>2000s strategy game adds ships to the game
>no one plays on sea maps on multiplayer and ship combat ends up being a campaign only gimmick
Why was this so common?
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>2000s strategy game adds ships to the game
>2000s strategy game adds ships to the game
>no one plays on sea maps on multiplayer and ship combat ends up being a campaign only gimmick
Why was this so common?
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Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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Strategy players suffer from massive Dunning Kruger and can barely handle land combat
Pretty true but we just apes so be nice
We are land creatures living in agricultural society and most are not forturnate enough to enjoy water and air and thus the myth, history, and architypes with it. So such theme is often overlooked by both player and devs. Ocean production, resources, and defenses are often entirely missed and island hopping now require ferry because your worker don't have flippers, everything make it feel not like an integral part but a tack on.
Without it water units has to be OPing the land for someone to bother playing, and with map knowledge and player choice the land community easily isolate water player base.
>most are not forturnate enough to enjoy water and air
That's why most cities and the biggest cities are coastal, right?
how many people own boat or work in and out of boats?
The efficiency and volume of ships means it is not the majority in number, and so is the attention. There are more truckers than fishermen, sailors and oil rig workers and that is just one land job.
>build game around land combat
>make all objectives land based
>make all resources land based
>add seafaring as a gimmick
>it gets treated as a gimmick
Even in 4X games it's never implemented as a core feature unless it is the only way to do literally anything (spaceships, in which case land combat eats shit).
I think summarized it.
>Ground battle is sophisticated with 12 units and as many building
>naval battle are 2/3 units including the "transport" containing only 10 unit
>no map actually force you to use them or make boat a good idea
A shame I'm bad at Supreme Commander, it does have a good composition.
>I think they're also hard to balance.
Certainly, you've got far less unit, no building yet they all need a rock/paper/scissor treatment and a place in the grand scheme.
Doesn't help that IRL ship are far more versatile and you can't afford to lose many, do it right and you'll need a player just to manage fleet composition and tactic.
I'm going to park a Torrent off shore and tac your SMD to frick, then nuke you.
>devs don't even code AI for the ships so naval combat is disabled in skirmish vs. AI
it still hurts. these were the coolest and most satisfying to use ships i have ever seen. and they felt like ships, not a piece of artillery floating on water. they used cannons, cruise missiles, point defense guns to try and shoot each others' missiles down, it was beautiful to watch.
You forgot scale. Literally zooms out when you get to the ships.
2000s RTS with non-gimmick naval combat coming through.
Still pretty gimmicky, half of the boats are eclipsed by a couple in strategic value.
That's more about balance, no? You don't want your enemy to beat your economy by stealing all water and island resources or let him escape defeat by retreating onto or across the waters, restore his power and strike back. Or destroy your land shit with carriers or ship rockets. Players should constantly move their stuff across both land and water and I don't think I've seen another RTS with similarly high level of interaction between all of the elements.
Red Alert 3 may have had its fair share of faults & issues, but the game is admirable in its sheer dedication to promote naval gameplay as being near equal to terrestrial gameplay. It is rarely in anyone's "Top RTS" list but damn do I love the uniqueness of the gameplay. I had a ton of fun playing this back in the day. Somehow still has some of the prettiest water graphics in any RTS I've played. Too bad about it being locked to 30 FPS.
Also cute pic, fukken saved.
Newbs don't like them because you can't turtle in the open seas - no towers, no walls, no gates, no cliffs, just boring empty water. The few usual ship types (the ship, the anti-ship ship, the shore bombardment ship) lead to boring combat. Tryhards don't like them because all they do is get in the way of the fun stuff.
I think they're also hard to balance. Make them strong - suddenly every puddle is crawling with them. Make them weak and they become a bad joke that can't deal with basic riflemen in one salvo.
Makes me want a sea-based game in the age of sail where it's just either ships or weak infantry.
Factions would be colonial powers, pirates, and various native settlements.
Bases are on land but resources gathered must be shipped off-map before you get money, so turtling away from coasts kills you slowly.
Yeah I find water meta usually pretty annoying and boring.
On land if you lose a battle you can still have a chance with manoeuvring your smaller army on favourable terrain like mountains or hills as you say, use your cities as defence or maybe do some raiding in weak spots.
But the ocean is typically just 1 flat type of terrain, there is most often just 1 strategy and that is acquire critical mass, after that it is mostly impossible to challenge the enemy on sea. So it's maybe a single big battle or maybe even just losing a couple of ships early in the process that tips that scale and now you win or the enemy wins. You can't really raid because usually their navy will quickly maneuverer in and destroy your docks after you lose a decisive battle anyway.
To counteract this you could maybe add mechanics like ocean currents, ocean depths, weather or whatever. This is a lot of work to invest in a part of the game that is usually not favoured.
Ancient Conquest: Quest for the Golden Fleece, being a naval-focused game without land combat, had a bunch of interesting mobility aspects to it. Maps were typically labyrinths of islands, some of which were inhabited by monsters, some had active volcanoes. There were shallows that couldn't be crossed by heavier vessels. Wind strength and direction affected the speed of your units. One of the spells allowed you to sink parts of islands to deny building space and create new passageways. You could build fortresses (they required you to transport weapons into them first) to deny fishing spots and amber beaches, or towns to cast spells from them.
>make asiaticclicker
>half-ass janky, unbalanced sea warfare
>"wtf why is everyone playing land maps?!?"
ships are always broken
stats/cost they are always ridiculously strong but they are obviously limited in that they can't leave the water
so players just avoid the water because even if you win the sea you can't actually win
sea combat has a large degree of chance mitigated only by raw industrial output, so it's very boring without some sort of larger gimmick like rule the waves thing where you are the high sea lord and you get subjected to all sorts of historical bullshit outside your control and just try to do your best
It's like that irl too.
Tell that to the Germans.
you forgot
>custom map chads play an assortment of fun and innovative sea maps
Ah good old battleships. I used to play that with my mates. Way better map than battletanks.
Once I was playing a 2v3 and my mate decided to play as the Trader and feed me money. I filled my ship with torpedoes, so as soon as anyone on the other team appeared on my screen they would get instantly nuked.
Needless to say, my mates on the other team weren't very happy.
Because ships do frick all for you with no sea trade to protect.
The moment some proper RTS makes it absolutely critical to ferry shit across the open water is when you'll see intense naval action.
Victory at Sea Pacific
>blocks your path
Is Cossacks 3 a good game?
From what I understand, it's just a remaster of the first one.
> 18th century ships of the line unlocked
> one ship built
> gold income is cut in half
> moves slower than a turtle
> but literally BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT-tier rate of fire
> levels entire islands of buildings and people in three bursts
This game rocks.
basé
Loved how this monsters ate through your coal and iron stock in minutes, was nuts
Sea battles are way more tense than they have any right to be, it's great.
>all important things you need to kill / capture to win are on land
>water superiority usually just slows down / disadvantages your opponent while land superiority wins you the game
God I can hear the ship sound just by looking at it
>an expansion pack to a late 90's RTS game dares to start its campaign by forcing you to git gud with managing your navy or die trying for the first couple of missions
Just imagine the butthurt this decision would make today...
To be fair, TA let you build almost everything in the water. Most RTS games give you a shipyard and that's about it.
Most games can do without the sea, but can't go without land. So players treat land strategy as normal and sea as a gimmick, which is an entirely reasonable stance to take. But at the end of the day it's all to do with attitude and expectations. Brood War occasionally introduces island maps into its rotation for tournaments and ladder and then you see units like the Devourer that you would never see in a hundred normal games.
Because it was generally not core to the gameplay and ships usually couldn't affect land much.
In Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, losing naval dominance is usually almost as bad as losing air dominance; often it's worse. Once you're pushed out of the sea it's very hard to get back in, navies can pack a ton of AA and shields, they can bombard your base and reach quite far inland (Aeon missile ships can reach most land areas on most maps), and they can act as nuclear weapon launchers. Naval dominance is so important in fact that even on maps like Seton's Clutch that have land routes to the enemy, players will often forgo a land assault in favour of more ships.
In a game that makes naval combat a core component and makes naval dominance realistically powerful players won't neglect it.
The water civ dlc for Endless Legend feels like the most pointless dlc of them all.
Don't you like being the only player researching ships to fight npcs for small FIDSI gains dwarfed by focusing on just expanding and fighting normally?
Stupid me thought you could actually build your water civilization with cool fishmen
Sea areas tend to be negative space with very few resources. Fish is the most common, I remember AoE3 did gold with whales, but for the most part the ocean is not really worthwhile.
Honestly I think Red Alert did it the best, but even then it wasn't perfect.
Empire Earth solved this by allowing some types of late-game mechas to walk underwater or hover over it
no RTS has done naval combat better than WC2
when wc2 added boats it was the coolest thing ever.
too bad wc2 is kinda lame as an rts
The navies didn't matter enough to make them from what I remember. It wasn't like you got access to exclusive sea based resources, not even non-exclusive. The best thing was control of access to more land resources stuck on an island. The navies could also mostly only participate in naval battles. There weren't things like carriers, missile cruisers, etc. TA is the one game which has things like extensive sea based resources and construction and submarines but that game also fell short of having ships with range enough to fight in battles on land. A lot of these additions were games that weren't designed with combined arms in mind from the start. They were land battle games with navies added on later without mechanics to make them decisive.
Also many maps weren't designed with navies in mind. No maps with huge strategic bays, no maps with rivers that can support battleships, no maps with locations that navies can lock down, etc. The one kind of map where navies mattered were the archipelago maps, which again suffered because the game mechanics are designed for land combat and resource operations. Even stuff like victory conditions are dependent on land structures existing. There is nothing like a ship that can serve as a building to satisfy a victory condition or something. If the games had mechanics where sea based combat and resources operations could become most important navies would become better in RTS.
>He doesn't know about Cossacks and American Conquest
Many such cases