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The Future of RTS

• FemmeAndroid 6y ago
  I always loved watching Huk play Starcraft 2. He was one of the early NA players that really helped hook me on competitive gaming. I remember how he could even make the boring things interesting - I have a distinct memory of him drawing a heart in the queued up movements of his scouting probe, which Day9, I believe, was able to show off on stream. Those early days of WoL remain the high bar food watching competitive gaming for me.
• WaxProlix 6y ago
  People interested in a new generation of RTSs should check out Frost Giant Studios [1]. About the time Blizzard was canceling future development on SC2, a bunch of prominent ex-Blizz devs and designers announced they were making a new studio with the express intent of keeping the genre going. You can scroll to the 'team' section to see their bona fides; the founding members have track records that make me want to believe it'll be a good product. 1. https://www.frostgiant.com/ https://www.frostgiant.com/
• gamegoblin 6y ago
  Something that isn't significantly touched on here that most RTSes neglect is physical logistics. That is, actually getting resources from the point of collection to the point of consumption. In most RTSes, once you collect resources they essentially go into a magic resource counter in the cloud. You can collect wood on one side of the map, and instantly create a building with that on the other side of the map. I would be really interested in playing an RTS that focused much less heavily on variety of combat, and much more heavily on variety of logistics. Imagine a game where you had to shuttle food to your army to keep it fed, or physically bring stone to a construction site to build a castle, and you had to physically stockpile resources in vulnerable depots that would become targets of enemy raids. You'd have to do a lot of design work to make the ergonomics of setting up the logistics infrastructure not incredibly tedious, but I think it could be done. The closest RTS I have seen to this is probably the Warrior Kings series which was definitely ahead of its time in many ways.
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
    Offworld Trading Company addresses this pretty well.
    • rektide 6y ago
      how? there's additional operational cost in the form of energy used if you have far off resources being harvested. and the transport shuttle has to go get the goods, which increases cycle time a little. i have less than a dozen games in but i definitely didn't feel like I was managing the logistics; that moving stuff around was an issue or concern. there's a lot of different resources but they all roll up pretty automatically wherever they are without thinking about it. that was my (limited) experience.
      • rcxdude 6y ago
        I agree. It models it (which is more than most RTSs do), but it adds a fairly small amount to the gameplay (mostly location becomes important, it gives another element to the core supply and demand mechanics, and it gives value to one of the technologies which basically just eliminates the cost entirely).
  • WaxProlix 6y ago
    Almost seems like you'd be better off making mods/changes to the existing logistics game genre (Factorio, maybe?) to introduce RTS elements rather than looking for a ground-up implementation of a novel RTS.
    • ericbarrett 6y ago
      I haven’t played it, but PvP Factorio (with rules and balance) definitely exists.
  • Macha 6y ago
    Hearts of Iron 3 is probably the closest game to a RTS that put a big emphasis on logistics.
  • 6y ago
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Top 3 control, I mean writing, from HuK. Seems like a limited review so far, only a handful of games, no C&C mentioned. I'd say the genre is for a niche audience, just like model trains or golf video games, etc. I love RTS but I almost never hear of friends loving this genre, they usually want easy, relaxing games after long days of work.
• noxvilleza 6y ago
  Whilst I certainly have huge respect for HuK, I feel that either his use of the categories in the article as perhaps a bit simplistic. Many of the points he mentions are really intertwined - most importantly balance vs variety: it's very hard to score highly on both. SC2 has 3 very distinct races (he gives it a 8.8 for variety), hence there are just 6 possible matchups. AoE 2 (DE) has 35 (he gives it a 3), making over 600 possible 1v1 matchups. This creates a huge amount of extra work to ensure matchups are enjoyable - yet (at 1650+ Elo) there are just 2 races with > 55% winrate (Franks @ 56.98% & Celts @ 54.21% on random map). Despite the good balancing, tournaments also come up with rules to limit the impact of the best civs, normally with specific civ bans and limited picks in a series. It's really only because of the huge overlapping tech & unit tree that this is possible - if there were more diversity there would be too many variables to balance around. This is further compounded by the variety of maps which the game is played on - as he does mention the map does affect which of these are viable, and this makes the game even more interesting and diverse since you need to adjust to multiple types of map. SC2 on the other hand has a much smaller responsibility in this regard: provided there are interesting viable builds within each race the task to balance across-races is minimal. SC2 also only has 7 maps in the pool (at least, right now) and just spawn positions are randomized. This makes preparation way more important, and less dynamic. Both AoE and SC2 also use the space as a stop-gap for specific strategies - it's a way for the less aggressive player to fend off early aggression, but also a way for a more dominant player to choke out resources. Traditionally this is done by controlling the entry to your main base or your expansion (in SC2), but in AoE it's way more open and difficult to accomplish this most of the time. This importantly makes players rely on very adhoc dynamic walling, often incorporating undestroyable natural resources (like gold deposits).
  • na85 6y ago
    >AoE 2 (DE) has 35 (he gives it a 3), making over 600 possible 1v1 matchups. The 3 species in Starcraft are quite distinct in many key areas, whereas in Age of Kings and AOE3 (the only ones I've played) the differences between the factions were limited to a handful of units and buildings, but ultimately they all played pretty much the same.
    • 6y ago
• lacker 6y ago
  I was excited to read the first part - an analysis of why RTS games have become less popular - and a bit discouraged when the author didn’t follow up on that theme more, and instead reviewed a bunch of past RTS’s. I do completely agree with the analysis, though. RTS games are hard for a “casual” player to get into. It’s hard to even follow a game on Twitch, because the camera is frequently jumping around while a player handles logistics, and when someone is doing multiple actions per second it’s hard to observe them. The difficulty of casual play also makes it difficult for streamers to chat with the audience while playing. It’s interesting to compare to MOBA games like League of Legends. They are very similar mechanically in terms of unit control, but you have much less context switching because you are only controlling a single character. So it’s easier to follow a stream or to play. I think there’s room for a middle ground, a game that has more complex strategies like RTS’s do, but with casual play like a moba. We’ll see...
  • freddie_mercury 6y ago
    There have been tons of analyses written on why RTS games have become less popular. If you're curious to read some, it should be pretty easy to google up. But the general theory is that RTS has lots of subsystems and very few people like all the subsystems in a single game, so the player base fragmented as gaming evolved. Tower defense games took the people who liked the base building part of RTSes. Slower-paced strategy games (Crusader Kings, Total War) took the people who liked deeper strategy. MOBAs took people who liked the micro. > I think there’s room for a middle ground, a game that has more complex strategies like RTS’s do, but with casual play like a moba. We’ll see... One problem is that RTS genre is a bit stuck. It is hard to pull in new players given all the other genres I just mentioned. And old RTS players "like what they like". You can see this in new RTS games that try something new like Tooth & Tail. It has a lot of negative reviews from RTS players saying things like "No micro?!? This isn't a real RTS!" Even though the lack of micro is specifically to try to draw in new players.
    • ABCLAW 6y ago
      The RTS genre isn't really stuck - it's dead. Blizzard killed it. Studios left the genre when SC2 came out because at the time it was launched, SC:BW was, literally, e-sports. Power user players sought legitimacy for their games, hoping it would rise up to occupy that position, in the form of punishing, unfun mechanics. The result was that for a 4 year period prior to the release of SC2, games patched themselves to death to cater to the complaints of competitive players, players who promptly dropped the games they tailored to themselves for SC2. Following SC2's announcement, RTS games almost stopped being developed entirely - no studio wanted to compete with blizzard's release. Unfortunately, Blizzard created a game which had very little of the UMS lobby scene, and very little of the captivating visual spectacle of SC:BW. Blizzard's response to the decline of SC2 was made very clear very early; they didn't see the point in investing further in the genre when Hearthstone and WoW both featured recurring revenue and SC:BW had it's popularity owed to recurring fan based content at a set upfront price.
• Glyptodon 6y ago
  Are there any games that have players controling different slices in the same space, like one player controls economy, another player controls production/R&D, and a 3rd player controls tactical?
  • Macha 6y ago
    So a few RTS games (StarCraft 2, Steel Division 2 come to mind) allow multiple players to share control of the same units/resources so you could artificially divide up responsibilities. You need to go far away from RTS to a game like Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator to find a game where players are dealing with distinct gameplay to a common goal in a shared space however
    • jbay808 6y ago
      Age of Empires 2 lets you do this as well.
      • Macha 6y ago
        Ah, is this a definitive edition change? I don't remember HD/AoK having this
        • KMnO4 6y ago
          Actually, I was just playing AoE2 (the original from 1999) last night with my family and discovered this feature. When joining a multiplayer game, you can choose player number and team. If you choose the same player number and team as someone else, both players have control of the same units.
  • SailorJerry 6y ago
    This is the main characteristic of Dwarfheim https://dwarfheim.com/ https://dwarfheim.com/
• kylepdm 6y ago
  It's a shame that the RTS is a dying genre but those three issues he states are pretty spot on of why they aren't as popular anymore. Those three issues are also some of the most defining aspects of RTS games, especially competitive RTS games. There was a time where I tried to get really good at AoE2, but it is a mentally exhausting "hobby". 1v1s in AoE2 feel like fencing whilst trying to do an obstacle course. There is so much to know and it's quite hard to execute everything you want while being harassed and prodded by your opponent.
• on_and_off 6y ago
  my hot take on RTS : I like the genre (or rather used to like, the last one I loved was SupCom) but I wish somebody would make an RTS with no/minimal macro. Controlling the builder/peons units is a chore at best and I would love to see it streamlined a lot. For example just ask for a building to be built instead of finding/assigning builders to the task and micromanaging what they will do next. Dungeon Keeper comes to mind as a game that starts to go in that direction but it can be argued it is more a (very) fun management game than an RTS. Probably not doable, we would lose a lot of expressivity in such a change. However, if there is a new RTS coming, I personally would love to see an innovative take on the genre, closer to Brutal Legends 2 / Sacrifice 2 (or as another commented posted, something emulating logistics would be another interesting avenue) than to the inevitable Warcraft 4 (for ios ;)).
  • AussieWog93 6y ago
    SupCom's still active, through Forged Alliance Forever. I got back into it a couple of months back and was pleasantly suprised by how easy it was to find a game.
    • on_and_off 6y ago
      happy to hear that this is still going on ! I lost interest in FA around the time when FAF was in its first betas. Planetary Annihilation is more or less a successor but I could not get into it. I like its idea but in practice the micro was insane in order to keep an eye on several different planets.
  • the__alchemist 6y ago
    AOE2 Deathmatch mode? Thanks for bringing up Brutal Legend and Sacrifice - genuinely fun, interesting games.
    • on_and_off 6y ago
      They had some sweet ideas. I just watched a retrospective on 20 years of Double Fine. Tim had some interesting comments in there about how BL came to be. They were avoiding very hard to make or market the game as an RTS because the genre already had a big stigma at the time. It might kinda explain the weird state of the game. It was definitely a fun and interesting experience but it was also flawed .. way too many games packed into one for its own good.
• hnracer 6y ago
  RTSs attract a certain personality type: the type of person that becomes an engineer, mathematician, scientist, or statistician. I met so many individuals from these career choices when I was playing RTSs that it was uncanny. Given this, it's no surprise to me that RTSs aren't wildly popular, the complexity and depth is just too much, it takes a systematizing nerd (of which there aren't many) to fully appreciate it. I believe another reason is that these games are mostly 1-on-1, so they don't benefit from the same team play benefits and network effects as other games.
  • denimnerd42 6y ago
    At least in starcraft, >2 player has a totally different feel as early game rushes are way more powerful. a lot of people don't like to play like that
    • hnracer 6y ago
      It's designed to be a 1v1 game, a lot of people don't like that because it becomes hyper-competitive and even a little stressful when compared to team games
• the__alchemist 6y ago
  Age of Empires 2 Definitive edition is thriving. I play regularly with a group of friends, and found out this week that several of my colleagues play it too. DE really is AOE2 in its finest form: Fixed netcode, responsiveness, matchmaking, and continuous patches and balance tweaks. It's a 20-year old game that gets monthly patches, and is active enough to match you to opponent[s] in minutes. Compared to SC2, I miss the asymmetry among Civs, and ability to pull off surprising strategies effectively. (eg Thor rushes, and going straight planetary fortress+Raven etc). AOE is more predictable by comparison. Thoughts on if AOE2 DE players are mostly people who played the original, or if there are newer players? The pros seem to be a mix.
  • reitzensteinm 6y ago
    AoE 2 DE is a lot of fun, but I do wish they'd allow for 16 players. Comp stomps with a group of friends are limited to 4-5 right now, but there's probably no intrinsic reason they couldn't be higher.
    • BadInformatics 6y ago
      > but there's probably no intrinsic reason they couldn't be higher. The client (from the original version through DE) runs a single-threaded simulation. That is a big barrier to getting more players or even larger maps (it used to be that ludakris size was unplayable before DE/UserPatch optimizations). Given how many players can't even clear the multiplayer performance benchmark without dramatically reducing quality settings, I'm not sure they'll bump up the player cap unless they decide to re-architect a good part of the engine internals.
      • reitzensteinm 6y ago
        The original simulation ran fine on a Pentium 2, and that was a single core that also handled rendering, animation and audio. Considering a single core can be dedicated to it these days we're approaching two orders of magnitude more performance available. If it's become a bottleneck it's likely that there is very low hanging fruit to fix it.
• stephc_int13 6y ago
  As a master-level player of SC2 and once a top-1000 ladder player of Brood War I would also love to a see this genre evolving and staying fresh. I think that SC2 should be studied for its qualities but also for its mistakes. I think it is overall an excellent game but at the same time I feel that it was not as well designed as SC1, even if patches improved it and fixed some glaring errors over time. A few things that come to mind: - Free units, they are extremely hard to balance and can easily lead to stale situations, and in my opinion they never feel right. And to be clear, projectiles are not free units. - Spell casters able to stand a fight on their own and be massed, again it does not feel right and lead to imbalance/abuse. Spell casters should be support units, fragile and not scalable to a whole army. - stackable aoe damage, because it leads to death ball armies that can be extremely difficult to engage, with somewhat difficult to read and seemingly random outcomes. A good aoe design is the SC1 inspired Psionic Storm, powerful but not stackable. - Hero units, there is only one hero unit in SC2, for no good reason. - Population cap, in SC2 the population is capped at 200 supply, this is an inheritance of SC1 technical limitation, but it has a strong impact on SC2 late game, not for the best as players tend to invest in defensive structures to compensate, leading to potentially static/ boring games.
  • cjbprime 6y ago
    These mostly seem to have been solved in modern SC2 already -- swarm hosts are no longer a lategame unit, high templars and ghosts are extremely vulnerable to units like speed banelings, viper abducts are powerful against motherships, it's fairly rare for tournament SC2 games to last more than 20 minutes and when they do it's not because there are fields of static defense splitting the entire map: more like mining out for a 200 supply fight, after which the next fast remax's composition choice will decide the game. (Am also Masters SC2.)
  • Synaesthesia 6y ago
    I think the biggest problem is just how quickly units do damage and how fast fights go. It's way too fast! Brood War has slower fights and it better for it.
    • 6y ago
• misschresser 6y ago
  I like HuK, but his thoughts on WC3 are off-base. He says: Economy/Resource - 2.8 / 10 "However when comparing it to the SC universe, WC3 has always been underwhelming to me when comparing its resource counterparts of mineral/vespene. Gold obviously being the most important, with wood generally feeling more like a chore than something I want to collect. To me the most limiting factor is the upkeep cost, a mechanic that not only limits strategies, but also deters expanding or larger scale battles." This misses the point of WC3 vs. Starcraft / Starcraft 2. In Warcraft 3, one of the most important resources not present in Starcraft is your heroes and their levels. If you watch any professional WC3 game, there is rarely a discussion of who's ahead based on economy (although that is a factor at times) - but there is always discussion on hero levels. The importance of creep routes and disrupting creeping for heroes / races with favorable creep is a huge component of the game. Also, upkeep is a specific choice meant to reward players who don't inflate their armies for the sake of it. Grubby said it on his stream, in Starcraft, it is universally a good decision to spend your money as soon as you have it. It's not strategy if it's always a good thing to do. Whether you spend it on X, Y, or Z is where the strategy comes in, but as long as you spend it something, you can be confident that it was better than not spending it / banking it. In WC3, that too is up for debate. You can spend on X, Y, Z (units, hero items, expansion, another hero, tech, upgrades) but at certain times in the game, it is also perfectly valid to hold on to that money for a specific reason. I think this is a smart design decision, and is one of the reasons why WC3 has some interesting dynamics. This is my perspective as a really big fan of both games. They're different games, but it's clear HuK is using Starcraft as the rubric. No game is as Starcraft as Starcraft, Warcraft is its own game with its own complexities.
• redisman 6y ago
  My hot take is that RTSes focus too much on making things competitive and balanced and cater huge amounts of resources to the 0.001%. I just want a fun campaign and be done with it. But it’s not viable, instead you must build and balance multiplayer which is more work than the rest of the game. If you don’t then the online/esports personalities will trash your game. I did enjoy Spellforce 3 Fallen God a lot lately and that’s such a rarity
• denimnerd42 6y ago
  The cool thing about brood war is that it will last forever.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  Honestly, I think the RTS genre is too hidebound to the origins of the genre. Too focused on trees of units and factories that existed originally because of singleplayer campaigns and trickling out upgrades. I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming. An RTS basically expects a player to learn multiple games with completely little intersectionality between them - an early-game, a mid-game, and a late-game, wherein you use completely different units and strategies. Given the fact that the designers have to figure out how to make the "core loop" fun in several completely different gameplay modes, and players have to learn all of them, is it any wonder that RTS isn't more popular? I love the RTS genre - the combinations of base-building and unit command and creativity and intensity scratches all the right itches for me. But every RTS game I play feels like it's bogged down in far more complexity than the game really needed. For a while I had a lot of fun playing with the Cambrian explosion of simple RTS games on mobile because they don't feel the need to bolt on so many mechanics - they figure out what their core loop is and stick to it... but the mobile gaming world has been ruined by F2P mechanics. I've been enjoying Zero-K lately, which does reduce some of the RPGishness that I think hurts the genre - no upgrading, no teching, no tech trees... you just plop a factory and you start building units. But its mechanics are still incredibly complicated, grown organically over a decade of experimenting within the genre of Total Annihilation-style RTS play. But even then, it's still very tied to Total Annihilation, another mid-'90s RTS game. I'd love to see more first-class attention to the "core loop" of RTS games, but I'm worried the only people who are truly experimenting with the genre are the mobile developers, and the economy of mobile gaming is an ugly place.
  • rhn_mk1 6y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but Zero-K still has some "teching", just in the form of creating a supply chain of energy to the huge cannons. However, it's messed up in that the mechanic is simply undiscoverable without a tutorial. That's sort of ironic, as I've been missing higher tier units, as they were as close to a disruptable supply chain as it gets in TA: build factory -> make builder -> build factory 2 -> make tier 2 unit. Targeting builders or resources was a way to delay the coming of the next tier units. It also gave some predictability to the gameplay: not seeing tier 1 units meant tier 2 units were unlikely to come. I agree with the complex mechanics, and I hate that there are so many factories, with so many units, many of them basically copies of each other. Same for defenses: do we really need 3 different anti-air towers? I much preferred the TA approach, where each unit was good at something different, and easily visually distinguishable too.
• shash7 6y ago
  Surprising to see no mention of Supreme Commander. This game isn't just alive, its thriving and getting popular(the FAF mod, not the base game). Maybe RTS games are not being actively made but the mods are very much alive.
  • heelix 6y ago
    Was looking for this in the comments. Forged Alliances Forever (FAF) is a lovely community mod. While the Winter Steam sale is going on, SupCom:FA is $2.50 - required for the mod to work. The single player campaigns were updated and turned into co-op missions. New survival, phantom, and other mods. New faction even. This is one of the few games where multi-monitor support just works. Runs on Linux with just a bit of work.
    • shash7 6y ago
      Agreed, they added Nomads faction recently. And its really popular these days. The only problem is that you still need a relatively good pc(good processor ideally) to play this game, considering that its over a decade old.
  • anon777778 6y ago
    I think that Supreme Commander has the best UI in the RTS world. This is the only game where I saw things like queing tasks for all units (whole construction schemes), estimated time of finishing each task, unrestricted zoom (from map view to the single unit) and multiple minor utility functions, like patrols of engineers (that can help creating units) or "help" function for factories (queued units in one factory and the other ones helping it). Those functions greatly reduced cognitive load and micromanagement of most task, allowing the player to focus on the grand strategy. I really hope that next AAA RTS game will be greatly inspired by this UI.
  • badosu 6y ago
    I must say I'm very impressed with this FLOSS TA inspired RTS after playing it for about a month: https://beyondallreason.info https://beyondallreason.info
  • 6y ago
• etempleton 6y ago
  I felt that Company of Heroes was a nice evolution of the genre and minimized the need for incredibly high APM. For those who have not played Company of Heroes it is more about unit positioning and microing those units effectively. It requires a different set of skills than other RTS games. Unfortunately I have not seen this catch on. Relic, the developers of CoH are working on Age of Empires IV and so I hope they will infuse their particular style RTS in it, but, for good and bad, it looks to be very similar to past AoE games.
  • Macha 6y ago
    Wargame/Steel Division are other games in the company of heroes vein.
  • s_dev 6y ago
    Company of Heroes 2 is fantastic. I bought everyone in my Steam list that game -- it was €1 a few months ago. However flops like Dawn of War 3 (a sister game to CoH) are why publishers are slower to risk on RTS.
    • blaerk 6y ago
      I feel like dawn of war 3 commited StarCraft suicide, they scrapped almost everything that made the dawn of war series great and replaced it with a more "StarCraft like" gameplay to cater to a larger audience, instead of evolving what they had from dow1 and 2, making it a mediocre sc2 :(
  • izacus 6y ago
    Yeah. I was pretty disappointed when CoH2 wanted to get on eSport bandwagon and shoveled in a lot of micro heavy features. Suddenly every unit had bunch of manually triggered abilities you had to babysit (because apparently WW2 soldiers are too dumb to throw a grenade on a tank by themselves). As such, it got significantly less fun for me with the exception of Ardennes Assault campaign.
  • Eupolemos 6y ago
    Yeah, vanilla CoH had "The stuff" IMO. It was more about decissions than APM. The resouce system was very cool too. It was super streamer friendly; any viewer could look at it for 10 seconds and understand what was going on - zero nerdiness required. And it was gorgeous for its time. Then Relic started making a lot of mistakes: - New factions with units a viewer would need to "learn" to be able to understand what was going on in the match. - Introduced a super defensive faction which could fight the old defensive faction, resulting in long, abhorrently boring games. - CoH2 which sold new mini-DLCs each month with special units purposely not balanced for online play. Top scummy. - A plethora of other things I won't bore you with. But Relic became a customer-toxic company in my eyes. But vanilla CoH could be examined to find gold, IMO.
• Gunax 6y ago
  There is one thing I've noticed about RTS: every player seems to think they are awful at the game. This seems to be the opposite of most games, where players tend to overestimate their skill. This actually keeps a lot of players from even trying online play. There is something different about RTS... I think in some way they aren't fun. They are really quite stressful to play in ways other games aren't.
  • xupybd 6y ago
    I played hours against friends. I did okay against them but got murdered in online play. The skill jump was huge and I never found a way to climb the ladder.
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    The first thing would be that almost all competitive RTSes are one-on-one games. Can't really flame your team-mates for getting pummelled. And yep they're mechanically stressful. I used to play Broodwar competitively and it really felt more like exercising than gaming at some level. But it's also rewarding if you get into it, because just like in sports beating someone through mechanical skill is fairly satisfying.
  • rc-1140 6y ago
    It's like this for fighting games, as well. I've played both genres, but it's also the same deal for any mode that's inherently competitive, such as league play in the older shooters like Quake, CounterStrike, Team Fortress Classic & 2. Everyone says that they're "bad" but a few say they're "good", either through sheer practice and results or hubris. You're right that there's a lot about it that isn't fun. One's ability to enjoy fighting games and RTS games begins and ends with understanding a multitude of different mechanics and having the physical execution to make one's plans a reality. People who play those genres have to practice daily to derive some decent enjoyment from the games in them, almost as if it's a second job (maybe even a third depending on what you do for a living, i.e. the software developers of HN still have to carve out time to keep up with tech advances). It's worth it in the end in my opinion because of the people one meets in these communities. They're usually very dedicated, most like to see more people be able to compete and are really helpful, and will participate in group events in real life (tournaments for both fighting and RTS games, locals for fighting games).
• FrozenVoid 6y ago
  The author talks of APM requirement as benign challenge; the RTS decline is caused by RSI, because once the player gets to high-level play - speed of execution becomes dominant and players injure their muscles to win. Turn-based games are thriving because the cost-of-interaction is much less and APM is irrelevamt
  • 6510 6y ago
    I really hate the intentional crap UI to make actions more challenging. (sc2) Soldiers and creatures running into their death because they didn't get an attack command. Creating control groups and adding units manually. Producing units manually in as weird as possible ways. Those things just draw attention away from engagements of which you will simply have fewer at a time and they are won by catching the opponent while off guard, not by your distraction but by build in ones. :/
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      > Soldiers and creatures running into their death because they didn't get an attack command. I wouldn't say that's there to make the controls more challenging. You should default to doing an attack move instead of a non-attack move. > Creating control groups and adding units manually. While I would like to be able to make factories assign units to groups, that's still manual creation. What do you have in mind for automatic groups? There's always F2. > Producing units manually in as weird as possible ways. This one is definitely there to get in the way.
      • Iolaum 6y ago
        F2 is an anti-pattern. It can be OK if you play casually in bronze/silver. But if you want to play more competitively you need to be able to have units split in different locations on the map executing different orders.
        • Dylan16807 6y ago
          Well yes, but clever unit grouping is the opposite of automatic.
• forrestthewoods 6y ago
  I will never, ever forgive Blizzard for removing quality-of-life features from Starcraft 2 for the sole purpose of artificially inflating the required APM. Specifically in the beta you could just use hotkeys to quickly use Zerg Queen to spawn extra larvae. But nope! Pro players hated that. Why should players be able to do something in a strategy game in fewer clicks when they could simply do it in more? Garbage. In an RTS the mechanical skill largely comes down to raw speed. And it’s relatively binary. As opposed to a shooter where mechanical skill is reaction time and accuracy. Interesting write up. I agree with many points. I pray someone twists the RTS genre in a way that is radically less reliant on APM.
  • VRay 6y ago
    You can't play in the master league with a low APM, but I held my own in Diamond league without going APM crazy. Just sticking to the fundamentals (scouting, harvesting+spending resources, knowing the basic matchups/units to go for) got me to lower Diamond and kept me there for a pretty good while Nowadays the game's just too intense for me, though
• 4778468d 6y ago
  The future of RYS is already here and it’s absolutely gigantic making millions per day and it’s called Clash of Clans.
• Iv 6y ago
  I think RTS can evolve, but I don't think you can compete with SC2 in the style where it excels, after more than a decade of balance patches. You can make games with a different focus though. SC2 is a short (~10-20 minutes) 1 on 1 APMs contest. (APM=actions per minutes). APMs are more than fast clicking. No pro player managed to do everything they know they should do. It is about prioritization. Even I, a modest gold-league player can watch pro replays and go "oh, they should have moved the drones there, they could have saved these 3 marines". Knowing your skills there, execute well, recover from errors, exploit your enemies' mistakes, cause them. This is the kind of game SC2 is, and it is perfect in that regard. It fits a niche perfectly, has the good amount of complexity. RTS can be about other things than APMs, but also, I believe they can be about something else than being an eSport. It is not necessary to be an eSport to be a good game.
  • qznc 6y ago
    The article ignores the Total War style of RTS which is more relaxed. I'm not sure if we should consider them in the same genre as Starcraft though.
    • username90 6y ago
      As a rule of thumb if you don't produce units it isn't in the strategy genre. Total War is a turn based strategy with real time tactical battles. Online play is mostly the tactical battles so is a real time tactics game. The reason you separate it there is that in a strategy game you should be able to win the war while losing every battle. You can't do that unless you can produce units, meaning if you plan well you can outproduce your enemy and win even though he kills more of your stuff every time you fight.
  • neogodless 6y ago
    > SC2 is a short (~10-20 minutes) 1 on 1 APMs contest. This is the first time I learned this. (Sorry tongue in cheek a bit.) But yeah as an eSport (1v1), or in modes where people play 1 on 1 (and APM tends to win), your statement is true. It is not the only mode you can play SC2, and while it might the most recognized or popular setup, the people I play with prefer basically ever mode except that one. (Many of us also enjoyed the campaigns!)
• Guthur 6y ago
  One RTS that i actually really like, to the point i actually made a couple of maps for was World In Conflict. It somewhat surprises me that it died off so much with no sequel or replication of the format, I thought it was a decent team RTS with a reasonable amount of variety though maybe not enough. It also a baseless RTS and had not resource gathering component, iirc, and so could be argued it's more of a Real Time Tactics game.
  • albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    World in conflict was awesome, I couldn’t remember the name of it until your comment, thanks! Was there a multiplayer or longer / more replayable part? Perhaps that is the reason for the lack of long term success
    • Guthur 6y ago
      There was MP, players selected classes like armour, infantry, support, air and then battled over a map in a team. The environment destruction was amazing for the time, you could call in carpet bombing, napalm and even tactical nukes and it left the map as a warzone.
• Razengan 6y ago
  I'd love an RTS that lets you command hundreds of units but instead of controlling them directly like puppets, you set lists of priorities with something like a visual programming UI and let AI carry them out. Besides the hard limit on the number of units in StarCraft and other RTSes, there's also a "soft" limit on how much shit an average player can keep track of or care about.
• erulabs 6y ago
  I love seeing the Starcraft folks come out of the HN community! Have loved Starcraft and sc2 and still watch the major tournaments - but I’m always curious that the most popular RTS of all time is so ignored by “PC RTS” players: Clash Royale / Clash of Clans. The future of RTS games to me lays in increasing accessibility. I’ve been playing Starcraft for decades and my hands and lack of time keeps me from really excelling like I used to as a kid - which is why a game or two of Clash Royale goes pretty far to scratch the 1v1 RTS itch.
  • VRay 6y ago
    Yeah, and if you ever have trouble winning, you just drop $500 on the game and you'll be good for a nice victory streak plus you don't have to worry about losing to someone who just started playing, since they'll have to grind out dozens (hundreds?) of hours to be on a level playing field with you
    • erulabs 6y ago
      Hrm - I play Clash Royale and the clan wars are typically locked-level cards. Early on when you’re getting started, the levels of cards for sure matters - but it stops fairly quickly. I’ve spent $10 on the game and regularly make it to the top league. Once you know how to play, it’s already stopped being pay-to-win. There is a reason it’s insanely popular and it’s not because there are no redeeming values. If time is money, I’ve spent thousands of times as much on Starcraft and Warcraft (and at least 6x dollars compared to sc2 alone). It’s a good product :)
    • scotty79 6y ago
      Whatever you pay (even 0$), you'll end up with 50% winrate sooner or later. I never paid anything for this game and had a lot of fun for years. You get opponent that's either good with bad cards or good with bad cards. But you have 50% probability to win with either. You are only winning as you climb to your level of opponents. It's quite brilliant way to ensure players are appropriately challenged.
  • scotty79 6y ago
    > Clash Royale A game called Castle Burn was also very good take on RTS on mobile. Unfortunately defunct now.
• jtolmar 6y ago
  Some problems I'd note for any resurgence of the RTS genre: * There hasn't been a huge RTS hit in ages, so large studios aren't going to push large chunks of cash into them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you may disagree with whether large studios should act this way, but that doesn't matter, because the observable fact is they do. * RTS games are still pretty expensive to make well. There hasn't been a breakout indie RTS, and nobody has established a default cheap art style for these. It's not like platformers where the world has accepted we can get away with pixel art forever. * Streamers rely on their ability to self-commentate, but nobody can play an RTS while talking. * Even back in the heyday of RTS, everyone I knew played custom maps rather than the actual RTS. I'm pretty sure that crowd is all in Roblox or modded Minecraft these days. And some bright spots: * People /are/ trying to make indie RTS games, more than I've ever seen before. * Tooth And Tail managed to look great while using pixel art. It's very high-production pixel art, but more importantly it's only one unit facing. Indie RTS costs will go down as people experiment with that. * The game randomizer community keeps building new community-run tournaments and fan commentated races. This means there's an increasing amount of talent available in the wider gaming community for organizing tournaments and commentating.
  • Kinrany 6y ago
    > Streamers rely on their ability to self-commentate, but nobody can play an RTS while talking. For Starcraft 2 there's replay commentary. (I sometimes watch Lowko and WinterStarcraft. It's interesting how just watching pro players can unlock skills you wouldn't consider otherwise.)
    • Kinrany 6y ago
      > Even back in the heyday of RTS, everyone I knew played custom maps rather than the actual RTS. I'm pretty sure that crowd is all in Roblox or modded Minecraft these days. Roblox does have a couple RTS games! They're not very good. Feels like an RTS engine could lead to an explosion and, with cross-pollination with other common mechanics, create a couple new genres.
      • 6y ago
• TwoBit 6y ago
  It's sad to me that this author's only view of RTS is as an esport. If that's how it is then I'll be fine if there's never another RTS, and 95% of the public doesn't care about esports either.
  • orthoxerox 6y ago
    I would love to play another RTS with a nice campaign. I don't care if my game is a poor esport. But no, everything must be an esport now, with ladders, seasons and whatever, unless it just can't.
    • scotty79 6y ago
      For me the fun of RTS is slowly discovering new units and their application. After I know the full tech tech tree RTS games become fairly boring to me.
    • GreenWatermelon 6y ago
      The Command and Conquer (and Red Alert) campaigns were awesome. Loved playing them.
  • Aerroon 6y ago
    The author is HuK, a former professional SC2 player.[0] It's understandable why he would focus on the esports aspect more, however, he does point out that RTS games need a way better social side. The game needs lots of players that just play it for fun to really support a strong competitive scene. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HuK
  • baby 6y ago
    I’m sorry but the whole points of RTS is competition. It’s like complaining that we’re talking about tweaks to make chess more competitive.
    • bjterry 6y ago
      The single-player campaigns were a major focus for many early RTS. Even Warcraft II many players mostly played the single-player, but that was probably the tipping point due to the success of Battle.net.
• DerSaidin 6y ago
  AOE2 variety comes from many different map scripts with many different seeds, not so much from the civilizations/units/techs. The doc talks about map generations in the AOE2 space section, but given the rational for prioritizing diversity, I expect this the variety in map generation should lead to a higher variety score. I really enjoying watching the AOE2 tournament scene: https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Portal:Tournaments https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Portal:Tournaments
  • missurunha 6y ago
    I find it rather funny the author rating Starcraft with good variety. The game made every unit ranged so they wouldn't need to bother balancing melee attacks. I understand he means that each faction has different units, but imagine how boring AoE2 would be if all units were archers.
    • Aerroon 6y ago
      Melee units are effectively ranged units with a very short range. One of the most interesting aspects of games is how different ranges interact. Whether that's "melee range" or "slightly further than melee range" really shouldn't matter that much. Also, zerglings, zealots, ultralisks, dark templar and workers are melee in StarCraft 2.
    • neogodless 6y ago
      Can you explain what you mean by "made every unit ranged"? Does that mean that zerglings, zealots, ultralisks, firebats/hellions, banelings... (did I miss any) are ranged attack units? Because they swing claws and blades and flamethrowers around?
• gwenzek 6y ago
  If people want to look at what a good RTS on mobile could be, look at Command and Conquer Rivals. They team add a lot of good ideas IMHO, even though the game suffers from micro transactions (good luck to newcomers). In particular: * they have a soft population limit with a cooldown increasing with the number of units on the map. This make it harder to snowball, and make it easier to punish people spamming a unit. Also it keeps the number of units to micro manageable. * economy is auto-ramping. You only chose the number of collector. I think this could use some balancing and more experimentations. But it changes the dynamic of the game over time from money being the limiting factor to pop cap. Even if the two players play very aggressively. * Also the game is not about destroying opponent base (you cam still win this way) but about controlling some map zones. Controlling the "pads" charges a nuke missile, but the missile can flip hand 1 second before firing. This builds up a lot of intensity and makes timing very important in the gameplay. Knowing when you should stale the charging or fasten it, and how much you should pay for this is hard to master.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• erlend_sh 6y ago
  I’m working on one such modern RTS game: https://github.com/amethyst/shotcaller https://github.com/amethyst/shotcaller Note: We’re adding UI, input and playable units this month. Currently the game is just an non-interactive simulation. It’s a MOBA-style game that is played 1v1, with the 5 “players” on each side controlled by autonomous bots. This design accommodates AI development as part of the sport, much like a F1 driver and their team of engineers and mechanics. The game is written in Rust and will use WASM for scripting to accommodate a wide range of languages for both game modding and AI code. While it’s only 1v1 in its initial iteration, I agree that there’s immense value in cooperative and more micro-level play, so we do intend to incrementally move towards that as an alternative game mode. I’d love to chat more with anyone interested in this particular design or RTS/MOBAs in general. You can find my email on my GitHub.
• golergka 6y ago
  It makes me sad that Ruse, the 2009 title hasn't made it on the list. It had gone under a radar of many RTS players, but it was revolutionary in terms of APM: there were so few actions per minute that you could competitively play it on an xbox controller (which it had a great control scheme for). The challenge was always to out-fox and out-smart your opponent, and you didn't have to click fast to achieve it. Unfortunately, the developer, Eugene Systems, didn't keep this in later games. The Wargame series are an excellent and very deep strategy games that further built on recon and other mechanics from Ruse, but it is, once again, a bit of a click-fest. Still, I highly recommend both; Ruse is more on a casual side, and Wargame series if you want something more hardcore.
• je42 6y ago
  Hope that https://www.frostgiant.com/ https://www.frostgiant.com/ will release a great RTS. Looking at the team, they should have the capacity to pull it off.
• richardfey 6y ago
  Any idea why google docs mobile looks objectively worse than HN comments?
• baby 6y ago
  I agree with everything here. The learning curve is too steep for RTS in general: it is not clear how to improve. It’s also not fun that there is no mechanism to cap APM. I’ve also always dreaded starting 1v1 due to the mental stress. I get the same playing Go. I really wish there were more competitive 2v2 or more. Anyone here remembers natural selection I and II? They were hybrid RTS/FPS where a single player would play an RTS game and other players would play units. I felt like there was something to be explored more there... Also one thing that always created great space control were front lines: total commander has that, and capture the flag (I remember league of legends having a “dominion” mode that was really fun). I also remember an RTS where you could occupy buildings.
  • Iolaum 6y ago
    As a player who managed to get to masters on SC2:WoL I have two simple suggestions for you. 1. Look into what build orders you should use for different strategies. 2. Watch the replays of your games afterwards. You d be surprised how much that helps.
• djhworld 6y ago
  Growing up I remember playing a lot of AoE and AoE2 with my school friends online, over dialup connections. I was never into any competitive scene, we were all probably very bad at the game but it was fun. The enjoyment came from the building, designing your base, and then the wars to defend or attack your opponents. This was back in the early 2000s, I've never played an RTS game since.
  • BadInformatics 6y ago
    I'm biased because I play it, but AOE2 DE is probably the best the game has been since its original heyday. My friends and I do play ladder, but more often than not we do skirmishes amongst ourselves or AI games. Worth a try for the nostalgia. I think the eye candy and new civ variety alone can justify it.
• concordDance 6y ago
  Disappointed to see no mention of Zero-K. https://zero-k.info/ https://zero-k.info/ It's an open source RTS game with really nice UI controls (line move, group move, circle guard) and good unit AI reducing micro burden. Makes it quite hard to go back to more primitive RTS controls in other games. It would also score very highly on all of those metrics and has a big teams scene.
• ganafagol 6y ago
  Any chance to include what RTS stands for? I opened the article, reading the heading and the first two sentences, encountering RTS 3x but still not having a hint of context, I closed the page.
  • Kinrany 6y ago
    Real Time Strategy, a genre of videogames
• YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  >> Simply put, most RTS games are exhausting. As someone who has achieved a relatively high level of play in numerous popular RTS games, my best coaching advice for the vast majority of players would be to play more and to play faster. In most instances being able to micro, macro, and multi task is the biggest obstacle keeping players from pushing their play to the next level. Many times, I hear players getting frustrated as they ultimately know what and how to execute, but their fingers cannot keep up. Often a player with higher APM will trump an opponent who might otherwise make better decisions and have a better grasp on the game. There are always exceptions, but most players would agree that a 300 APM player will beat a 100 APM player almost every time. I used to love RTS games (until I discovered Total War) and I have to say I'm a bit taken aback by this assumption that playing an RTS game must necessarily mean that the player is chasing some ultra-high performance standard, quantifiable in APM. I get that the author is a competitive player, but the vast majority of players are casual players who don't thnk of games as a career. If the reason no new RTS games are being made is that they are not very good for e-sports, then that's just sad. I would really have thought that making a good game that is pleasant to play, would do the trick. Maybe it's the ultra-competitive edge that's actually driving players away and keeping the incentives to make more such games low? If game procuders are thinking of how to make the next big e-sports RTS hit, instead of a game that many people will want to play, then yes, I can see how they are finding design constraints hard to satisfy.
  • rcxdude 6y ago
    I don't think it's just about the competetive nature of RTS, though that's part of the appeal, so much as about the kind of skills modern RTSs reward. If I'm playing a game where I'm good at one element of it (especially the element after which the genre is named), but I consistently lose against those who have no skill in that element because a different element is so strongly weighted it trumps almost all of the others, I'm probably not going to have a lot of fun playing it, and it's probably going to lack wide-ranging appeal. In fact, in modern RTS this effect is probably strongest at the lower performance levels. Just executing something, anything faster will win far more than any deeper understanding of the game and its systems or strategy.
  • viraptor 6y ago
• egeozcan 6y ago
  How can you talk about RTS games and never mention the CNC series? Red Alert 2 was amazing. As an advanced Age of Empires 2 player, Red Alert 2 has a complete different set of strategy choices to offer and feels much more arcade. This may be good or bad depending on your preferences but it must be mentioned IMHO
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  I tried to play SC2 for the first time in years last night and the servers were erroring with Global Timeout and everyone in chat was complaining so I logged out and might not try again.
  • neogodless 6y ago
    We play casually very often, and this happened the other night, and was the only time I've seen it. So it's not a good way to judge the (current state of the) game. The uptime is actually quite good, and you happened to log in at unlucky time!
  • Dumblydorr 6y ago
    Queue times for matches can be really rough as well. I used to love a good 4v4 but it can take 5-10 minutes to find one some nights. Nevermind errors like yours, yikes
• shoulderfake 6y ago
  I clicked just to see what the op would say about warcraft 3 and the very first point is a clear indication of inadequate understanding of the game at elite level of play. Spacing is important and in fact a big part of the game but not in a Starcrafty kind of way. Different maps allow for different tactics around map control based on race and ability to creep and gain map control. Its not about holding a high ground as a strategy, its more about holding a high ground for a certain type of army composition and while trying to expand for example. And on the subsequent points ,again op just fails completely to understand the game at a higher level or simply has not seen any high level tournament in the last 2 years. Warcraft 3 is a masterful piece and the reason its not popular is it is fucking hard to be even decent at it online. Micro is more important than macro and thats a big deterrent for anyone thats a causal player.
  • hiq 6y ago
    Yes exactly. I would also debate the popularity point: how many games released by 2003 (release year of The Frozen Throne) still have an active pro scene, meaning people whose job is to play this game at tournaments? With the rise of streaming I'd venture that most pro players do not rely solely on tournaments (and their tournament sponsoring) anymore, but the point remains that the game seems to have seen an increase in popularity in the past few years. The Warcraft 3 scene is nothing compared to the biggest names in esport, but it is still remarkably healthy. One reason for this is that Blizzard let the community take the lead unofficially with things like https://www.w3champions.com/ https://www.w3champions.com/ which is basically like Battle.net but better than Battle.net has ever been in many regards. I think it also helps that WC3, as a RTS, can still be relatively enjoyable as a beginner: fewer units to control, fewer resources and buildings to manage, and at the very beginning (say, with 50 APM) focusing mostly on the first hero (meaning a single unit) is clearly the best return on investment to increase one's win rate, which can become apparent after just a few games. Few RTS games are able to both offer such a gentle learning curve and the depth required for people having played the game for more than 17 years to still refine their strategies.
  • pa7ch 6y ago
    Agreed! I think WC3 is massively underappreciated. After being terrible at it in its heyday in middleschool and hearing about Grubby it was a delight many many years later to discover he streams. Watching his stream fully made me appreciate the depth of strategy in WC3. Not the top player when it comes to micro but he often beats the best with brilliant and constantly varied strategies. One thing he is known for is successfully base trading his way to a win that most would have already considered a loss. That grubby does so well despite his "low" APM I think is a testament to WC3's depth of strategy and balance.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  This article is biased towards Blizzard-style RTS. Not a single C&C game mentioned. Not even RA2 and C&C:Generals, which had very healthy multiplayer scenes. Blizzard RTS games are extremely conservative by design, how are things supposed to get better if you're so conservative? I think a fundamental problem is control method. In Blizzard RTS, you just must click fast. Lack of automation makes it worse. The interface pioneered by the first C&C game is suitable for commanding small squads. You draw a rectangle to select units and point them at a SINGLE target. There is no way to order snipers to only target infantry and bazookas to handle tanks. No way to tell infantry to keep distance so tanks don't run them over. You only have the primitive X key, which makes selected units move 1 square in a random direction. Limited ways to select multiple units. In most RTS games you can only select pre-configured squads or units of the same type. No way to quickly select only wounded units or only units close to enemy. Basically you can do everything you want but you have to click fast enough. That's like an elaborate version of "Applause for Xi Jinping", the game where you need to click as many times as you can over 9 seconds. Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander had some interface innovations, but it hasn't caught on. In general, I think RTS games should use many, many more keyboard commands and I don't mean just build unit and spell hotkeys. There is an over-reliance on mouse. Mouse scales very poorly with conflict size. RTS games still haven't managed to implement a useful formation system. In Blizzard RTS, "melee units in front, shooters behind" is called a fine formation. Developers don't give players a formation system to deal with splash damage, they artificially limit impact area. There are very few flanking maneuvers. Another sign this essay is biased for Blizzard games is no mention of scouting and information gathering. I suppose because it can't be further improved? In Blizzard RTS games, scouting is very rudimentary and you typically send a unit once in a while to enemy base to see what structures he has available. Then you call it a day. Information gathering is an extremely important part of warfare and it's stagnant in Blizzard RTS games. Sometimes you have a spell like Farsight or Satellite scan, which only reveals a small area for a very short time. There are no tools to survey the area between bases to give you an idea where enemies might be. Without proper scouting as a layer of contest, the game can become a match of rock, paper, scissors. Incentives to spread your force. In this area, SC2 is actually a regression. A force is typically called a "ball", and you run one ball into another ball. There are no good ways to deal a lot of damage with a smaller force, so most players stick to a huge ball. There are no incentives to attack in 2 areas at once. By dividing your force you usually put yourself at a disadvantage. Incentives to keep some money or units in reserve. There are none. It is usually considered bad play to have any money sitting in the bank - you haven't optimized your build order. You're doing fine if all your factories are producing at full capacity. Starcraft players like to bring up Chess because they have an inferiority complex, but a better comparison might be playing guitar. To play both you need to practice, practice, practice until you can perform very well. You need to know what to do in advance. If enemy does something strange, you better know the counter already. It's not a game for thinking much. In short, I think the essay author should play more non-Blizzard games to see how things can be done differently. Settlers, Northgard, Z, Planetary Annihilation, Total War series, Homeworld...
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  Northgard is a quite popular game that proves a semi-casual RTS can be successful. It's designed like a mix of Settlers and a board game.
• d0z 6y ago
  I'm having a lot of fun with 0AD, an open source rts game that's similar to Age of Empires II. Most linux distros have it in their package repositories.
• sabas123 6y ago
  I find it so weird that this is written by Huk, since I would have expected a lot more well thought opinions from somebody who admittedly once was one of the best non-koreans. I'm truly shocked that he just describes the economy as too simplistic only because it has just 2 types of resources. I don't get the comments on APM, since "playing faster" isn't a function of "my fingers don't have strong enough muscles" but much more "how much processes can you handle subconsciously or purely on muscle memory". Also I really liked day[9]'s take on it that Starcraft focuses on Real time aspect of RTS instead of the strategy aspect (while that also goes incredibly deep!). But let's face it, 1v1 esports is dead. Nobody enjoys mechanical heavy games anymore and that sucks!:< Give a world where the top esports would be any starcraft, an arena fps like quake/diaboticals and GunZ and I would be happy.
• jchassoul 6y ago
  The future of RTS is the acknowledgement of Brood War as our new modern digital chess.
• a20201227 6y ago
  I get my real-time strategy fix from 0 A.D. [1]. It's free and open source, and has been discussed previously on Hacker News [2][3]. I've been playing for 5 years, strictly solo against AI in various configurations. I typically don't play for 3-9 months, then spend 2-4 weeks playing 0 A.D. with virtually all my free time. It's a nice sojourn from my usual side project, and a way to unwind after the day job and increasingly busy family life. [1] https://play0ad.com/ https://play0ad.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638238 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108843
• Threeve303 6y ago
  RTS games and shooter games like Quake ultimately have the same problem. The skill ceiling is very high compared to the average player base so you're always going to wind up with a lot of people playing short term then moving on to something else. When you start losing players, the match quality goes down, which leads to longer matchmaking searches or unbalanced teams... Either outcome accelerates the process of losing players until the game only exists for the better players. At this point any new players are turned off by the skill level and matchmaking times by the players left. The last ditch attempt to save the game is making it free to play. This is the only way out of the last problem because you get a lot of new players for a minute... Usually this doesn't work unless you pull a FortNite and completely change the game mode when you go F2P.
• fbmac 6y ago
  If it fits a genre you already lost me, give me something new to play
• rvba 6y ago
  The author: * gave StarCraft 1 a balance score of 7.4 / 10 while the game is probably the most balanced RTS ever and deserves nothing else than 10 out of 10 * Gave higher scores to games that are irrelevant (Company of Heroes?) and were never relevant, while people still play StarCraft 1 up to this day ... is someone who knows not much about RTS. The scores there are completely wrong. StarCraft 1 is a game from 1998 that is still relevant to today and overall the best RTS ever. Nothing else touched it when it comes to balance. Gameplay is debatable, but Id say no other RTS touched it too. Also the author completely omits the thing that made StarCraft Brood War relevant: the map editor with custom games. Those were and still are revolutionary, since they allowed the players to create their own maps with own rules. Things like Turret Defense, or whole MOBA genere came out from custome StarCraft maps. Thousands such maps were made and played by players - the game gave the relatively easy to use map editor that also provided a relatively easy to use (and primitive) programming language. That added to the game's longetivity. WarCraft 3 had it too -> the whole DOTA was probably more popular than the game itself. StarCraft 2 didnt have real custom maps - as Blizzard didnt know what to do: they wanted to monetize them, yet didnt, so effectively they killed this mode with their wrong decisions. If SC2 had a decent ability for custom games from the start, the game would be much more relevant today. The whole paragraph about "ladder anxiety" goes away, if you can play custom games all day. As many player in SC1 did. But couldnt in SC2.