131–140 of 275 posts
It's an open source RTS game with really nice UI controls (line move, group move, circle guard) and good unit AI reducing micro burden. Makes it quite hard to go back to more primitive RTS controls in other games.
It would also score very highly on all of those metrics and has a big teams scene.
I think RTS can evolve, but I don't think you can compete with SC2 in the style where it excels, after more than a decade of balance patches. You can make games with a different focus though. SC2 is a short (~10-20 minutes) 1 on 1 APMs contest. (APM=actions per minutes). APMs are more than fast clicking. No pro player managed to do everything they know they should do. It is about prioritization. Even I, a modest gold…
The article ignores the Total War style of RTS which is more relaxed. I'm not sure if we should consider them in the same genre as Starcraft though.
The reason you separate it there is that in a strategy game you should be able to win the war while losing every battle. You can't do that unless you can produce units, meaning if you plan well you can outproduce your enemy and win even though he kills more of your stuff every time you fight.
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 breako…
The requirement for online multiplayer (while dealing with hundreds of units) is the bigger obstacle. Especially if they're working with Unity. Pathfinding (in a way that lets large swarms of units move smoothly through narrow choke points) is a non-trivial problem, too.
Then there's the design problems. How to get away from standard build orders, and how to make a game that's more accessible than Starcraft but still allows high-level competitive play.
I agree with everything here. The learning curve is too steep for RTS in general: it is not clear how to improve. It’s also not fun that there is no mechanism to cap APM. I’ve also always dreaded starting 1v1 due to the mental stress. I get the same playing Go. I really wish there were more competitive 2v2 or more. Anyone here remembers natural selection I and II? They were hybrid RTS/FPS where a single player would…
1. Look into what build orders you should use for different strategies.
2. Watch the replays of your games afterwards.
You d be surprised how much that helps.
I used to love RTS games (until I discovered Total War) and I have to say I'm a bit taken aback by this assumption that playing an RTS game must necessarily mean that the player is chasing some ultra-high performance standard, quantifiable in APM. I get that the author is a competitive player, but the vast majority of players are casual players who don't thnk of games as a career. If the reason no new RTS games are being made is that they are not very good for e-sports, then that's just sad. I would really have thought that making a good game that is pleasant to play, would do the trick. Maybe it's the ultra-competitive edge that's actually driving players away and keeping the incentives to make more such games low? If game procuders are thinking of how to make the next big e-sports RTS hit, instead of a game that many people will want to play, then yes, I can see how they are finding design constraints hard to satisfy.
I felt that Company of Heroes was a nice evolution of the genre and minimized the need for incredibly high APM. For those who have not played Company of Heroes it is more about unit positioning and microing those units effectively. It requires a different set of skills than other RTS games. Unfortunately I have not seen this catch on. Relic, the developers of CoH are working on Age of Empires IV and so I hope they wi…
Any chance to include what RTS stands for? I opened the article, reading the heading and the first two sentences, encountering RTS 3x but still not having a hint of context, I closed the page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'm most definitely not a "first time player" with 566 hours sunk so far! I did try Bob's and Angel's, but I found the formulas so nonsensical that it broke the "immersion" for me. I think I'd be more interested in a mod that added something that fits the game world and just... extended it a little. E.g.: adding aluminium and titanium, not 50 new raw materials that inter-convert into each other in absurd ways -- loop…
It does tweak nuclear a little, giving you a way to use reprocessing side projects for fusion power near the later part of the tech tree.
In terms of circuits, the one area in which I always use them is to control oil refining so I didn't end up capping on heavy/light oil but also didn't turn it all into petrol and leave myself without the resources to make lubricant or rocket fuel.
Space Exploration pretty much forces you to use circuits too in controllijy what goes to your space stations/other planets but it's a long mod with most of the content basically starting after a full vanilla playthrough
Something that isn't significantly touched on here that most RTSes neglect is physical logistics. That is, actually getting resources from the point of collection to the point of consumption. In most RTSes, once you collect resources they essentially go into a magic resource counter in the cloud. You can collect wood on one side of the map, and instantly create a building with that on the other side of the map. I wou…
Adding another game with good logistics to the list of games: The Wargame series from Eugen (the most recent one being Wargames: Red Dragon) Logistics is a huge part of it, your armies can run out of ammo, or be stranded without fuel - there are dedicated units used for resupply. Supply dumps, supply columns, and their protection, is a big part of the game as well.