I don't play games much anymore, but when I did, I always had an affinity for RTS games(Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Warcraft, etc), and Action RPGs (Diablo, Torchlight).
It's exhausting to find games nowadays that don't nickel and dime you to succeed. I like the Kingdom Rush Tower Defense games on iPad when I'm traveling. Any other suggestions?
Also this game is fully open source and is a great resource if you are learning something like Blender or want to dev a game / side mod in .js ... https://github.com/0ad/0ad
On mobile you probably would like the Auto Chess game Dota Underlords. The are the next evolution of the RTS games, that grew out of Warcraft like League of Legends.
I was intrigued by "Auto Chess" so I went and looked it up, and it looks sort of like Archon crossed with an idle game. Interesting, but not really my cup of tea.
Has anyone made an up-to-date Archon lately? I know there was The Unholy War on the original PlayStation, but that was a long time ago.
Bloons, despite the goofy aesthetic, is probably the most balanced and polished tower-defense game I've ever played, and mobile/tablet is its primary platform
i came here to say this. More along the lines of kingdom rush, but an excellent game. For me personally i spent ages trying to research a mobile game i could just buy and play and not be harassed for micropayments. Bloons is where i ended up. Yes, of course you can show them with extra monies but it really isn't needed at all. Excellent fun game, where you can see your progress over playing it.
They are Billions is a very well made game! I like it. And it's actually a refreshingly colorful game.
The tower defense element (thousands of zombies spawning and storming your settlement) makes it a pretty punishing game: you try to frantically build out your settlement while protecting it from early waves for about two hours before the inevitable overwhelming final wave comes. You don't know until the very end whether you are doing OK or not.
In addition to the Path of Exile suggestions, I'd recommend Grim Dawn as an alternative. An extremely fun and interesting Diablo clone. Coincidentally, the prequel / same engine was used for 2006's Titan Quest, which is now available on iOS and Android. Although I haven't actually played the mobile versions, I think as per the original, there won't be any microtransactions, or multi level marketing schemes to "win", just dozens of hours of campaign. Both games are highly recommended in general, the class systems offer such interesting and unique combinations.
IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter.
And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
And OpenRA itself has been somewhat of a success.
BTW, C&C has a Red Alert reboot coming out before too long. It will be classic in design.
> the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its bread and butter.
Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
Personally, I felt this way about SC2 as compared to SC1.
I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units.
For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some damage in the process, at least. In contrast, in SC2, it always felt like a failure to properly anticipate army makeup would frequently lead to completely lopsided battles where my force might be completely annihilated without doing measurable damage to the opponent.
This was aggravated by the second point. I'm not a professional player and my APM has never been amazing, and I'm fine with that. But the more complex required army composition put a higher emphasis on APM and in-battle tactics, especially with heterogenous forces and units, like blink stalkers, that really benefit from very high levels of micro. I'll be the first to admit that, when watching replays, the things that skilled players could pull off in SC2 was pretty amazing to see- but that didn't really help my playing experience.
There result was a game that felt significantly more frustrating than SC1, even if my win/loss ratio wasn't actually all that different.
That's an interesting view of the situation. I don't think I've ever seen someone say that APM requirements are higher in SC2. Notable enormous APM sinks in SC1 are the unit selection cap, the inability to give orders to multiple factories at a time, and the inability to make workers rally to the mineral line.
Whether the counters are harder, I don't have enough knowledge to say.
Those are different uses of APM than what the parent is talking about. The unit selection cap is kind of a similar thing, but in practice, selecting an entire giant army and attacking with them all toward the same target at once is not competitive. So even without the unit selection cap, to win battles at high levels (even platinum and definetely diamond when I was playing) requires controlling small groups of different units in the right way. It does seem like you can get away with lower average APM for macro, but peak APM during key battles may have more of an impact. But I didn't play enough SC1 to really compare, I just mean that it is at least plausible based on my experience with SC2.
On the other hand, design changes like special attacks like Psionic Storm only triggering for one of the selected units reduced required battle APM in SC2 too. (In SC1, if you had a group of units selected and triggered one of those attacks, all selected units would cast on that location, so you had to select a single one, cast, individually select the next one, cast, ... if you didn't want to waste your charges)
I think a significant cause of this has been the simplistic/restrictivee definition of "macro" as "economy." There are other simple/powerful concepts that give a bigger bang for buck---stance, position, etc.
I never got into sc2, but didn't they get rid of muta stacks and dancing dragoons? The silly "can move during weapon cooldown" mechanic of sc1 imho was disastrous for extreme micro requirements as it meant that units could back off in between firing while the unit AI just wants to stand and fight, meaning even the simplest battle requires extreme micro.
What I can think of : I remember playing vs my friend a single game of c&c 3 tiberium wars for a 3 hours but seeing starcraft 2 the game end in 15 min in the esports.
Everything in SC2 is about the RUSH. Turtlers are not welcome.
I put SC2 down and never picked it back up after playing the third timed mission in a row.
Supreme Commander dealt with this by having genuinely large maps and resource flow rather than a fixed amount of resources. If you tried to "rush" someone or go after their resources, you generally ran into units a level higher and got annhilated.
RTS as a genre has always favored aggressive play. Even in games that tried to favor defense, like SupCom, turtlers are stills not welcome, and higher level players start aggression quite early. Rarely will a rush downright end the game, but pulling one off correctly will generally put you ahead.
I don't think any RTS game will be able to deal with this naturally, only by adding rules like NR20 or even NR40 can you avoid early aggression and turtle in peace, and even then the winning strategy will always be to expand as aggressively as possible and to defend with units instead of static defenses.
> IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for esports
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
You seen to either get games where the multiplayer scene is non-existent, or hyper competitive like SC2, where you feel a bit brutalized.
One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more attractive.
Check out the SC2 arcade and co-op missions. They perfectly target the 'mid-core' strategy gamer and Blizzard has pushed a lot of content into them over the past years. I would not be surprised if it dominates the normal ladder in hours played, just like the old Brood War UMS maps.
Probably a strong reason why there isn't much competition - why build a new game, when you can weave less competitive mechanics on top of an existing engine and game universe that already has fans?
Fun fact. When Blizzard was working on match making for SC2 they found they’d made it too good. That you’d consistently get matched with someone so close to your level that each game would be completely draining. They found they needed to widen the standard deviation so that some games felt like a cake walk and other times you just got stomped. What I don’t know is how much of the change was due to direct player feedback, and how much of it was simply trying to maximize player session retention.
I suspect I’m quoting a post I read on gamasutra. Very good site for those interested in game industry anecdotes.
I think also that any competitive game over time will optimize for the experts or be optimized by experts. Fighting games is another example, and a lot of rhythm games are. MMOs that focus on PvP too.
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
>the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
I find this to be a really interesting point. Many people would ask why they are playing a PvP game in the first place, if they're not interested in competing. I think it makes a lot of sense though, because they're not actually all that interested in playing against players. They just want more of a human-like challenge than what AI can provide. The only option there is to play against other players.
A friend and I used to keep in touch by playing RTS Vs the AI while chatting over the mike.
The AI in most games is utterly banal and predictible, and as soon as you go past the easy or medium settings it cheats ruthlessly. Of the big recent ones (StarCraft 2, Company of Heroes 2), it's been a very disappointing experience.
For SC2, it just keeps rushing you, so you end up turtling until the AI runs out of resources.
For CoH2, again it just constantly rushes you with much better stuff that you can afford. CoH2 is actually really annoying as you can never afford anything, and so don't get to play with different units, you're always seem to end up playing the same composition.
What this means is that every game is virtually the same, you're just trying to establish a line, wait until the computer runs out of something (or uses the artifical unit cap for stupid things, effectively running out of an army), and then you roll them.
The only game I remember with a little variance was Dawn of War 2.
Maybe co-op Vs AI is something they just don't care about, but it feels as if it's got worse over time, becoming extremely predictable.
This. My personal favorite game for co-op vs the AI was RUSE - they had several different AI profiles that tended towards certain strategies you could specify, or it would choose at random. However, it really did respond to what units you built and what strategies you chose, building bunkers against a rush and such, or building a ton of anti-tank weapons if it saw you had tanks.
This meant that subterfuge and concealing your intentions was legitimately a huge part of the strategy - if you intentionally let the AI see a lot of a certain kind of unit and then build a different kind of strategy, you'd often see success, but because of the way the AI strategised it could sometimes meet you head on with an unexpected surge because it briefly saw you building up from an unspotted recon unit hiding somewhere.
Ultimately it is relatively easy to defeat with a little experience, but I still several years later occasionally boot it up with a friend to try and beat the hard AI 2v4 - we've only managed a handful of times, and the experience of slowly being whittled down back to back is a great experience to have in a friendship
It's not that they don't like to compete. It's that over time that the bar gets raised so high that they can't. People get too good while their skills don't increase as much or remain static. Or the effort needed to remain competitive is too much.
I played StarCraft 2 for nearly a decade after it came out. It was always a solid experience. It is surprising that in all that time, there hasn't been a serious competitor to SC2 in the traditional RTS format. This article does a great job of breaking down why that might be. I mean, the mobile revolution did take some steam and excitement out of PC gaming for a while there. As the author points out, game devs tend to chase the trends and in some cases, they have to. I agree with the author's conclusion that the industry is missing out on a big opportunity. They remain to this day my most satisfying gaming experiences. And if they're done right and well balanced, people will play the same RTS for decades, so they have a lot of staying power.
I remember when the iPad came out I was incredibly excited. This was surely perfect for RTS games!
There was Command & Conquer: Red Alert Mobile, then....
The only other one I remember was an actually really good StarCraft clone by Gameloft (I forget the name).
I always thought mobile would be great for RTS and then it just wasn't. Though when I think about it, the keyboard is pretty important and that kind of fast control is really difficult on a touchscreen, so maybe that explains the lack of 'classic' RTS games on touch devices.
You wrote exactly my thoughts! I was so excited for a new generation of touch-optimized RTS games when the iPad was released and I’ve been disappointed with the options.
Do you (or anyone) know of any iPad games that fit the bill these days? I played Vainglory for a while but that’s not a RTS - it’s a MOBA (and was fun and worked super well on touch).
I doubt it. Age of Empires 2 is pretty much the entire AoE scene left. And Age of Empires 2 definitive edition (AoE2DE) is coming out soon. And that'll only work if it accurately recreates the AoE2 experience with better graphics and slightly better interface.
I expect any modern non-AoE2 AoE game to be just as bad as any other modern RTS. Even AOE2 DE was/is probably going to be requiring Win 10 just to force people to upgrade. MS is still MS.
Not an unreasonable request, Windows 7 is a decade old. Computers are tools and you need to keep your tools up to date, at least if you're not writing the code yourself to keep it secure and running.
Not unreasonable in general but there's absolutely no reason that AoE2DE needs to use DX12 and the Win 10 requirements that come with it. And there's a significant reason why they shouldn't.
A large fraction of the player population is in countries without access to large purchasing power or modern computing equipment. If it requires 10 then a large part of the playerbase will simply stick with AoE2 AoC on voobly or HD on steam. So DE will only be new players or players in rich western economies. MS is showing they either don't care or don't understand the AoE2 scene.
Windows 7 mainstream support ended in 2015 and extended support ends in 2 1/2 months. I can't wrap my head around why I would support that, encouraging people to stay on an OS that is insecure. It would make more sense to support a current RHEL-based LTS release. An option for unsupported systems will be streaming, given their investment in Azure Gaming. I don't disagree there's no technical argument to not be DX12-only but I would've only agreed with your stance a year or 2 ago, not this close to the extended support ending on Windows 7. There's always a cut off point and today seems reasonable for titles still in development.
One thing Microsoft does need to do is offer an ad-supported, Microsoft Store only, free-of-charge Windows-S 10 to everyone to download. Since it would only support their stuff, it could be optimized to run on lower end hardware.
>An option for unsupported systems will be streaming,
Do you think a pay subscription using up bandwidth like that is going to work for the vast majority of the low income, very international, old hardware AoE2 scene? It won't. Just like trying to force them up upgrade to 10 won't. They don't care because they don't think they can make money off those people. You don't care because you don't understand. But both you and MS don't understand that they are the AoE2 pro and ranked scene and that by ignoring them AoE2DE is going to be a flash in the pan and everyone will go back to playing AoE2 patched on voobly.
I care that those people are on supported software, not insecure versions that are unsupported. You're welcome to hold out on old hardware, no one is offended, but don't expect MS to support unsupported operating systems. That's doing no one a favor.
There's plenty of old hardware scenes and gamers, and has been for a long time before AOE2. It is important if MS can make money off people, because without that incentive there never would've been an AOE2 to begin with. So I'd save your dinars for that upgrade.
I think Starcraft was actually part of what pushed people away from the RTS genre and into MOBAs. Blizzard deliberately made WC3 and then SC2 much faster-paced and more micro-based variants of their predecessors. Then they started pushing the e-sports angle, which in my opinion made it even less about the traditional strategy elements of RTS and more about APS, multi-tasking, ability matching, etc.
MOBAs are then the natural step from fast-paced micro-heavy RTS - strip out the base building part and make it 100% about micro, abilities, and squad control. It's the evolution of what happens when RTS gets ADD. In a way, I think Blizzard basically gave kids candy instead of vegetables and now the mainstream player attention span isn't there for traditional RTS games anymore.
Heh, Brood War is FAR more micro intensive than SC2, mostly by virtue of the game interface; terrible unit pathing, 12 unit selection limit, no "smart casting" etc. Add to that more cumbersome macro mechanics and the game is much more difficult and twitchy to play effectively than it's successor. Though I'll agree that SC2 is faster paced, especially with the 12 worker start since LOTV
WC3 was more hero focused, like MOBA's, which of course had their start in WC3 as custom maps.
It is of course ironic that Blizzard inadvertently spawned a genre that ended up crushing them in a field that arguably they also pioneered, e-sports.
It's worse yet, as someone who started with the very first RTS (Dune) all the way to League of Legends, in most games your teammates have zero concept of late-game or playing defense. If they're not destroying from the start it's time to give up. The game is very good if played properly. No one is good enough at lower skill levels that better teamwork can't allow a come back from behind. Which is an amazing feeling.
For me, the test of a good game is if it's fun even if you're losing, which is the case with LoL but not as much with most traditional RTS.
Myth II was my favorite game of the era. There were also a number of community created scenarios created for it. Highly recommended if you can get you hands on a CD for it. Not sure how well it still runs (or not) under Windows but it still runs great on Linux under Wine.
It lives on as Project Magma (http://projectmagma.net/) but the scenarios that shipped with Myth II are what made the game for me.
While both great games (we ignore III), the Myth games were better classified as real time tactics, not real time strategy. There is no growth past the beginning of a campaign. There is only range, terrain, and formations (veteran survivor prowess notwithstanding) until your units die. Also carpet bombing, remote lightning, and phantom trow kick glitch attacks. I'm not crying, you're crying.
To this day, though, I don't think a better pair of games has been made, and I will always be sad about Bungie abandoning the franchise during the Microsoft purchase.
> Some people from Relic split off to found Blackbird Interactive. They made a prequel to Homeworld which is apparently really good. They’re now also working on Homeworld 3.
Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D, it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.
Yes, they manged to carry over essential design elements into their land based setting: there are no stationary bases. You have a huge, unique carrier vehicle instead of a mothership. The harvesting mechanics are almost identical. The biggest difference really is the terrain. The game has an easier time shaping the challenges by making use of terrain. In space, breaking the uniformity of the map was more challenging and the original Homeworld series didn't do too well in that regard. Finding in-universe reasons to make space non-uniform is apparently hard. There are resource spots and regions which affected ship systems, but that's it.
The most popular, recently released RTS I can think of is Factorio. It seems like RTS game elements have been splitting into their constituent parts and forming a game around those.(e.g. production to Factorio, or combat to DOTA) It may be that way there’s a greater ROI on smaller/simpler games than building out all the components involved in an RTS game.
Today gamers don't like to multi-task and Starcraft(and its clones) is a multi-tasking monster(scouting,economy, building, combat), so similar RTS which force multiple issues at same time are outfoxed by simpler game mechanic games where attention is more deeply focused and players can gain skills easier.
Another factor is RTS are anti-casual, they don't forgive mistakes and only a tiny % of gamers can handle the stress of constant losing/failing, in context of highly demanding, multitasking heavy game. The genre doesn't accept game style variations either - a single cookie-cutter build order is the best one, the rest is suboptimal and loses you either time or money.
The 'combined arms' approach where your 'macro' is turn-based and your 'micro' is real-time is doing very well in Total War franchise (briefly mentioned in the article).
Turn-based aspect of settlement/empire management flows much better than real-time base-building aspect of the classic RTSes. Battles being fought in a separate real-time ux means that you can field thousands of troop models while micro-managing tens of 'squads' -- and you don't have to worry about strategic side in the middle of the battle.
Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.
You say "richer", I say "removes important difficulty". Part of what makes the genre interesting is balancing your attention between these different aspects.
But more importantly, it's critical to an RTS that you can use micro to disrupt enemy resource gathering. If all unit movement is decided on a turn-based world map, you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point. Micro still influences who wins a battle, but you have to have a head-on fight. A combat is stuck in one grid cell instead of having access to the entire world.
(The hybrid design can make the macro richer. But troop movement and micro suffer a lot. It's not win/win.)
> you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point
Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war, move your army another to suck in units.
I would argue that sneaking based on "the human playing the video game was focused on something else" is a less compelling dynamic than sneaking based on "real" dynamics.
> Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war, move your army another to suck in units.
That's not getting around a distracted army.
Even if we ignore player focus, and pretend everyone can multitask perfectly, you're still losing options. You can't engage in a big fight on one side of a map just long enough for a flanking force to hit a critical target, then immediately retreat out of the main fight to avoid losses. With turn-based movement, that big fight is either unnecessary or it's likely to get your army crushed by the non-split-up force from lack of retreat options.
And you can't dodge an intercepting force with most forms of turn-based movement.
I’d also point out that you can adjust the “speed” of army movement — at least in TW: Warhammer — so that if they’re moving more quickly, like a forced march, they are less likely to spot hidden or sneaking armies. This does leave the mechanic depending on user choice of where to focus, not just ambient fog of war. It at least gives a similar state of mind as in SC where the player says to himself “do I go in with blinders on or do I proceed with more attention to surroundings” with real pros/cons for each.
You can indeed do what you describe. It is a sometime useful tactic in e.g. quest battles where you can kill a target then withdraw. An uncommon thing to do but generally possible.
But what you seem to describe are tactical operations, so they are happening on a tactical map. Sneaking up a group of units with stalk/forward deployment behind enemy lines then hitting the backline with it in an opportune moment when the main lines are engaging is a staple in a tactical engagement. As are the flanking maneuvers. You might not be hitting the workers or the production buildings but taking out an artillery piece is just as important and satisfying. Cavalry play has alot of the 'dodge the intercepting force' moments, etc.
The high-end TW multiplayer play is not the same and it might not be as difficult as high-end Starcraft play but I have never found the apm requirements and the need to control both macro and micro at the same time an appealing challenge. And the single player campaign is just straight up better because of a sheer variety of what you are doing.
I don’t have an answer either. Playing a lot of SC2 and waiting for Homeworld 3. 2022 ETA though. My main explanation is more recent strategy games have been a let down and as graphics don’t matter as much, players stick to old games discouraging even more game studios to try again.
I'd count Paradox's games (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Stellaris, etc.) as "real time" strategy; they're certainly not turn-based. And as far as strategy games go, they're nowadays the gold standard, IMO.
Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version, but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld: Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).
Total Annihilation holds a big part in my history. It was a great game for one thing, but annihilated.com inspired me to get into running a website.
Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience.
Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.
As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little to show for it.
I liked TA much more than RA. The strategy felt deeper, plus I liked the idea of the Commander unit representing you on the battle field. Sending him into battle was a risky move. The D-Gun made him extremely powerful, but if he died, you lose.
The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.
we used to play TA at lunch...but cut it off abruptly after an hour.. . so we'd spend 55 minutes building up epic armies then send them to apocalypse for the last 5 minutes :)
I tried to fire up my TA disk in a Win7 machine a few years ago, but the graphics came out all wrong :( any suggestions for reviving it?
Not sure if you are aware of the community that keeps Supreme Commander Forged Alliances - but this goes on sale for a couple bucks every big steam sale. If you have any version of the game on CD, steam will convert your CD keys into the gold version (both vanilla and SupCom:FA). https://www.faforever.com is an updated set of rules, graphics, patches, multiplayer, etc that totally updates the game to a very playable experience. Even the original single player missions were updated to co-op.
Not RTS, but certainly real time, and as old as the hills.
Railroad Tycoon
The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours, but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse of course. I did play it years later and it want the same.
I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably never existed - its a sepia tomes memory of a feeling from a different time with different expectations - but for some reasons the original Railroad Tycoon really stuck with me.
The map missions in Railway Empire make it a lot less like Railroad Tycoon than what I'd want. What really made RT great was the open ended ways to succeed, while the very focused missions in RE too often forces me to build specific things in specific order. I really miss the freedom the map objectives in RT3 gave me.
That said, it is a great game and it is one of the highlights of the railroad-building genre.
If you're looking for a modern derivative of Railroad Tycoon, you may enjoy Transport Fever. You'll find its demand-driven economy familiar, and staying solvent in the early game is tricky. Fever places a bigger emphasis on terrain—managing grade and turn radius to improve the speed (and profitability) of your vehicles.
I think this is a common enough sentiment. Your first games leave more of an impact and that feeling is often not really related to how good the game is. Just like comfort food, they're comfort games.
I never player Railroad Tycoon, my first in that genre was Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I feel pretty much the same way about it, and I'm pretty lucky that OpenTTD exists.
Similarly there's a game called Star Reach (also known as Space Federation) that was the first strategy game I played. In retrospect, it was pretty bad, but sometimes I want to play a space game and not even much superior games like Masters of Orion or more modern games like Sins of a Solar Empire will satisfy the particular craving like Star Reach.
Playing TT the first time, was the second time of my life I've ever done an all-nighter. I think I must've been 13 or 14 at the time. I'd only realized how much time had passed when my mom walked into the room at 6AM in the morning.
Then I was lucky to find TTD on some abandonware sites, shortly thereafter, the first TTD-Patch became available, and a few years later OpenTTD development started. I still remember playing it on a Nokia 5530 XM, they had actually ported it to the Symbian OS.
A few years ago, I learned that Chris Sawyer had programmed the entire thing in Assembly. It ran super-smooth on almost anything.
2004, 2006, and 2007 for Dawn of War, CoH, and SC respectively. More well known titles like Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer Generals, and Warcraft 3 were even earlier than that. Starcraft 2 was the last "AAA" RTS game that I can think of. Deserts of Kharak is probably the only RTS game I've played in the last 8 years that I really enjoyed. I tried CoH 2, but the micro transactions put me off. Eugen's Wargame series and Steel Divison had interesting and deep nuanced mechanics, but single player was very rough and the multiplayer player base wasn't big enough to sustain a good matchmaking experience.
Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.
Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
The domination of StarCraft has always bewildered me. I really loved the Battle for Middle Earth games back in the day as they were much more slow paced than SC. I absolutely loved spending an hour in total silence frantically constructing a base or two with massive armies before sending them off en masse against my opponent(s) - usually a friend or two connected via a LAN so you could hear their occasional grunts and chuckles, before cries of dismay or triumph. So fun!
Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
Battle for Middle Earth 1 is definitely one of my favorite RTS, I love how the constraints on buildings played into the mecanics of the game (not a fan of the second one which was more classic).
Have you tried Supreme Commander? It's the spiritual successor to TA and is amazing. There's a community lobby, Forged Alliance Forever, that has a solid number of active players.
Not 2; that's a whole different beast that was not well received. Play Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, which is more or less v. 1.5, and widely considered to be the pinnacle of the series.
The original Supreme Commander is not bad as well and interesting if you want to see the storyline that Forged Alliance sprang from.
Don’t know if it counts but did anyone else like the close combat series? I only ever played the first one because the others were PC only. I’ve even bought a few of the later ones recently on GOG, but I can’t get them to run with WINE.
I've played a few of these; I think I liked the Battle of the Bulge episode best (pacier than the preceding episodes). The first was really slow-moving. A Bridge Too Far was annoying.
CC3: The Russian Front was amazing! It feels kind of like it fits into a separate genre of “digital tabletop war games” (due to the fact that you pick your units from a large roster using points, rather than build them in-game, and had a focus on campaigns where the balance of power swung back and forth).
The demo of the British one (CC2 maybe?) was the one that got me into it.
I think they were remade by another company a few years back actually - but I’d definitely throw money at a modernized take on a similar concept.
I've heard the RTS genre described as three sliders.
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
there isn't anything quite like it still. There's something about it being 2.75D that makes it approachable even though it's 3-D, and the attention to the art was a big deal, too.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 95.7 ms ] threadIt's exhausting to find games nowadays that don't nickel and dime you to succeed. I like the Kingdom Rush Tower Defense games on iPad when I'm traveling. Any other suggestions?
https://kotaku.com/you-should-be-playing-the-brutal-city-bui...
Northguard is amazing and very much a successor to the games you mentioned.
https://kotaku.com/northgard-demands-that-you-take-winter-se...
On mobile you probably would like the Auto Chess game Dota Underlords. The are the next evolution of the RTS games, that grew out of Warcraft like League of Legends.
Has anyone made an up-to-date Archon lately? I know there was The Unholy War on the original PlayStation, but that was a long time ago.
For ARPGs, the elephant in the room is Path of Exile: https://www.pathofexile.com/
Neither is really viable for mobile, but I didn't quite catch whether that was a major criterion for you.
The remastered edition (“Definitive Edition”) of AoE2 is coming out in November.
The tower defense element (thousands of zombies spawning and storming your settlement) makes it a pretty punishing game: you try to frantically build out your settlement while protecting it from early waves for about two hours before the inevitable overwhelming final wave comes. You don't know until the very end whether you are doing OK or not.
And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
And OpenRA itself has been somewhat of a success.
BTW, C&C has a Red Alert reboot coming out before too long. It will be classic in design.
Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units.
For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some damage in the process, at least. In contrast, in SC2, it always felt like a failure to properly anticipate army makeup would frequently lead to completely lopsided battles where my force might be completely annihilated without doing measurable damage to the opponent.
This was aggravated by the second point. I'm not a professional player and my APM has never been amazing, and I'm fine with that. But the more complex required army composition put a higher emphasis on APM and in-battle tactics, especially with heterogenous forces and units, like blink stalkers, that really benefit from very high levels of micro. I'll be the first to admit that, when watching replays, the things that skilled players could pull off in SC2 was pretty amazing to see- but that didn't really help my playing experience.
There result was a game that felt significantly more frustrating than SC1, even if my win/loss ratio wasn't actually all that different.
Whether the counters are harder, I don't have enough knowledge to say.
I put SC2 down and never picked it back up after playing the third timed mission in a row.
Supreme Commander dealt with this by having genuinely large maps and resource flow rather than a fixed amount of resources. If you tried to "rush" someone or go after their resources, you generally ran into units a level higher and got annhilated.
I don't think any RTS game will be able to deal with this naturally, only by adding rules like NR20 or even NR40 can you avoid early aggression and turtle in peace, and even then the winning strategy will always be to expand as aggressively as possible and to defend with units instead of static defenses.
People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more attractive.
IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...
Probably a strong reason why there isn't much competition - why build a new game, when you can weave less competitive mechanics on top of an existing engine and game universe that already has fans?
I suspect I’m quoting a post I read on gamasutra. Very good site for those interested in game industry anecdotes.
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
I find this to be a really interesting point. Many people would ask why they are playing a PvP game in the first place, if they're not interested in competing. I think it makes a lot of sense though, because they're not actually all that interested in playing against players. They just want more of a human-like challenge than what AI can provide. The only option there is to play against other players.
The AI in most games is utterly banal and predictible, and as soon as you go past the easy or medium settings it cheats ruthlessly. Of the big recent ones (StarCraft 2, Company of Heroes 2), it's been a very disappointing experience.
For SC2, it just keeps rushing you, so you end up turtling until the AI runs out of resources.
For CoH2, again it just constantly rushes you with much better stuff that you can afford. CoH2 is actually really annoying as you can never afford anything, and so don't get to play with different units, you're always seem to end up playing the same composition.
What this means is that every game is virtually the same, you're just trying to establish a line, wait until the computer runs out of something (or uses the artifical unit cap for stupid things, effectively running out of an army), and then you roll them.
The only game I remember with a little variance was Dawn of War 2.
Maybe co-op Vs AI is something they just don't care about, but it feels as if it's got worse over time, becoming extremely predictable.
This meant that subterfuge and concealing your intentions was legitimately a huge part of the strategy - if you intentionally let the AI see a lot of a certain kind of unit and then build a different kind of strategy, you'd often see success, but because of the way the AI strategised it could sometimes meet you head on with an unexpected surge because it briefly saw you building up from an unspotted recon unit hiding somewhere.
Ultimately it is relatively easy to defeat with a little experience, but I still several years later occasionally boot it up with a friend to try and beat the hard AI 2v4 - we've only managed a handful of times, and the experience of slowly being whittled down back to back is a great experience to have in a friendship
I recall a LAN party where we used two mods, one for the field of view (2x wider), and increased the unit cap (again, by 2x).
It made for some pretty epic (and laggy) games.
Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the software and could insert bs monetization.
Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the software and could insert bs monetization.
All game design has been effected since game companies took control of game software starting from 1997 onlward with the release of ultima online.
The whole project was to undermine game ownership from the very get go.
Here's the game industry gloating of it's great victory of the PC gaming masses:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...
There was Command & Conquer: Red Alert Mobile, then....
The only other one I remember was an actually really good StarCraft clone by Gameloft (I forget the name).
I always thought mobile would be great for RTS and then it just wasn't. Though when I think about it, the keyboard is pretty important and that kind of fast control is really difficult on a touchscreen, so maybe that explains the lack of 'classic' RTS games on touch devices.
Do you (or anyone) know of any iPad games that fit the bill these days? I played Vainglory for a while but that’s not a RTS - it’s a MOBA (and was fun and worked super well on touch).
But I suspect people went to mobas like League of Legends because they wanted a more social, team based experience and they liked playing a hero.
I expect any modern non-AoE2 AoE game to be just as bad as any other modern RTS. Even AOE2 DE was/is probably going to be requiring Win 10 just to force people to upgrade. MS is still MS.
A large fraction of the player population is in countries without access to large purchasing power or modern computing equipment. If it requires 10 then a large part of the playerbase will simply stick with AoE2 AoC on voobly or HD on steam. So DE will only be new players or players in rich western economies. MS is showing they either don't care or don't understand the AoE2 scene.
One thing Microsoft does need to do is offer an ad-supported, Microsoft Store only, free-of-charge Windows-S 10 to everyone to download. Since it would only support their stuff, it could be optimized to run on lower end hardware.
Do you think a pay subscription using up bandwidth like that is going to work for the vast majority of the low income, very international, old hardware AoE2 scene? It won't. Just like trying to force them up upgrade to 10 won't. They don't care because they don't think they can make money off those people. You don't care because you don't understand. But both you and MS don't understand that they are the AoE2 pro and ranked scene and that by ignoring them AoE2DE is going to be a flash in the pan and everyone will go back to playing AoE2 patched on voobly.
There's plenty of old hardware scenes and gamers, and has been for a long time before AOE2. It is important if MS can make money off people, because without that incentive there never would've been an AOE2 to begin with. So I'd save your dinars for that upgrade.
MOBAs are then the natural step from fast-paced micro-heavy RTS - strip out the base building part and make it 100% about micro, abilities, and squad control. It's the evolution of what happens when RTS gets ADD. In a way, I think Blizzard basically gave kids candy instead of vegetables and now the mainstream player attention span isn't there for traditional RTS games anymore.
WC3 was more hero focused, like MOBA's, which of course had their start in WC3 as custom maps.
It is of course ironic that Blizzard inadvertently spawned a genre that ended up crushing them in a field that arguably they also pioneered, e-sports.
For me, the test of a good game is if it's fun even if you're losing, which is the case with LoL but not as much with most traditional RTS.
I wonder if this colors the author's statistics, because he is getting his statistics from games that collect them.
I have a library of steam games I downloaded then have been playing in offline mode for quite some time.
free to play? (grind or pay) bah.
I would love to hear people's suggestions for favorite offline games.
It lives on as Project Magma (http://projectmagma.net/) but the scenarios that shipped with Myth II are what made the game for me.
To this day, though, I don't think a better pair of games has been made, and I will always be sad about Bungie abandoning the franchise during the Microsoft purchase.
Too bad that I overcomplicate everything I try to do and accomplish nothing...
Anyway, great post! This guy is very right, hopefully we start getting good strategy games soon.
Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D, it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.
I thought the missions were quite tedious tbh. I gave up after the 3rd case of "where is the last enemy unit on map" hunt
Turn-based aspect of settlement/empire management flows much better than real-time base-building aspect of the classic RTSes. Battles being fought in a separate real-time ux means that you can field thousands of troop models while micro-managing tens of 'squads' -- and you don't have to worry about strategic side in the middle of the battle.
Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.
But more importantly, it's critical to an RTS that you can use micro to disrupt enemy resource gathering. If all unit movement is decided on a turn-based world map, you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point. Micro still influences who wins a battle, but you have to have a head-on fight. A combat is stuck in one grid cell instead of having access to the entire world.
(The hybrid design can make the macro richer. But troop movement and micro suffer a lot. It's not win/win.)
Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war, move your army another to suck in units.
I would argue that sneaking based on "the human playing the video game was focused on something else" is a less compelling dynamic than sneaking based on "real" dynamics.
That's not getting around a distracted army.
Even if we ignore player focus, and pretend everyone can multitask perfectly, you're still losing options. You can't engage in a big fight on one side of a map just long enough for a flanking force to hit a critical target, then immediately retreat out of the main fight to avoid losses. With turn-based movement, that big fight is either unnecessary or it's likely to get your army crushed by the non-split-up force from lack of retreat options.
And you can't dodge an intercepting force with most forms of turn-based movement.
If there's a time limit before you can retreat, it all seems rather... artificial, compared to having full control on a single map.
But what you seem to describe are tactical operations, so they are happening on a tactical map. Sneaking up a group of units with stalk/forward deployment behind enemy lines then hitting the backline with it in an opportune moment when the main lines are engaging is a staple in a tactical engagement. As are the flanking maneuvers. You might not be hitting the workers or the production buildings but taking out an artillery piece is just as important and satisfying. Cavalry play has alot of the 'dodge the intercepting force' moments, etc.
The high-end TW multiplayer play is not the same and it might not be as difficult as high-end Starcraft play but I have never found the apm requirements and the need to control both macro and micro at the same time an appealing challenge. And the single player campaign is just straight up better because of a sheer variety of what you are doing.
IMO both are far superior to Starcraft or even AOE
Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version, but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld: Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).
Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in 1998ish was a unique experience.
Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.
As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little to show for it.
The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to build.
I tried to fire up my TA disk in a Win7 machine a few years ago, but the graphics came out all wrong :( any suggestions for reviving it?
Railroad Tycoon
The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours, but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse of course. I did play it years later and it want the same.
I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably never existed - its a sepia tomes memory of a feeling from a different time with different expectations - but for some reasons the original Railroad Tycoon really stuck with me.
That said, it is a great game and it is one of the highlights of the railroad-building genre.
I never player Railroad Tycoon, my first in that genre was Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I feel pretty much the same way about it, and I'm pretty lucky that OpenTTD exists.
Similarly there's a game called Star Reach (also known as Space Federation) that was the first strategy game I played. In retrospect, it was pretty bad, but sometimes I want to play a space game and not even much superior games like Masters of Orion or more modern games like Sins of a Solar Empire will satisfy the particular craving like Star Reach.
Then I was lucky to find TTD on some abandonware sites, shortly thereafter, the first TTD-Patch became available, and a few years later OpenTTD development started. I still remember playing it on a Nokia 5530 XM, they had actually ported it to the Symbian OS.
A few years ago, I learned that Chris Sawyer had programmed the entire thing in Assembly. It ran super-smooth on almost anything.
Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base. Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing League or Dota 2.
Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.
Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well! Definitely sad the genre disappeared.
By the way, if someone is still playing out there, the dwarf hold mod was a great extension to the base game : https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dwarf-holds
Gyle's channel on Youtube has some of the best replays around if you're like me and just like watching competitive RTS gaming.
https://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta
The original Supreme Commander is not bad as well and interesting if you want to see the storyline that Forged Alliance sprang from.
SupCom 2 was hot trash. An attempt to make an RTS xbox friendly. Some of the worst voice acting in decades of gaming.
The demo of the British one (CC2 maybe?) was the one that got me into it.
I think they were remade by another company a few years back actually - but I’d definitely throw money at a modernized take on a similar concept.
Does anyone know other similar games?
1. Amount of control over units
2. Amount of control over a hero
3. Amount of control over building infrastructure
By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.
As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics. AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high
Cannot wait for the sequel. I spent so many hours playing HW1. Great balance of macro and micro strategy.