Real-time strategy grew up on the desktop, with a mouse in one hand and a keyboard under the other. Bringing it to a phone is not a matter of making the buttons bigger. A finger is a different tool, and the games that work on touch are designed around what it can and cannot do.
What a finger cannot do
Hover. A mouse can rest over a unit and show its details without clicking. A finger cannot: touching is clicking. Any information that lives behind a hover is lost on a phone.
Two buttons. A mouse has a left button to select and a right button to order. A finger has one touch. A touch game needs another way to tell "choose this" from "go there".
Precision. A mouse pointer is one pixel; a fingertip covers a small coin's worth of screen, and hides what is under it. Small targets close together are hard to hit.
A hundred keys. Desktop strategy games put dozens of commands on the keyboard. A phone has none.
Speed. Expert desktop players give hundreds of commands a minute. On glass, that pace is neither possible nor much fun.
What designers do about it
Separate who from where. If one touch cannot both select and command, give each its own gesture. Dot Conquest uses a long press to draw a lasso (who) and a tap to send (where). The two never collide, so a tap never selects by accident and a lasso never sends.
Command groups, not units. When each order is costly, make each order count. In Dot Conquest a command always goes to the whole group, and there is no "send a share" slider to fiddle with.
Put information on the board, not behind a hover. If you cannot hover, everything important has to be drawn: a capture ring filling, faded land that is cut off, a countdown in the top bar. A rule that cannot be seen is a rule a touch player cannot learn.
Make targets big. Buttons the size of a fingertip, with room between them, and nothing important at the very edge of a phone where the case or the camera notch is.
Let the game wait. Pausing for decisions (Dot Conquest's Councils pause the battle while you pick a card) gives a touch player time that a fast hand on a keyboard would not need.
Shorten the game. Long matches with constant small decisions are tiring on a phone. Short battles, a few minutes each, suit how phones are used.
What touch does better
It is not all loss. Drawing a loop around an army is more natural than dragging a rectangle, and pointing at a place with a finger is as direct as an order can be. A pinch to zoom is easier than any scroll wheel. Games that lean into these feel better on a phone than their desktop ancestors ever did there.
Mouse and touch together
A game built for touch first often works well with a mouse too, because the mouse simply maps onto the gestures: a box for the lasso, a right-click for the tap. Dot Conquest's browser version does exactly that (see mouse and keyboard controls), and its touch controls are in lasso, tap, fall back.
Where to go next
- Thinking about speed and decisions: macro versus micro in a five-minute match.