacking player focuses on quickly building a large number of units with the hopes of swarming the opponents before they can defend themselves. In the majority of cases, these units are fast and cheap to enable larger numbers and opportunistic attack strategies, but they may sometimes be chosen to exploit a particular weakness of the enemy. The player who rushes may sacrifice options such as long-term resource gathering or immediate research up the tech tree to opt instead for a quick strike.

A successful rush usually attempts to disrupt the resource gathering of the defending player or annihilate that player entirely. The rush is a risky tactic. If the rush is successful, then the player may have won the game or significantly set his or her opponent back; if the rush fails, then the rushing player may have wasted valuable time and resources that would have been better spent on research, building defenses, and building more powerful units. A rush can also be considered a mass attack with primarily only one type of unit used, and depends on overwhelming numbers and force to succeed. The rush is often a suicidal attack (for the units involved); rushing units are often expected to die, but to nevertheless benefit the player initiating the rush by disrupting the opponent's operations. In World in Conflict a team will sometimes choose to rush with poorly armored, unarmed troop trucks to capture all points in an Assault game to force an early Total Domination.

The term "rush" is often preceded by a word describing the type of unit used in the rush. For example, in the game StarCraft, a Terran player may use a Marine rush (or in some cases an SCV rush), a Protoss player may use a Zealot rush, and a Zerg player may use the eponymous and infamous Zergling rush. The units used are almost always cheap, easy to produce, and weak compared to other units.

Occasionally, the term is applied to the different, but related tactic epitomized by the Tank rush present in the Command & Conquer series since Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The tank rush differs in the units are neither cheap nor easily produced, but in a sufficient group they can be nigh unstoppable. Similar to the Starcraft etymology, the term is often altered according to the units involved, such as the Rhino tank rush of Red Alert 2, the Flash tank rush of Total Annihilation and the Pitbull rush of Command & Conquer 3. This alternate application can also be found in many gaming communities. Some rushes rely on units that may not be cheap or quick to produce but have a particular advantage such as flight or invisibility that requires specialized defenses to counter. For example, a protoss player may use a Dark Templar rush against an opponent with no units or structures that can detect cloaked units. A Dark Templar rush would not work against an opponent with sufficient ability to detect cloaked units because Dark Templars are too expensive and slow to produce to be used in a rush where their invisibility is not an advantage. In Red Alert 2, a tactic called a "Rocky Rush" where an allied player, without the knowledge of their opponent, quickly amasses a large force of flying infantry called Rocketeers is a somewhat common rush. The strategy relies on the idea that just as many Starcraft players may forget early invisibility detection ability to defend against more conventional attacks, many Red Alert 2 players might not have built any anti-aircraft defenses early in the game in order to defend against tank and engineer rushes more effectively. If an opponent has sufficient warning of a Rocketeer Rush, it is easy for them to build a defense to counter the Rocketeer rush for a fraction of the cost of the Rocketeers, ensuring victory for the defending player, because the opponent will be left with little money and no way of stopping a ground assault with anti-aircraft support.

In another departure from the generally derogatory nature attached to the Starcraft etymology, the term can sometimes be used to describe a rapid early game assault, intending to take the opponent by surprise. Some games even go so far as to incorporate the rush into their resource collection, such as Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.

Origins

The first common appearances of the term rush in this sense came from Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) Warcraft II players used the term Grunt rush, the "Grunts" being the basic Orcish military unit.

There was a variation of the Grunt rush that involved building a barracks (the primary military structure) before building a town hall (the primary structure for collecting resources and developing the tech tree.) The "barracks first rush" was effective because in the 1.0 release of Warcraft II, the players' starting locations were bound to the players' colors. It was possible to know where a player was located on the map if you knew the starting location for each color. The color/location problem was fixed in the first patch and barracks first rushing became a losing proposition on most larger maps. Since the barracks first rush was a do-or-die tactic, it was banned in most leagues and strongly discouraged by most serious players. Players would start games saying "thf", short for "town hall first". The much later release, Warcraft II Battle.net Edition, forced players to build a town hall first.

In Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1996) so-called tank rushes were a dominant strategy for players using the Soviet forces. Tank Rushes are not true rush, as the units used are neither cheap, fast, nor produced quickly. Tank Rushing is to mass a large number of tanks and then charge them into the enemy base. Since the Soviet's Mammoth Tank is almost as strong as a Tesla Coil (the strongest defense tower in the game) in terms of power and as resilient as a construction yard, it's essentially a moving fortress and are often used. One extension of this for the Soviet forces in Red Alert 2 was a Flak Cap (Flak Capture) Rush. The Soviet player would quickly load two engineers (units capable of capturing enemy buildings) and a Terror Drone (a unit that rendered vehicles useless so early in the game) into a Flak Track (a transport) and rushed the enemy base. The idea was that either the engineers would capture the enemy Construction Yard - their most vital building - or the Construction Yard would turn into a vehicle in which case the Terror Drone would hop in. Either way, the enemy loses their vital means of production and is effectively doomed from that point on, unable to advance any further. Another method for Soviets is to continuously produce Conscripts, the cheapest and most basic Soviet infantry unit. This method is to swarm the enemy using numbers since Conscripts only cost $100, half the price of an Allied GI, and therefore are more inexpensive and expendable. A player also got more Conscripts (about 20 or so) in the beginning of the game, compared to the Allies 10 GIs or Yuri's 6 Initiates. A rush that has been widely used throughout the command and conquer series is the "engineer rush" where the rushing player would load up transports with engineers and storm the enemy base, capturing many buildings; this tactic was popular because engineers are usually slow and weak, but transports like APCs are usually faster and have decent armour and players could not tell what was in the transports; a swarm of engineers could capture many vital production structures. A cheap defensive wall around the construction yard would prevent most engineers from capturing it though.

Zerg rush

The term was further popularized by the strategy called Zerg rush from StarCraft (1998) and continued through its respective expansion pack. The Zerg race can execute faster rushes than either the Terran or the Protoss races; players consider the Zerg the race most likely to and best-adapted to rushing.

The first infantry units of Zergs are Zerglings. They are small and inexpensive Zerg units which can be produced quickly. Zerglings hatch from cocoons in pairs, although, at the beginning of a game, only three cocoons can exist at one time. Thus, it is possible for a Zerg player to produce 6 Zerglings very early into the game, while the first Terran and Protoss infantry unit (Marine and Zealot, respectively) must be produced one at a time. Although weaker and easier to kill, 6 Zerglings can beat two Marines or Zealots in an opened battle without support, which makes Zerglings quite deadly at the beginning of a one versus one match.

A Zergling rush is the tactic of attacking an opponent with 6 or more Zergling units as early as permissible. This refers specifically to the strategy where a Zerg player creates a Spawning Pool very early in the game, sacrificing his or her economy to enable creation of Zerglings. Within StarCraft, the strategy is further classified by how early the player attempts to sacrifice economy to execute the rush, for example the four pool rush is the earliest possible Zergling rush. It is called the "four pool rush (often shortened to 4pool)" because the player immediately gathers resources (each player starts out with four worker units) and does not build more workers until the player has enough resources to build a Spawning Pool.

Using this tactic, a player can overwhelm, hinder the expansion of, or even defeat an enemy who does not have sufficient defenses. Because Zerglings are quick to produce and cheap, consecutive rushes may defeat an opponent. A Zergling rush often targets an enemy's main building (the one building that each player begins with that produces workers to allow for resource gathering). This building would be the Command Center (Terran), Nexus (Protoss), or Hatchery (Zerg). Destroying the main building of an enemy early in the game, preventing the gathering of resources, can easily cripple the opponent.

On a 2-versus-2 match, it is very hard to defend against a dual-Zergling rush. For example, if two Zerg players decide to rush one enemy player, they would have 12 Zerglings against that one player. This dual tactic is efficient and easy on micromanagement, resulting normally in the destruction of the enemy player. The most effective way players can survive against the single- or dual-Zergling rush is by defending ramps or other tight areas to force the Zerglings into a bottleneck. The downside of the Zerg rush is the overall weakness of the Zergling; even worker units, the weakest in the game, are almost equally matched.

Due to the instability the strategy caused, Blizzard Entertainment later balanced this by implementing changes through patch 1.08. The patch raised the cost of the spawning pool, allowing more time for the other players to defend themselves while the Zerg player gathers resources. However, the Zerglings are still the fastest-spawning units in the game, and the rush strategy is still lethal if used correctly.

It is important to note that the overall Zerg strategy caters towards massive armies of units. Portamanteaus such as hydraling (referring to an army of Hydralisks and Zerglings), mutaling (Mutalisks and Zerglings) and muta rush (A rush of air-borne Mutalisks) have been created and are common Zerg strategies.

Culture

When the first RTS-games were released in the early to mid 1990s, and rushes were first discovered, rushes were considered to be an unskilled tactic in many RTS gaming circles. However, the design of RTS-games usually allow a rush of some type to exist. Furthermore, a rush that failed was likely to result in the loss of the rushing player, so a rush involved taking an inherent risk. Consequently, soon the opposite became true: players who could rush well became respected. By the late 1990s, in most RTS-games, virtually all good players practiced the rush, which is still considered a standard and completely acceptable strategy. In some games, such as Galactic Civilizations, some players consider it unfair for the rush to be applied by artificial intelligence players because the AI does not need to explore the map; it knows where the human players are. The AI can instantly know where to rush and is protected since the human player has usually not done much exploring. In early versions of StarCraft, players were able to quit the game within 5 minutes without having a loss filed in the official Battle.net statistics. This led to extremely early rushes where the rusher quit just before 5 minutes if the rush did not seem successful enough. The time limit was lowered to 2 minutes in later versions.

In RTS-games that have been played for a long time, anti-rush strategies are usually developed, causing most rushes to become more of an attempt at early pressure rather than a direct attempt to win the game, though the latter still sometimes occurs.

In more recent Age of Empires games, however, the developer made rushing an almost futile strategy. This was done by strengthening the settlement by further fortifying it with projectiles and, in some other cases, with towers. Another change was to make the villagers stronger; attacking the villagers with weak units was no longer a profitable business.

In such games, a rush can still be applied, but mostly to weaken your opponent's expansion plans.

Another way to avoid a rush is to enforce a non-rush rule for a particular period of time. It could be anything from 10 minutes to 1 hour; in turn-based games, the rush restriction could last for hours.

Raiding

Raiding is a currently more common variant of the rush. A rush usually implies a strategy that relies heavily on build order, has a very narrow window of time, and aims to either win the game as early as possible or permanently cripple your opponent, often by destroying his or her important buildings that are too expensive to repair or rebuild and remain competitive in the game.

Raiding, by contrast, implies a focus on "hit and run" (or "bite and flee") attacks on an enemy's resource gathering units and apparatus — while usually cheaper and somewhat less effective than destroying command centers or expensive military training buildings, it requires relatively little early military presence. A successful raid will usually destroy a couple of economic gathering units and disrupt the enemy's concentration. It will rarely cripple an opponent, but will put them at a noticeable disadvantage in the early and midgame.

Some games have units dedicated to the practice of raiding, such as the cavalry archers in Rise of Nations and light cavalry units in Age of Empires III. In Starcraft, the Terran Vulture is a very fast unit that is often used for raiding enemy worker lines. Additionally, in Empire at War, any rebel landing party of four or less units constitutes a raid party and can bypass space defenses. The Rebel Infiltrator unit, also from Empire at War, can attach a detonation device to buildings and destroy or cripple them. Another effective raiding unit is the "raider" unit from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, a quick melee unit with an attack that is highly effective against buildings, and can be upgraded to "pillage" or steal resources from an opponent while destroying the buildings. However, because the "raider" is a tier 2 unit, it is rarely used for attacking supply lines unless the opponent has a poorly defended expansion base.

Harassing

Harassing is almost the same as the process of rushing, but being extremely cautious so as not to lose the 'harassing' units. It involves hitting valuable but unprotected targets, such as poorly-defended resources, workers that are not blocked off, or merely annoying enemy forces via the use of fast or stealthy units. It can refer to a harass at the start of the game or in its duration. It is very unlikely to occur during the late stages of the game. A good example of a harass is in Warcraft III, where you can equip a fast-running hero with a decent attack or spells (such as a Demon Hunter) with boots of speed. The hero then proceeds to attack the enemy's hero or base. A Blade Master is another example of a good harassing hero, and he can attack workers and/or enemy heroes before using his Wind Walk (invisibility) skill to escape. Accompanying a hero with only one or two trusty supporting units is sometimes called a "lieutenant rush". Harassing is much the same as raiding, involving a hit and run, but covers a wide variety of targets and uses more powerful units, often flying, to deal damage before escaping quickly. This strategy is often used to divert attention away from the attacker's base while they quickly ascend the tech tree in order to obtain the most powerful units early in the game.

In Starcraft, a form of harassment is called "dancing" your units. This involved someone who was very experienced in micromanagement or also coined "micro-ing". The process of dancing your units involved quickly climbing up the tech tree to create units that are long-ranged and have moderately fast movement. Units such as the Terran Vulture or the Protoss Dragoon are effective at dancing. The units created as fast as possible, with little regard anything other than the necessary buildings and gatherers. The units are created in amounts ranging from 4-12 (any more usually takes too much time). When the units are sent into the base, the opponent usually does not move so fast and still has slow or close-ranged units. The player dancing attacks with his long-ranged units, and when other units come to attack back, the long ranged units run away. When they get far enough away, either by running faster or when the opponent gives up the chase, they move closer and attack again, until they are chased again. This process does not work well later in the game, and is implemented as an early game strategy. Also, it does not work well with the Zerg long-ranged units, the Zerg Hydralisk, because in early game these units are quite slow-moving and, therefore, not adept to dancing.

Another good example of harassment is Harvester Harassment in the Command & Conquer series. Because of the series' use of Tiberium harvesters (heavily armoured resource collection vehicles), which are expensive and take long to produce, players have developed a type of harassment that use raid tactics to weaken and destroy Harvesters. Unlike worker harassing in other games Harvesters are usually sent out without backup, making this much easier than other types of harassment. In World in Conflict a team will sometimes choose to rush with poorly armored, unarmed troop trucks to capture all points in an Assault game.

In all cases of harassment the victim will inevitably send troops to safeguard the harassed unit. This is often used as a tactic on its own to divert the majority of the enemy troops away from a strategic point or from their base, which then the harassing player then can attack without fear of retaliation.

First-person shooter

Rushing in team-based first-person shooters has the same meaning as in real-time strategy games, and the term probably originates from RTS games. The opposite of rushing in this sense is camping. In FPS games, rushing is often considered to be an honorable tactic, in contrast to camping which is often looked down upon as a dishonorable tactic. It is noteworthy that when defensive objectives are present in an FPS game, protecting the objective isn't dishonorable, however this is loosely interpreted.

A team will rush towards an objective or certain area of the map hoping to overwhelm the players there before backup can arrive. In a bodycount or Team Deathmatch game such as True Combat: Elite, players will often rush at the enemy in a close quarters location to effectively remove the opponent's chance to react. In a round-based game like Counter-Strike, players rush typically in an all-or-nothing attempt at the beginning of the round. In most other first-person shooters players spawn continuously, so they might wait and plan for a group of players to form a rush. For example in Unreal Tournament 2004's "Onslaught" mode (territorial control), players might prepare an organized rush to capture the last control point and win the game. Another interesting example is the Warthog or Ghost rush common in Halo and Halo 2's capture the flag matches. The strategy revolves around the common practice of spending the first few moments of the game collecting the player's preferred weapons mix. This leaves a team uncoordinated, distributed and ill prepared for a pounce by two or three high speed vehicles into their base. A carefully orchestrated rush, thanks mainly to the powerful weapons fitted to the vehicles, can usually eliminate any remaining defenders and allow an easy capture of the flag. There is a certain amount of humour to be observed in the execution of a simultaneous rush of two players, especially if they choose differing paths to their opponent's base as the teams can end up retrieving the required flag, only to return to base to find their own (a prerequisite for scoring a point) missing. In Counter-Strike, players who died in previous round must spend time to repurchase weapons at the beginning of the following round, as such, a rush by the winning team (which has fewer players who needs to repurchase weapons) can lead to decisive victory. In addition, on some maps, rushing can be used to counter an enemy rush, as such, rushing by one team can lead to both teams rushing.

Similar to and spiritually derived from the "zerg rush" is a phenomenon known in the MMOFPS Planetside as "the zerg". Organized and teamwork-focused Outfits assign this description to the masses of hundreds of players in any faction that travel from base to base in a massive, unorganized squabble - rather than cooperating with fellow Outfits or coordinating with other players, and typically winning by gross numerical superiority rather than any amount of skill or tactical expertise. This tactic is now commonly associated with the Terran Republic faction, as the weapons employed by the Terran Republic have extremely high firing rates. This gives the TR infantry a significant advantage over the other empires, so in most facilities, the Terran Republic usually 'zerg rushes' the target, swarming it with overwhelming numbers of infantry.

Since the release of Valve's online team-oriented shooter, Team Fortress 2, numerous types of rushes have come about. They are predominantly the Scout Rush, and the Spy Rush; although Pyro rushes have also grown in popularity due to their perceived hilarity and ineffectiveness, though it is not uncommon to see rushes with other class types. The Scout rush is normally used at the beginning of a match on control point maps. It involves most, or all, of the team choosing the Scout class, and capturing all control points as the match starts. This rush works for several reasons. While having the least amount of health, the Scout is the fastest class in the game, and has the ability to capture control points twice as fast as the other classes, so that a handful of them could capture a control point in seconds, while a group of players playing as other classes may take a minute or so. Ordinarily, on maps like Granary, Badlands or Well (in which each team has an equal amount of control points and one unowned middle point) Scouts will reach the middle point first. If one team has more Scouts they will be able to kill the other team's Scouts and capture the point faster. Often some Scouts will run on ahead to the next capture point in the sequence. Most teams will be unprepared for such an event, as any players in that area will expect any action to be up ahead at the middle control point. Most defenses will not even be in that area at that time, making the point an easy capture. Scouts who have run ahead even further can now easily capture the opposing team's final control point. There are a few counters to the Scout Rush. While Scouts are good at getting places quickly, and capturing points, it takes some skill to fight with them effectively, and they hardly fare well when fighting an organized group of enemies. Normally, when the rushing Scouts capture the point, they leave it to capture the next one, leaving the point undefended or leaving it to the fews players on their team who aren't rushing. This makes it easy for the opposing team to capture it from them, provided that they can capture it before the rushers capture their next point, blocking them from capturing that point (the captures must go in a sequence, you may only capture an enemy point if you own the point preceding it). Another way of stopping the rush is to kill most of the Scouts who are rushing, or leave some defenders at the points. The Scout rush doesn't work well on maps like Gravel Pit or Dustbowl, as there is only one Attacking team and the defenders have a minute of setup time to prepare for any rushes. The Spy rush is more exclusively used mid-game or late-game, but can also be used at the beginning of the match. It involves one or more Spies infiltrating enemy territory through a combination of cloaking and the use of disguises. They can sneak on to the enemy point and capture it when most of the opposing team isn't looking. This rush works because the enemy team is not expecting it, and are most likely at the front near the enemy control point. While defenses are normally set up around the points, several Spies can easily overcome them and then capture the undefended point. Good spychecking is key to stopping this kind of rush. While Spies excel at killing unaware enemies and disabling defenses, they do not have enough health or do enough damage to fight a group of enemies who knows that he is there. Also these types of rushes take time to form and good coordination. The Spy Rush won't work if the opposing team is wary of enemy spies and will be vigilant against them. In certain situations, Spy rushes can work on all of the maps. Pyro rushes are usually arranged at the beginning of or at a climax point in the game (for example when one or both teams are only one flag or control point capture away from victory) and involve a large number if not all of the players on a team switching to Pyro. The attraction to Pyro rushes comes largely from the fact that Pyros can set fire to their enemies and are armed with the humorous (if cliched) melee weapon the fireaxe, however they seldom succeed in any productive progress or captures unless well co-ordinated. The main aim of a Pyro rush usually is not to succeed in any form of victory (as they are often used in a 'blaze of glory' condition when a team is about to lose the game) but to go in and have as much fun as possible. The added incentive is that the enemy scouts will run out of their base singly or together, turn a corner see a mass of Pyros and try to run away. Pyro rushes are easily defeated by Snipers, Heavies or Sentry guns or in very open maps where the superior ranged firepower and accuracy of the enemy makes bringing down the Pyros very easy. Other 'Joke Rushes' include Medic or Engineer rushes mainly due to their lack of substantial firepower or any kind of entertainment being gained as neither has the ability to set fire to opponents or cause other slapstick humorous damage.

Many games attempt to deter "Zerging" in some way, as it is often not considered "the way the game should be played". For example, the Xbox 360 game Rainbow Six: Vegas offers a difficulty mode called 'Realistic', offering the player an opponent which effectively acquires targets and combats against rushes. This causes the players to use effective cover and take well placed shots. However, the enemy can be exploited through the use of smoke grenades, as the player is rewarded Thermal Imaging goggles.

Online role-playing games

Character advancement

Rushing can mean a type of assisted powerleveling commonly related to powergaming, such as an attempt to speed up or circumvent the established path of progress with the help of another player. In multiplayer RPG games, like Diablo II, low level characters can allow high level characters to complete tasks in such a way that the low level character is awarded the progress. This type of action usually is followed by the low level characters leeching off other characters and gaining rewards they ordinarily would not have access to. This enables rapid progression with characters gain rewards much faster than ordinarily possible. Diablo II, in particular, was patched by its makers to attempt to inhibit this action. Player have since found ways around the new measures introduced. Rushing, in the 1.10 patch of Diablo II, has passed into a form of currency since rushing became more complicated. Other games may have other names for this process, for example it is generally called "running" in Guild Wars.

Fighting Games

In the world of fighting games, especially those of the 2-D variety, rushdown is a play style utilizing aggressive, unrelenting attacks designed to cause the opponent to be unable to move or attack. This can cause mental intimidation in the other player (due to the visually impressive string of attacks), and force them, due to the increased game pace, to make defensive errors, leading to punishable mistakes. More importantly, most fighting games feature some penalty for blocking too many attacks in a row, such as guard crushes in most Capcom- and SNK-made fighting games, and the increase of the guard meter in the Guilty Gear series. Characters who excel in this style are referred to as "rushdown characters". A rushdown game is inherently a game of calculated risks.

Other uses

Although the term is most commonly used in MMO games, it can be applied to many other games as well. For example, a player of a Collectible Card Game can employ a strategy of flooding the enemy with small, cheap targets rather than strong, well-coordinated units.

See also

• Camping
• Turtle
• Human wave attack
• Ogging