plain english
RTS glossary — every term explained
Strategy games have thirty years of accumulated jargon and most guides assume you already have it. Here is all of it, briefly.
Alphabetical. Terms that only matter in one game are left out.
APM
Actions Per Minute. How many commands you issue per minute. A real measure of speed and a very poor measure of skill — plenty of extremely good players sit at 80 APM, and plenty of bad ones hit 200 by clicking the same unit repeatedly.
Attack-move
An order to advance to a point but engage anything encountered on the way,
rather than walking obediently past an enemy that is shooting you. Usually bound
to A. The single most useful order in the genre, and the one new
players never use.
Build order
A pre-planned sequence for the opening minutes. See the build order guide.
Cheese
A strategy that wins by surprise rather than by being strong — an all-in rush from an unexpected direction, a building placed secretly next to the enemy base. Loses badly to anyone who scouts it, which is the whole point of scouting.
Choke / chokepoint
A narrow gap in the terrain. Fighting at one is worth an enormous amount, because the enemy arrives a few at a time and your whole force shoots each arrival. Finding the choke into your base and defending there rather than at your buildings is most of base defence.
Composition
The mix of unit types in your army. Almost always beats raw numbers: eight tanks and four rocket soldiers handles far more situations than twelve of either.
Control group
A selection saved to a number key, usually with Ctrl + the number.
Recall it by pressing the number. Most of what looks like professional speed is
just this.
Creep / creeping
Killing neutral monsters for experience or resources, from Warcraft III. Not present in C&C-style games, which have no neutral units.
Deathball
One enormous army that moves as a single blob. Powerful, because it wins every fight it turns up to, and fragile, because it can only be in one place and usually leaves an economy undefended behind it.
Expansion
A second base or refinery placed at another resource field. Expanding is how you win a long game and how you lose a short one.
Feeding
Sending units into a fight a few at a time so they are destroyed piecemeal. The most common way for a new player to lose an army they had enough of. Gather, then commit.
Fog of war
The unseen parts of the map. Usually two layers: black shroud you have never explored, and grey ground you have explored but cannot currently see, where the terrain is remembered but enemy movement is not.
Harass
Small, repeated attacks intended to cost the opponent money and attention rather than to kill them. Killing one harvester and leaving is a successful harass.
Kiting
Retreating while shooting, so a faster or longer-ranged unit damages a slower one that can never close. Also called hit-and-run.
Macro
Everything to do with the base: income, production, build order, spending, expanding. The half of the game that decides matches.
Micro
Fine control of individual units in combat — focusing fire, pulling damaged units back, keeping artillery behind the line.
Push
A committed attack with a massed army, as opposed to a raid. A push that is repelled usually loses the game for the pusher, because the army was the investment.
Raid
A small party sent to do economic damage while the main armies are occupied elsewhere. A base that only pushes goes quiet between attacks; a base that raids never stops being a problem.
Rally point
Where newly produced units walk to automatically. Setting it somewhere sensible — usually your gathering point, not your factory door — saves you a hundred clicks a match.
Rush
Attacking as early as possible with minimum economy. A bet that the opponent went greedy. See how to beat a tank rush.
Scouting
Sending a cheap unit to look at the enemy. The cheapest information in the game and the most neglected.
Stance
How a unit behaves without orders: aggressive (chase anything), guard (hold here, chase briefly, return), hold (never move, fire in range), hold fire (never shoot unless told). Defenders belong on guard, essentially always.
Teching / tech tree
Spending on buildings that unlock better units rather than on units now. "Teching up" means going for the higher tier and accepting a window of weakness.
Turtling
Playing purely defensively behind static defences. Effective in the short term, and a slow loss in the long term, because the opponent takes the rest of the map and out-earns you while you sit still.
Worker / harvester
The unit that collects resources. In C&C, Dune II and TANKS it is a vehicle that drives to a field and back; in StarCraft and Age of Empires it is a small unit working near the base. The vehicle version makes the map into a place — see games like Dune II.
Reading about it is slower than playing it.
TANKS runs in this browser tab. No download, no account, no launcher.
Questions people actually ask
What does APM mean in strategy games?
Actions Per Minute — how many commands a player issues each minute. It is a rough proxy for speed, not for skill, and it matters far less below professional level than the genre’s reputation suggests.
What is the difference between micro and macro?
Micro is controlling individual units well during a fight. Macro is managing your base, income and production. Macro decides most matches; micro decides most highlight reels.
What does turtling mean?
Playing entirely defensively — ringing your base with static defences and refusing to fight in the open. It works until the opponent takes the rest of the map, at which point it stops working permanently.
Read next
A beginner’s guide to real-time strategy
Starting from nothing: economy first, what to build, when to attack, and the five mistakes everybody makes.
RTS build orders explained
What a build order is, why the first four minutes decide the match, and an opening you can copy.
How to play TANKS
Every control, the economy, the power rule and the full tech tree for TANKS, the free browser RTS. If you have played Command & Conquer this will take two minutes.