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Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

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Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#201

Post by adammarples »

b3ing wrote: post #29
aetherspawn wrote: post #14

Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units. Also, one particularly aggravating part of the com…

Does it have a solo mode?

Me and my friends just play against the AI. We'd last 2 seconds against real players but we're slow and old RTS gamers and just have a good time stacking up a few AI opponents and smashing them.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#202

Post by samhclark »

stouset wrote: post #196
estearum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy wha…

I think M:tG was ruined by this too. Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero. Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine…

I think that's why I like prerelease (and sealed, generally) the most of any format. For day 1 prerelease, a lot of the players are reading the cards for the first time. For sealed later on, even if you know the meta for that set, it's more about playing the best deck with the cards you've got. Knowing the meta doesn't change your pool. (As opposed to draft, where if you don't know the meta you might inadvertently pass excellent cards and miss signposts other players will catch)

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#203

Post by adammarples »

izacus wrote: post #177
ghosty141 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the ear…

I'm not sure what are you trying to prove and refute in your post really. The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something. What was your goal with this post, really?

Understanding a bit about BAR but not really understanding those multilayer games, I found it a helpful counterpoint to the assertion that front is basically t1 spam then die. The idea that you should budget and save for your t2 con because your opponent also has to is useful, and the idea that greater strategies also open up after micro becomes second nature actually makes me want to play these multilayer lobbies more, whereas the initial post seemed quite negative and just intending to moan.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#204

Post by adammarples »

energy123 wrote: post #85
bob1029 wrote: post #13

If you are into playing with others, you might find a more stable community with FAF. https://www.faforever.com/

What's the toxicity level of the FAF community?

It's not as bad. I came from faf to bar and was an ok setons player but my first setons/supreme match on bar I was literally being flamed out of the gate for not being totally optimal from the jump. On faf it seems you will get flamed if you don't know the broad strokes but people will cover for you especially if you're lower rated.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#205

Post by adammarples »

mholm wrote: post #118

As someone who loved Supreme Commander, I really wanted to like BAR, but I found it felt like death by a thousand cuts. I last played more than a year ago, so things might be different, but the QoL felt really lacking.

There are so many qol things in bar that I would love to see in faf. Area mex build, for example. Sticky unit grouping, draw unit formation is essential. Reclaim/repair area. Unit and command queue jumping. That said there are a few faf ones I would like to see in bar too.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#206

Post by Lucasoato »

This game is so great, particularly the depth behind the different roles you can play. You could be in the frontline and fight for every cm, or be behind, following your carefully crafted recipes to build an exponential economy that will eventually sustain your team late game.

The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#207

Post by summa_tech »

chongli wrote: post #192
summa_tech wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can predict if you lose 2 or if you lose 3 pieces because of your next move, and you're expected to use this knowledge. The strategy of chess is about perfection in every turn. RTSes present continuous, larg…

The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their oppone…

Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more complicated situations it's still a lot less predictable than chess. Even the examples you're giving can only happen probabilistically outside very early game.

But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#208

Post by dimitar »

gloosx wrote: post #90
pohl wrote: post #2

Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.

Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because: 1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple. 2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures. The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate i…

There is an interesting technical reason why its a challenge (and they can't just swap in a supported library):

> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.

https://recoilengine.org/articles/netcode-overview/

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#209

Post by gesis »

stouset wrote: post #196
estearum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy wha…

I think M:tG was ruined by this too. Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero. Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine…

This is why I primarily play Old School 93/94 and other non-rotating, niche formats.

The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#210

Post by gavmor »

mboerwink wrote: post #66

I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes

The cold takes themselves are a fantastic proof of the care and attention the devs put into this game, as well as the depths of their design philosophy.
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