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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

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.

defertoreptar 7y ago
> 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?
- kyralis 7y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    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.
    - sanderjd 7y ago
      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.
      - detaro 7y ago
        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)
  - invalidOrTaken 7y ago
    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.
  - Pxtl 7y ago
    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.
- SalimoS 7y ago
  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.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    I had epic total annihilation LAN parties that would last all day.
- bsder 7y ago
  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.
  - temporaryvector 7y ago
    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.
  - empath75 7y ago
    You can turtle in Starcraft and people do it all the time. People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.
bsder 7y ago
> 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.
nitwit005 7y ago
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.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  That is the main reason I liked Total Annihilation, you could be decent with only some practice, and the scene wasn't hypercompetitive.
  - vasili111 7y ago
    > Total Annihilation IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  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?
- axython 7y ago
  Warcraft 3 Remastered is coming quite soon, supporting all old custom games! :)
- milesvp 7y ago
  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.
Noos 7y ago
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.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >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.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    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.
    - 7y ago
sha666sum 7y ago
Dawn of War hasn't aged very well for me. The camera is super zoomed in and the user interface takes up huge swathes of screen real estate.
- all2 7y ago
  There are several mods floating around that improve this. 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.

defertoreptar 7y ago

> 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?

kyralis 7y ago
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.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  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.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    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.
    - detaro 7y ago
      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)
- invalidOrTaken 7y ago
  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.
- Pxtl 7y ago
  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.
SalimoS 7y ago
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.
- dleslie 7y ago
  I had epic total annihilation LAN parties that would last all day.
bsder 7y ago
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.
- temporaryvector 7y ago
  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.
- empath75 7y ago
  You can turtle in Starcraft and people do it all the time. People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.

bsder 7y ago

> 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.

nitwit005 7y ago

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.

AstralStorm 7y ago
That is the main reason I liked Total Annihilation, you could be decent with only some practice, and the scene wasn't hypercompetitive.
- vasili111 7y ago
  > Total Annihilation IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...
smallnamespace 7y ago
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?
axython 7y ago
Warcraft 3 Remastered is coming quite soon, supporting all old custom games! :)
milesvp 7y ago
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.

Noos 7y ago

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.

Mirioron 7y ago
>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.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  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.
  - 7y ago

sha666sum 7y ago

Dawn of War hasn't aged very well for me. The camera is super zoomed in and the user interface takes up huge swathes of screen real estate.

all2 7y ago
There are several mods floating around that improve this. 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.