Rob Zacny

Episode 326: State of the RTS

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Three Moves Ahead 326:

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State of the RTS

This week Rob, Fraser, and Troy "More Than a Phalanx" Goodfellow take a look at the RTS genre. Rob has concerns about the health of this stalwart of the strategy space, where innovation seems low and quality titles are few and far between. Troy wants more elves and less aliens.

Starcraft 2

Planetary Annihiliation

Supreme Commander

Age of Mythology

Gray Goo

Ruse

Act of Aggression

Wargame series

Age of Empires 3

Kohan

League of Legends

Dota 2

Warcraft 3

Company of Heroes 2

"Men of Assault War"

SC2VN

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I just want RTS with grand campaign in the fashion of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, C&C3: Kane's Wrath (conquest mode?) and Ardennes Assault...

 

Didn't include Planetary Annihilation because as much as I enjoyed the Titans expansion, after about 9 hours of it, it still felt like a shell of a game that could have been greater but felt largely... empty?  And the galactic conquest mode felt really slapped on top of a multiplayer game (more so than above mentioned examples where they all feel little bit slapped on).

 

Ardennes Assault was most 'fleshed out' of the 3 samples but the fact that AI never attacked you was kind of a big hole... given that CoH has minimalistic base building I think fighting off enemy counterattack would have worked wonderfully :x

 

DC and KW both suffered where you can over build your base and army and just face roll AI in every battle by starting with super units.  But AI did attack you and the map had bit more off 'free-roam' feel to it, which AA lacked.

 

Or CoH game where instead of series of mission, just one giant mega mission that can take few hours to complete?  I mean in terms of pacing closest I can think of is Sins of the Solar Empire, except the empire building part and more of large protracted battle.  Ahhh imagine CoH2: Stalingrad where it's just Stalingrad... in its entirety in a single map! Oooooo

 

On broader topic of burning out on RTS... yeah it's mostly me been fan of RTS from singleplayer perspective.  But unlike Fraser I'm more interested in the whole singleplayer being tied through some sort of meta progression so I was quite fond of Red Dragon's campaign mode (but helicopters were too abusable with CP sniping and free flanking).

 

And I'm so sad to hear that Troy doesn't like sci-fi theme.  I mean I also hate most alien presence in sci-fi themed games as well, but as a lover of gauss weaponry and basically WW2 in space theme stuff (basically like near future (100 ~ 200yrs frame) sci fi), I'm so sadden to hear that T_T

 

Sorry for ranty post but I guess that is how I feel about RTS as a whole... bits I like, bits I'm tired of, overall just unsure of what's going on.

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When I came of age RTS games were dead. I've played WarCraft 3 and Rise of Nations, even older games - but I was a kid. I vividly remember what I wanted RTS to be. I think most players want it to be the same, except few MP-oriented ones.

 

City-builder and tower defense.

 

Really, it's a default strategy newcomers fall into. You don't know what's the size of army you need to win so you have to build the biggest one. You want to see what's in the end of the tech tree so your primary objective it's getting there and seeing all you can use. It's the same in all strategy games. Heroes, Civilization. But in RTS you're punished for this behavior. Turtling may help you survive campaign but it's a least effective behavior - understandably, cause if all players turtle you don't exactly get a game. Civilization 5 is a rare classical game succesfully embracing this newb behavior - probably cause 4X are better suited for it already as it has tutrling victory.

 

I'm not dumb or slow yet I can't be bothered playing RTS good. Seriously, it's a very demanding gameplay. And it's easy to give AI an edge by teaching it to microcontrol. I play Lords Management games with friends and those are basically RTS with one unit. And those are still complex as hell. Meanwhile city-builders and tower defenses are played the way most people would want to play RTS. Especially Tower Defense. Creating a progression is easy. Tweaking difficulty is easy. Creating a SP experience with infinite progression is easy.

 

Look at Infested Planet. Haven't played CoH2 Ardennes Assault but IP feels like the best campaign ever to me, even better than WarCraft 3. It has story missions which are specific scenarios modifying basic formula. It has side missions of various types of difficulties. You can grind to buy better setup before next mission. And gameplay itself is sort of tower-defensy. Enemy doesn't really become proactive till you're deep into the game - it's too complex so I won't get into it but trust me. It's a progression reminiscent of RPG games with tweak your difficulty requirement. You can grind if it's difficult, you can play a relatively short campaign if you want to close Gestalt, you can play random maps and daily challenges with increasing difficulty forever. I understand it's similar to Age of Empires but I've missed that game.

 

Anyway, to hell with those balance MP-oriented games. And Troy, don't let Johan to build grand strategy games around multiplayer. I'm still in denial but when Paradox people talk about how next title is fun in multiplayer and new features or design philosophies are implemented specifically for multiplayer I get nightmares about GS genre getting into the same traps of making games for an elitist few.

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Rob Zacny mentioned he didn't think we will see a Warcraft 4.  Aren't they releasing an extended trailer for it next year? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803096/

 

Do you think all the hype from that movie will be channeled into WoW, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone, without another Warcraft sequel/reboot title released to coincide with/cash in on the movie? 

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Seconding the praise for Infested Planet, a game chock full of exciting ideas, that many seem not to have noticed.

This episode was interesting to me. I seem to recall, in the distant past (i.e. around when SC2 came out), an episode of 3MA decrying the single player campaign and saying that developers should give up on it...? Also I think everyone got sick of WW2 for a bit? If so, funny how things have turned around.

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I believe the last time 3MA did a state of the RTS type episode it was with Soren Johnson right around the time Offworld Trading Company had been announced.  It has been awhile, so my memory is a little rusty, but my take away of Soren's broad point was something like this: The classic RTS model that we know from C&C, TA, and SC was the right gameplay model for its time. Rob mentioned that you only needed one disc to play with a couple of your friends, and to top it all off, internet connections were bad, and we didn't have matchmaking back then so we generally weren't aware of how bad we all were at these games. Once that became clearer that model became a lot less appealing to a lot of people. The RTS still has a ton of potential because games in real time offer certain strategic calculations that can't exist in turn based games, and these games are intrinsically a better format for multiplayer games, but designers need to let the old base building model die and invent new designs that successfully exploit the interesting strategic choices that exist in a real time game.

 

I think all of that is basically correct. I've been playing a lot of DOTA for the last year, and I can see how it really satisfies that strategic itch I used to get from playing RTS's, but without all of the annoyances. And that is the thing about trying to play a RTS match competitively, it mostly involves having to do a bunch of annoying things. People complain about how annoying last hitting is in DOTA, but I think it's a stroke of genius. That one mechanic elegantly wraps together your macro and your micro demands that you used to have to separately monitor in the game.

 

There are annoying things you have to do in DOTA to play efficiently. There are these items, a magic potion and a magic wand, and you can use them to regain some fixed amount of HP and mana. But before you use them you want to drop any items that give you bonuses to your strength or intelligence attributes because those stat bonuses affect the size of your HP and mana pool. When your stats change your mana and HP change as a percentage, so it is more efficient to use the potion and wand without the stat boosts so when you pick them back up you have a greater amount of HP and mana thanks to the magical properties of math than you would otherwise. That sort of thing is an annoyance. It's a lot of clicking around to squeeze out a marginal advantage. But its something you only have to do a couple of times a match. In an RTS I feel like a game is typically asking you to do a dozen of those annoying things every minute.

 

That's the reason for the success of RTS campaigns. Most of them weren't that good, but you could get away with not having to do a ton of annoying stuff and still win, and that gives you a taste of what you want out of the genre.

 

So I think a couple of companies tried to release the traditional RTS, and didn't have a ton of success even if a game like Grey Goo was pretty good. I think the genre will be fine, but it won't be because of a revival of the base building genre. It'll be something new, and I think it will need to be free to play just because you want the biggest install base possible.

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Seconding the praise for Infested Planet, a game chock full of exciting ideas, that many seem not to have noticed.

This episode was interesting to me. I seem to recall, in the distant past (i.e. around when SC2 came out), an episode of 3MA decrying the single player campaign and saying that developers should give up on it...? Also I think everyone got sick of WW2 for a bit? If so, funny how things have turned around.

To the first point, I'm surprised I never brought up Infested Planet on the show, since I was quite high on it over at PCGN. Though unless it has changed a ton, I'm not sure it warrants comparisons to the Warcraft 3 campaign that I saw above.

 

To the second point... yeah. That's another reason I wanted Tom. Because in retrospect I feel that part of the conversation was pretty misguided (and forum members called us out on it at the time). But I also think that a bad campaign is worse than no campaign at all. Sins of a Solar Empire works without a campaign. The first Wargame had a really sparse campaign (really just a bunch of linked scenarios) and was still pretty great. But so many RTS campaigns spoon-feed you new units and concepts that they're just endless filler. Especially "commando" missions. Ugh.

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One of my favourite genres.  I would much rather play a great campaign rather than against a human opponent on-line.  I want to travel through and overcome a lengthy and varied challenge, if I play some random on-line either I will lose or they will (and probably quit) - neither means anything.  

 

Podcast back on form over the last couple of episodes. 

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Lords Management/Lords Management are not RTS. They are fighting games. You control one unit and you perform various moves, just like in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. The team fight aspect, equipment trees, and minion generators are included because of historical accuracy.

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When I came of age RTS games were dead. I've played WarCraft 3 and Rise of Nations, even older games - but I was a kid. I vividly remember what I wanted RTS to be. I think most players want it to be the same, except few MP-oriented ones.

 

City-builder and tower defense.

 

Really, it's a default strategy newcomers fall into. You don't know what's the size of army you need to win so you have to build the biggest one. You want to see what's in the end of the tech tree so your primary objective it's getting there and seeing all you can use. It's the same in all strategy games. Heroes, Civilization. But in RTS you're punished for this behavior. Turtling may help you survive campaign but it's a least effective behavior - understandably, cause if all players turtle you don't exactly get a game. Civilization 5 is a rare classical game succesfully embracing this newb behavior - probably cause 4X are better suited for it already as it has tutrling victory.

 

Hmm I think you nailed a lot of this stuff and also help me re-focus on my work in some ways.  Much appreciated.

 

And for the reasons stated here, I think IP (I really liked it) falls a little short cause building aspect is little on the short end of the stick.

 

And I do think offense has its place but most players it comes AFTER establishing the two that you mentioned (city builder & tower defense).

 

CoH is interesting here because most of the defense are essentially units + something (either barricades or buildings) and instead of city builder, you can build on your units quite a lot (for an RTS that is) so that may explain lot of its fun factor.

 

This episode was interesting to me. I seem to recall, in the distant past (i.e. around when SC2 came out), an episode of 3MA decrying the single player campaign and saying that developers should give up on it...? Also I think everyone got sick of WW2 for a bit? If so, funny how things have turned around.

 
Ah yes, that was 213 I think, one about Heart of the Swarm.

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To the first point, I'm surprised I never brought up Infested Planet on the show, since I was quite high on it over at PCGN. Though unless it has changed a ton, I'm not sure it warrants comparisons to the Warcraft 3 campaign that I saw above.

 

Not much has changed. Of course Warcraft 3 had a great story, movies etc but campaign structure lacked flexibility. Infested Planet can win hearts with cheap, casual but effective system of grinding and bribing your way to victory. What can devs learn from Warcraft 3? Threw a bunch of money at the game and make it shine. Infested Planet dev made effective single player experience in his mom's basement (not actually true fact) by understanding players needs and embracing RPG/F2P style grinding and Tower Defens-ish difficulty curve. Troy talked about Age of Empires 3 model not being reused - Infested Planet is where something similar is used quite effectively.

 

And perhaps C&C4 but we don't talk about it.

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I believe the last time 3MA did a state of the RTS type episode it was with Soren Johnson right around the time Offworld Trading Company had been announced.  It has been awhile, so my memory is a little rusty, but my take away of Soren's broad point was something like this: The classic RTS model that we know from C&C, TA, and SC was the right gameplay model for its time. Rob mentioned that you only needed one disc to play with a couple of your friends, and to top it all off, internet connections were bad, and we didn't have matchmaking back then so we generally weren't aware of how bad we all were at these games. Once that became clearer that model became a lot less appealing to a lot of people. The RTS still has a ton of potential because games in real time offer certain strategic calculations that can't exist in turn based games, and these games are intrinsically a better format for multiplayer games, but designers need to let the old base building model die and invent new designs that successfully exploit the interesting strategic choices that exist in a real time game.

The observation about how we didn't really know how bad we were at these games (for most people - Tom Chick taught me very quickly how bad I was at these games) because that information was masked by the lack of multiplayer is a great point. Furthermore, I think the base-building model is an inherently turn-based mechanic, because it is much more interesting to actually see each decision a player makes based on roughly equal resources: oh, I started building this resource enhancer, but he is using an equivalent number of resources to make a bunch of piddly military units. Oh, I don't have adequate defenses to counter that. That's much more interesting to see in process than it is to just see your base all of a sudden under attack.

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Yeah, comparing vastly different options in real time games are beyond the scope of most of us without extensive training in the field.

 

So in a way, Total War games are ones where they divorced production and battle into two separate 'games' but it also seem to always get bit (not a lot) of flak for the two not mashing up all that well.  But we all seem to want both detailed combat and infrastructure building represented in our war command themed games...

 

Are we just cursed to want the impossible?

 

I'm the worst at this with Civ games... every pre modern battles, I get this irresitable urge to imagine the battles play out in TW engine... and most modern ones in either CoH or Wargame.

 

Why can't Firaxis license those two combat engines to create an abomination that I desperately want but know that will surely fail??? :x (yes I know they should not do that ;) )

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So in a way, Total War games are ones where they divorced production and battle into two separate 'games' but it also seem to always get bit (not a lot) of flak for the two not mashing up all that well.  But we all seem to want both detailed combat and infrastructure building represented in our war command themed games...

 

Are we just cursed to want the impossible?

I think the Dominions series has actually solved this problem :)

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I'm googling Dominions right now (forgive my plebian knowledge of strategy games!) and one of the image I was greeted with Naberius casting enlarge.

.

.

.

If that's the right game, then this is indeed looking promising in so many ways.

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Troy complained about many rts begin sci-fi, and while I have no problem with sci-fi, I too kind wondered about that, my theory is...

 

First, historical rts have to solve the problem of mixing and matching the general structure of a RTS with what we understand or imagine that a battle in this or that period look like, and the issue is not only the research need, but how to don´t make the already conflict of building vs battle don´t get even more out of hand. Since the "historical accuracy" might just translate in make a rts which is often already very fast paced even more complex*.

 

* Exemple: In cossacks you could add a banner and a guy with a drum in a group of units, but given the fast pace of the game, often this just became a busy work and don´t mean anything, it was just easier to throw units in any way against the enemy, since moving group of units was almost impossible once they are engaged, meaning that all that busy work often was for nothing.

 

Second, while fantasy don´t suffer from that, it kind share a issue with the historical accuracy, which is the cost to animate stuff, this can get wat beyond many developers could afford, keep in mind how relic (and CA) however managed to have game rich with animations (so much, that once I tried to play SC2 demo, I very soon missed DoW animations, despite knowing that this where different game with different focus).

This leave the sci-fi, now here you can kind get away from having factions units just begin vehicles, or in another words, blocks which shoot things and stand still, much easier to do and you don´t need to worry about represent what people think that battle should look like. Again, I have nothing against sci-fi, it just annoy me when this game have things like giant robots which just stand still (and often the general design is really weak), I do felt this a lot playing Supreme Commander 2, I mean it could be cool if at least your UC unit had some punching animations (which could be simple and crude, to represent that is a robot) when facing another UC.

 

On the subject of campaigns: Yeah I too would like to see good grand campaigns, but I do see that the issue is that this requires not only a good plot (and dialogues), but good characters and faction design which is beyond just mechanics. Nothing impossible, but very trick do to.

 

This remind me of one thing that often you can hear people complain, that is repetition - I guess in the past many rts had campaigns, which are just the same thing over and over again, which maybe can made worst in case which different historical periods don´t have any actual changes.

 

There is the other extreme of this situation, which is Spellforce 2, which often have very scripted rpg style maps, which maybe not very good, because instead of rts you are playing a rather limited rpg with not very good structure or map/quest design.

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Very much agree with the sentiments as far as all RTSes trying to be designed for multiplayer when there's probably a bigger audience not looking for that at all.  Kind of feels like how they keep making Lords Managements trying to take down LoL and DOTA vs just making something on its own.

 

For me, a traditional RTS of the "build a base while trying to also manage everything in the field" has no draw anymore.  I never have actually liked that dynamic but at this point in my life I can't be bothered to deal with it to get what I like about RTS games anymore.  Dividing your attention that way is not attractive to me.  I want to be able to take all the game action in and not feel like how fast I click or scroll around the screen is key to how well I do in a strategy game.  I want to follow my soldiers into a battle if that's what I'm doing in the game, not have to scroll back to start making reinforcements or building more as I send an attack in.  This dynamic got even more maddening to me post Warcraft III when most RTSes started to work in RPG like abilities you need to be in the action to use.  I think this post:

 

I believe the last time 3MA did a state of the RTS type episode it was with Soren Johnson right around the time Offworld Trading Company had been announced.  It has been awhile, so my memory is a little rusty, but my take away of Soren's broad point was something like this: The classic RTS model that we know from C&C, TA, and SC was the right gameplay model for its time. Rob mentioned that you only needed one disc to play with a couple of your friends, and to top it all off, internet connections were bad, and we didn't have matchmaking back then so we generally weren't aware of how bad we all were at these games. Once that became clearer that model became a lot less appealing to a lot of people. The RTS still has a ton of potential because games in real time offer certain strategic calculations that can't exist in turn based games, and these games are intrinsically a better format for multiplayer games, but designers need to let the old base building model die and invent new designs that successfully exploit the interesting strategic choices that exist in a real time game.

 

sums up some of my feelings as well on the traditional RTS looking back at it.

 

 

My thinking is that Relic is brilliant as far as how they have experimented in the genre (Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 the most) and yet no one really picks up Relic's innovations or ideas and tries them.    It's a shame because as I say, Relic has worked against those issues and found something I like but few games try anything like that.  I think the Men of War series deserves mention for doing its own thing, and although quality varies, it can provide some awesome tactical depth.

 

I think there are avenues to expand RTS or build off things that have already been experimented on but most just keep making traditional RTS, which is a shame.  Something more defense based (as talked about in the Tower Defense podcast), more tactical like Company of Heroes, more RPG-ish like Dawn of War.  Yet I just don't see too many developers trying that.  As mentioned on the Tower Defense podcast, why has no one made a game that actually is the castle management/defense game!?  I think frankly the genre need more experimentation.  Maybe the audience isn't there to support that, but otherwise the genre no longer does much of anything for me, especially if it plays basically like Starcraft all over again.

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Stronghold Crusaders 2 came out but it was just a bad game :x

 

 

On the subject of campaigns: Yeah I too would like to see good grand campaigns, but I do see that the issue is that this requires not only a good plot (and dialogues), but good characters and faction design which is beyond just mechanics. Nothing impossible, but very trick do to.

 

What's your thoughts on ones more akin to say, Dark Crusade or War Game type (but more fleshed out) where story is minimal but the campaign is more open?

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or me, a traditional RTS of the "build a base while trying to also manage everything in the field" has no draw anymore.  I never have actually liked that dynamic but at this point in my life I can't be bothered to deal with it to get what I like about RTS games anymore.  Dividing your attention that way is not attractive to me.  

 

I feel the same way. It's why I kinda like Theatre of War, even though it was kinda busted. I've been meaning to try out something from the Faces of Men: War Assault series.

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I think that the points made about wanting to play RTS matches with friends is really important. I'm 31. That means I grew up with Dune 2, played the shit out of Command and Conquer, and had a great time with Starcraft. I really enjoy RTS campaigns but I am just not that into playing with randos who can crush me in 3 minutes. I like playing against my friends once the campaign is over but I just can't hack it against the rest of the internet.

 

It's hard to convince someone to buy a game just to play a few matches when they spend all of their time playing something else.

 

 

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Hey, I'm a relatively new listener, and considering and one of the guys who used to play RTS games a lot, and now moved to Lords Managements, I thought I could chime in to the discussion.

 

I used to play a lot of SCII back in it's golden days, around 2011/2012. I was 19/20 years old, in my first university years, and had plenty of time to play video games. SCII managed to grip me like nothing else had before. I loved how balanced the game was, how I felt rewarded for my effort, how I saw myself learning and improving with every game. I watched pro players, learned from Day 9, and wrote down build orders, for every race and every matchup (Random ftw). It was amazing, but it was SO time-consuming. and really, the enjoyment was less on the gameplay than it was on the self improvement, and the thrill of the competition.

 

Eventually, as other responsabilities/hobbies emerged, it started to fade. I recently tried to pick it up again, after almost 2 years of not playing and, no matter how much I tried to force myself, I couldn't enjoy it. I mean, it's a great game and all, but I felt clumsy, and my build orders were garbage. I knew what I had to do in order to improve all that, and I really didn't have the time/energy to do it. So I turned to LoL. There, I can log in for a while, joke about how I miss a flash over the wall, tease about how I'm a God descended from the Heavens when I get a triple kill as support, and then log off. Maybe I don't play for a week. But I know that after that I can log o and have all the same fun again. I can be terrible at LoL and still enjoy it. If I'm terrible at SC, there's really no fun there for me.

 

Something I wanted to point out, and which ties in well with the question about what do RTS players want today, is that I moved back into my old RTS favorites. I found a small community is still playing Battle for Middle Earth 2, and I can log in to GameRanger to play around, sumon a bunch of Nazgul and Mumakil, or even a friggin Army of the Dead, and roll over my enemies (or get rolled over). I can fire up Age of Mythology and summon the wrath of Zeus uppon my foes. And that is something many new RTS games seem to be missing IMO. The stupid, flashy and amazingly overpowered effects or powers that are so much fun to use, and that many times make games amazing.

 

Anyway those are my two cents, hope I haven't ranted to much :)

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Stronghold Crusaders 2 came out but it was just a bad game :x

What's your thoughts on ones more akin to say, Dark Crusade or War Game type (but more fleshed out) where story is minimal but the campaign is more open?

It could work very well, Dark Crusade was a great campaign, that even managed to establish characters with the unique dialogues that would happen during the stronghold maps. However, Soulstorm and Retribution wheren´t so good, the second one suffered much from that there wasn´t almost any difference if you play with any faction, dialogues, maps and everything played the same and everything react the same way no matter if you playing with Tyranids or Orks or Chaos.

Can´t comment much on the Wargame campaign, while I do play it once in a while I did most skirmishs to get more the hang of the game (the fact that I am not familiar with modern military hardware don´t help, half of the time I have no idea what I am choosing for my deck XD).

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Nice podcast. 

 

I think Stronghold Crusader 2 used a traditional RTS formula, and reduced the castle management aspects and siege tower defense aspects, it is clearly that the developers are following the recent trend of many re-made/HD edition classic RTS games approach, which is about competitive fast pace multiplayer game rather than innovative RTS game design, and that's the problem that made game such the stronghold very generic and mediocre, that also applies to other newly released RTS games. 

Innovation in RTS is very important nowadays, the older player already got done with those repetitive clicks and actions, while the new players find other genre more appealing as discussed in the podcast. 

We need more games that can take RTS in different direction such as COH, wargame series, and the game that nobody mentioned : Hegemony series. 

 

Regards 

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I think multiplayer RTSs are a young person's game. They require a lot of commitment- time upfront to learn, and then further time to hone and maintain those skills. They need a lot of energy to commit to each individual game as well. 

 

I'm in my mid-30s, with a job and kids yadda yadda. Time and energy are precious to me in a way they never were in my teens and 20s. After a full day, or during rare free time on a weekend deciding to work up the intensity and focus is a big decision, and if I can't choose to do that regularly, I may as well not bother.

 

The thing that Heroes and League and the like have some of that competitive intensity, but not as relentlessly as a true RTS. There are ebbs and flows, laning and ganking, teamfights, retreats, regrouping. Time to catch your breath, and times when you don't need a quart of adrenaline. 

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To play or not to play


For me, Troy's model about other games offering the same fix definitely applies, although in the other direction. RTS games were something possibly-fun to do when I didn't have a "real strategy game" to play, i.e. a turn-based game. I vaguely remember arguing on some BBS, probably 1996 or so, that the term RTS was a misnomer, because they aren't really about strategy, but controlling units in a battle, real-time-tactics was my proposed, correct, term for the genre. But there was a time, I suppose between 1999 and 2005-6 where I did play a lot of RTS games. Because there were a lot of them at the time, and everyone was playing them. Some of them were even good.

Noteworthy here is that what I actually wanted was light and perhaps lighthearted games with some economics and some units fighting over territory. I especially loved games with concrete provinces, those were my ideal games. The real-time nature, multiplayer focus, on the other hand certainly are aspects that do not appeal to me. I sometime do play multiplayer games, I can even play a lot of them, but I mostly play to play with specific people, the game doesn't really matter.

Lords Managements on the other hand are just way too far along the spectrum for me. I think. I haven't really studied them even, since the WC3 mod.
 

Rambling man


Having said all that, if someone could ever re-create what playing as the commander in Natural Selection was like for me, without having to deal with all the annoyances of multi-player, my life would probably be somewhat ruined.

Natural Selection is a multiplayer asymmetrical first person team-shooter, where one person plays an RTS game with the rest of the players acting as units. The team sizes were usually 6-8 people, which meant it was just around the upper limit of what I am able to keep track of. The tech tree is short, but still offers some variety and possibilities for unorthodoxy. The map sizes are fairly small, once again, something that's easy enough to keep track of. Most things roughly an order of magnitude beyond your ability to fully control, but still manageable.

Of course often the players would ignore all your orders or complain constantly. But mostly that was just like any other constraint. Your troops weren't ideal. Or sometimes they were too ideal compared to the other team and what you did, did not matter. But that small scale made the game manageable at the fast pace of an RTS. Not that I ever was a great commander, just a lowly pub. But I think it would not be impossible to capture something similar in an RTS, just very difficult to design in a way that would be both fun and challenging.

I know there have been several games that have done the same thing, but all are, I believe on-line multiplayer. I did play some NS2 with the Rock Paper Shotgun crowd for a while a couple of years back. But I was too much an old man for even that. Lovely game that, though.
 

Dead-ends


One of the few RTSes that I do remember fondly is an odd Russian game called Perimeter. It kind of had this proto-tower defense feel with very concrete dispute over/control of land, and an unit production mechanic where you transformed your basic units into more advanced versions. It has been 10 years, but I would like to hear if there are games that have successfully applied the same ideas in some interesting ways?

I never tried the sequel because my friend said it was rubbish, and he likes RTSs.

Edited by unimural

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