Same thing happened to Bethesda games, each is more popular than the last and each has lost more of its magic.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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I’m wondering if better AI could save this genre. I always hated the fragility of any soldiers I wasn’t actively controlling, having idle workers, workers trying to chop wood in the middle of enemies, etc.
If the computer can take your high level commands but also put out logical low level ones, and maybe also punish high APM, it might restore some of the moderate-paced feel of the game.
Why would you punish high apm? Thats punishing people for being better.
If you free up actions, good players will use the free space for other options.
If it only taked 50% skill to defend an expandion, people will double expand or expand and attack at the same time.
It’s a question of whether to reward a player that can see that the opponent is using rock, take a step back, start building paper, and send them out even if they take time doing it; versus a player that just super-optimizes building an army of rock to send against armies of paper, and give them the best chance of winning by perfectly kiting every attack on the field.
There’s certainly an argument that some groups would like the tournament of APM, but I think a lot of people didn’t bother with high level StarCraft because they saw Koreans clicking 15 times a second and figured they can’t keep up. It’s like how fighting games work to demonstrate they’re not rewarding button mashing.
RTS games going mainstream are what killed my precious baby boy Command and Conquer.
God damn EA. Tiberium Wars was blegh, but what they did with Twilight.. Thats just molestation of a corpse.
I liked tiberium wars.
One of my favorite games actually.
Okay, and?
You're allowed to like and enjoy things, even bad things.. Hell, theres entire fandoms around liking bad things (like B-Movies), that doesnt make them less fundamentally bad. and it doesnt make you wrong for liking them.
There was one on Xbox original where you talk using the headset. It's military with tanks, etc. Its like "unit 3 attack objective A... All units hold... Unit 3 patrol... It was awesome but the campaign was short and as far as I remember there was no skirmish/play with PC.
Endwar! I remember yelling into the mic to attack because it never understood me lol
I think that is a separate genre of games now, I've seen a few different games like that.
Tom Clancy’s End War?
Star Wars: Empire at War is a classic with more nontraditional gameplay and light 4x elements (no diplomacy). The modding scene is rich too, with Thrawn's Revenge for the EU and multiple Clone Wars mods.
Going to throw a shout out for Against The Storm.
It takes my favorite part of Age of Empires (setting up the dang base) and distills it into the perfect game.
Now if someone can figure out how to make the other half (the combat) really good.
I like the concept of an RTS.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It's in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven't played much of it, so I can't give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.
It's also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven't been playing any RTS lately.
FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a "cursor character" that's like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There's also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you're commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there's the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.
Mount and Blade (Warband, WFAS, and Bannerlord) is another that I would say puts a unique spin on RTS. You are down on the ground with your troops and need to give orders like when to have certain troop groups attack, retreat, change formation, etc. You have the opportunity for your own skill as a fighter to matter, but once the battles reach a certain size, it becomes far more important to have a tactical advantage than to just be good at fighting yourself.
RTS games demand so much time and patience from the player to learn. What’s the proper build order? What’s the best unit composition? How many workers should get allocated for each resource? These things aren’t always obvious. And you don’t have time to read all descriptions because the time is ticking.
Not to mention good APM and battle tactics.
Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.
Important addition: the majority of people isnt equipped for this kind of game. Patience and ability to grasp this kind of thing is what makes the computer nerds the computer nerds.
Programming and sysadmin stuff isnt really popular either for that express reason.
Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.
They demand so much time and patience. Whats the best weapon load out, where to move to be safe from fire, how to avoid enemy snipers, trying to figure out the excessive complexity of what WSAD does.
RTS games are much easier to understand. You drag a box around your units, and click the enemy and watch them blow up. You don't need to follow youtube guides to understand that.
I think the key difference is that it's "easier" to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.
With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.
Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It's easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get "ok" with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.
One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.
My point is that there’s usually an easier level of entry for other types of games. You aim and shoot, and you get instant feedback if you succeeded or not. You don’t need to understand advanced meta to get this, although it can help.
For many RTS games it can all be dependent on how fast you expanded your economy, not on how you play your units. You can fail the entire game because of bad gameplay early.
You don't meed to have any advanced meta knowledge to play most games. There are options like playing against easier ai's or similarly skilled players.
Look at some Low Elo Legends from the game Age of Empires 2 on Youtube from T90. Most don't use advanced meta.
Heck, I as a kid never used advanced meta and had loads of fun.
The internet TELLS you that the latest meta is necessary and that you play suboptimally. But they're just optimizing the fun out of the game for you if you're not that kind of player.
This mentality is even worse in competetive shooters. People playing the latest "meta" even though they don't realize they don't even have the skill to pull that meta off. I wish the "internet" would just let players have fun in their own way. And that playing games "suboptimally" can still be just as fun and rewarding an experience.
/rant
I wish I could play a game where I could talk in real time instead of click, prepare attacks with my generals before the battle and settle a strategy, and where the fastest tabber-clicker is not the one who always wins.
Why? Because I’m getting old, that’s why, and anyone who ever played a competitive RTS knows exactly what it means.
Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can't really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.
I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.
Neither of these has base building, both are more of a "this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely" type game.
You have just perfectly explained why I loved Shogun so much! It was much more forgiving to learn, and to then excel at. Very much a fun RTS. Atleast the original was very well made, I should try the second one.
Shogun 2 is arguably the best TW game imo.
Thanks mate
RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.
Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.
Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.
moba feels like superfast mmorpg. the only reason i don't like it.
As far as I'm concerned, the genre peaked with Battle for Middle Earth II.
God is that ever true. A remake that's true to the spirit of the original could have all my money
IMHO also the pinnacle of LOTR-related video games.
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