Zero-k: A libre sci-fi RTS game, with an economy based on metal and energy

I used to play Total Annihilation online back when I was in secondary school in the late 90s

We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP.

Eventually I got into creating new units for the game. You had to animate them with a C-like language, and I was trying to teach myself C at the time so that was part of my programming journey.

The 'Swedish Yankspankers' were a clan that had a channel on the IRC server, and my recollection, which may be wrong, is that they started building an app, 'TAreplay' that we could use to record and rewatch tournament games. People used to pass the exe around - not very secure, but those were the times!

It's amazing to me that those players hacking little apps together for themselves, have spawned a lineage of RTS engines and games that are still going all this time later.

A small but incredible example of hacker culture.

They said Macintosh Operating System, not macRos, but in Spring-Recoil games like these, you can basically program whatever you want using Lua widgets, and there's a fairly easy scripting for commands allowing for things like «when I press button X select half of the currently selected units, in a radius of Y around my mouse cursor, picking only the ground combat ones with more than Z% health».

I hadn’t heard of this before, and was excited that a new RTS was being announced, given that RTSes seem like a fading genre.

Of course it’s just a link to an older game. I guess the days of the RTS really are behind us. :(

BAR is more similar to the original Total Annihilation (and successors like Supreme Commander). It's a lot of similar units (e.g. tanks) with subtle variations, multiple tiers, with a focus on out-numbering your opponent.

Zero-K went a different route. They simplified the economy (metal cost = energy cost) but added a whole lot of mechanics like overdrive grids and made every unit unique. There is a lot of variety with mind-control, jumpjets, shields, unit-throwers, self-replicators, teleports, terraforming, etc.

Zero-K has been on Steam for a few years, I think BAR is working towards it. They are both good worthwhile games, they share some common elements, but they are both worth trying in their own right.

It basically came out a few years before SC2, being even less graphically demanding. (At which point my own PC with a GeForce 4 which, for comparison to today, had either 0.064 or 0.128 Go of VRAM, would struggle to run it.) Some graphic improvements have happened since then of course, and the requirements are now somewhat higher.

Now the issue is that it doesn't have the unit caps that SC2 does, and the number of players (now up to 16vs16 in a normal game, sometimes even 32vs32, while in 2009 8vs8 would have been the max), map sizes, and number of units (typically up to ~0.5k in 2006 compared to topping up at ~5k-10k today) only kept growing.

So if you want to play big team games, and have a much worse CPU than the average player, you might not have the best time in the endgame.