1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001)

What you're missing is that there have been many titles that have reduced the mechanical demands in pursuit of "greater accessibility", and have been even less popular. That's been most RTSes over the last 15 years, really. They're always talking about how they wanna get rid of the clickiness or base building or what have you. "We're not gonna be APM heavy like Starcraft!" they crow, as they quickly fall into obscurity while Starcraft remains.

It's not wrong to want the genre to be more accessible or fun, or less frustrating, but getting rid of technical and tactical options by reducing control of your units is generally a bad way to go about that.

> People often find it really compelling to get into these games and do the singleplayer stuff. The multiplayer experience didn't live up to that. Limited strategic choices and a demanding micro are not what most people liked when they first entered the genre.

Nah, what points the way forward is SC2's co-op mode. That was extremely popular among more casual players -- being more popular than ranked ladder at least for a time -- despite getting only limited support as a new feature in LotV.

And the way SC2 co-op worked is that it had the same mechanical inputs of course, but it actually had less strategy, not more; similar to campaign AI's, the AI in co-op mode is largely scripted and predictable, no scouting and very little reacting required. People loved it!

Well, it is. They've been a lot less successful. "The fire was gone from the genre" isn't how things work. SC2 co-op is a good example of this -- if something is good and polished, people will play it, have fun, spread it around, etc.

In contrast, you could look at the CoH series, which is one of the many games that went for being less APM heavy (albeit there's still a fair amount of micro involved). CoH2 is decently popular, sure, but much less so than AoE2 or SC2. The CoH/DoW branch is one subgenre of RTS that's less demanding, but you could look at the C&C and TA-like branches the same way. And yeah, they're moderately popular, but less so than the more demanding games. Why?

> It's more so that the traditional "Random Map Battle" mode is really devoid of strategy for the majority of players because you have so few real choices to make. You don't get to do much strategy. You probably have a build order for several minutes. And then want to rush. That's almost always the optimal move until you're very, very talented. I can't think of any competitive multiplayer focused RTS games that tried to address that successfully.

This is just an argument from ignorance. The truth is that even APM-heavy games like AoE2 or Starcraft have plenty of strategy. Well, maybe not the really cheesy games where someone immediately goes all-in, but the ones that go beyond a few minutes, yes.

Like, these words

> You probably have a build order for several minutes. And then want to rush.

don't even make any sense. In the case of Starcraft, if the game is several minutes in, attacking is no longer a "rush". It's just...an attack. Which you'd expect people to do in an RTS. And even early attacks aren't necessarily rushes.

The words you've put in here is like stumbling into a discussion about Counterstrike and claiming that the game is nothing but people using the AWP forever and ever, or that you can win every game of PUBG or Fortnite by doing nothing but hiding. You're simply wrong, and advertising that you don't really know what you're talking about.

> I'm amused because I feel that was MY point. Single player (and naturally also co-op) content against scripted scenarios was the best part of RTS games. It's where the genre was born.

If that's what you like most, that's fine, but it's true that these involve less strategy, rather than more. You don't have to outsmart someone, you don't have to scout them out and react, all the while they're scouting you out and reacting to you. The computer's on rails and there's usually a dozen different ways to exploit how dumb the AI is. That can be good fun, just like any other single player game, but it's not very strategic at all, because your opponent isn't actually strategizing against you.

> My point is that you DON'T get to do that with Random Map Battle RTS games in competitive multiplayer. Instead you largely just get punished for not doing the meta plan; or worse, get punished because your execution of the meta plan is worse.

People get 'punished' if they have poor strategies or poor execution of strategies, which is as it should be, yes. There's nothing special about being "on meta", what's meta is usually just what people have found to be effective -- at lower levels, the professional meta tends to be markedly less dominant, with all kinds of other strategies being effective that wouldn't be at higher levels. I'm considerably higher ranked than average, but I still lose to plenty of stuff that would never work at a pro level.

The netcode was written so that players only send their inputs along with a timestamp (The "timestamp" actually being a frame counter). The server would then relay those inputs with the timestamp to other players. The client maintains snapshots of the game state and would then re-run the game logic from that timestamp given the new input.

I handled clients falling behind by making the server reject any inputs that were more than 500ms (Really, 30 frames) behind the current time. The server would send a message to the client that essentially said "You're lagging, here's the current frame counter and current state of the game"

Granted, this approach really only worked for my game because the entire game state could be squished to ~300 bytes. But it had the added benefit that it prevented players from cheating using a lag switch. They couldn't have a malicious client that sat and listened to what other players were doing and then send a bunch of back-dated inputs to put itself in an advantageous position.