91–100 of 275 posts
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.
* economy is auto-ramping. You only chose the number of collector. I think this could use some balancing and more experimentations. But it changes the dynamic of the game over time from money being the limiting factor to pop cap. Even if the two players play very aggressively.
* Also the game is not about destroying opponent base (you cam still win this way) but about controlling some map zones. Controlling the "pads" charges a nuke missile, but the missile can flip hand 1 second before firing. This builds up a lot of intensity and makes timing very important in the gameplay. Knowing when you should stale the charging or fasten it, and how much you should pay for this is hard to master.
Whilst I certainly have huge respect for HuK, I feel that either his use of the categories in the article as perhaps a bit simplistic. Many of the points he mentions are really intertwined - most importantly balance vs variety: it's very hard to score highly on both. SC2 has 3 very distinct races (he gives it a 8.8 for variety), hence there are just 6 possible matchups. AoE 2 (DE) has 35 (he gives it a 3), making ove…
>AoE 2 (DE) has 35 (he gives it a 3), making over 600 possible 1v1 matchups. The 3 species in Starcraft are quite distinct in many key areas, whereas in Age of Kings and AOE3 (the only ones I've played) the differences between the factions were limited to a handful of units and buildings, but ultimately they all played pretty much the same.
High level tournaments include civilization drafting before a best of N series of games. Occasionally, one player/team ends up with a civilization match up which gives them a clear advantage (because they successfully predicted their opponent's civilization pick - it the opponent had picked something else the advantage might swing the other way). Occasionally games are described as "civ win" when the advantage is large and wielded well.
Honestly, I think the RTS genre is too hidebound to the origins of the genre. Too focused on trees of units and factories that existed originally because of singleplayer campaigns and trickling out upgrades. I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming. An RTS ba…
That's sort of ironic, as I've been missing higher tier units, as they were as close to a disruptable supply chain as it gets in TA: build factory -> make builder -> build factory 2 -> make tier 2 unit. Targeting builders or resources was a way to delay the coming of the next tier units. It also gave some predictability to the gameplay: not seeing tier 1 units meant tier 2 units were unlikely to come.
I agree with the complex mechanics, and I hate that there are so many factories, with so many units, many of them basically copies of each other. Same for defenses: do we really need 3 different anti-air towers? I much preferred the TA approach, where each unit was good at something different, and easily visually distinguishable too.
It’s a MOBA-style game that is played 1v1, with the 5 “players” on each side controlled by autonomous bots. This design accommodates AI development as part of the sport, much like a F1 driver and their team of engineers and mechanics.
The game is written in Rust and will use WASM for scripting to accommodate a wide range of languages for both game modding and AI code. While it’s only 1v1 in its initial iteration, I agree that there’s immense value in cooperative and more micro-level play, so we do intend to incrementally move towards that as an alternative game mode.
I’d love to chat more with anyone interested in this particular design or RTS/MOBAs in general. You can find my email on my GitHub.
my hot take on RTS : I like the genre (or rather used to like, the last one I loved was SupCom) but I wish somebody would make an RTS with no/minimal macro. Controlling the builder/peons units is a chore at best and I would love to see it streamlined a lot. For example just ask for a building to be built instead of finding/assigning builders to the task and micromanaging what they will do next. Dungeon Keeper comes t…
Unfortunately, the developer, Eugene Systems, didn't keep this in later games. The Wargame series are an excellent and very deep strategy games that further built on recon and other mechanics from Ruse, but it is, once again, a bit of a click-fest.
Still, I highly recommend both; Ruse is more on a casual side, and Wargame series if you want something more hardcore.
Looking at the team, they should have the capacity to pull it off.