I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
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In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
121–130 of 194 posts
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad." One day maybe there'll be games with just one move... just to dumb games down to the lowest common denominator and not leave anyone out.
Nidhogg and One Finger Death Punch come to mind
surprisingly a good amount of depth from just one move, if played right
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
What was wrong with them? I found SupCom had some of the best controls in gaming; strategic zoom was a real game-changer (although many games have it now). I guess left- vs right-click for RTS is a big divisive one, but it doesn't take so long to get used to and there's nothing objective about which way is better.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#124I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
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.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#125Supreme 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 c…
It's interesting that you pick Cybran SACUs as your example; I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units. Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses? Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
Also FAF is amazing, if anyone reading this is interested I suggest you check out some replays on GyleCast:
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#126I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
Surprised no one here has mentioned Sanctuary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGfuLXAB1o), an upcoming RTS made by several guys in the Supreme Commander/FAF community.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#127One 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.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#128I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ Ashes of the Singluarity: 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/
"Ashes of the Benchmark", if you will.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#129I feel like there’s been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss any significant releases?
Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/ Ashes of the Singluarity: 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/
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.
Re: In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Haha. I completely forgot there was actual SupCom 2 and not straight to FA... yeah, it was bad.
In 2017 I overheard my physics TA who was like 6 years older than me mention SupCom to another TA during a lab. Was so weird to hear somebody mention it in the wild. I talked to him about it a bit, he ended up whizzing me straight thru all the labs the rest of the semester.