If you've ever tried building a strategy game, you know that getting a roblox rts unit control script working properly is basically the backbone of the whole project. It's one of those things that sounds simple on paper—you just click a unit and tell it where to go—but as soon as you start coding, you realize there's a ton of moving parts. You've got to handle mouse inputs, draw selection boxes, deal with pathfinding, and make sure everything doesn't lag out when you have fifty units on screen at once.
Getting the Selection Logic Right
The first thing any RTS needs is a way to actually grab your units. Most people start with a simple click-to-select system, which is fine for a basic prototype, but players expect a "click and drag" box for anything serious.
To make a box selection work in your roblox rts unit control script, you're mostly going to be working with UserInputService and the camera. When the player clicks and holds, you store that initial 2D screen position. As they move the mouse, you calculate the area between the start point and the current mouse position.
The tricky part is translating those 2D screen coordinates back into the 3D world. You'll want to use the WorldToViewportPoint function for this. Instead of checking if a unit is "inside" a 3D box, it's often much easier to check if the unit's position, when projected onto the player's screen, falls within the 2D coordinates of the selection box. It's way lighter on the math and feels much more responsive to the player.
Highlighting Selected Units
Once you've actually detected which units are inside the box, you need to show the player that they've actually been selected. It's super frustrating to play an RTS where you aren't sure if your command registered.
Most developers use a simple SelectionBox object or a circular Decal on the floor under the unit's feet. If you want to get fancy, you can use a Highlight instance, which was added to Roblox more recently. It looks great, but be careful—if you have a hundred units and they all have active highlights, you might see a bit of a performance dip on lower-end devices. I usually stick to a simple neon ring at the base; it's clean and classic.
Making Units Move Properly
Selection is only half the battle. Once they're selected, you need them to actually go somewhere. This is where your roblox rts unit control script meets the PathfindingService.
You can't just tell a unit to walk in a straight line to a destination because they'll get stuck on the first tree or wall they hit. You need to calculate a path. When the player right-clicks the ground, you should fire a raycast to find the exact 3D position of the floor. Then, for every selected unit, you generate a path.
Handling Group Movement
If you tell ten units to go to the exact same spot, they're going to bunch up and look like a weird, glitchy mess. To avoid this, you need to implement some sort of offset. Instead of everyone targeting the same Vector3 point, give each unit a slightly different target based on their position in the group.
A simple way to do this is to arrange them in a grid or a circle around the target point. It makes the units feel like an actual army rather than a single clump of parts fighting for the same space.
The Importance of Client vs. Server
This is where a lot of beginner scripts fall apart. If you try to run all the unit movement logic on the server, your game is going to feel sluggish. There's a delay between a player clicking and the server receiving that command, calculating the path, and moving the unit.
Ideally, you want your roblox rts unit control script to handle the "visual" movement on the client side for immediate feedback, while the server handles the "authoritative" position. However, for a lot of Roblox games, people just handle the input on the client and fire a RemoteEvent to the server. The server then updates the unit's target.
To keep things smooth, make sure you're using SetNetworkOwner(nil) on your units. This ensures the server has full control over the physics of the units, which prevents them from stuttering when different players get close to them.
Adding Combat and Interactions
An RTS isn't just a walking simulator; your units need to be able to interact with things. Your script should be able to tell the difference between clicking on the ground (movement) and clicking on an enemy unit (attack).
You can handle this by checking what the player clicked on with their mouse. If the Target of the mouse is a part of another unit with a specific "Team" tag, you switch the state of your selected units from "Moving" to "Attacking."
State Machines for Units
I highly recommend using a simple state machine inside your unit logic. A unit can be in an Idle, Moving, or Attacking state. * Idle: The unit just stands there, maybe plays an animation, and looks for nearby enemies. * Moving: The unit is following a path to a location. * Attacking: The unit moves until it's within range of a target and then starts dealing damage.
Using states makes your code way cleaner and prevents units from trying to do two things at once, like trying to walk to a location while also trying to chase an enemy in the opposite direction.
Optimizing for Large Armies
If your game is going to have hundreds of units, you can't have every single unit running its own complex script with ten loops and a bunch of Wait() calls. That's a recipe for a crashed server.
Instead, use a "Controller" script. One single script on the server can manage the movement and logic for all units. You loop through a table of active units and update them. This is way more efficient than having 200 individual scripts all competing for resources.
Also, be mindful of how often you calculate paths. You don't need to recalculate a unit's path every single frame. Once every half-second is usually more than enough, especially for units that are far away from the player.
Making the Controls Feel Natural
Lastly, don't forget the small stuff. Add a "waypoint" marker when the player right-clicks. Maybe add a sound effect to confirm the order. These little touches are what separate a janky tech demo from a game that's actually fun to play.
If you're writing your roblox rts unit control script from scratch, take it one step at a time. Get a single unit moving first. Then get a group moving. Then add the selection box. If you try to do it all at once, you'll spend more time debugging than actually building.
Roblox is a surprisingly powerful platform for strategy games, but it requires a bit of creative thinking to get the controls feeling just right. Once you have the core movement and selection down, the rest—like building systems, resource gathering, and tech trees—becomes a lot easier to plug in. Just keep your code organized, watch your performance, and don't be afraid to iterate on the feel of the controls until they're snappy.