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Rob Zacny

Episode 238: State of the RTS

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Soren Johnson joins Rob and Troy to discuss the meaning of the RTS format, why the traditional genre definition is too narrow, and his new studio.

 

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Man, Troy's point about how internet connections in the 90s shaped the development of RTS's was totally genius! That leads to the situation today where people lament how the single player campaign of a RTS teaches you "to play the game wrong".

 

Best of luck to Soren.

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There were a couple of points in this episode where I had "wait, what about X?" moments, but for the most part I was nodding. 

 

As an indie developer, I think Soren's position on mobile is wise; it's a hostile market.  It's hard to maintain any visibility in the app stores, and if nobody knows you're there you just aren't making any money.  Between that and potential customers being conditioned to think of $1.99 as "overpriced", it's very difficult to make a game actually pay for its development costs.  The DSiWare market has been routinely panned by pretty much everyone (for fairly good reason), and the games we shipped on DSiWare haven't come within an order of magnitude of recouping their costs, but we shipped our DSiWare titles years ago now, and we're *still* making more on them per month than our iOS titles have earned in their entire lifetimes.

 

At the recent Apple event, they announced that there were a million (give or take) apps in the app store, and they'd paid out (presumably slightly more than) ten billion dollars to developers.  So, on average, each app makes $10,000.  That wouldn't be enough to recoup the investment necessary for most games, but when you remove some outliers like Rovio ($195M profit last year, probably mostly from Angry Birds on iOS), the story gets very sour, very fast.

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My main "what about X" moments mostly centered around Homeworld and Battlezone, neither of which completely fit the discussed standard, but which at the same time can't exactly be said to have spawned subgenres of any significance.  Somebody is trying to resurrect Homeworld, and there's at least one project attempting to remake Battlezone (Bionite Origins, which still seems to be staggering on, but is looking increasingly like a failed project despite raising some kickstarter money).  A couple of "let's bring back X" projects isn't exactly evidence of thriving genre diversity, however.

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I think there were a few great points in this episode, especially those commenting on the impact of a game's forum or online community. When I enjoy something I often feel the need to research it and learn all the interesting bits. What often comes along with that are game-breaking exploits and complaints about how "broken" something is because of some perceived imbalance. (I've often thought that the best way to enjoy a Civ game is to avoid the core Civ community.)

 

It's something I especially see on wargaming boards. I can think of a few titles from Matrix that I've enjoyed quite a bit, blissfully making my way through the game while not noticing anything particularly off. When browsing those boards, however, all I see are "THIS GAME IS UNPLAYABLE UNTIL XX BUG IS FIXED". Well, I guess those AA values were a bit off, but I think the game still played fine. 

 

My game-breaking internet moment was in Plants vs Zombies. I put a fast 60 hours into that game until I went online and saw the "unbeatable" survival mode layout. I built that exactly once, closed the game, and haven't opened it since. (And I'll probably never touch PvZ2 but for other reasons.)

 

I'm also looking forward to Soren's game as I think economic simulators are incredibly interested and under-represented.

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From a post on another thread when discussing Homeworld that I think relates to this episode
 

"Interestingly, especially after listening to the latest podcast, it was [originally] to be a salvage economic game--a competitive game of salvaging crashed spacecraft on land. Again, that's just the impression I got reading what little there was out there about it."

 

I definitely consider the city/castle/empire builders and "4X/RTSs" I have to be RTSs. Real-time tactics games like Ground Control I do not, though they have very related controls and gameplay. Something like Dawn of War or Homeworld (the Relic games) may fall somewhere in-between (I haven't played the second DoW at all, but it sounds like even less of an RTS, at least in some game modes).

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Amazing podcast!

 
Troy´s fantastic point about the conflict between how the player could play the single player campaign in anyway (and because of this with greater sense of self-expression and agency) against the demands of the multiplayer (where community and the efficiency-driven style of play was imposed over the player, which had less self-expression and agency) also remember me one thing:
 
The demand of total different play style along with "optimal strategies" (and maybe exploits, but they aren´t the same) lead some players to a general fear toward RTS and multiplayer. Some people (specially ones which played classic RTS, but no other strategy games) often complain how they where playing at their on rhythm until they where overrun by other players with more units (this fear often get the image of the zerg rush or the priest in AoE 1,2 and their "wolololo").

Another issue, is that while in single player you would have a larger self-expression and agency at the same time that "optimal strategies" even if they exist, they only affect you if you wish (In Skyrim I could forge hundreds of Iron Dagger to rise my Smithing, but only if I wish) but in multiplayer things change: you might be forced by the game (if its poorly made or balanced) and community (in MMOs often you could be reject by clans and party if you character isn´t using the latest optimal build) to play in a total different way that might have much less agency or self-expression.
 
Another point not related: there appear to be a fine balance between much stuff a player must do and react in classic RTS. If you try to insert too much stuff the game could collapse. For me, the best case of this issue if Cossacks, the game already runs at a ridiculous speed, but the fact that you must form regiments manually is really annoying - "recruit lots of individual units, recruit standard-bearer, recruit drummer, form regiment, watch them all die at speed of light, repeat again" all of this while lots of things are happening in the game.

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The demand of total different play style along with "optimal strategies" (and maybe exploits, but they aren´t the same) lead some players to a general fear toward RTS and multiplayer. Some people (specially ones which played classic RTS, but no other strategy games) often complain how they where playing at their on rhythm until they where overrun by other players with more units (this fear often get the image of the zerg rush or the priest in AoE 1,2 and their "wolololo").

 

I never got into the Age of Empires series specifically because of that; there were a couple of people playing it at the office over lunch, I joined a game and got wiped out by a huge second-era army just as my guys were finally building a market. I hadn't realized the fruit trees were a resource rather than just decorative sprites, so I'd had my guys haring all over the map chasing deer, and when I did figure out about the fruit trees my guys barely managed to harvest anything because they all got stuck in the middle of an empty field, unable to pathfind around each other.  And then this massive blue army with priests and catapults and things showed up and murdered them and burnt down my half-built market.

 

At that point I was "eff this, back to total annihilation", and I never did try any of the series after that.

 

 Another point not related: there appear to be a fine balance between much stuff a player must do and react in classic RTS. If you try to insert too much stuff the game could collapse. For me, the best case of this issue if Cossacks, the game already runs at a ridiculous speed, but the fact that you must form regiments manually is really annoying - "recruit lots of individual units, recruit standard-bearer, recruit drummer, form regiment, watch them all die at speed of light, repeat again" all of this while lots of things are happening in the game.

 

There was a point in the early 2000s where StarCraft was getting really big, Dark Reign was doing pretty well, Total Annihilation had a decent following, and pretty much every publisher decided that THE FUTURE IS RTS AND SHOOTERS. I don't have documentary evidence for this, but it seems in retrospect like that's about the time when things like flight sims and adventure games and the like started to move off the eye-level shelves and into the reduced bin.

 

When that happened, there was a flood of also-ran RTS games, and in a lot of cases the game design process was essentially "StarCraft except with this one broken thing fixed", or "StarCraft except underwater" or what have you. After a little of that, the publishers seem to have started saying "So, what makes your game different from the other five RTS pitches I've seen in the past hour?", at which point the shovels come out and you started to see the baroque, gnarly design philosophy 4X games have been suffering from.  Throw everything in!  You'll be leveling up your peons, and choosing their specializations and equipment! Formations! Multi-part structures with branching upgrade paths! 30 resource types, with complex conversion paths between them involving structures! Stealth! Shields! Multi-level maps! Strategic metagames!

 

Any of which are potentially fine, of course, the problem is that when they're all in the same game what you have is a complex mess that would be difficult for the player to learn even if the developer had been given the time and budget to give each subsystem the treatment it deserved.  And you can be pretty sure that didn't happen.

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Multi-part structures with branching upgrade paths!

 

The Earth series, maybe? Build your own units--land, sea, and air. E2160 even has buildings that stack or connect laterally depending on faction. I think it hurts the game because it's simply annoying to have to stack structures. On top of that, no pun intended, you don't have as much of the enjoyment of seeing a base expand outward as you build up. Warzone 2100 has the unit construction feature as well.

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This episode had a really interesting chain of thought, which I took away as: the RTS is a niche genre characterised by extremely high demands on the player's ability, particularly in multiplayer, which is where the genre is at its most interesting. The genre was propelled into the mainstream by an accident of timing, and, barring Starcraft, has largely receded back to niche status in recent years. 

 

It's a new way of thinking for me- as a long time PC-focused gamer the RTS was always a core genre of the platform. Heck, Dune 2 was the first game I ever really fell in love with, in that glorious "why is it 2.00 in the morning?" kind of way. It rings true, however.

 

I see the demands placed on the player as largely two-fold: difficulty of co-ordination, and difficulty of execution. Starcraft is famous for its difficulty of execution, hence the advantage granted by high actions-per-minute. I'm more accustomed to Relic's Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2. 100+ APM is by no means necessary for skilled play here. The difficulty arises from the need to co-ordinate precise position, movements and actions often in more than one part of the map. The easiest way to lose a unit is to forget you sent it to capture a point in hostile territory.

 

In any real time game the advantage is going to go to the player who can do more in a given time space. That's just how it is. Unless you slow the whole thing down so that everything just takes a long time (Sins of a Solar Empire) multiplayer RTS is very likely to be difficult and exhausting.

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I see the demands placed on the player as largely two-fold: difficulty of co-ordination, and difficulty of execution. Starcraft is famous for its difficulty of execution, hence the advantage granted by high actions-per-minute. I'm more accustomed to Relic's Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2. 100+ APM is by no means necessary for skilled play here. The difficulty arises from the need to co-ordinate precise position, movements and actions often in more than one part of the map. The easiest way to lose a unit is to forget you sent it to capture a point in hostile territory.

 

In any real time game the advantage is going to go to the player who can do more in a given time space. That's just how it is. Unless you slow the whole thing down so that everything just takes a long time (Sins of a Solar Empire) multiplayer RTS is very likely to be difficult and exhausting.

 

This is a design choice, not something fundamental to the RTS genre.  It's partly a question of pacing, but it's also very much a question of the tools provided to the player.  The Dune 2/C&C/Warcraft model has concentrated on actions per minute, but many other RTS games have not. It all comes down to the tools the player is given.  Westwood/Blizzard gives you a very restricted set of tools in order to force the focus to APM, locking the camera down low, limiting the amount of preparation you can do (ie: little to no queueing of actions), limiting the selection tools, and so forth.

 

Consider Total Annihilation and its descendants; the unit groups have unlimited size, there are hotkeys like "select all combat units", "select all units of this type" and "select all units onscreen".  If you assign a vehicle factory to a group, everything that it builds is assigned to that group.  If you hold down shift when giving orders, you can queue up orders, so a single construction unit can be ordered to build an entire base, or a combat group can be given complex patrol orders.  In the later games (Kingdoms and onwards) you could zoom out far enough to see the whole map.

 

Or consider Dark Reign, where you could set AI behavior in units; you could build something and tell it "go do harassment raids randomly, return for repair when you're 50% damaged" and it would do that without you ever having to pay attention to it again.  You could lay down waypoints *independently* of units, so you could lay down a left pincer attack path, a right pincer attack path, and then tell group 1 to take path A, group 2 take path B, and you've got a coordinated attack without having to hand-manage it.

 

You mention the pacing of Sins of a Solar Empire, but that's only part of the reason it's easier to play.  It's also easier to play because once a fight starts, the units take care of business.  There's little advantage to getting in and interfering; the game is more about logistics than tactics.  Once the battle starts, the winner is going to be the one who got the right quantity and mix of forces to the battlefield, not the one who can group select and choose targets the fastest.  Sins also makes many of the upgrades single click actions, and will even auto-place structures for you if you ask it to.

 

I've long-since grown cold on the Westwood/Blizzard style RTSs because of this.  After playing games that gave me higher-level command tools, it feels clumsy and idiotic to go back to a formula that's basically a gambit metagame combined with "how many marbles can you hold at a time?".  The Westwood/Blizzard model is all about burying you in busywork so the fastest APM wins the day.  There are far more interesting design models to follow for RTS games which concentrate more on strategy and less on reflexes and single gambit victories.

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hexgrid, you mention Total Annihilation and its excellent progeny (the Supreme Commander games); specifically their excellent interfaces making the micro more managable. On the other hand, I remember SC frequently referred to as exhausting to play. In the terms I used above it's not a difficult to execute game, necessarily. It's very difficult to co-ordinate. In particular keeping your economy in balanced, optimised production is an intense mental challenge.

 

I never really enjoyed the Blizzard execution-focused style. I respect those who do, and I know that it allows for a very high skill ceiling and a satisfying sense of growing mastery that attracts a wide audience.

 

The other thing I think it's important to keep in mind is that part of what automation does is allow the player to manage other things. I bet a good Dark Reign player would still have a high APM. There's nearly always something useful one could be doing at any given time, and the player who can do more will do more of these things will have an advantage. It wouldn't surprise me to learn good Sins players actually do give quite a few commands in combat (as well as managing other things, naturally).

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hexgrid, you mention Total Annihilation and its excellent progeny (the Supreme Commander games); specifically their excellent interfaces making the micro more managable. On the other hand, I remember SC frequently referred to as exhausting to play. In the terms I used above it's not a difficult to execute game, necessarily. It's very difficult to co-ordinate. In particular keeping your economy in balanced, optimised production is an intense mental challenge.

 

I did find I liked the earlier games in the lineage better; it seems like the player mental energy freed up by the improved controls has been spent on making the scale of the game increasingly insane.

 

I never really enjoyed the Blizzard execution-focused style. I respect those who do, and I know that it allows for a very high skill ceiling and a satisfying sense of growing mastery that attracts a wide audience.

 

That's fair, and I can respect it as a sport that I can't be bothered to get good at but that other people might be very focused on. I might watch it the way I might watch sumo wrestling; fascinating in its own way, and a highly specialized skill that requires one's full devotion to master.  I'm not getting in the dohyou, though.

 

The other thing I think it's important to keep in mind is that part of what automation does is allow the player to manage other things. I bet a good Dark Reign player would still have a high APM. There's nearly always something useful one could be doing at any given time, and the player who can do more will do more of these things will have an advantage. It wouldn't surprise me to learn good Sins players actually do give quite a few commands in combat (as well as managing other things, naturally).

 

I've actually found that if anything in Sins my units get less effective if I start giving them orders in battle; I usually only interfere if they've picked targets particularly stupidly.

 

I guess my point is that a reliance on APM is a design decision rather than a fundamental aspect of the RTS. There's no reason you couldn't make an RTS that focuses on mental acuity rather than reflexes. As an example, though I never played it, I had the sense that Achron has moments where tight timing pays off, but is mostly a game about out-thinking your opponent rather than out-clicking them.

 

For a *really* simple example relevant to the other part of the podcast, consider the market in MULE.  It was four players in a timed event, where buyers started at the bottom of the screen and sellers started at the top. Sellers moved down to lower the price, buyers moved up to up their offer, and when a seller and a buyer were at the same height on the screen, goods and money were exchanged. It's active, compelling, and quite strategic, and it doesn't rely on reflexes at all despite being real-time. It was a simple little thing, but it was the core of the game.

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APM can help, but I think the choices one makes are still a more important part of traditional RTSs.

Yes, strategy is big-picture, long-term thinking, but I tend to think of and describe RTS as a management exercise for multitaskers. Or an attention exercise. The games are all about the choices one makes about what to focus on at any given moment. It's like having 100 things to do at any given time and being forced to choose what few things one will focus on. Like real life. This is still strategy in the sense that after one makes an initial plan of attack, they have to support it and adapt to circumstances as the situation changes. As in the real world. And some people really enjoy the challenge (combined with some entertaining simulation of tanks or spacecraft or what have you).

Of course, more actions per minute allows one to switch between tasks more quickly, but if one plays skirmish against AI's rather than mutliplayer, they can usually choose a speed and difficulty level that suits them. That said, there are a few games that don't let one adjust speed, even before a match, to force one to focus on APM (like RA3). There can also sometimes be a big step between difficulty levels in a title that one can get stuck at. I think I often like the large, sprawling RTSs that some reviewers might call "unwieldy". When things move too fast though, a large game really is (trying to grab and direct/micro individual aircraft in EEII is a bitch sometimes). Been going back to RoN lately.

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Do people think there's a sweet spot? Take a fairly classic RTS design: an economy to allow one to acquire a variety of units to defeat an opponent with. Could you make one of those that would not be nearly as stressful as your Starcrafts and your Supreme Commanders, but would still be deep enough that hardcore players could play for months or years? I think to truly be popular a multiplayer match or an AI skirmish needs to be done in under 45 minutes. Does that condition throw off the design?

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While listening to the bit regarding how Lords Managements are replacing RTSs, I always considered Massive Entertainment's "World in Conflict" (they also did Ground Control) to be the best example of where RTSs could go to refresh the genre.  While there was nothing revolutionary, the game had a lot of great features:

 

- Drop in play that worked

- Assymetric classes that were available to both teams

- A unit buying system that was not directly tied to if you were already winning or resources (you get points faster the less points you had on the board).

- Clan support including clan match servers and clan leaderboards

- Small unit counts (accessible)

- A veneer of tactical play (flanking, units could fire outside of their own LOS if the had scouting, cover) for depth 

- Teams could share TAs (a.k.a super power points) for bigger effects or to help each other out.

- Quick matches that were full of action

- A "tug of war" victory system that allowed for spectacular comebacks

- A great website loaded with stats and information

- The right ratio of damage/firing range/unit speed which never feels right in Starcraft-style RTSs

- Replays, spectator mode and even an awesome broadcast tool

 

To me this seemed like a great direction for RTSs and seems like an excellent framework for games that wanted to capture the appeal of Lords Managements (easy to pickup, short games), but not copy the DOTA (i.e. "lanes", creeps, fantasy themes, controlling one hero, etc.).

 

Unfortunately, the series died after the studio got shuffled between publishers.

 

"End of Nations" seemed to be going in that direction but a combination of a bad developer (Petroglyph, which hasn't done anything interesting since the Star Wars RTS), free to play and Lords Managementization ruined the game.

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I never got into the Age of Empires series specifically because of that; there were a couple of people playing it at the office over lunch, I joined a game and got wiped out by a huge second-era army just as my guys were finally building a market. I hadn't realized the fruit trees were a resource rather than just decorative sprites, so I'd had my guys haring all over the map chasing deer, and when I did figure out about the fruit trees my guys barely managed to harvest anything because they all got stuck in the middle of an empty field, unable to pathfind around each other.  And then this massive blue army with priests and catapults and things showed up and murdered them and burnt down my half-built market.

 

At that point I was "eff this, back to total annihilation", and I never did try any of the series after that.

 

 

There was a point in the early 2000s where StarCraft was getting really big, Dark Reign was doing pretty well, Total Annihilation had a decent following, and pretty much every publisher decided that THE FUTURE IS RTS AND SHOOTERS. I don't have documentary evidence for this, but it seems in retrospect like that's about the time when things like flight sims and adventure games and the like started to move off the eye-level shelves and into the reduced bin.

 

When that happened, there was a flood of also-ran RTS games, and in a lot of cases the game design process was essentially "StarCraft except with this one broken thing fixed", or "StarCraft except underwater" or what have you. After a little of that, the publishers seem to have started saying "So, what makes your game different from the other five RTS pitches I've seen in the past hour?", at which point the shovels come out and you started to see the baroque, gnarly design philosophy 4X games have been suffering from.  Throw everything in!  You'll be leveling up your peons, and choosing their specializations and equipment! Formations! Multi-part structures with branching upgrade paths! 30 resource types, with complex conversion paths between them involving structures! Stealth! Shields! Multi-level maps! Strategic metagames!

 

Any of which are potentially fine, of course, the problem is that when they're all in the same game what you have is a complex mess that would be difficult for the player to learn even if the developer had been given the time and budget to give each subsystem the treatment it deserved.  And you can be pretty sure that didn't happen.

 

I think its a very good theory.

 

30 resource types, with complex conversion paths

The only game which managed to do that very well was the Settlers I and II, but the game had a much different pace, more slower and relaxing that most RTS and as more about city building. That allowed for a more complex way to handle resources without overwhelm the player. While I never played Knights and Merchants, I often heard how people said that the complex resource management often was quite tiresome, since you also had to do a lot of stuff.

 

Formations!

oh, yes. Most RTS had that, but you never really need it anyway or even made any difference. Even Cossacks, which was about XV century warfare, had them, but you never really could use it, since the game pace was so ridiculous fast (it was almost like someone playing a video in fast-foward) that you couldn´t move you regiments in any strategical way, at best you would to massive selections and thrown them at the enemy (I know, that somewhat you do in Total Annhilation, but it worked very well there, while in Cossacks, if felt strange and even historical innacurate).

 

You'll be leveling up your peons, and choosing their specializations and equipment!

That remember me of Empire Earth I, where you could spend resource improving invididual units. But first, the game never tell you about that (Take me a while to figure that out) and hardly made any difference, and again the pace of RTS game, and the lack of way to see which units you had upgraded or not, made difficult to keep them alive or even remember they existed. Another issue, the "invisible bonus"  where you told that now you have 0,0002% when doing something, but while you almost won´t notice, the community in multiplayer will make a huge issue of about that...or maybe the problem is, that the game never tells you when a bonus kick.

 

This affect a lot of space 4X, where each race have a lot of bonus, but they all felt exactly the same.

 

Do people think there's a sweet spot? Take a fairly classic RTS design: an economy to allow one to acquire a variety of units to defeat an opponent with. Could you make one of those that would not be nearly as stressful as your Starcrafts and your Supreme Commanders, but would still be deep enough that hardcore players could play for months or years? I think to truly be popular a multiplayer match or an AI skirmish needs to be done in under 45 minutes. Does that condition throw off the design?

 

Talking about Empire Earth... the first two games managed to combine Civilization elements and RTS elements very well, later Rise of Nations (maybe Rise of Legend too, but I never played) pushed this forward even more, I believe that this was the limit of how much stuff you can thrown in.

But a classic exemple of disaster was Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War. I remember how back there, when it was released I was quite hyped to it, due begin a fan of Empire Earth I. But in the end they never sold the game where I live and I could only test the demo, it was huge let down (to be fair, I didn´t liked Empire Earth II too, I didn´t even bother with the third game) so much that I didn´t complain anymore the lack of sale.

Anyway, here is the deal: Rise & Fall tried to combine RTS with Dinasty Warrior style of gameplay. You would play RTS style, with heroes, but you can assume direct control of said heroes (for a short time, you had a stamina bar, once it end you back to the rts, to remain in hero mode you had to find more stamina potions) and play a hack and slash game. It was a nice idea on paper, but in reality all that Rise & Fall became was a bad RTS and bad Dinasty Warrior clone (it simple lacked everything that make Dinasty Warrior fun, such the charismatic characters, the colorful designs, the over the top themes).

Poor controls, lack of feedback (it was very hard to tell when you blows are hitting the enemy or not) and clashing design decisions: because overall the game was trying to be accurate, but the heroes felt out of place, it was strange seeing Cleopatra running around with small knifes mowing down Roman Legions or seeing Caesar using a longbow or calling for air strikes from catapults. Again, say what you will, Dinasty Warriors, innacurate and fantasy like it is, at least its quite honest and manage to make its elements coherent. And if memory didn´t fail me, some DW game came with ingame enciclopedia telling a more accurate version of the events in the game. But the issue is that in hero mode you can´t manage your units or building so effective you lose control of everything (I don´t remember what happened in game, did everything freeze?) begin thrown from one mode to another was confusing.

To be fair, the idea of taking direct control of a unit is quite cool, and I would love to see that in Sins of Solar Empire as was suggest in another podcast. I believe it would work very well, because such minigame combine more with sins pace (there is a lot of time that we can spend just looking at the game amazing graphics, a minigame there won´t hurt). But there, didn´t work since all the stuff you most keep track in a RTS.

 

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That remember me of Empire Earth I, where you could spend resource improving invididual units. But first, the game never tell you about that (Take me a while to figure that out) and hardly made any difference, and again the pace of RTS game, and the lack of way to see which units you had upgraded or not, made difficult to keep them alive or even remember they existed. Another issue, the "invisible bonus"  where you told that now you have 0,0002% when doing something, but while you almost won´t notice, the community in multiplayer will make a huge issue of about that...or maybe the problem is, that the game never tells you when a bonus kick.

Anyway, here is the deal: Rise & Fall tried to combine RTS with Dinasty Warrior style of gameplay. You would play RTS style, with heroes, but you can assume direct control of said heroes (for a short time, you had a stamina bar, once it end you back to the rts, to remain in hero mode you had to find more stamina potions) and play a hack and slash game. It was a nice idea on paper, but in reality all that Rise & Fall became was a bad RTS and bad Dinasty Warrior clone (it simple lacked everything that make Dinasty Warrior fun, such the charismatic characters, the colorful designs, the over the top themes).

....

To be fair, the idea of taking direct control of a unit is quite cool, and I would love to see that in Sins of Solar Empire as was suggest in another podcast. I believe it would work very well, because such minigame combine more with sins pace (there is a lot of time that we can spend just looking at the game amazing graphics, a minigame there won´t hurt). But there, didn´t work since all the stuff you most keep track in a RTS.

 

 

 

In EEI you can tell what upgrades have been made via the unit info panel when you select a unit. It's on the far left if I recall correctly.

In the expansion there was this very alien looking new space age. Good for an enemy faction I thought. So in order to have different looking factions in a future eras game, I would let AIs focus on aging up to that, and I would focus on upgrading my units in order to stand a chance. It made the game more challenging and factions that looked the same, and Empire Earth problem, wasn't a problem anymore.

 

Taking control of units from a 1st person perspective is possible in Earth 2160 but not useful. It's a novelty to get into the driver's seat of a scout unit you sent out though. It's strange seeing a map from such a different perspective than usual. And you can drive at night with the headlights on which just feels strange. Works with aircraft, too.

I think hero control is also possible in a game called Maelstrom. I'd avoid hero control if playing RaF. It's something for non-RTS action game fans put into a hybrid game. I don't see it being all that fun or useful if somebody actually likes RTS controls.

 

 

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That's sort of the problem though isn't it? For those who do like traditional RTSs? And maybe it's part of the answer to "where did all those old-style RTSs go?". People complain and complain about the perceived unwieldiness of traditional RTSs, Developers stop making them, then we have podcasts asking if they've finally completely died off. It's not the users who like to play them who are most vocal I think (at least not w/offline players), so they are the ones left with nothing new. Developers then cater to players who didn't really like the style of game they were previously making to begin with, a style that was successful in the past. No wonder new ones often aren't successful. They aren't made for the people who like them--too small an audience.

 

Hybrid games run the risk of not making anybody happy if the mix is not done exactly right for that time in game develpment. In regards to the question above of maybe making more RTSs WiC like, well yeah, it might be good for those who want something in-between an RTS and a Lords Management. But there are diehard RTS fans who have no interest in Lords Managements. It's a different audience, so the game is a hybrid that catches people in the in-between space. Is that space occupied by more people than that at either end of the spectrum? Can that space be made or grown by a really successful new game?

 

 

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Oh, and regarding unit upgrades in EE(1), upgrades are applied to all units of that type from that point forward, not an individual unit. You probably will not notice any benefit until you apply enough upgrades (defensive and offensive - armor and guns for example and there were multiple types of each). It would be especially difficult to notice if you let the AI jump epochs on you as they get more powerful units. I'd let that happen intentionally to get more asymmetric factions.

 

The choices of upgrades may be an example of something overly complicated, but to make the game more interesting, I got into it and then found a way to make the game more complicated intentionally. May be a sickness. I was having more fun, so it didn't feel like more work. The basic game was just a larger scale AoE in 3D.

 

I recently found that Empires: Dawn of the Modern World was basically an Empire Earth game with more asymmetric factions built on an improved version of the EE(1) engine. It's not bad if one likes older, traditional RTSs.

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It appears somebody put functionality into the forum to automatically change the term M O B A (as one word) to Lords Management. Funny.

 

Testing -  Lords Management

 

Yep.

Edited by RTS Novice

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It appears somebody put functionality into the forum to automatically change the term M O B A (as one word) to Lords Management. Funny.

 

That seems to be an Idle Thumbs thing.

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