Rob Zacny

Episode 213: On Campaign

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Other than Homeworld (yep, ships persist), I was trying to think of games that were RTS'ey but didn't invovle heavy base or build-queue cycles.  Of course, Close Combat! 

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Always seemed strange more games didn't try the squad level scale with linked battles to tell a story.

Is that more of an RTT game? Some older RTT games that I've found and played (very little of) of include Ground Control, Soldiers of Anarchy (which Bruce has spoken of on the podcast and written about on FoS), and the Mech Commander games. They're all squad based without base building. Since I've gotten so into RTS games, they feel like only part of a game to me though I've been wanting to play through some the campaigns of GC and MC. There were two games in each of those franchises. MC may be difficult to get running on a modern machine.

After starting an RTS hobby, listening to the podcast and reading about games, I found it seemed RTS franchises were evolving in that direction but were still always being called RTS rather than RTT. Like the term fell out of favor despite game development going more in that direction.

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Oh yeah and Force Commander as hexgrid mentioned. I downloaded the demo (I like old games obviously) and lost interest in it immediately. The highlight boxes on the models is one thing I remember hating besides it being more RTT.

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This has been pretty cool read.

 

I worked on SupCom, SupCom:FA, and SupCom 2. Interesting to see how this sample set of people match up against what I remember of the dev team at GPG.

 

I wish skirmish had more resources associated with it to make it more interesting. That's one of the reason we made sure that SC was so mod friendly. The AI mods really helped extend the life of the game a lot. (Especially since most of the time you are making a game the balance can swing hard and fast, so you have to make an AI system that can *try* to keep up with balance)

 

Even though I like campaigns, I don't think all RTS campaigns are good. And lots of campaigns have 1 or 2 good maps and a lot of maps that aren't all that great IMHO. I don't think all SupComs campaign maps are great, but we had some I liked a lot (and I think SupCom Forged Alliance campaign is pretty good). 

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Thanks for sharing your perspective. I always enjoy reading from people that worked on games.

 

It's been awhile since I played SupCom, but I remember the first time the battlefield opened up in the middle of a mission was a really cool, bewildering experience.

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