17 ms·

In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games

158 points by aw1621107 5y ago

tobyhinloopen 5y ago
I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
- dimitar 5y ago
  I like the Eugen games, especially the wargame series
- Vadoff 5y ago
  Nope, feel like the last major release the masses played was Starcraft 2, and that's over 10 years old now.
- 2bitencryption 5y ago
  Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch. It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.
    - Majromax 5y ago
      > If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve. That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos. That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
      - antifa 5y ago
        You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.
    - rollcat 5y ago
      I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :) Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft. I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
    - wyre 5y ago
      Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.
    - gmueckl 5y ago
      Zero-K is a surprisingly good free (open source), community driven RTS. When you look past the dated graphics, it gives you a deep TA style game that tries to also give a few quality of life features to reduce APM count a bit. It's not for everyone, but it can be a lot of fun.
  - harpersealtako 5y ago
    MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor. If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time. If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping. I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      > I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls). Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.
    - jessewmc 5y ago
      I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing, playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who didn't play competitively. This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.
    - jgon 5y ago
      I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.
  - throwaway6734 5y ago
    If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been growing over the past year with the release of the definitive edition
  - thrower123 5y ago
    RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring. You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.
    - Retric 5y ago
      SC2’s co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It lacks much strategic depth, but it’s still surprisingly fun if repetitive.
    - izacus 5y ago
      Yep, although there are now new games which kinda balk the trend - Iron Harvest has a pretty good SP campaign, Total War series is still going strong with its SP focus as well.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3 games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful and annoying.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort. That's a big initial bite to get down. I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through. But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go. I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
    - chrishynes 5y ago
      Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health, armor, etc. To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"... Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies, but that's also offset by most abilities having a geometric component to how they're targeted or have area of effect. Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game. There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes). RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop. If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
    - the_only_law 5y ago
      Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved. I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.
- zeroonetwothree 5y ago
  Sure feels like the genre is mostly dead. Kind of sad
  - ddek 5y ago
    Concentrated, rather than dead. SC2 and AoE2 are the only games still running strong. SC2 seems quite alive. I play AoE2 competitively, and it's stronger than ever. In terms of new games, yeah it's pretty dead. AoE4 looks cool, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if its near as fun to play competitively as AoE2. Wacky civ specific strategies make games more predictable, and 2d is more ergonomic than 3d.
    - MichaelMcG 5y ago
      I also will be pleasantly surprised if AOE4's online multi is anywhere close to AOE2's scene. Definitely managing my expectations due to what I've seen graphically regarding the micro/non-intuitive unit design as well as potential balancing issues due to the vastly divergent civ play styles/age-up mechanics (e.g. Mongol nomad movement & the dynasty system).
- s5300 5y ago
  To my knowledge, Supreme Commanders Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) community has been updating the game and has a fairly active community. It seems to be in a fairly good state, wish I was in the position in life to be able to relax and dump some hours into playing it. Was always a fun game.
  - tobyhinloopen 5y ago
    FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.
    - askesisdev 5y ago
      I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The performance of the original was even worse, you had to apply a patch to get multithreading. Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I guess it was the logical path as people complained about SupCom's difficulty/complexity.
      - javajosh 5y ago
        I found the SupCom 1 controls uncomfortable in the first 20 minutes of the tutorial, and chose not to continue. Life is too short to finish bad books or punishing games; however for me SupCom 2 was a huge ergonomic improvement and if not for that game I wouldn't be playing the series at all.
        askesisdev 5y ago
        That's something I didn't notice but I understand. As an Emacs user that had to end up using Vim mode (evil) due to such concerns. As I said, spent a lot of effort getting good at SupCom and didn't feel like learning everything again for the expansion.. For me a perfect SupCom would be a SupCom 1 with better performance and graphics. Prefer games that are focused on economics and construction than rushing and getting some land resources, which was the focus in SupCom FA and I guess is better for most people. SupCom 2 I played like 5 hours so I don't even remember much other than I didn't like it. Haven't played any games, other than VR, in years but I will install SupCom and play a few hours for the memories..
- stu2010 5y ago
  Company of Heroes was an outstanding release, and its sequel is a good game with a still living, active community. Company of Heroes 3 was recently announced, and its launch will probably get a lot of old players back into the multiplayer lobbies.
  - tobyhinloopen 5y ago
    CoH is great, i’ve seen the CoH3 announcement! I’ll definitely give that one a try
  - throwaway17_17 5y ago
    The CoH games are great small army RTS games, even if I think of them as Real Time Tactics games. But that really is the point for me. It seems that with the aging and seeming non-interest in RTS games like Starcraft, the market and those making products to serve that market have splintered a relatively homogeneous genre into a group of loosely similar niche genres where the differences between themselves and other games is seen as a dividing line instead of focusing on the commonalities involved to grow interest and increase player base amongst the larger game segment. I see Warhammer 40k and Starcraft having much more in common with each other than either has with Halo, despite the very obvious surface level trappings. And I think X-com has more in common with CoH than either have in common with modern warfare or call of duty. I really despair for a broader grouping of strategy and tactics games, that may or may not exclude 4x games, in hopes that it could build a bridge between the various niche styles and cross promote the bigger genre.
- chaps 5y ago
  Check out Zero-K if you haven't already. Open source RTS and arguably the best, but definitely has that lingering ol' open source taste to it.
- thrwawy12345 5y ago
  Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has a thriving pro level tournament scene and online multiplayer culture.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    And Age of Empires 2 on Voobly is still active as well, with userpatch updates being released. Then there is Age of Empires 4 that is nearing completion which might be an Age of Empires 2 DE contender or might be an AoE 3 dud.
    - ddek 5y ago
      Unlikely. AoE4 looks more like a Civ competitor than AoE2, in that it'll look beautiful, have wildly divergent civs, and almost entirely be played SP long run. AoE2 does so many things wrong by 'modern game' standards. The graphics are 2D. Pick any two civs, they're 80% identical. New, goofier mechanics (Flemish Revolution) are disliked by the players (although still used). It's still an incredible game.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Since nobody has figured out how to integrate loot boxes or gambling into RTS yet, other genres are currently much more profitable.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I'd love to see a competent PvE-oriented RTS with the MMO-lite treatment: co-op missions, entire campaigns, customizable armies, unlockable units, mission rewards, purchasable (with in-game currency) items, bigass raids, the whole shebang. SC2 co-op mode took a big step in that direction, and it was well received and has become fairly popular...but a game built around that as its primary locus could be so much more. I know many more traditional core gamers would practically vomit at this idea, but I think there's room for plenty of different styles under the RTS umbrella. And bringing in tons of money with one style might well benefit the others.
    - tobyhinloopen 5y ago
      It’s far from what you asked for, but Mindustry is kinda PvE-RTS-like. It’s also open source, i’d recommend to give it a try. It’s an ugly game though, but I do like the concept.
      - fxtentacle 5y ago
        Thanks for the interesting tip. I agree it needs polishing, though.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ Ashes of the Singluarity: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/ https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/ I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks. I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/ https://planetaryannihilation.com/
  - Causality1 5y ago
    You are the first person I've seen mentioning Ashes of the Singularity who wasn't doing a hardware review.
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    GG is a good SC-alike and Annihilation is Annihilation. Both bring a lot to the table. Ashes just never ran properly so I gave up on it.
  - beefjerkins 5y ago
    "Ashes of the Benchmark", if you will.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Planetary Annihilation spherical maps are an interesting concept, but graphically kind of uninteresting to watch (and my necessity very small in actual build area). It was certainly interesting though with the experience of not having anyway to "put your back against the wall" though.
  - tobyhinloopen 5y ago
    Planetary Annihilation was okay but didn’t really speak to me compared to SupCom/TA. I don’t know why, but I do feel like the planets are hard/annoying to navigate and don’t add anything. I really liked the TA/SupCom maps where there’s natural cover (water/walls) to navigate through, but with PA it’s just whatever since you can just launch some stuff from another planet.
- oneplane 5y ago
  I think there is a much going on as ever, but because RTS games tend to be on the more heavier side to get in to and get good enough at to really enjoy it, it isn't featured as much as any of the generic FPS/BR/DOTA style games. While there might be less of an SC2 eSports bonanza going on right now, there is Age of Empires that is pretty active (as was posted here as well). I think one of the major impacts to the 'visibility' is the fact that 'generic' or 'casual' games have social buy-in that is orders of magnitude bigger than what we used to think of when talking about 'big games' or 'big communities' or 'active genres'. 10000 players or even 100000 players used to be top-tier. Now that's less than 1% of any of the 'big' games out there right now.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Not releases, but there have been some other significant developments: * Ex blizzard RTS devs have gone to a few different studios. Frost Giant has the most hype, but there's also one of the Dream Haven studios IIRC, and Uncapped Games. * A bunch of SC2 modders made a new studio, SunSpear, and their new RTS called Immortal: Gates of Pyre had a successful Kickstarter and has been getting a fair amount of hype from the StarCraft community.
- nestorD 5y ago
  If you are not familiar with it, OAD[0] is a fully open source RTS with an active community of developers that keep making it more and more polished at every release. [0]: https://play0ad.com/ https://play0ad.com/
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    I haven’t played in too long, thanks for the reminder to jump back in.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  AOE2 gets balance and content patches about once a month. It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
  - BadInformatics 5y ago
    The community staying very active has been the biggest factor here IMO. The predecessor to the current Definitive Edition, the rather disastrous (engine-wise, not content-wise) HD Edition, was created in part by co-opting community made mod content and hiring on some of the creators. This has continued for both the Definitive Edition and AOE 4. Likewise, most of the biggest pros and casters started their careers 5-10+ years ago working on community tournaments and other grassroots events. Even though there's a lot more money now with investment from Microsoft, Red Bull and others, that grassroots core has stuck around and feels (at least to me) more fresh than the very corporate machinery around Blizzard RTSes. It's funny to think that the most anticipated LAN tournament is literally held in someone's apartment (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/ https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/)!
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I am so disappointed this article didn't even touch on AoE2 - it has a pretty amazingly well tuned approach to this problem with extremely finely targeted (except back when camels were technically boats cough) bonus damage system. To compare it to SC2 is hilarious - SC2 has more hard counter systems than most games (both visibility and flight are common uncounterable attributes) and yet for all that countering tends just to be a question of how much and how wide the splash damage is when attacking tightly packed formations. High level SC2 eschews huge portions of the roster since they're essentially irrelevant - AOE2 definitely has strong preferences but most of those units get to see action pretty regularly... except the siege tower.
    - Synaesthesia 5y ago
      High end SC2 is really awesome to watch these days, most units get made and there are a lot of strategies available to either side. The balance team has done a great job making sure every unit has a role and is used.
- javajosh 5y ago
  Not a new release, but I've been enjoying Supreme Commander 2 on a modern gaming PC! The game is pretty cheap on Steam ($13)[1] but it scales very well with modern hardware, and the gameplay is far improved (IMHO) over SC1. (Another RTS series I'd like to replay on modern hardware is Homeworld[2]). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2... [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remastered_Collection https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    SupCom2 felt very tailored to consoles. It felt like a dumbed down version of SupCom1. Good fun and had some interesting research mechanics though. My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  Keep your eye on Frost Giant.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  I'm still playing relatively old ones with my friends: * Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation * Sins of a Solar Empire * Zero-K
  - beefjerkins 5y ago
    Sins of a Solar Empire is such an underrated RTS in my opinion. Do you play the base game, or do you try out some the mods (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) as well?
    - MayeulC 5y ago
      Agreed, that's a personal favorite. We mostly play the base game (with all the DLC; one nice thing is that it's enough for the host to have them). I've tried some mods, but Star wars Interregnum seems to crash for me after a while. I think it's a known issue on Linux: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/265#issuecomment-877479610 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/265#issuecomm... These mods seem nice, but I am not so much into these other universes, and the base game is pretty solid already. I might try them again at some point for more variety, notably Sins of the Prophets.
- opportune 5y ago
  Starcraft 2 is still the leader after like 10 years at this point
- danielecook 5y ago
  Check out They are Billions. It has an RTS-like feel, but the strategy is largely defensive.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Gray Goo was really really good but pretty much fizzled. Nobody has brought that kind of budget in since. Westwood[esc]cwPetroglyph subsequently made some very fun "8bit" styled RTSs with a more CnC flavor. We also just got a CnC/RA remaster, StarCraft Remaster, and WC3 remaster. So RTS almost feels more like a historical than a vital genre at this point. Which is a shame because it's imo more accessable than a MOBA (in which every match you must strap in, prepare to endure abuse if you suck, not surrender, and click really fast.)
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Grey Goo had an absurdly awesome setting. About as close as I think you could get to making a wargame that contained "the Culture".
- badosu 5y ago
  I've been having lots of fun playing (and collaborating a bit on) Beyond All Reason: https://beyondallreason.info/ https://beyondallreason.info/ It's an Open Source RTS heavily inspired in Total Annihilation, with nice graphics and great balance.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tasogare 5y ago
  Age of Empires II Definitive Edition is getting new DLC recently, as well as new game modes (Campaign co-cop, Empire Wars). Wargame Red Dragon announced a South Africa themed DLC.
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  Surprised no one here has mentioned Sanctuary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGfuLXAB1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGfuLXAB1o), an upcoming RTS made by several guys in the Supreme Commander/FAF community.
- naravara 5y ago
  Blizzard recently ended development on Starcraft 2. This prompted a lot of hand-wringing. There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C). These include: - Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene. - FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni - A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent. Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.
  - antifa 5y ago
    > competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C). I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years." IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.
    - naravara 5y ago
      Even in SC2, click-speed is not a significant determinant of winning or losing for anyone below Diamond. It's simply not an issue for the vast majority of the player base (75% of players are Platinum league or below) so I don't know why so many people have fixated on that as the thing to blame problems on. It's like saying "basketball revolves around dunking" even though dunks are basically not an element of the game for anyone playing below the professional level. Insofar as there are barriers to entry to the game at lower leagues, the challenge is more the mental challenge of keeping track of a bunch of different variables and keeping up with the multi-tasking. It's not nearly as execution dependent, at that level, as most fighting games or even a Soulsborne. It's a mental acuity and habit-formation challenge rather than a dexterity one. Better players will have more actions per minute (assuming they're not spamming), but it will be because they're making decisions more quickly, not because they have concert pianist fingers. I got up to Gold league playing mostly with a trackpad. I know someone who got to Diamond on a trackpad as well. There's lots of problems with SC2's design, but they mostly center around a poor onboarding experience, doing a bad job of communicating the ripple effects of early decisions, a surfeit of high-lethality units that settle battles or games in a second, and the availability of multiple "cheese" strategies for each faction that are much much easier to execute than they are to defend against. But those are all addressable within the broader framework of a Blizzard-style RTS with better unit design, UI/UX, and tutorial or single player game modes.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  The Total War franchise is still going strong, especially nowadays with Warhammer releases. Mind you, it seems to be mostly PvE and includes a big Civilization-like aspect, and you have to be into the particular style of combat that Total War does.
thom 5y ago
First half of the title got my hopes up as a Magic: the Gathering player, but alas, it was not an argument in defence of hard counters costing only two mana.
- pete5x5 5y ago
  "In defense of Mana Drain: how to lose friends in cube draft"
  - thom 5y ago
    If you’re tired of Mana Drain in cube, you’re tired of life.
    - pete5x5 5y ago
      Amen.
ironman1478 5y ago
I think its cool seeing what factors are considered in RTS balancing. I guess an equivalent for fighting games would be invincible vs non-invincible DPs or weird things like movement options. In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the character/move properties or if its because one player is way better.
- chrisfosterelli 5y ago
  I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start. Zynga was infamous for a stats driven approach, but there it was all about tricking people into maxing out the micro transactions :(
    - post-it 5y ago
      > One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start. The opposite to "the enemy's gate is down"
scotty79 5y ago
If you want to see really brutal hard counters try Clash Royale. Game is really fun, and requires a lot of thinking but it's absolutely ruthless. Every single unit has multiple hard counters. When it comes to combinations everything gets more messy and fun.
Animats 5y ago
There's a real world version of this, the DePuy Quantified Judgement Method.[1] It's fairly simple - weapons have a weight value (sword=1.0), you add that up for the forces committed, there's a quality of troops multiplier for each side, some adjustments for defensive preparations, and you get a measure of combat strength. DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His observation is that the side with a 2x advantage almost always wins. If nobody has a 2x advantage, either side can win. So, real-world war has a "hard counter".
- capableweb 5y ago
  Except real-world doesn't have any counters at all but instead anything can happen at any time almost. The outcome of encounters in war is controlled by endless amount of parameters, just because someone has more swords than another doesn't mean they will almost always win. See Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper who killed ~500 Red Army soldiers during the Second World War as an example of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
  - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
    Your example of the most outlier sniper of all time doesn't really conflict with "advantaged side almost always wins".
    - afrodc_ 5y ago
      They also lost the war
  - bcgraham 5y ago
    Can this line of reasoning be extended to poker?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I feel like nukes are a pretty hard counter.
- 5y ago
ajuc 5y ago
> The ground unit cannot hurt the air unit in any way, and the air unit can hurt the ground unit. This relationship is based on innate and immutable differences between the two unit types. There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart. So, in a way - there are no hard counters either :)
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Generally a unit would only be considered a hard counter if it could destroy the other unit in a reasonable amount of time. If a swarm of zerglings can take continuous fire from some air units and still manage to destroy an entire base before being destroyed themselves, then the air units aren't much of a counter...
AussieWog93 5y ago
Supreme Commander's gameplay is nothing but hard counters[1], especially with the reclaim system (you can harvest a dead unit to reclaim 80% of the mass used in creating it). The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF. [1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades. Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs. They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards. I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!
- ipnon 5y ago
  SupCom has remained interesting to RTS players long past its expiration date. The official servers have been down for years! Games are played on unofficial servers now.[0] Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic. [a] Technically tactics at the scale of SupCom [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Not an expert, but urban warfare is more complicated and doesn't have as much 'hard counters'; they had to fight tooth and nail, door to door to (re)take cities in the middle-east. Of course, if you take the gulf war you can see it in action, with most of Iraq's tanks and airplanes being taken out via airstrikes.
    - ipnon 5y ago
      Yes, it is perhaps at a level between the tactical and strategic that hard counters mostly exist. At the highest strategic level, hard counters are nonexistent in a game theory way. Institutions like the UN and the US military prevent much of anything significant happening at the greatest levels of geopolitics. This can be seen in the abundance of world wars in the early 20th century, and their absence in the late 20th and now 21st centuries. Then at the utmost tactical level it is truly man versus man. There are few, if any, hard counters for that.
Teknoman117 5y ago
One of the games I used to play that wasn't reviewed very well was Tom Clancy's End War (the online multiplayer died pretty quick). It was the one with the gimmick / sometimes really useful attribute of being purely controllable via speech recognition. It was certainly more forgiving of casual players - you could only have 12 "addressable" units in the game at a given time. A unit was 4 vehicles or 4 groups of 5 infantry. Rather than having to produce one soldier or vehicle at a time, they'd deploy in their groups. "Healing" them could be achieved by evacuating the unit off the map, which would return half the unit's deployment cost. They could then be redeployed later at full health. Infantry units could be evacuated by air, vehicles had to drive off the map's boundary. There was a fairly simple circle of vehicle hard counters - Helicopters were highly effective against Tanks, which were highly effective against IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles), which where highly effective against Helicopters, etc. There were two types of infantry units - rifleman and combat engineers, and were vulnerable to everything, but could be placed in cover to drastically increase their defense stat. Rifleman (in cover) were highly effective against other infantry units and combat engineers (in cover) were highly effective against all vehicles. Rifleman could capture control points / forward deployment points faster than combat engineers. IFVs could be used to move infantry units quickly around the map, and rifleman could be redeployed by air at the cost of some deployment points. Artillery was effective against everything but helicopters (which were highly effective against them), whether units where in cover or not. Downside was that it was vulnerable to everything, but this rarely mattered because they could engage from half the map away. There was also a command vehicle which could manufacture robots. You had a UAV for spotting and guard robots which would be tasked to guard a control point or a unit. Match start had you select 3 units to deploy first. A common strategy was to start with a command vehicle, an artillery unit, and a rifleman unit. You'd immediately send the rifleman unit to capture the nearest control point, and by the time they finished you'd have had enough time to get an IFV unit in to pick them up. You'd deploy your UAV to the enemy's side of the map to see what they were up to, and have the command unit build defense robots for the artillery to cover for their extreme vulnerability to air units. I had fun with it anyways.
imwillofficial 5y ago
I had so much fun reading this! Brought back my star craft and CandC days. Hell I even have a Nod tattoo. (Long live Kane!)
im3w1l 5y ago
I think the big issue with soft counters is rather that attention and APM is very scarce. Spamming a well rounded unit means you can spend your attention on other stuff. If each side had a team of people controlling their units then you could imagine one guy could focus on the economy another on producing the right units and a third on combat micro. This could make soft counters become more important.
- antifa 5y ago
  I like the 5 heroes v 5 heroes aspect of MOBAs, but I wish they kept the entire RTS part of it.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
Hmm, kind of reads like a worse Rock Paper Scissors - A Method for Competitive Game Play Design ? https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130150/rock_paper_scissors__a_method_for_.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130150/rock_paper_sci... (Mostly worse because he's offering multiple, somewhat idiosyncratic, contradictory and incoherent definitions of "hard" and "soft" counters ?)

158 points by aw1621107 5y ago

tobyhinloopen 5y ago

I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?

dimitar 5y ago
I like the Eugen games, especially the wargame series
Vadoff 5y ago
Nope, feel like the last major release the masses played was Starcraft 2, and that's over 10 years old now.
2bitencryption 5y ago
Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch. It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
- jdmichal 5y ago
  I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.
  - Majromax 5y ago
    > If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve. That's not really true. A typical player can watch the replay of their losing match and see the proximate cause of the failure ("my army got blown up"), but looking at the game analytically to find the ultimate cause is/was much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular feature of the Day[9] daily videos. That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely highlighted by the game itself as important, and optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
    - antifa 5y ago
      You can see what your opponent did. If you're new, this will probably be that the opponent did more things and did them faster, also their build order might be new to you or could be something new for you to scout for to counter.
  - rollcat 5y ago
    I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro - in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and communication. 60% winrate last season :) Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over random teams, you can really punch above your weight if your teammates understand how to support you.
- ajuc 5y ago
  MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft. I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
  - wyre 5y ago
    Age of Empires II has an updated version (Definitive Edition) that I want to recommend, but I never played SC2 so I can’t compare the APM.
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Zero-K is a surprisingly good free (open source), community driven RTS. When you look past the dated graphics, it gives you a deep TA style game that tries to also give a few quality of life features to reduce APM count a bit. It's not for everyone, but it can be a lot of fun.
- harpersealtako 5y ago
  MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor. If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time. If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping. I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    > I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls). Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood pretty much everything except the individual feel and tactics of each character.
  - jessewmc 5y ago
    I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing, playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who didn't play competitively. This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer really only appealed to serious competitive players. It sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a gateway.
  - jgon 5y ago
    I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc, etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my memories of it were basically that if you weren't doing things at literally every moment, you were probably going to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and tactical understanding but you'd eventually run up against someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting. Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced than RTS' ever did to me.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been growing over the past year with the release of the definitive edition
- thrower123 5y ago
  RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring. You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.
  - Retric 5y ago
    SC2’s co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It lacks much strategic depth, but it’s still surprisingly fun if repetitive.
  - izacus 5y ago
    Yep, although there are now new games which kinda balk the trend - Iron Harvest has a pretty good SP campaign, Total War series is still going strong with its SP focus as well.
- vkou 5y ago
  > It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap... This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3 games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful and annoying.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort. That's a big initial bite to get down. I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through. But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go. I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
  - chrishynes 5y ago
    Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health, armor, etc. To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that ability, might want to dodge next time"... Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies, but that's also offset by most abilities having a geometric component to how they're targeted or have area of effect. Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't even see the game until you get some months under your belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need to know exactly what spells are going off, how your allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing but hearing it and knowledge of the game. There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy, but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP original twitch malphite combo).
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes). RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop. If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Yeah this is what killed my interest in the genre. Ultimately it seems that it comes down to learning the meta, and APM with strategy only superficially involved. I do play some AoE3 still since they released the DE for that one and I will say there’s been one players running around pulling off victories that shatter the meta, and ofc the establishment players have referred to that as “toxic”.
zeroonetwothree 5y ago
Sure feels like the genre is mostly dead. Kind of sad
- ddek 5y ago
  Concentrated, rather than dead. SC2 and AoE2 are the only games still running strong. SC2 seems quite alive. I play AoE2 competitively, and it's stronger than ever. In terms of new games, yeah it's pretty dead. AoE4 looks cool, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if its near as fun to play competitively as AoE2. Wacky civ specific strategies make games more predictable, and 2d is more ergonomic than 3d.
  - MichaelMcG 5y ago
    I also will be pleasantly surprised if AOE4's online multi is anywhere close to AOE2's scene. Definitely managing my expectations due to what I've seen graphically regarding the micro/non-intuitive unit design as well as potential balancing issues due to the vastly divergent civ play styles/age-up mechanics (e.g. Mongol nomad movement & the dynasty system).
s5300 5y ago
To my knowledge, Supreme Commanders Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) community has been updating the game and has a fairly active community. It seems to be in a fairly good state, wish I was in the position in life to be able to relax and dump some hours into playing it. Was always a fun game.
- tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.
  - askesisdev 5y ago
    I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The performance of the original was even worse, you had to apply a patch to get multithreading. Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I guess it was the logical path as people complained about SupCom's difficulty/complexity.
    - javajosh 5y ago
      I found the SupCom 1 controls uncomfortable in the first 20 minutes of the tutorial, and chose not to continue. Life is too short to finish bad books or punishing games; however for me SupCom 2 was a huge ergonomic improvement and if not for that game I wouldn't be playing the series at all.
      - askesisdev 5y ago
        That's something I didn't notice but I understand. As an Emacs user that had to end up using Vim mode (evil) due to such concerns. As I said, spent a lot of effort getting good at SupCom and didn't feel like learning everything again for the expansion.. For me a perfect SupCom would be a SupCom 1 with better performance and graphics. Prefer games that are focused on economics and construction than rushing and getting some land resources, which was the focus in SupCom FA and I guess is better for most people. SupCom 2 I played like 5 hours so I don't even remember much other than I didn't like it. Haven't played any games, other than VR, in years but I will install SupCom and play a few hours for the memories..
stu2010 5y ago
Company of Heroes was an outstanding release, and its sequel is a good game with a still living, active community. Company of Heroes 3 was recently announced, and its launch will probably get a lot of old players back into the multiplayer lobbies.
- tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  CoH is great, i’ve seen the CoH3 announcement! I’ll definitely give that one a try
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  The CoH games are great small army RTS games, even if I think of them as Real Time Tactics games. But that really is the point for me. It seems that with the aging and seeming non-interest in RTS games like Starcraft, the market and those making products to serve that market have splintered a relatively homogeneous genre into a group of loosely similar niche genres where the differences between themselves and other games is seen as a dividing line instead of focusing on the commonalities involved to grow interest and increase player base amongst the larger game segment. I see Warhammer 40k and Starcraft having much more in common with each other than either has with Halo, despite the very obvious surface level trappings. And I think X-com has more in common with CoH than either have in common with modern warfare or call of duty. I really despair for a broader grouping of strategy and tactics games, that may or may not exclude 4x games, in hopes that it could build a bridge between the various niche styles and cross promote the bigger genre.
chaps 5y ago
Check out Zero-K if you haven't already. Open source RTS and arguably the best, but definitely has that lingering ol' open source taste to it.
thrwawy12345 5y ago
Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has a thriving pro level tournament scene and online multiplayer culture.
- oneplane 5y ago
  And Age of Empires 2 on Voobly is still active as well, with userpatch updates being released. Then there is Age of Empires 4 that is nearing completion which might be an Age of Empires 2 DE contender or might be an AoE 3 dud.
  - ddek 5y ago
    Unlikely. AoE4 looks more like a Civ competitor than AoE2, in that it'll look beautiful, have wildly divergent civs, and almost entirely be played SP long run. AoE2 does so many things wrong by 'modern game' standards. The graphics are 2D. Pick any two civs, they're 80% identical. New, goofier mechanics (Flemish Revolution) are disliked by the players (although still used). It's still an incredible game.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Since nobody has figured out how to integrate loot boxes or gambling into RTS yet, other genres are currently much more profitable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I'd love to see a competent PvE-oriented RTS with the MMO-lite treatment: co-op missions, entire campaigns, customizable armies, unlockable units, mission rewards, purchasable (with in-game currency) items, bigass raids, the whole shebang. SC2 co-op mode took a big step in that direction, and it was well received and has become fairly popular...but a game built around that as its primary locus could be so much more. I know many more traditional core gamers would practically vomit at this idea, but I think there's room for plenty of different styles under the RTS umbrella. And bringing in tons of money with one style might well benefit the others.
  - tobyhinloopen 5y ago
    It’s far from what you asked for, but Mindustry is kinda PvE-RTS-like. It’s also open source, i’d recommend to give it a try. It’s an ugly game though, but I do like the concept.
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      Thanks for the interesting tip. I agree it needs polishing, though.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ Ashes of the Singluarity: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/ https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/ I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks. I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/ https://planetaryannihilation.com/
- Causality1 5y ago
  You are the first person I've seen mentioning Ashes of the Singularity who wasn't doing a hardware review.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  GG is a good SC-alike and Annihilation is Annihilation. Both bring a lot to the table. Ashes just never ran properly so I gave up on it.
- beefjerkins 5y ago
  "Ashes of the Benchmark", if you will.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Planetary Annihilation spherical maps are an interesting concept, but graphically kind of uninteresting to watch (and my necessity very small in actual build area). It was certainly interesting though with the experience of not having anyway to "put your back against the wall" though.
- tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  Planetary Annihilation was okay but didn’t really speak to me compared to SupCom/TA. I don’t know why, but I do feel like the planets are hard/annoying to navigate and don’t add anything. I really liked the TA/SupCom maps where there’s natural cover (water/walls) to navigate through, but with PA it’s just whatever since you can just launch some stuff from another planet.
oneplane 5y ago
I think there is a much going on as ever, but because RTS games tend to be on the more heavier side to get in to and get good enough at to really enjoy it, it isn't featured as much as any of the generic FPS/BR/DOTA style games. While there might be less of an SC2 eSports bonanza going on right now, there is Age of Empires that is pretty active (as was posted here as well). I think one of the major impacts to the 'visibility' is the fact that 'generic' or 'casual' games have social buy-in that is orders of magnitude bigger than what we used to think of when talking about 'big games' or 'big communities' or 'active genres'. 10000 players or even 100000 players used to be top-tier. Now that's less than 1% of any of the 'big' games out there right now.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
Not releases, but there have been some other significant developments: * Ex blizzard RTS devs have gone to a few different studios. Frost Giant has the most hype, but there's also one of the Dream Haven studios IIRC, and Uncapped Games. * A bunch of SC2 modders made a new studio, SunSpear, and their new RTS called Immortal: Gates of Pyre had a successful Kickstarter and has been getting a fair amount of hype from the StarCraft community.
nestorD 5y ago
If you are not familiar with it, OAD[0] is a fully open source RTS with an active community of developers that keep making it more and more polished at every release. [0]: https://play0ad.com/ https://play0ad.com/
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  I haven’t played in too long, thanks for the reminder to jump back in.
the__alchemist 5y ago
AOE2 gets balance and content patches about once a month. It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
- BadInformatics 5y ago
  The community staying very active has been the biggest factor here IMO. The predecessor to the current Definitive Edition, the rather disastrous (engine-wise, not content-wise) HD Edition, was created in part by co-opting community made mod content and hiring on some of the creators. This has continued for both the Definitive Edition and AOE 4. Likewise, most of the biggest pros and casters started their careers 5-10+ years ago working on community tournaments and other grassroots events. Even though there's a lot more money now with investment from Microsoft, Red Bull and others, that grassroots core has stuck around and feels (at least to me) more fresh than the very corporate machinery around Blizzard RTSes. It's funny to think that the most anticipated LAN tournament is literally held in someone's apartment (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/ https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/)!
- munk-a 5y ago
  I am so disappointed this article didn't even touch on AoE2 - it has a pretty amazingly well tuned approach to this problem with extremely finely targeted (except back when camels were technically boats cough) bonus damage system. To compare it to SC2 is hilarious - SC2 has more hard counter systems than most games (both visibility and flight are common uncounterable attributes) and yet for all that countering tends just to be a question of how much and how wide the splash damage is when attacking tightly packed formations. High level SC2 eschews huge portions of the roster since they're essentially irrelevant - AOE2 definitely has strong preferences but most of those units get to see action pretty regularly... except the siege tower.
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    High end SC2 is really awesome to watch these days, most units get made and there are a lot of strategies available to either side. The balance team has done a great job making sure every unit has a role and is used.
javajosh 5y ago
Not a new release, but I've been enjoying Supreme Commander 2 on a modern gaming PC! The game is pretty cheap on Steam ($13)[1] but it scales very well with modern hardware, and the gameplay is far improved (IMHO) over SC1. (Another RTS series I'd like to replay on modern hardware is Homeworld[2]). [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2... [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remastered_Collection https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  SupCom2 felt very tailored to consoles. It felt like a dumbed down version of SupCom1. Good fun and had some interesting research mechanics though. My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.
georgeecollins 5y ago
Keep your eye on Frost Giant.
MayeulC 5y ago
I'm still playing relatively old ones with my friends: * Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation * Sins of a Solar Empire * Zero-K
- beefjerkins 5y ago
  Sins of a Solar Empire is such an underrated RTS in my opinion. Do you play the base game, or do you try out some the mods (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) as well?
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    Agreed, that's a personal favorite. We mostly play the base game (with all the DLC; one nice thing is that it's enough for the host to have them). I've tried some mods, but Star wars Interregnum seems to crash for me after a while. I think it's a known issue on Linux: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/265#issuecomment-877479610 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/265#issuecomm... These mods seem nice, but I am not so much into these other universes, and the base game is pretty solid already. I might try them again at some point for more variety, notably Sins of the Prophets.
opportune 5y ago
Starcraft 2 is still the leader after like 10 years at this point
danielecook 5y ago
Check out They are Billions. It has an RTS-like feel, but the strategy is largely defensive.
EamonnMR 5y ago
Gray Goo was really really good but pretty much fizzled. Nobody has brought that kind of budget in since. Westwood[esc]cwPetroglyph subsequently made some very fun "8bit" styled RTSs with a more CnC flavor. We also just got a CnC/RA remaster, StarCraft Remaster, and WC3 remaster. So RTS almost feels more like a historical than a vital genre at this point. Which is a shame because it's imo more accessable than a MOBA (in which every match you must strap in, prepare to endure abuse if you suck, not surrender, and click really fast.)
- XorNot 5y ago
  Grey Goo had an absurdly awesome setting. About as close as I think you could get to making a wargame that contained "the Culture".
badosu 5y ago
I've been having lots of fun playing (and collaborating a bit on) Beyond All Reason: https://beyondallreason.info/ https://beyondallreason.info/ It's an Open Source RTS heavily inspired in Total Annihilation, with nice graphics and great balance.
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tasogare 5y ago
Age of Empires II Definitive Edition is getting new DLC recently, as well as new game modes (Campaign co-cop, Empire Wars). Wargame Red Dragon announced a South Africa themed DLC.
gautamcgoel 5y ago
Surprised no one here has mentioned Sanctuary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGfuLXAB1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGfuLXAB1o), an upcoming RTS made by several guys in the Supreme Commander/FAF community.
naravara 5y ago
Blizzard recently ended development on Starcraft 2. This prompted a lot of hand-wringing. There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C). These include: - Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene. - FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni - A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent. Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.
- antifa 5y ago
  > competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C). I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years." IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.
  - naravara 5y ago
    Even in SC2, click-speed is not a significant determinant of winning or losing for anyone below Diamond. It's simply not an issue for the vast majority of the player base (75% of players are Platinum league or below) so I don't know why so many people have fixated on that as the thing to blame problems on. It's like saying "basketball revolves around dunking" even though dunks are basically not an element of the game for anyone playing below the professional level. Insofar as there are barriers to entry to the game at lower leagues, the challenge is more the mental challenge of keeping track of a bunch of different variables and keeping up with the multi-tasking. It's not nearly as execution dependent, at that level, as most fighting games or even a Soulsborne. It's a mental acuity and habit-formation challenge rather than a dexterity one. Better players will have more actions per minute (assuming they're not spamming), but it will be because they're making decisions more quickly, not because they have concert pianist fingers. I got up to Gold league playing mostly with a trackpad. I know someone who got to Diamond on a trackpad as well. There's lots of problems with SC2's design, but they mostly center around a poor onboarding experience, doing a bad job of communicating the ripple effects of early decisions, a surfeit of high-lethality units that settle battles or games in a second, and the availability of multiple "cheese" strategies for each faction that are much much easier to execute than they are to defend against. But those are all addressable within the broader framework of a Blizzard-style RTS with better unit design, UI/UX, and tutorial or single player game modes.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The Total War franchise is still going strong, especially nowadays with Warhammer releases. Mind you, it seems to be mostly PvE and includes a big Civilization-like aspect, and you have to be into the particular style of combat that Total War does.

thom 5y ago

First half of the title got my hopes up as a Magic: the Gathering player, but alas, it was not an argument in defence of hard counters costing only two mana.

pete5x5 5y ago
"In defense of Mana Drain: how to lose friends in cube draft"
- thom 5y ago
  If you’re tired of Mana Drain in cube, you’re tired of life.
  - pete5x5 5y ago
    Amen.

ironman1478 5y ago

I think its cool seeing what factors are considered in RTS balancing. I guess an equivalent for fighting games would be invincible vs non-invincible DPs or weird things like movement options. In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the character/move properties or if its because one player is way better.

chrisfosterelli 5y ago
I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective. The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast. One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start. Zynga was infamous for a stats driven approach, but there it was all about tricking people into maxing out the micro transactions :(
  - post-it 5y ago
    > One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start. The opposite to "the enemy's gate is down"

scotty79 5y ago

If you want to see really brutal hard counters try Clash Royale. Game is really fun, and requires a lot of thinking but it's absolutely ruthless. Every single unit has multiple hard counters. When it comes to combinations everything gets more messy and fun.

Animats 5y ago

There's a real world version of this, the DePuy Quantified Judgement Method.[1] It's fairly simple - weapons have a weight value (sword=1.0), you add that up for the forces committed, there's a quality of troops multiplier for each side, some adjustments for defensive preparations, and you get a measure of combat strength. DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His observation is that the side with a 2x advantage almost always wins. If nobody has a 2x advantage, either side can win. So, real-world war has a "hard counter".

capableweb 5y ago
Except real-world doesn't have any counters at all but instead anything can happen at any time almost. The outcome of encounters in war is controlled by endless amount of parameters, just because someone has more swords than another doesn't mean they will almost always win. See Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper who killed ~500 Red Army soldiers during the Second World War as an example of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  Your example of the most outlier sniper of all time doesn't really conflict with "advantaged side almost always wins".
  - afrodc_ 5y ago
    They also lost the war
- bcgraham 5y ago
  Can this line of reasoning be extended to poker?
- bawolff 5y ago
  I feel like nukes are a pretty hard counter.
5y ago

ajuc 5y ago

> The ground unit cannot hurt the air unit in any way, and the air unit can hurt the ground unit. This relationship is based on innate and immutable differences between the two unit types. There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart. So, in a way - there are no hard counters either :)

seoaeu 5y ago
Generally a unit would only be considered a hard counter if it could destroy the other unit in a reasonable amount of time. If a swarm of zerglings can take continuous fire from some air units and still manage to destroy an entire base before being destroyed themselves, then the air units aren't much of a counter...

AussieWog93 5y ago

Supreme Commander's gameplay is nothing but hard counters[1], especially with the reclaim system (you can harvest a dead unit to reclaim 80% of the mass used in creating it). The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF. [1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades. Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs. They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards. I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!

ipnon 5y ago
SupCom has remained interesting to RTS players long past its expiration date. The official servers have been down for years! Games are played on unofficial servers now.[0] Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic. [a] Technically tactics at the scale of SupCom [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Not an expert, but urban warfare is more complicated and doesn't have as much 'hard counters'; they had to fight tooth and nail, door to door to (re)take cities in the middle-east. Of course, if you take the gulf war you can see it in action, with most of Iraq's tanks and airplanes being taken out via airstrikes.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Yes, it is perhaps at a level between the tactical and strategic that hard counters mostly exist. At the highest strategic level, hard counters are nonexistent in a game theory way. Institutions like the UN and the US military prevent much of anything significant happening at the greatest levels of geopolitics. This can be seen in the abundance of world wars in the early 20th century, and their absence in the late 20th and now 21st centuries. Then at the utmost tactical level it is truly man versus man. There are few, if any, hard counters for that.

Teknoman117 5y ago

One of the games I used to play that wasn't reviewed very well was Tom Clancy's End War (the online multiplayer died pretty quick). It was the one with the gimmick / sometimes really useful attribute of being purely controllable via speech recognition. It was certainly more forgiving of casual players - you could only have 12 "addressable" units in the game at a given time. A unit was 4 vehicles or 4 groups of 5 infantry. Rather than having to produce one soldier or vehicle at a time, they'd deploy in their groups. "Healing" them could be achieved by evacuating the unit off the map, which would return half the unit's deployment cost. They could then be redeployed later at full health. Infantry units could be evacuated by air, vehicles had to drive off the map's boundary. There was a fairly simple circle of vehicle hard counters - Helicopters were highly effective against Tanks, which were highly effective against IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles), which where highly effective against Helicopters, etc. There were two types of infantry units - rifleman and combat engineers, and were vulnerable to everything, but could be placed in cover to drastically increase their defense stat. Rifleman (in cover) were highly effective against other infantry units and combat engineers (in cover) were highly effective against all vehicles. Rifleman could capture control points / forward deployment points faster than combat engineers. IFVs could be used to move infantry units quickly around the map, and rifleman could be redeployed by air at the cost of some deployment points. Artillery was effective against everything but helicopters (which were highly effective against them), whether units where in cover or not. Downside was that it was vulnerable to everything, but this rarely mattered because they could engage from half the map away. There was also a command vehicle which could manufacture robots. You had a UAV for spotting and guard robots which would be tasked to guard a control point or a unit. Match start had you select 3 units to deploy first. A common strategy was to start with a command vehicle, an artillery unit, and a rifleman unit. You'd immediately send the rifleman unit to capture the nearest control point, and by the time they finished you'd have had enough time to get an IFV unit in to pick them up. You'd deploy your UAV to the enemy's side of the map to see what they were up to, and have the command unit build defense robots for the artillery to cover for their extreme vulnerability to air units. I had fun with it anyways.

imwillofficial 5y ago

I had so much fun reading this! Brought back my star craft and CandC days. Hell I even have a Nod tattoo. (Long live Kane!)

im3w1l 5y ago

I think the big issue with soft counters is rather that attention and APM is very scarce. Spamming a well rounded unit means you can spend your attention on other stuff. If each side had a team of people controlling their units then you could imagine one guy could focus on the economy another on producing the right units and a third on combat micro. This could make soft counters become more important.

antifa 5y ago
I like the 5 heroes v 5 heroes aspect of MOBAs, but I wish they kept the entire RTS part of it.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

Hmm, kind of reads like a worse Rock Paper Scissors - A Method for Competitive Game Play Design ? https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130150/rock_paper_scissors__a_method_for_.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130150/rock_paper_sci... (Mostly worse because he's offering multiple, somewhat idiosyncratic, contradictory and incoherent definitions of "hard" and "soft" counters ?)