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The Future of RTS

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Re: The Future of RTS

#81

Post by VRay »

erulabs wrote: post #78

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 excel…

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

Re: The Future of RTS

#82

Post by m463 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #70
jiggawatts wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What mods do you recommend for Factorio?

I'd actually recommend you play your first full game modless (plain vanilla). That should give you a feel for what the vanilla game is like, and what you like and don't like about it, so you'll be in much better shape to make your own decisions as to which mods look interesting or useful to you. Then I'd experiment with mods to find out which one you like or not. Some of the most popular mods are probably not too bad…

I've always shied away from mods in games. I vaguely recall playing a game and finishing it, then I tried it with some cheat code and all of a sudden the game became completely meaningless. There's something very important tied into the struggle and limitations.

On the other hand, I think things like keybindings and mods that fix problems are probably ok (personally).

Re: The Future of RTS

#83

Post by Dylan16807 »

6510 wrote: post #71
FrozenVoid wrote: post #60

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

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 wh…

> 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.

Re: The Future of RTS

#84

Post by VRay »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #61

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 a…

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

Re: The Future of RTS

#85

Post by jtolmar »

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.

Re: The Future of RTS

#86

Post by erulabs »

VRay wrote: post #81
erulabs wrote: post #78

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 excel…

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

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 :)

Re: The Future of RTS

#87

Post by Dylan16807 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #16
lacker wrote: post #13

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 play…

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 stra…

> 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.

Well it's rated Very Positive on steam, for what it's worth.

It's definitely far from a standard RTS, though, with the way you have a single avatar character that runs around to personally provide vision and perform all actions.

Re: The Future of RTS

#88

Post by TwoBit »

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.

Re: The Future of RTS

#89

Post by TwoBit »

Gunax wrote: post #56

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.

The problem with online gaming for RTSs (and to some degree all skill-based games) is it's unwelcoming because there is too large a disparity between casual players and those that somehow spend hours a day on it.

Re: The Future of RTS

#90

Post by DerSaidin »

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

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