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The RTS APM myth

I've heard a lot of people who don't like real-time strategy games dismiss the genre for being largely about how fast you can input actions rather than strategy. (APM refers to actions per minute, a commonly measured statistic.) I've even heard some who do like the genre occasionally attribute their inability to improve, or their individual losses, to insufficient APM. This is mostly a myth.

I've watched beginners play these games. I've trained them myself. I never see them struggling to click or press keys fast enough. What I do see is them just doing nothing, looking around, trying to decide what to do, or only looking at one part of the map while their units are idle somewhere else. In other words, it's not click speed holding them back, it's think speed. How quickly you can think about a game isn't a physical limitation, and it can be improved with practice.

If you've watched high-level players play these games, you might've noticed they seem to have incredibly high APM. But what you might've also noticed if you look closer, is that most of those actions are pointless. I see pro players spam clicking on a destinatiom to send their units there when one click would do, or spam clicking a button to buy something when they can see they don't have resources, because they expect the resources to come in any second. I've even heard pros comment on this phenomenon, explaining that it's a psychological thing, they spam actions to keep themselves alert. I even have my own psychological pointless actions sometimes, though for a different reason: in the early phase of an Age of Empires match, you're supposed to set a bookmark on your scout so you can jump to it later, so I have a muscle memory to do this after selecting my scout for the first time, and that muscle memory sometimes causes me to set the bookmark every time I select my scout even if it's already set.

The point is that despite the spam clicking and keypressing you often see while watching these games, you don't need high APM to be good at them, and APM is not the primary difference between skill levels.

I want to highlight that even micro is mostly based on decisions, not APM. I'll use some more examples from the game I'm most familiar with, Age of Empires 2:

• There are multiple strategies for micromanaging ranged units in combat. Focus-firing single enemy units has obvious value for reducing the enemy's damage output faster, especially if their army is also ranged. But if you have way more than enough units to kill an enemy in one volley, then by focus firing you waste a lot of damage. In those cases it might be better to use the stop command to interrupt your units' movement so they all auto-fire at whatever's closest to them. But that still means they all fire at the same time. If you have a real lot of overkill, it can actually be better to not kite and just let your units fight automatically as the enemy comes in range, causing them to fire at different times.

• If you have a group of cavalry trying to kill a group of archers, an advanced tactic is to order some of them to move past the archers instead of attacking immediately, to surround them so they can't kite (ranged units can normally kite even if they're slower because they can reload while moving). But this might not be helpful if there's a wall nearby that you can corner them against instead, or if you might have to retreat soon because enemy pikemen are coming.

• In castle/trebuchet wars, you have to decide whether your trebuchets should be shooting the enemy castle or the enemy trebuchets.

Deciding which of these micro strategies to use doesn't require high APM, it requires an intellectual analysis of the situation.

To be clear, inputting actions faster definitely gives some advantage in these games, but it's much less important than inputting good actions, and it's very unlikely to be the primary reason you lose a game.