[phaus]

Games in general don't have to have control complexity in order to have depth, but some genres have to be significantly dumbed-down in order to work with touch controls.

The concept of an on-screen virtual analog stick is great in theory. I practice, its always going to be terrible in comparison to its physical counterpart. Games like Modern Combat 4 are pretty impressive when you first see them, but 5 minutes in you realize two things: The controls are bad, and the entire game has been dumbed-down because the developers know that the controls are bad. Its not even their fault. They did as good of a job as anyone has, but a capacitive touchscreen just isn't going to offer the user a pleasant experience in a 3d fps.

Certain genres are well-suited to touch controls. Many genres are not. Board games and card games work very well.

[smsm42]

I would say any strategy game would be just fine with touch controls. Any quest or exploration game too. Many puzzle-type or construction-type games as well. So I don't think touch is a huge problem here except for some genres like hardcore "click-click-click" action or racing games.

[phaus]

>I would say any strategy game would be just fine with touch controls.

I'd agree that board-game style strategy/war games would work, and also quite a few turn-based strategy games.

Its also possible to make certain types of real-time strategy games. Unfortunately, complex RTS games like Starcraft probably can't be done well without extreme oversimplification.

[smsm42]

What would be the problem with Starcraft? I can't think of a lot of things that you can't do using touch/twofinger touch/long touch.

[Tyr42]

I think you'd need to slow down starcraft for it to be playable as the same game. People hit 60-100 actions per minute, like jumping around the map and directing units, setting build queues. Without hotkeys, you'd drop to around 20apm, and you'd be unable to do any micromanagment of units in battle. So it's not that any one action is impossible, just that lots of tactics that require many actions would be impossible.

[smsm42]

Maybe for hardcore sport-like starcraft players this is true. But when I played starcraft I never did nearly anything like 100 apm neither my game ever required me to. Yes, that'd probably mean I'd lose miserably if I ever play 1-on-1 against a hardcore sport players, but that's not why I would be playing it and I'd probably never play with them anyway, I'm not in the same league. So I think for a casual player it would be OK. And hardcore players would have their hardcore setups.

[pflanze]

There's also the accelerometers, compass, perhaps more. X-Plane is basing the primary controls on those and I find it works amazingly well (I've been playing the Android version).