Soft and Hard counters both have different qualities to add depth to the game. They can have great effect on the way units are used, what kind of skills are needed, and what kind of strategies must be used.

Many players do not like hard counters, because they usually don’t require a lot of skill to use. This is only partly true though. When talking about micromanagement, hard counters are usually simple ot use: Click attack button and reap the rewards. Since they have such a big advantage over the unit they’re countering, you usually only need to worry about other units in the vicinity (this is not true for all genres, for example counter characters in fighting games).

However, this does not mean they are skill-less: Instead they provide a new level of depth to the macro game. Will my opponent build unit X? How many will he build? Where will he attack?

As you can see, with hard counters you really have to read your opponent (or scout) well. Otherwise you’ll use a lot of resources and time on building hard counters the enemy might not even use!

Soft counters work the other way around. While they benefit greatly from micromanagement, they’re boring in the macrogame. While hard counters are usually one-trick ponies, soft counters perform well against a variety of units.

This in turn means that you can build them without risk: Even if your opponent never uses unit X, they’re still useful.

An effect of this is that the more soft counters there are in a game, the more generalized armies become: Only a couple of different units are needed to handle most threats. Hard counters, on the other hand, cause players to be more specialized, and have a wider array of units in their army.

Reading this you might think I prefer hard counters. I actually prefer the toolbox-style gameplay with units able to fulfill multiple roles. However, it’s important that a game has a mixture of both hard and soft counters, to give people a choice of how to handle the enemy.

It should also be noted that these comments are definitely not true for all games. For example, while a fighting game may have hard counters, they do not contribute to the game at all, because players cannot switch out in the middle of a game (you can usually switch out in a match). Hard counters do not add any value to the game, because you cannot use them to respond to the enemy while in a game.

Next up is something about Risk vs Reward, an important way to add variety and balance to a game.