They could move on to VR and turn in similar to what black and white looks like or like in the Enders Game movie. The game need to evolve though. They need to make rts long term so you have to grind and build up over time. Maybe make the gameplay more continuous like an mmo where you have to continually manage and plan over much longer times.
Someone that realizes that a good campaign is all that's needed
Remove asiatics, streamers and women.
Neuralink will remove your physical APM limitations and you will truly be able to play RTS bound only by your capacity to comprehend the orders you wish to give.
the games themselves dont need big changes. theres just a mindset that died, where it was okay for games to not sell gangbusters.
i guess it happened when supreme commander 2 was struggling to find a publisher.
>we want a platform agnostic api >"what do you mean the AMD cards everybody uses on linux have sunset opengl optimization back in 2013 and now perform like 7 generations behind their nvidia equivalents on opengl tasks?"
Autism/moronation
nothing, rts games split into city builders and mobas
don't pretend you'd buy some new rts game coming out. you'll just say it's nostalgia bait. zoomers ceratinly won't buy them.
aoe's genre is done
This
Mobas captured the sweaty micro crowd, 4x captured the autistic buildgays.
The sphere of overlap between these two groups is very small, and these groups kinda fricking hate eachother.
There's no more reason to make an RTS instead of the other two.
the neighing sounds? they're probably stock sounds used by a shit ton of movies and games. I've heard them in lots of different places and i don't mind. I wish DE had kept the melee sounds though. They removed a sound that sounds like someone sharpening a knife with another knife.
yeah, I know they're used a lot but I always associate them with RO and I hate it because hearing them makes me want to go back. I wish they'd left the sounds in SE alone in general, they were good as is.
agree, especially the campaign voices. They're very nostalgic for me for some reason, mainly the William Wallace campaign (which was included in the demo edition). BTW you can get the voices back using a mod. Not sure about the other sounds.
Something like a mix between Pikmin and Warcraft 3, a more casual approach to RTS where you don't have to worry too much about micromanaging units or build orders. Third person perspective where you control one character with an army of AI controlled units that you can boss around with simple input commands.
Build a town to produce various new units, assign some units to guard it then wander around the map killing monsters to get XP and items then either fight other players or bosses in PvE.
Have an appealing medieval fantasy setting and visuals with memorable units and characters.
Good luck.
Sweatlords in RTS don't exist. It's more about vocal shitters insisting that they exist. In reality, RTS scenes are very friendly and full of boomers and people who teach. And if the game had Coop and PvE, hardcore RTS players would still be playing it whatever the mode is.
In reality, shitters are just shitters, and no matter how casual or braindead or competitive the game is, it's just about inferiority complex and the innability to learn RTS or in depth games, read: Don't really play them.
As if there's a divsion between campaign gays and compgays: reality is RTS players play whatever and wouldn't mind it if happens or not.
>writes an entire post to out himself as the very thing he denies exist
you are one dumbfrick, and i say this as someone who loves sc2 ladder to this day
This, what is with devs looking to become the next SC2? A tiny proportion of people actually play competitive, the majority want to dick around in singleplayer or custom games.
SC2 had a good campaign even if the story is absolutely awful. Scenarios of the missions and the upgrades are all good. Main thing SC2 does wrong is how they neutered UMS style games. Also it has a really fun coop mod with a lot of ways to modify and add challenges, but it has a really cancerous monetization scheme that holds it back from being an superb coop mode. The esports thing with started with SCBW, anyways. SC2 was just so happened to be around and the big thing with JustinTV started
Many ways really, even a series of skirmish maps can be workable as long as it's surrounded by quality writing and good maps but generally by setting up interesting scenarios and objectives that feel good both to accomplish and to perform
Of course addition of extra layers like upgrades that change your units and stay consistent between stages or cool powerups tied to difficult locations in risk styled campaigns are also possible
for me its unit choices and tech that make each campaign interesting. Like if I want to specialize in spider mechs for my army let me do that and get unique upgrades that make them even more fun
I wanted to write "wc3" first. It has weak rpg mechanics with its hero focus and inventory. Totally unique at the time. Spellforce is obviously much more rpg
4 months ago
Anonymous
having a hero unit and an inventory is not rpg
4 months ago
Anonymous
RPG MECHANICS. I NEVER SAID RPG. FRICKING HELL.
OK AGAIN. ARE THERE ANY OTHER GOOD RTS/RPG HYBRIDS LIKE SPELLFORCE A GAME INSPIRED BY THE WC3 HYPE (THE GAME THAT AUGMENTED RTS BY INTRODUCING RPG MECCHANICS)
RTS doesn't need fixing as a genre. I'm not sure how it could become super popular again, RTS - by virtue of its core mechanics - is going to require a lot of game knowledge and also a lot of mechanical skill. There's a daunting learning curve and a lot of difficulty, a typical "classic" RTS probably has enough to learn and is difficult enough that most people will never get close to learning it all, especially acquiring the skill required. It's a hard genre and it's not going to be as popular as basic b***h, easy stuff. You can see this with other genres like fighting games too, they've got their audience but they're also hard games that are difficult to learn properly and don't get massive mainstream success because of it.
I'm not so sure. I've always been iffy on RTS campaigns. They all feel extremely limited and artificial. Start the first mission, you're only allowed to make workers and the most basic of unit. Play another mission and now you get to make 1 more unit. Next mission you just get 3 dudes you have to micro across the map for, no base, no economy, no actual army. 4th mission you get to build a new building and the 3rd unit type and so on. Maybe you get to like the 2nd to last mission and you finally have the full kit available to you and get to play a proper match with all the games mechanics available, then the campaign is over. Kind of sucks.
My problem is that the campaign is like playing a castrated tutorial version of the game for 90% of its duration and that sucks. MP is actually the full game. Skirmish against AI is also the full game but AI in most RTS games I've played can't really keep up with the genre so playing against it is either a compstomp which gets boring fast or the AI outright cheats with more resources, faster production and so on which can make fighting it arbitrarily difficult but at the same time destroys part of the appeal of a strategy game when you're no longer fighting on even ground.
One negative aspect about RTS games is that there'z absolutely no downtime, even the most fast paced shooter, there are several moments of you just camping, waiting for some thing, talking a quick break, but in RTS if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing, it's just too demanding, it's exhausting to play.
You're not good enough to get matched up against people who have 300APM, so you don't need 300APM to beat them either.
This is true, though. SP has always been what's essentially a training session before going MP. Dripfeeding you tech and units, increasing challenge curve.
Campaigns where it's ACTUALLY something else were, are and will be rare. People praise Rise of Nations/DoW Dark Crusade for it's risk-style SP which are essentially just skirmish games with very few extra steps, which I have always considered dumb. I can't find any fun in exploiting objectively dumb AI, especially when I know all of the maps already AND I get an advantage in the form of stronger commander or honor guard. Sometimes that is enough to win a fight without even really building your base.
Multiplayer doesn't just extend a game's lifespan, it is THE lifespan. Every single successful traditional RTS has/had active multiplayer for a reason.
Your anxiety actively kills RTS.
The only way for a game to be predominantly SP is for it to have a large degree of replayability, like Total War or Paradox games. Or actual choices in the game.
CoH2 does pretty well despite releasing after Dota2 and LoL.
>Let others play MP.
Too bad nobody does hence why RTS is dying you stupid frick
less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
>less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
so who's to blame? Surely not MP players. It's not my fault that you suck, don't want to improve and don't want to accept that you're the only one to blame. In a game with MMR, this really should not be an issue.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>CoH2 does pretty well despite releasing after Dota2 and LoL.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Impressive, very nice, now let's compare it to other RTS games
>The only way for a game to be predominantly SP is for it to have a large degree of replayability
Or you don't have to play the same game forever and can move onto the next one
Then you can't "kill a genre", which seems to be the idea.
Buy it and frick off. Let others play MP. You'll surely enjoy your scripted as frick 6 hour campaign.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Let others play MP.
Too bad nobody does hence why RTS is dying you stupid frick
less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
4 months ago
Anonymous
>less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
4 months ago
Anonymous
citation on that statistic? Because even when I was 14, I learned how to set up computers in lan with my friends because we were so fricking hype to play warcraft 2 multiplayer.
Because once again, presentation and getting to actually play the game is EVERYTHING
Skirmish maps by themselves without that are only good for messing around with a few friends and tormenting (or being tormented by) the AI
AoE2 still nails campaigns. The newest ones, Armenia/Persia/Georgia, were all kino. Some missions are better than others, but the overall experience is great. Glad they are still putting out good campaigns.
Scripting as in what? In general I thought the recent three campaigns had a lot to do in each mission, it wasn't just build up base and kill enemy base every time. Supporting allies, optional enemies, stuff like that.
One of the Armenian missions left a big impression on me, it was a 2v2 but at one point one of the enemies declares a ceasefire. If you accept, it lets you focus on the one enemy for around 20 minutes, but once the ceasefire is up you have to face a much more powerful enemy, so you better hope you did a lot of damage. With a major bridge chokepoint, an ally to defend from one of the enemies, man that was a fun mission.
Problem is everyone wants you to KEEP spending on the game. Just getting game sales is not good anymore due to "leaving money on the table" moronic mindset. Hence additional monetization in every single way.
>Make a good campaign >Then make a good expansion pack with more shit and another campaign >You get more cash for doing less
It's almost like this approach worked well before
In every game that is not Starcraft, APM is useful but its about meaningful decisions, map control, intel, and execution rather than move things quickly. You can play slow but precise and win. SC on the other hand, its about moving units back and forth, and doing attention checks due to the game design.
Everytime someone mentions APM is talking about Starcraft, because that's what Starcraft is about. Like shooters to aim %
Some of the best AoE2 players are 'slow' by pro standards. You can click 1000 times a minute but that won't help you at all if you don't know what you are doing or don't have a plan of action. And no, following build orders doesn't count.
>play ranked >land on your "natural" rank >now you play with people with the same APM
And that's assuming APM is all. I always wonder why this argument exists, in other games, let's say league majority of players are between silver and plat, they don't play like gods they still play it, and yet when it comes to RTS people watch top 1% of players play and decide they're not that good they won't bother playing.
There isn't much to fix, they got it right the first time. The genre doesn't really gain anything from better tech gameplaywise, and games like BW and AoE2 have unique quirks that would never be copied intentionally today. I don't think we'll ever see another RTS with workers that are useful the way SCV's are in the first ~5 minutes of a BW match for example, the obsession with "streamlining" tracks everything to becoming more like League or Dota. You'd have to make a game that's both beautiful/pleasant to look at as well as implement counter-intuitive gameplay hooks to pull people away from AoE2, and I don't think anyone is going to figure it out. Even if they did, the audience could easily turn their nose up at it for being archaic, being gameplay that's only acceptable when it's grandfathered in.
There are tons of indie RTS games coming in the recent years, but all of them look like they belong to 25 years ago mechanically. There's nothing that could challenge late C&C or AoE. RTS needs more than indie devs.
One negative aspect about RTS games is that there'z absolutely no downtime, even the most fast paced shooter, there are several moments of you just camping, waiting for some thing, talking a quick break, but in RTS if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing, it's just too demanding, it's exhausting to play.
>is that there'z absolutely no downtime
Sounds like a personal problem. do you expect the other player/ai to just sit on its ass and wait for you to catch up?
He just explained the main reason RTS is not a huge mainstream thing, and he's 100% right.
Most people don't enjoy the korea-bot autism where the apex of gameplay is to condition yourself into becoming a literal build-order script.
With no down-time it also means that gameplay will require less strategy in the moment as well, simply because it's limited how much more you can multi-task if the gameplay already has 0 downtime for you to strategize mid-game. You can't really make huge pivots in strategy without losing out on the 300 apm autism so any changes you do has to be fairly small to not mess up your macro-game.
>I'm going to sit in my base where it's comfy >no I'm not going to expand on the map I need to be prepared first >it will take me literally 2 hours to max out because I only built 20 workers >nice now that I have a completed tech tree I will pick the most expensive unit with no counters to mass produce >time to lean back and max zoom out to reward myself to an epic battle while I pat myself on the back for thinking of another art of war-esque play
if I can't do this the game is esports without real strategy. if you attack me before I can complete this you are a tryhard. only easy computer and human players who agree to play the same way I do understand how rts is meant to be played.
>take the Low ELO Legend pill >play a chill city builder for 2 hours in ranked until we have a gentlemanly skirmish in the middle before going back to city building
Age of Empires 2 has tons of downtime, you just have to get your ELO low enough
That's what I don't get from anxiety gays
Ranked systems are exactly for that. You're always gonna play with people as good as you. If you're bad or slow, you're gonna play with people that are the same as you. There's no pressure to climb as it will come naturally with every game.
I mean that's the point of a Ranked match. Nobody really cares about you being bronze or platinum but you.
because for a lot of these people, their skill level is lower than the bottom
and smurfs will frick you at every elo even if it's not exactly a common occurrence
>take the Low ELO Legend pill >play a chill city builder for 2 hours in ranked until we have a gentlemanly skirmish in the middle before going back to city building
Age of Empires 2 has tons of downtime, you just have to get your ELO low enough
One negative aspect about RTS games is that there'z absolutely no downtime, even the most fast paced shooter, there are several moments of you just camping, waiting for some thing, talking a quick break, but in RTS if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing, it's just too demanding, it's exhausting to play.
Play quickplay, protip: quickplay matches have a hidden ELO that nobody knows about and nobody cares about. It's the only place you can find people who legitimately wait until 200 population before sending their army forward anywhere that's not Arena.
When I discovered this, my enjoyment of the game went up immensely
>You're always gonna play with people as good as you.
That's kind of the thing. If you're at a particular ranking you always have to play your best or you go on a losing streak and people don't like that. You play the game more and naturally get better, but this never changes. Whenever you slack a bit, it's assrape time. Take a 2 week break to play another game so you're a bit out of practice, assrape time. Want to play a new race that you're not so good at, assrape time. You might wish to call this your "rank correcting" but most people don't like losing 10 games in a row until their rank is "corrected" no matter how you phrase it.
If the game matched you against whoever was available randomly rather than based on skill, then your improvement at the game would directly be visible in your win rate and how well you do in an average game. If you've gotten good and slack a bit, you're probably still better than the average. Play a new faction, again you're not playing at your peak but having game knowledge and good core mechanics will probably mean you're not going to be terrible either. Of course the flip-side to this is that being bad at the game is also going to be more punishing. If you're legitimately bad and significantly below average then you're not going to be relegated to the steering-wheel controller RTS underhive, you're going to be matched against people randomly and most of them are going to push your shit in. In any case getting good would feel a lot more rewarding since being good = winning more, whereas with ELO matchmaking being good doesn't change how much you win or need to tryhard and the moment you slip the system is eager to apply "correction" instantaneously.
Quick match is the same shit, except they don't show you a shiny badge. The same kind of ELO matchmaking is going on in the background. You can of course play FFA, team games and so on as well. I don't really know how FFA is handled but team games tend to be handled with an ELO system too so it's not much different.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>You're always gonna play with people as good as you.
That's kind of the thing. If you're at a particular ranking you always have to play your best or you go on a losing streak and people don't like that. You play the game more and naturally get better, but this never changes. Whenever you slack a bit, it's assrape time. Take a 2 week break to play another game so you're a bit out of practice, assrape time. Want to play a new race that you're not so good at, assrape time. You might wish to call this your "rank correcting" but most people don't like losing 10 games in a row until their rank is "corrected" no matter how you phrase it.
If the game matched you against whoever was available randomly rather than based on skill, then your improvement at the game would directly be visible in your win rate and how well you do in an average game. If you've gotten good and slack a bit, you're probably still better than the average. Play a new faction, again you're not playing at your peak but having game knowledge and good core mechanics will probably mean you're not going to be terrible either. Of course the flip-side to this is that being bad at the game is also going to be more punishing. If you're legitimately bad and significantly below average then you're not going to be relegated to the steering-wheel controller RTS underhive, you're going to be matched against people randomly and most of them are going to push your shit in. In any case getting good would feel a lot more rewarding since being good = winning more, whereas with ELO matchmaking being good doesn't change how much you win or need to tryhard and the moment you slip the system is eager to apply "correction" instantaneously.
You're saying that you want to play a game but don't want to lose at all?
You want to play a game but ONLY against people that will let you win half, if not all the time?
What about the other guy?
4 months ago
Anonymous
No? Are you projecting?
4 months ago
Anonymous
You're saying that it's a problem to lose, and specifically that people feel bad about losing, so they won't play a game at all, and it's a problem
Is it really a problem the "lose" state?
I wouldn't feel anything if I couldn't lose. I know the other guy is trying his best. I WANT to try his best. Losing slow or fast doesn't change the fact that it was a fair match. Whenever I lose I think about what can be optimized and what did I learn about it. Certainly, there's a skill ceiling for me though, where I really have a hard time breaking out. But up to that point, the game was played, fair and square. That's kinda the point of a game.
Some games though aren't fun at any level, but that's game design. What I mean is that I don't really get your rant. >In any case getting good would feel a lot more rewarding since being good = winning more, whereas with ELO matchmaking being good doesn't change how much you win or need to tryhard and the moment you slip the system is eager to apply "correction" instantaneously.
That would be an ELO system failure, where as in LoL it's not even about skill but "engagement" and that's kinda bullshit
In any case, any match you play, the game wasn't rigged and it is what it is (unless you're playing CoD lmao that shit IS RIGGED and bullets do less damage from time to time)
4 months ago
Anonymous
I'm explaining why people have "anxiety" when playing 1v1 RTS, did you even read the entire reply chain? Yes, people would rather win than lose. Is that a big revelation to you? When you play any 1v1 if you lose you know it's on you, you lost because the other guy is better than you and a lot of people don't like their entertainment showing them that they suck ass. You can see this in what games become massively popular, if they're competitive MP then they're not 1v1, they're team games where everyone can screech about how it's the team's fault even when it isn't or they're massive 100-player FFA clusterfricks where random luck is as important as skill if not more so, therefore every player can cope with rarely winning.
>I wouldn't feel anything if I couldn't lose. I know the other guy is trying his best. I WANT to try his best.
OK but then you're not the guy with 1v1 anxiety and you're not the guy who wants to play 2h long sim city matches either because that's not "trying your best" so this discussion is clearly not about you.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Yes, people would rather win than lose. Is that a big revelation to you?
Kinda it is, i'm really surprised about the anxiety problem >you lost because the other guy is better than you and a lot of people don't like their entertainment showing them that they suck ass.
Well, it's an RTS. It's a versus mode, like fighting or an arena shooter. I would guess people know what they're getting into.
Reading into the thread I realize that the anxiety seems deeper, but is it truly that much of a thing IRL? I mean, every RTS has AI and SP activities, but people buy their games for what they are, not for what they want them to be, and RTS are multiplayer at the half, or even at the core.
Meaning, for instance, If we entered a Street Fighter thread, people is indeed b***hing about something in the game, but community knows it's a fighting game, and wouldn't even entertain the idea of a "turtling" chill not even trying match. And even so, they DID add a single player campaign with a Beat Em Up style. So even then, there's something for everyone.
But in RTS threads the anxiety is to die for, and rife with negativity or outright denial. Strange.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Competitive MP anxiety is a huge thing. It's not even RTS exclusive but RTS games are big and complex and mechanically difficult to play well so it's very applicable, look at other games like fighting games too. Player population is tiny compared to shit like DotA & clones, CS, CoD, battle royales and so on. All the massively popular competitive MP is either team-based or FFA, not 1v1. 1v1 is extremely unpopular in comparison.
Shit like turtling is genre-specific and for low skill players it's a symptom of not being able to play well (certain factions in certain games can actually turtle well after all), I don't play fighting games myself so I don't know much about the genre but I'm sure there are things bad fighting game players have their own things to complain about. I'm sure there are people out there complaining about character X or Y being OP or whatever combo being impossible to block or some shit even though it's just a symptom of their lack of skill and not actually true. There are other things to consider too, a fighting game match is shorter, maybe it's easier to swallow when you lost in 2 minutes and move on than it is when you lose after 10-15 mins, or 30 or 1h+ even.
>I would guess people know what they're getting into.
They do and that's why they don't get into it, hence the general lack of popularity and only having a small audience.
what game is this?
That's AoE2 DE
4 months ago
Anonymous
Mechanical simplification for PvP is cope. It doesn't matter how simple and slow you make it, if the other dude you're playing against does it better and quicker than you then you still get your shit pushed in even if the game is simple. All you're achieving in the end is making a duller, more boring game with a lower skill ceiling.
Then it's all about how RTS are niche and will always be niche because they're complex games for "moderately" competitive people.
It's not bad though. They are what they are. Like Dwarf Fortress, people that is into it it's because it's complex and autistic, and not for the casual passerby.
What actually need is to be even MORE complex, more indepth, and with much more options. Campaign is nice but only if the base of the game is already superb. Campaigns are just tutorials and challenges, if the underlying game is already good.
Case in point, listening to casuals is bad. They never liked them in the first place. But nothing stops anyone from joining in and learn the game. If it was the other way around, being super casual, super friendly and super "le comfy" it comes around as dull, shallow, and in fact, not even a real game inside the genre. So there's no point in listening what people that aren't into it have to say, if you really want to do a red blooded new RTS like AoE2, SupCom, or C&C.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Then it's all about how RTS are niche and will always be niche because they're complex games for "moderately" competitive people.
Yeah, pretty much.
>What actually need is to be even MORE complex, more indepth, and with much more options.
Yeah, I'd like this. Especially on the economic / macro side I'd like to see something a bit more in-depth, for instance having an economy that's a bit more complicated than "resources go in and out of universal, global storage" like actually having mechanics to move things from source to destination and so on. Think of it like some sort of Factorio-lite thing, not as much depth as Factorio itself of course but maybe if you want to build a tank then you need to make an engine and a gun and a chassis and take them to the tank factory rather than the tank just costing X credits or whatever. It would have to be pretty basic to fit in a single RTS match but it would be quite interesting. Spellforce 3 does something kind of like this.
I remember playing some early access demo of an RTS which actually had shit like conveyor belts and you'd have to process and smelt ore and such in order to get resources. It was meant for 3v3 where each player had their own role, like one guy was supposed to build the base, one guy handles mining and the smelting / resource processing machinery and the 3rd guy controls the army. That was pretty interesting as well but it was extremely rough around the edges.
4 months ago
Anonymous
4 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah, I know about it. IIRC DORF is also supposed to have some similar elements, but neither is out yet.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>listening to casuals is bad. They never liked them in the first place
Casuals are 90+% of the people that buy/bought rts games and are even the majority of people that still play them. Ignoring them in favor of e-sports gays is what all but killed the genre
4 months ago
Anonymous
These same casuals are the kinds of people who think the normal ai in any rts is too hard. They're fricking stupid and don't actually learn how to play the game.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>They're fricking stupid and don't actually learn how to play the game.
But they're still the primary audience. That's not say you should make games easier in some kind of attempt to appeal to them. Fighting games have already definitively proven that their is no correlation between how easy a game is and how much casuals like it. But having things for these players to do besides an endless ranked grind like campaigns and a scenario editor are important if you want your rts to succeed.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>But they're still the primary audience.
Lmao they're not
They are not my dude
You want sales doing what doesn't sell what you sell. You want to sell something else.
Even if it was your audience, you still don't listen what they say, you give them what they need.
4 months ago
Anonymous
It is the audience though, the sales audience. >sell game >90% of sales don't play game beyond a minimal point >10% continues to play multiplayer
if you only appealed to the 10% you get way less sales. Appeal to that 90% and you get way more sales. Makes no sense to appeal to the esports stuff exclusively.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Fighting games have already definitively proven that their is no correlation between how easy a game is and how much casuals like it.
Dude did you get the memo? Fighting games are dead.
Shooters replaced them as staple PvP genre.
4 months ago
Anonymous
You vill buy the RTS
You vill get stomped
You vill not get it easier
And you vill be happy
4 months ago
Anonymous
But people do argue about the importance of single player content in fighting games and for exactly the same reason. Fighting game devs have been gutting the mechanical complexity of their games for quite a while now precisely to try and make things more accessible and improve player retention. And one of the primary counter proposals against this strategy is to provide more robust single player (or at least non-tryhard multiplayer) content rather than fixating on how hard the game supposedly is.
And this isn't even exclusive to vidya, let alone RTS games. I used to get nervous before soccer games as a kid. Regardless of the context, no one ever wants to frick up and lose.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Some genres are just really susceptible to small differences in skill compounding exponentially during a match, and this causes frustration for the majority of potential players.
RTS is a particularly egregious case.
Personally, I've only really been interested in single player campaigns partly because of this reason.
4 months ago
Anonymous
it's entirely an ego thing. anyone that complains about elo systems or skill based matchmaking is really complaining because they don't want to be told that they are bad. with strategy games it is even worse because people see the word "strategy" and think "I'm a smart person so I expect to be pretty good at this game." then they get sent to wood league and can't accept that it's their fault. look at the shit that goes on at the absolute bottom of the ladder. it's impossible that anyone with room temperature iq who is even playing half seriously can't win against people playing like this.
Your downtime is during resource collection. Having no resources is the moment to breath and do the mental checklist: your main resource should always be close to zero. 'Strategy' players now have been conditioned to 'make number go up' instead of keep it down.
>Your downtime is during resource collection.
No. If you currently have no resources for army you should harass enemy. Even with the single drone, forcing opponent to lose APM dealing with that. You APM bar should be filled to your max all the time. Its the name of game: who can click faster.
>if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing,
This is how I know you've never played RTS games competitively and instead just regurgitate shit you see and hear.
Retvrn to Tradition as a weird mix of real time tactics and city builders.
RTS died the sweatier the gameplay loop became. Casual players just want to build cities and watch hordes march into each other.
Put together an amazing story campaign and mod tools/map creator and you've got yourself a winner.
Are there any recent Classical style RTA games? You know, ones that actually have base building, multiple resources, and workers?
Tired of relicslop 'point control' game design. Dawn of War was a fricking mistake. If only Warhammergays weren't smoothbrains incapable of playing a complex strategy game.
>AoE4
Have it >Planetary Annihilation
Doubt it's good, sounds like a cheap cash grab based on the name alone >BAR
I'm not into F2P phone games, nothing free is ever good
BAR is the best rn though
But it's better you don't get into those, they're TA successors and not what you're looking for
why did people hate planetary annihilation again? dropping moons on a planet is fun.
It had an abysmal launch, but TITANS made it really good, still, not quite as engaging as one would like to, because navigating planets gets tiring even though exploding them is fun AND achievable. Still it's pretty good and playable with a healthy scene.
unironically if blizzard get their shit together and make a perfect starcraft 3
but it will never happen
and it will be shit and full of wokeism when it does
You're literally moronic if you think AoE2 fans are anything but the most obnoxious homosexuals in the RTS spectrum. Starcraft homosexuals are also insufferable, but they are angels in comparison to talking about any RTS around anybody who plays AoE2.
I don't really like to play single player campaigns in RTS games, and don't like to play against other people because of cheese builds.
The first thing I look for in an RTS is map generation. I go straight to skirmish mode. I don't really like small multiplayer arena maps, so I love random generated maps like what Age of Empires 2 does. DoW was an exeption because the gameplay is fun and it's fun to watch kill animations in it. I also like to roleplay as the factions I play as. I still to this day play old RTS games that have a modding community.
Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion for example is a game I've been playing since vanilla sins in 2010. It has random map generation, it has no campaign, but has a few conversion mods. All I do is fight against AI and it keeps me entertained.
Sins is fricking amazing. They absolutely knocked it out of the park a decade ago and only made it better. I still play it with the GF. TEC for life, I belong to the cult of the Autocannon.
>that screenshot
How do you get it to look that good? Every time I tried it the pic comes out looking like pixelated shit in a BMP format. Also based and TECpilled.
It can't come back because Starcraft 1/2 killed the genre by ruining it and turning RTS into RTT.
On the flip side, it doesn't need to come back because no RTS will ever be created that manages to surpass the absolute brilliance of Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. Kind of like how the stealth genre is dead because every new stealth game is just shit compared to Thief.
You're not entirely wrong. WiC got it right and that came out in 2007. Only thing that came close was Wargame and even those guys managed to run their studio into the ground.
Meanwhile massive is stuck in the ubisoft slave farm making the division
We have this thread every fricking week and we come to the same conclusion
RTS games started to suffer when they took the casual element out of them.
The most popular RTS game right now is AOE 2 definitive, and that game has literally hundreds of hours of single-player content. It has the largest, most expansive single-player campaign of any RTS game ever made.
Go online, and it is catered to the casual experience. hit quickplay and you're not pitted against the people in ranked who have been playing for 20 years but other people who play the game casually, just like most people who aren't neckbeards or autistic Fins
Meanwhile you look at other obvious flops coming out and it's all "asiaticCLICKasiaticCLICKasiaticCLICK" advertising peak performance at 145APM minimum with little to no strategy just micromicromicro. All designed to be redbull bait with no real reason for anyone who won't invest 20 hours a week playing it to even touch the game.
THIS shit is why RTS games fail. People want RTS games to be this huge e-sports endeavour and not only did RTS games get beaten at e-sports they can't even retain a casual playerbase anymore because of the asiaticclick homosexuals who have surely flooded this thread and will yell at my post because they know I'm right.
Anyone who thinks apm is the only thing that matters is moronic and doesn't even know what strategy is. Even in starcraft this isn't true. The fact that you look at esports autism then think it's how most people paly the game is moronic.
The worst thing to happen to RTS was Starcraft, because then everyone decided to copy it. Starcraft (and SC2) worked in its own niche which is fine, but what they failed to realize is that the vast majority of RTS games are not the enormously high APM 3 hitpoint unit games that Starcraft is. Company of Heroes (1) and Dawn of War, even TibSun and Red Alert 2, all of your units are fairly resilient and to a given point reward deliberate informed reactions. 'Shit, my marine squad is getting munched, I need to get them out of there.' 'My Airborne ran into an emplaced mg42, frick, half the squad is gone. It gives you the time to make choices and choose what to do. The alternative, IE: Starcraft etc, is that almost every unit feels and acts like they have 2-3 hit points before they explode. Suddenly all of your units are cheap and ultimately expendable because there is barely any investment into them whatsoever. It feels good when you make a mammoth tank. Its great when your Knights Cross holders reach max rank etc. At no point do you feel the same for anything like that in SC or SC2, or any of the variety of copycats. Stormgate is made by the same devs and its literally more of the same and I fricking hate it.
Another thing people don't realize is that Starcraft has always had an expansive, high-quality campaign to draw people in as well from the very beginning.
Didn't it also always have always-online DRM in the form of blizzard's battle.net cancer? So you could forgive people for thinking it was a multiplayer only game.
There is always a disconnect between a vocal online playbase and the reality of a game.
Diablo 4 is a great example, the game is absolute dogshit for anyone looking to invest serious time into it, yet for casuals like Elon Musk it's the perfect game because he can sit down play maybe 50 hours and forget about it for a year and then come back.
>the only real strategy is sitting in your base for an hour and getting the perfect expensive army, everything else is asiaticclick
Why are morons on Ganker like this?
Just normalize decent WASD camera controls schemes. Also make more big team modes that support drop in/out like popular FPS games. Basically just do what World in Conflict did
they're just suffering from anxiety at the idea of a fricking competitive multiplayer game.
Broken arrow is unironically really good for this. 5v5 is the only gamemode available.
Focus on good campaigns and custom maps like Warcraft 3.
The thing with the competitive scene is that you shouldn't actually pander to sweatlords. You should make it popular with regular gamers and then the sweatlords will be lured in and find a way to make it competitive. Then post-release you can appeal to the sweatlords with official tournaments and balance patches.
RTS is alive and well. >stormgate comin (might be good might be shit but lots of interest) >aoe 4 and 2 have plenty of players (4 is fun dont @ me) >sc2 ever popular >BAR reasonably popular for a game not on steam
If we get a decent C&C like (tempest rising looks ok but controls arent great and im not overly hopeful) or a remake of 2 we'll have everything we could want.
If you really want RTS to take off again for normies you need mass varied co op content for shitters like me to feel good about themselves against decent ai challenges. They are billions kinda had the right idea but make that co op.
GIVE ME RED ALERT AGAIN.
I WANT FMVS AND CHEESE AND RECOGNIZABLE FACTIONS WITH PERSONALITY.
EVERYTHING IS SO GOD DAMN BLAND THESE DAYS.
No seriously the reason why so many RTS are liked was the fact that the factions, lore, and basic normie stuff was on point. Yes the esports, balance, and all the crap is nice but that audience is very different and only 10%. You need the 90% of people to buy your FPS for the campaign just like Call of Duty.
considering how many people who loved Command & Conquer are now adults in gamedev I'm surprised there's no indie spiritual successor with intentionally cheesy green-screen FMV cutscenes
I'm sure the free version of Davinci Resolve has chroma keying and everyone has a high-quality camera in the form of your phone
The graphics should be good and detailed, but it should still have an isometric camera (and maybe no camera rotation).
It should have a satisfying gameplay loop of iconic units that counter one another.
Finally the scope needs to be fairly large with a long singleplayer campaign spanning several ages.
That's really all it would take, in my opinion. And if you only focus on 2-3 factions like a Command & Conquer game, the story becomes even more important, since it's more difficult to make interesting fictional factions than real historical ones.
SupComm didn't have any right to be that great. It spoiled anyone that played it. The first time you hear the "strategic map expanded" will forever stay with you. At that point you are just hyped that this game will open the floodgates and a new wave of massive scale RTS is coming but no. Thats the peak. then sup comm2 happened and yeah, frick you.
I unironically think it's over for rts in a similar sense to how people say it's over for mmos. there are just tons more online video games competing now and they've carved away the audience.
Just make a good fricking game that has fun base building for the casual player, a decent campaign for the solo player, and a variety of maps for the multiplayer.
Every RTS now comes out with moronic gimmicks like no base building, or only microing 4-5 super units, or moronic MOBA style multiplayer lane maps. Look at the latest Age of Smegmar RTS developed by Frontier. Absolutely atrocious. Only 4 factions even though the entire appeal of the setting is the huge variety of armies. No base building. Just point capture. For fricks sake guys.
>Every RTS now comes out with moronic gimmicks like no base building, or only microing 4-5 super units, or moronic MOBA style multiplayer lane maps. Look at the latest Age of Smegmar RTS developed by Frontier. Absolutely atrocious. Only 4 factions even though the entire appeal of the setting is the huge variety of armies. No base building. Just point capture. For fricks sake guys.
This
These shits weren't even RTS to begin with, but people insist on calling them those then say hurr hurr RTS are le ded
Make it slower, allow me to upgrade my units without having to click one million times per match lmao
That is if you want pvp, otherwise just make singleplayer decent
Mechanical simplification for PvP is cope. It doesn't matter how simple and slow you make it, if the other dude you're playing against does it better and quicker than you then you still get your shit pushed in even if the game is simple. All you're achieving in the end is making a duller, more boring game with a lower skill ceiling.
I play AoE 2 and I have this problem where if I put the AI on one difficulty it is too easy but if I put the AI on the next difficulty up they fricking rape me.
what do??
Stick to black forest. The AI no matter how hard never cuts a path through the forest so you can bottleneck the one approach to your base while turtling your army and then make a break for it through the bottleneck or open up a second front by catapulting a path through the forest.
Make the factions interesting. It feels like most factions in strategy games nowadays are le generic guys who have fast units and le generic guys who have tough units.
And the architecture just looks totally bland.
This
Basically every RTS has
"Strong, expensive, slow guys"
"Swarm of cheap shitters"
And
"Weak units, good abilities" along with the vanilla faction, with basically no deviation that isn't unequivocally the best or worst faction in the game because they can't into balance.
Divvy up the racial traits of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 as you please, with an occasional extra gimmick thrown in.
>Classic RTS action meets modern production and performance in Tempest Rising. >Inspired by RTS greats of the 90s and 2000s, Tempest Rising is a classic, base-building real time strategy game set in a modern day alternative history war scenario. >It features 3 unique factions, each with its own approach to combat and economy and offering a variety of strategies for players of all stripes, deep and rewarding gameplay that keeps a focus on strategy while rewarding skill, and built-in customization options that allow players to approach the game their way in both single player and multiplayer game modes.
hm...
>complaining about readability in TR
wait till you see the clusterfrick that is stormgate. you have to take several minutes to tell your units apart from the enemies.
My issue with stormgate is that it just doesn't look fun, them again I didn't think the sc2 co-op missions were fun either I just liked playing the campaign
yea but you can't outplay meta builds anyway. I wish there was some random element in-game which encourages non-conventional strategies and tactics instead of mindlessly repeating the same handful of build orders every time.
It's impossible to not have a "meta" because the meta is just the current understanding of the playerbase of how to best play the game. It's impossible for such a thing not to exist. The meta shifts and changes as new styles are discovered naturally, so there are probably ways to play that are good but not meta, but nobody good enough has discovered them yet. That's why the meta changes after all, beyond shit like patches. You can add some elements of randomness, like the random maps in AoE for instance and they will shake up what players do to some degree, but you can't go too hard on randomness because it's still a game of skill after all, not of luck.
>it's still a game of skill after all
I wouldn't call people being skilled at maining a faction as skilled in the game as a whole. I want an RTS game which tests the skill of a player to adapt and improvise (which is what strategy is all about) instead of one main vs another main, which at point is no different than a fighting game.
You can do that, some maps will favor certain factions. If the rush distance is very short, that's good for factions which can rush. If it's not then maybe it's better for turtle factions. Some are better defensively, some offensively, some maps have safer resources which are hard to harass, some are more exposed and so on. You can definitely play multiple factions and choose which one fits to extract a benefit, most people don't do that because playing 1 faction well is hard enough, but if you look at good AoE 4 players for instance they definitely pick and choose between multiple civs depending on various factors.
>You can add some elements of randomness, like the random maps in AoE for instance and they will shake up what players do to some degree, but you can't go too hard on randomness because it's still a game of skill after all, not of luck.
You could theoretically break up meta stagnation to some extent without having to resort to randomness. Just look at how map dependent the viability of different aoe2 civs is. If you you were to lean in to that and design your game such that things like map differences have an even greater effect on build orders and overall gameplans and also somehow actually get people to play on more than a handful of maps (ideally introducing new ones over time) you could make it a lot harder for an agreed upon meta to be established for any given map.
That wouldn't really mean there's no meta, just that the meta is more convoluted. On map 1 you do X, on 2 you do Y and so on. People would still try to figure out what the "best" way to tackle each map's unique features is and then gravitate to incorporating that solution into their play.
>listening to casuals is bad. They never liked them in the first place
Casuals are 90+% of the people that buy/bought rts games and are even the majority of people that still play them. Ignoring them in favor of e-sports gays is what all but killed the genre
You're just not going to get huge numbers in difficult and highly competitive games. Most people don't engage in entertainment that leaves them feeling like they suck ass (even if they actually do). RTS doesn't really seem more dead than other highly competitive titles. Look at the numbers AoE 4 has on Steam compared to new fighting games like SF6 or Tekken 8. Very similar peak player count, AoE 4 and SF6 have very similar avg counts currently too, Tekken is brand new so it's higher still but it'll go down inevitably. All of these games have similarly small audiences, though having like 70k+ peak and 10k+ avg even now isn't particularly small, it just isn't world-changing huge like more casual genres.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>that wouldn't really mean there's no meta, just that the meta is more convoluted.
That's more or less what I said. You were right when you said you can't prevent a meta from forming. But you can make it take longer while also regularly introducing enough new things that you don't end up with as calcified a meta. >You're just not going to get huge numbers in difficult and highly competitive games. Most people don't engage in entertainment that leaves them feeling like they suck ass
There is no correlation whatsoever between how difficult a game is at the highest levels of competition and how much casuals enjoy it. What actually matters to them is all the other content in the game. Many of them will never even touch ranked games so the fact that they'd get stomped there is irrelevant. They're interested in things like campaigns and goofing around on custom maps. This is why fighting games are actually in a worse situation long term than RTSes, because they've yet to figure out what they can offer casuals other than the ranked grind.
4 months ago
Anonymous
>how difficult a game is at the highest levels of competition
This is where you're the one who's wrong because the highest levels of competition don't come in the equation at all. RTS is complex and difficult at any level because it demands a lot of multitasking, decision making and mechanical execution. The fact that you're not at the top level skill-wise doesn't mean you engage with fewer or less complex systems, the fact that you're not good at it doesn't make it easy to play and it doesn't mean you can't tell you're struggling.
In any case this is mostly besides the point, because my point is about competitive 1v1 and not the inherent complexity of the RTS genre. When you play a skill-based 1v1 game and lose then you know for sure you lost because of your lack of skill compared to the opponent, you need to own that and accept it and most people aren't looking for that kind of experience in their entertainment, like I said. Other games are team-based or battle royales where you fight 100 people rather than 1 guy so you never need to own quite like you do in 1v1.
>random element in-game which encourages non-conventional strategie
roguelike mode which has a roulette of troops could maybe help but balance would become an issue.
I don't think it really needs to reinvent the wheel. Give me an RTS that looks like AoE2 or Stronghold, add a bunch of modes to the game on top of an excellent campaign mode, multiplayer, and that all it would take for me to buy it. Also, invest in marketing (streamers + youtubers). I never hear about any rts game coming out anymore, but I know dozens of them are coming out each year.
RTS suffers from the same issue as arena shooters and fighting games. No-one wants to play a straight skill test. They just don't. That kind of game devolves into a small sweaty tryhard community. The average gamer wants to feel like they're accomplishing something, even if it's an illusion. That's why MOBA and Battle Royale are so popular, you get to feel like you're progressing for 20-40 mins until your skill is tested. You can easily dismiss a loss as bad luck and get back on the treadmill. RTS doesn't let you fool yourself that way, so it turns people off real fast. To revitalize this genre it needs some BR style revolution, like letting the players build up their bases for longer, or avoid conflict somehow. Perhaps you could take the Rust meta game and apply it to RTS somehow, like extend each game out over a week or so before it resets.
I don't think investing more time into getting wrecked would make it sting less, or less of a skill test. I'm not sure how week-long RTS would even work. Maybe some sort of TBS like people used to play chess over letters they'd post or something, but RTS involves both players being active and playing at the same time and there's no way you'd sync up with some other guy online every day for a week to play a super-long RTS match. I think there are RTS games out there which allow MP saves too, so you could probably already do this if you wanted to, in something like Sins of a Solar Empire maybe. >That's why MOBA and Battle Royale are so popular
No, I think these are super popular because they're fundamentally not 1v1. If you lose in DotA or whatever you can blame your team or at least share responsibility so each player can literally cope by knowing it's not strictly their own skill and nothing else which lost the game. BRs can be played FFA as well of course, but those games basically tend to be a clusterfrick of randomness and you've got 99 opponents or something, not a single one, so when you lose it's not like you went up against one other guy and got wrecked in the first place, then secondly you can still cope by relying on bad luck as an excuse.
Won't stormgate save it? inb4 muh korean clickers
I haven't seen a lot of gameplay but what I have seen looks extremely reminiscent of SC2 and WC3, to the point where I'm not sure why you'd play Stormgate instead of either of those. Even the graphics don't really look like a step up, I mean yeah it's clearly higher fidelity than OG WC3 graphics but I don't think the style is as good and SC2 looks outright better to me.
what's that game called where you can script your units to make them do shit automatically like an AI?
Desynced? That's more a Factorio-like than RTS I'd say, though you certainly can make combat units too.
>I'm not sure how week-long RTS would even work
Rust servers reset every week or so, it'd work the same as that. Rust is already about base building/raiding, so it's a perfect fit really.
The issue is that these days something has to be accessable in order to maintain public interest. Niche genres like RTS and fighting games are really difficult to make accessable while still maintaining their core appeal.
no. It will fail because it's just riding the coattails of other RTS games (in a bad way) instead of being its own thing. also because it is a asiaticclicker.
It's not going to happen. Audiences don't go back to complexity once they're accustomed to simplicity. I suspect in another generation you won't have anyone familiar with the genre to develop future RTS. Like MUDs of old they'll just fade away.
RTS is a fish with legs. when the genre was big people didn't actually like playing RTS, they liked specific parts of RTS >People that liked building up a city moved to city builders or civilization >People that liked smashing big armies into eachother ("no rush 20 min") got into total war >People that enjoyed the stategy aspect moved to more squad level games like x-com or strategy rpgs >People that liked micro moved to mobas >All the other custom modes that weren't dota/moba have also received their own dedicated games. you don't need to download a tower defence map, you just play bloons
Very few people liked the specific combo of base building AND unit micro AND build orders AND strategy AND were okay with losing a 20 minute game because they choked at the 10 minute mark and the other guy didn't, they either put up with it because the game offered enough stuff they did like and used house rules to downplay as much of it they didn't like. Just look at how many people have said "asiaticclick" in this thread - people didn't actually enjoy RTS games.
>they liked specific parts of RTS
yeah and that's why we got different rts that focused on various things. there is no one-size-fits-all rts out there.
yes and people realized that even the specialized RTS games still had too much of the rts stuff they didn't like and moved on to fully dedicated games to offer what they like. someone that doesn't like unit micro and tried stronghold is only going to like it until they realize they just lost their entire army to fire traps because they didn't react in 1 second to move them away - then give up and go play civilization
I think there's still a niche market for indie single player RTS games with low budgets. AAA RTS games are gone forever. Blizzard just stopped giving a shit about SC2 and HotS because it took so much to develop and maintain and one WoW mount makes more profit than all of SC2.
It needs to have a good map editor at launch so people can make their own fun.
warcraft 3 isn't remembered for it's esports scene
it was remembered for having great custom games, one of which became so popular that it became a genre of it's own
nobody is going to spend the time to make a really compelling custom map when they could release it for cheap as an indie game using unity - the genie is out of the bottle and instead of using a fricking RTS map maker to avoid learning how to code their own engine they can just use the same premade engine even AAA studios use
Make single player content for casuals, and some of them will stop being casuals over time. That's how it has always worked, and how it always will. In every genre.
I miss Tom Clancy’s Endwar
remember that whole era where you were going to control units with voice commands and kinect and shit like that, that never actually worked well?
RTS was once the genre which pushed limits of creativity and gameplay. every old major game studio would have definitely done an RTS game or two in their past. It was a trampoline of a genre, which was popular with the techphiles of that age. due to games becoming mainstream, the audience of RTS is but a drop in the ocean now and therefore there aren't any games being made.
If not pandering to casuals was the problem then why not just play 8-bit armies the deathball making simulator? Imagine taking the strategy out of strategy games lol
You'd think with some of the reviews of it its the next coming of christ in terms of city builders but its literally just Dawn of Discovery/ Anno/ Settlers with a different coat of paint. It was dull as shit from the tutorial onward and it doesn't even look as good as those titles. Like what is offering something new?
It's impossible. Zoomers and mass appeal normalgays just aren't interested in RTS. You'd have to create an engaging hybrid game where you can step into the shoes of one of your units and shoot in first person or something. But as is, it'll always be niche.
I just want to say that Age of Empires campaigns were one of the reasons I almost never had to study for social studies classes as a kid. Having basic cable and nothing else to watch during the evening except PBS helped, but Age of Empires was a heavy lifter.
You need too fricking much revitalized at this point. >Good campaign >Scenarios >Fun and interesting factions >Co-OP >Smart AI >AI with personality >Modability and map creation toolkit
>How does the RTS genre get revitalized at this point? What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
stop b***hing on the internet and actually playing ages of empires and Homeworld 3 would be a great start
Unironically one of the best RTS campaigns I've played in years is a mod.
Blows the actual campaigns of the game out of the water in terms of quality of scripting, objectives, etc.
If you like MOWAS/Gates of Hell try Last Grenadier.
Here's a massive recent RTS that focuses in hard on people's favorite thing about the genre. Could do with more interesting enemies with more interesting enemy bases, though.
Am I the only one who wishes for a true dungeon keeper revival? Evil Genious is in the same category but has no multiplayer like dungeon keeper does. Leaving the fighting to minions and instead focusing on securing gold/portals and outmanouvering the other player with elaborate digging and traps and using your spells tactfully. No apm crap, just pure tactics with a slight chance of rng with the AI of minions who play by themselves but can be picked up and dropped off or forced to march to a location using a spell.
Isn't dungeons 4 a spiritual successor to it? I've also played another game that tried to reignite it, but I dropped it at random at some point. Forgot its name. I've tried to play it with a friend online against AI, and even on normal we got completely crushed. Not sure why they made it so hard.
Esports don't kill games.
Building the games around the goal of esports kills games.
Make a good competitive multiplayer game that's fun to play first and foremost. If it grows a base and people are organically forming competitions, consider monetizing them. Never make those competitions the main goal of development or focus on the top 1% of players at the expense of the majority.
I don't understand why people keep insisting that esports killed rts. literally no one except for worst koreans and a few nerds on teamliquid cared about esports until sc2 came out, but by that time rts was already pretty much dead. sc2 came out in 2010. ensemble was shut down in 2009 and westwood had been kill since 2003. relic and chris taylor were still around, but they always did their own thing. plus sc2 has every feature that casual players say they want like big campaigns, custom games, and coop modes.
>It's not the e sport and the players that get attracted by it that killed it, I swear! >Can't play any match without being ranked and put in place >People conditioned to only want to win >People conditioned to only care for ranked mode >Barely anyone creates maps anymore >Smurf accounts to stomp noobs >Casuals drop out after getting stomped repeatedly
Sweat lords don't want to realise it, but they are part of the reason why these games died. Next to devs catering to them of course. Is there even any benefit of all these systems to create a ranked match in today's climate?
Casual masses only go so far when they get stomped time after time. Can't imagine anyone going back to it when every match they have played turned out to be a stomp.
The follow up is of course that sweats cannibalise themselves after that until they drop the game for good. You can observe this process in all sorts of games, mind you.
>play ranked competitive mode >get mad at ranked competitive mode
and if there aren't any modes other than ranked competitive that's 100% on the devs, but you clearly aren't their target audience if you don't want ranked competitive
what game are you even talking about though? most rts games that released before sc2 didn't even have a ladder with ranked play. what major rts came out after sc2 that were ruined by esports? surely not fricking planetary annihilation.
Total War-type games are basically the only way RTS games will ever some real traction again, and Total War games are run by turbojews that expect you to fork out $600
>hehe, campaigns are not necessary for rts games! >Try out Iron Harvest and drop it not even halfway through the first mission because it is so unappealing without base building and drags on forever
Ough
I personally believe that campaigns are essential to pull me into the world and make it feel like the MP battles are a part of the wider conflict surrounding the campaign. It's so much more meaningful that way instead of just some factions fighting without any context.
>without base building
It's funny that the missions with limited units and no base building which were considered awful in traditional RTS games turned out to be their own genre with a big following.
go watch a mr beast video and realize the modern generation will NEVER have the patience to play an RTS
watching a mr beast video is like having schizophrenia, its fricking insane
rts are alive and well
they're just not popular as earlier that's it
trends come and go
electronic music isnt as popular as 20 years ago, yet it's still alive and well
in 20 years other types of games wont be as popular as they are now
>Pretty much everyone agrees that shitty single player is at fault >Most of the thread is people shitting it up with multiplayer 1v1(the worst way to play an RTS) talk
Check out the video posted somewhere in the middle of this thread. It concludes that the masses want a single player campaign and fun maps/modes away from try hard PvP bullshit.
>Pretty much everyone agrees that shitty single player is at fault
Bullshit. When rts switched from fun big campaigns and skirmish modes to e sport the genre died. In the 90´s and early 00`s rts was one of the most mainstream pc gaming genres.
100% based and truth pulled, if the campaign fricks I will buy your rts game, but when was the last time one had something decent? Wings of liberty from fricking 2008?
>What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
Re-release Dawn of War and all the expansions but make them run flawlessly on modern PCs. Literally all it needs because that game was the pinnacle of RTS.
This
Ive played dozens of rts games and the only one I tryharded in was sc2 and I was masters league. Its ultimately more fun to play campaigns or co-op/team battles
The problem with targeting campaign gamers is that they are not typically return customers, they one and done. You want a successful competitive scene, because it drives sales and advertises for you for free if competitive players actually enjoy playing the game. The goal most RTS gamers have had since starcraft blew up was "Lets try to make a solid campaign as a way to get people into playing competitively for fun"
Nah.
Campaign players will happily return for dlc and expansions if the game was good, skirmish modes/map editors are just fun extras on the side and should have minimal resources directed to them
>You want a successful competitive scene, because it drives sales and advertises for you for free if competitive players actually enjoy playing the game
this is bullshit though
Look at AoE2. Its still alive, one of the largest rts currently and selling dlc´s over 20 years after release. It releases big campaign packages. Yes it has a big multiplayer community. But the game is not a classic e sport title. Its design is very different from something like SC2. SC2 is imho much tighter designed and overall "better" multiplayer game. But for most people its not fun having to train every day to play a game. They want to play 1 or 2 evenings a week and have some fun and comfy mp games and watch units go boom.
And whats your point? I said the current goal design of campaigns is to have people get into playing the game competitively. Long term fans of a game are ones that either play it competitively, Or like to play silly casual custom games, which AoE2 also has, but is much worse than Warcraft 3, which is essentially its own game engine you can script entirely new games in.
It's the compgays who aren't return customers. They'll play one or two games for twenty years straight and won't ever need any other RTS because they don't care new SP content.
Neglecting SP is suicidal in the long run because new multiplayer communities never last long as the players always abandon fotm and go back to their ancient classics. And once MP is dead, there's no reason to get the game. Meanwhile, you can pick up any SP game old or new and it's always playable regardless of how many fans it still has.
>The problem with targeting campaign gamers is that they are not typically return customers, they one and done
What does that matter if you aren't charging money on an ongoing basis? If you're selling the game as a one off purchase, then you should target one-off customers.
That's a good thing. Generals 2 tried to do that but the community pushed back so hard the game was cancelled. Some say it's a shame that happened, I think RTS dodged a bullet here.
Generals 2 even back then would have been so neutered and soulless that I'm glad it was shitcanned
Generals and zero hour are like a precious time capsule to when you could have fricking hilarious racial caricatures in games because Americans everywhere were still in full salt the earth mode fresh after 9/11
SC2 co-op was the right idea, people want to play with friends and build armies and crush stuff, I hope stormgate is good but the art style looks garbage
The games are shit because pro players like Hera and Viper sell other players spreadsheets and then they come to terrorize lower elo players with Frank knights or egalos and/or castille drop
If you can't fully understand why the Corruption mechanic is disliked in Empire at War: Forces of Corruption, you will never truly understand why RTS games died.
Dawn of War has fricking stellar presentation and the rts is perfectly playable however you want even if you don't play perfectly and that's all that matters
I agree with the skirmish gameplay and the way the whole game is presented. Got introduced to it at a LAN party, just smashing all these diverse races against each other was a blast.
The DOW1 campaign was always criticized for being short and weak. The game became famous for being the first of its kind of rts (not CoH) and having a very good presentation. I loved the game but was disappointment by the campaign.
focus on the spectating ai vs ai experience, give ff12/dragon age origins style "programming" scriptability to players to allow one type of ai's procedure against another's
also generals zero hour style main campaigns
Hybrid gameplay with continuity.
Right now the rts genre is missing the key elements of popular games.
Is rts a fast game? No. Compare it to things like call of duty, Fortnite, overwatch where you can drop in and get to the fight right away. Rts takes much more preparation and build up.
Is there a continuity? Do the matches help towards some ultimate goal? No. Unlike RPGs or even just skin-based progression, rts games rarely have progression in a measurable way.
What about drop in / drop out? No. If you want to play rts you normally have to be there from the start, unlike battlefield or call of duty type games.
If you want rts to be popular in current year you will at the very least need to adress these issues in a smart way. Warcraft 3 added some minor continuity with heroes gaining one level per map in the campaign; warlords battlecry added persistent heroes between campaigns/multiplayer; spellforce did the same. I don't know of any games that used unit skins or such to demarcate progression but there probably are some.
Hybrid games, where some players handle the strategy layer and others fight as units with rpg elements that are persistent, would be the most obvious fix. There have been some low budget attempts like this without the rpg part (natural selection 1/2), and an amazing c&c game that never caught on.
The benefit of a hybrid approach is that you can get way more players that way, and it would support drop in play.
RTS is inherently toxic design. No matter who you try to skin it it would stay as a game about APM overload. Who can spin more plates. And spinning plates game is a chore and stressful.
The problem with AOE2 is it is not remotely representative of medieval combat in Europe. Going out of your way to kill working peasants is how you got all the other barons/kings to unite against you and annex your lands, not how you get ahead and win. If there were a resource raiding mechanic instead and actual battles were primarily line up your forces on opposing hills and THEN outmaneuver each other away from the civilians, it would be a worthy simulator.
>AoE2 >100s if not 1000s of hours of campaigns >WC3 >every campaign is kino, plus endless custom campaigns and custom games
This was all I needed growing up
Classic RTS formula mostly morphed into other things. Compgays still play some old games or switched to MOBA. Comfygays get lots of sp-only games with plenty of basebuilding. Players who only care about combat and explosions have tower defense and autobattlers. Numbers-go-up folks have idle games and sims.
RTS are dead not because they're bad but because people nowadays are lazy, they don't want to think, they can't think and live for the moment, they only want their constant dopamine shots and this is why gacha is so popular.
Man I miss how everything outside was way more silent and cleaner, in general back then. People seemed to be way more leaned back then as well compared to today.
Ill speak in terms of C&C Generals. >longer campaign than the 5 missions per 3 faction >secret/optional missions for each faction >failing mission doesnt mean failing campaign - you are put at a disadvantage or an alternative path/route >scenarios >challenge missions (like general challenges) or more general challnge missions (because demolition and infantry were cut out). >asymmetrical skirmish maps >huge unit variety >unit customisation (you can choose from multiple different loadouts and upgrades) >no rock-paper-scissors balancing/parity >more than 9 generals >relatively realistic damage/range/durability/cost for units (add logistics and supply for extra difficulty/challenge).
There. Its a lot of work though, so devs may be quite averse to that.
Considering all the slop people stomach these days, it might just well have been. There was no campaign and it added MTX + faction purchases. The engine switch to frostbite was forced by the higher ups just because it's was a fashionable engine at the time. Now in hindsight we can see that even RA3 made with SAGE looks better than this.
Some interesting dev commentary on the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rTK_DZG-oE
How come no one made a roguelite RTS yet? That sounds like a fun mix and interesting idea per session, with more varying units than you could bring to the battlefield each mission.
You generally want to avoid RNG in RTS, since it's all about fair game and execution, building an RTS fundamentally on RNG is not something that the playerbase would want.
But there's something that you may want to check out
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610770/Dust_Front_RTS/ >Dust Front is a classic RTS with elements of grand strategy, procedural world and non-linear campaign. >Procedural. Missions are combined with procedural map generation and external rules.
AoE3DE could easily do just that if only the devs made a special mode/campaign for it because it has the elements like deck building/unlocking new cards. You can already play on Unknown random map to have a bit of randomness.
Infested Planet has random maps/enemies/mutations, especially if you play the Planetary Campaign.
Against the Storm is more of a city builder but it does have experimental ideas like randomized building blueprints.
I am enjoying the Broken Arrow beta a lot. It's an RTT, but honestly frick base building. CoH is close to the most I can take when it comes to base management. I just want to get right into the command action, but micro some fricking morons plowing fields and chopping woods.
What makes a good RTS, though?
Detailed campaign? Modding tools? Multiplayer focus?
Opinions differ, perhaps too much even. Catering to one alienates the other and those who focus on one aspect generally avoid the rest.
I firmly believe most C&C games fail because they devalue the life of a pawn on the power scale of the battle. What made SC so popular was the usefulness of core units. What makes AoE so popular is the harsh rock paper scissor balance as well and cultural complexity + variety due to specials in a large tech tree.
Most RTS multiplayer is designed for 20 to 1 hour engagements. The single player needs to reflect that possible frenetic pace. There are too many oldfossils who desire downtime but that's always an unrealistic factor in war unless the timing is vital.
I suggest give environmental objectives and small missions on the map that these old timers can pursue. If they hold off the enemy and those missions succeed the enemy should have global cripple effects that last the entire game. This encourages the mentality to be a bit better than actively staying passive all the time. Alternative game play elements should exist and could be map based for example, they don't need to be balanced completely well just an established meta should exist. I fricking hate mirror maps there's honestly no real world equivalent of it to promote competitive fairness.
By giving hybrids like Battlezone 98 and Sacrifice another chance.
Or by leaning harder into the 3D element, like Homeworld, Ground Control or World in Conflict.
Is there literally anything more comfy than booting up an AoE/AoM, building a massive city, reaching population limit and then just having a giant war?
One of my favourite gaming memories was AoM against the max number of AI on the islands map. Then just slowly conquering the islands moving from one to the other and wiping out the entirety of the enemy team. Incredibly satisfying and fun.
Probably. I've been playing RTS's since I was really fricking young (I think the first Age of Empires was the first game I ever played) and that's literally how I've always played them.
Lowest difficulty/second lowest for AI, build big cool base, research all the technology and shit, build massive army and attack. Maybe throw in some cheat code units.
I only just started playing the campaigns as an adult recently and while I enjoy them; having to actually have a strategy in a real time strategy game is stressful
I'd get bored pretty quick. I do in fact. After beating all AI on the highest difficulty you're either impressed by how shit they are or how much cheat they need. If some guy can play 1v7 against expert AI in WC3 and still win, I do wonder why people think that it's interesting gameplay, when it's all about exploiting, whether the bad scripting or just genuinely lobotimized enemy.
Why is it so hard for Devs to just make an RTS that >Has more than 10 buildings >Worker-driven economy >Encourages expansions/secondary bases >Minimal to no RPS counter nonsense
There are a few games where your workers are essentially slaves and there are a few games where you can capture enemy units.
IDK what you mean by "slavery" to be honest. How would you even implement it
like using a slave workforce and slave army with a few commanders keeping them in line. a faction which is centered on neutralizing enemies, capturing them alive, etc.
Mostly balance, I guess. You can larp with monk spam and converting entire armies in Age of Empires but I know that it's not the same. If it's a game with asymmetric faction design then what you can capture depends entirely on what you're facing, and you need some units to do the work before you can start the enslavement, which can't be too strong because otherwise you wouldn't need to enslave at all, but can't be too weak because you'd instalose.
Chaos dwarfs are such a faction but instead of only having greenskin and goblin slaves, if they could subjugate others as well (each slave unit having different utility for the economy and in battles) I think that would be a good example.
never played WH TW
Doesn't it that mean that they just start with enslaved units, which is basically just lore paint for their normal roster? As in, they're "enslaved" only because they're from a different race and are named so? Are there any mechanics to that enslavement?
4 months ago
Anonymous
their core army consists of chaos dwarf warriors who are elite and expensive but their numbers are far too less. they use the slaves as the cannon fodder and meat shield. the enslaved greenskin units are not repainted units but they are look like slave miners with crude weapons and no armors. the issue is the mechanics aren't very detailed, you can capture slaves after battles and you need to maintain the slaves in line in your settlements with some buildings or standing army else they'll rebel. I wish it had more mechanics to it.
Warband allows you to capture enemies as PoWs and recruit them later, especially if you use blunt weapons to knock everyone out, you can also sell said PoWs to slave traders in a few mods, so I guess it sort-of works?
Strongholdgay here: I been playing AoE2 for the first time and I completed the Incas, Bohenians, French, Spainish, Hun and Dracula campaings,and now Im playing with the Indian Devapala trail.
Which one is a good Race to pick for MP?
Also why the frick siege machines outside the Bombard like operators? Feels very weird for a game trying to be "realistic"
Base building is fun, but the actual RTS "meta" gameplay is fricking aids.
I just want to build bases and armies at my own pace, frick the 150 APM meta bullshit RTS games tend to devolve into at higher difficulties or online.
>nooo you need to build in this exact order, and memorise 50+ hotkeys so it can all be placed as fast as possible! >you didn't place all of those buildings and scout the map before the 72 second mark? >Frick you, you may as well quit, you're too far behind.
literally never happens, you're just a shitter and need excuses to stay mad, AOE2 and SC2 players get to top ranks with 60 APM and less, as well as suboptimal tactics.
60 APM is the bare minimum you actively do unless you just do everything with one fricking worker and never do any scouting or raiding.
You're making up problems. You don't play the game.
>>if you don't currently play them then you can't say bad things about them 🙁
This but unironically. You haven't experienced the game, really. Shitter opinions don't count.
Artosis and Tasteless need to get back together.
They promoted competitive e-sports RTS their entire careers, which was what killed the genre.
Frick'em
Jewtosis needs to get a real job to support his family.
Tasteless is too busy fricking prime korean pussy. He hasn't played a video game in a decade.
maybe before his metamorphosis into orson welles
REAL
They still cast ASL together
They could move on to VR and turn in similar to what black and white looks like or like in the Enders Game movie. The game need to evolve though. They need to make rts long term so you have to grind and build up over time. Maybe make the gameplay more continuous like an mmo where you have to continually manage and plan over much longer times.
That sounds fricking awful.
Lol those are separate ideas I just typed it fast. I wouldn't combined them.
No, then it would just end up like some shitty facebook browser game.
Neuralink will remove your physical APM limitations and you will truly be able to play RTS bound only by your capacity to comprehend the orders you wish to give.
Age of Empires Online tried this and there is very good reason why it is dead.
the games themselves dont need big changes. theres just a mindset that died, where it was okay for games to not sell gangbusters.
i guess it happened when supreme commander 2 was struggling to find a publisher.
the big ones starcraft and warcraft 3 had cool custom game modes. bring that stuff back
With Blizz claiming all custom games are their property I doubt it'll come back again.
I also remember holocaust simulators and nazi maps being made after that announcement
>How does the RTS genre get revitalized at this point?
RTS were never good in the first place.
They only got traction because MOBAs didn't exit.
>warcraft 3 had cool custom game modes
Its called DotA m8 and there are such games around.
We got a variety of games already, it’s just that people don’t play them. Zero K, beyond all reason, forged alliance forever, are all great fun.
Play BAR
I've heard about it before. I'll probably pick it up when it gets a full Steam release.
no campaign, no play. as shrimple as that.
Even with all the jank and unoptimized mess, I still like FAF more, sorry sis.
>opengl
what were they thinking?
>we want a platform agnostic api
>"what do you mean the AMD cards everybody uses on linux have sunset opengl optimization back in 2013 and now perform like 7 generations behind their nvidia equivalents on opengl tasks?"
Autism/moronation
It can't be revitalized because it has already reached its peak long ago with Rise of Nations.
nothing, rts games split into city builders and mobas
don't pretend you'd buy some new rts game coming out. you'll just say it's nostalgia bait. zoomers ceratinly won't buy them.
aoe's genre is done
This
Mobas captured the sweaty micro crowd, 4x captured the autistic buildgays.
The sphere of overlap between these two groups is very small, and these groups kinda fricking hate eachother.
There's no more reason to make an RTS instead of the other two.
AoE4 is good
I think it's a moot point. People that like RTS are already playing them
>AoE4 is good
>People that like RTS are already playing them
But if they don't have 1 million players then they're dead
>How does the RTS genre get revitalized
It got popular because there was no other shit to play, it died because we got other shit to play
AoE2 is kino and the DE is surprisingly good.
DE edition. The water is worse but the rest is good.
>Definitive edition edition
Does the game let you tweak the contrasts so DE isn't as grey looking?
there's a setting that adjusts the lighting in each map to suit the biome and I think it does what you're saying
I hate how the cavalry uses the same sound sample as nightmares in RO
the neighing sounds? they're probably stock sounds used by a shit ton of movies and games. I've heard them in lots of different places and i don't mind. I wish DE had kept the melee sounds though. They removed a sound that sounds like someone sharpening a knife with another knife.
yeah, I know they're used a lot but I always associate them with RO and I hate it because hearing them makes me want to go back. I wish they'd left the sounds in SE alone in general, they were good as is.
agree, especially the campaign voices. They're very nostalgic for me for some reason, mainly the William Wallace campaign (which was included in the demo edition). BTW you can get the voices back using a mod. Not sure about the other sounds.
>you can get the voices back using a mod
nice, have to check this out
Something like a mix between Pikmin and Warcraft 3, a more casual approach to RTS where you don't have to worry too much about micromanaging units or build orders. Third person perspective where you control one character with an army of AI controlled units that you can boss around with simple input commands.
Build a town to produce various new units, assign some units to guard it then wander around the map killing monsters to get XP and items then either fight other players or bosses in PvE.
Have an appealing medieval fantasy setting and visuals with memorable units and characters.
Good luck.
You just described Manor Lord
Manor Lords is way too complex and drab, it doesn't play like pikmin at all either.
C&C3 but with SC2 unit control
It shouldn't be this hard
Focus on coop and give an endless PVE experience. Sweat lords will hate this though, even when it is the truth.
Sweatlords in RTS don't exist. It's more about vocal shitters insisting that they exist. In reality, RTS scenes are very friendly and full of boomers and people who teach. And if the game had Coop and PvE, hardcore RTS players would still be playing it whatever the mode is.
In reality, shitters are just shitters, and no matter how casual or braindead or competitive the game is, it's just about inferiority complex and the innability to learn RTS or in depth games, read: Don't really play them.
As if there's a divsion between campaign gays and compgays: reality is RTS players play whatever and wouldn't mind it if happens or not.
You are kinda proving his point though.
Shitters gonna shit the bed
Nobody should listen to a shitter
being a fromsoftgay is not a personality
>The shitter equates moderate difficulty to Dark Souls
>Dark Souls series ain't even THAT hard
Being a fromdrone is not a personality
>Sweatlords in RTS don't exist
They absolutely do and you're delusional if you think they don't. The fact that Starcraft had a major competitive scene is by itself 100% proof.
Stracraft was such a manufactured hype that died hard with SC2 and will never happen again
>writes an entire post to out himself as the very thing he denies exist
you are one dumbfrick, and i say this as someone who loves sc2 ladder to this day
Literally this. Co-op campaign modes with lots of cool shit is the only way to save RTS.
Stormgate is having a demo/beta in the nextfest literally tomorrow with a 3 player co-op mode
Everybody liked SC2 co-op mode or was cool with it.
I didn't I wanted more big meaty campaigns about heroes and backstabbing dirtbags, skirmish and co-op were both gay as frick
Fusion with other genre is the way to go
There’s stellaris
There’s mount and blade and total war
There’s also warcraft, with level system
And ck3
Someone that realizes that a good campaign is all that's needed
This, what is with devs looking to become the next SC2? A tiny proportion of people actually play competitive, the majority want to dick around in singleplayer or custom games.
SC2 had a good campaign even if the story is absolutely awful. Scenarios of the missions and the upgrades are all good. Main thing SC2 does wrong is how they neutered UMS style games. Also it has a really fun coop mod with a lot of ways to modify and add challenges, but it has a really cancerous monetization scheme that holds it back from being an superb coop mode. The esports thing with started with SCBW, anyways. SC2 was just so happened to be around and the big thing with JustinTV started
Thread done, what more is there to say.
How do you make a good campaign?
Build a base, go kill the enemy. It worked for my ancestors, it works for me.
Many ways really, even a series of skirmish maps can be workable as long as it's surrounded by quality writing and good maps but generally by setting up interesting scenarios and objectives that feel good both to accomplish and to perform
Of course addition of extra layers like upgrades that change your units and stay consistent between stages or cool powerups tied to difficult locations in risk styled campaigns are also possible
>by quality writing
It's an RTS not a book. And no, WC3 never had a good story.
good =/= big
Warcraft 3 human campaign.
Campaign tier list
Human > Undead > Night Elf > Orc
Frozen Throne
Undead > Night Elf > Human > Orc
for me its unit choices and tech that make each campaign interesting. Like if I want to specialize in spider mechs for my army let me do that and get unique upgrades that make them even more fun
Tell a hero's journey
Are there any other good rts/rpg hybrids outside of spellforce and wc3?
>wc3
>rpg
what
I wanted to write "wc3" first. It has weak rpg mechanics with its hero focus and inventory. Totally unique at the time. Spellforce is obviously much more rpg
having a hero unit and an inventory is not rpg
RPG MECHANICS. I NEVER SAID RPG. FRICKING HELL.
OK AGAIN. ARE THERE ANY OTHER GOOD RTS/RPG HYBRIDS LIKE SPELLFORCE A GAME INSPIRED BY THE WC3 HYPE (THE GAME THAT AUGMENTED RTS BY INTRODUCING RPG MECCHANICS)
frick you Black person
RTS doesn't need fixing as a genre. I'm not sure how it could become super popular again, RTS - by virtue of its core mechanics - is going to require a lot of game knowledge and also a lot of mechanical skill. There's a daunting learning curve and a lot of difficulty, a typical "classic" RTS probably has enough to learn and is difficult enough that most people will never get close to learning it all, especially acquiring the skill required. It's a hard genre and it's not going to be as popular as basic b***h, easy stuff. You can see this with other genres like fighting games too, they've got their audience but they're also hard games that are difficult to learn properly and don't get massive mainstream success because of it.
I'm not so sure. I've always been iffy on RTS campaigns. They all feel extremely limited and artificial. Start the first mission, you're only allowed to make workers and the most basic of unit. Play another mission and now you get to make 1 more unit. Next mission you just get 3 dudes you have to micro across the map for, no base, no economy, no actual army. 4th mission you get to build a new building and the 3rd unit type and so on. Maybe you get to like the 2nd to last mission and you finally have the full kit available to you and get to play a proper match with all the games mechanics available, then the campaign is over. Kind of sucks.
I think your problem is that you think the multiplayer is the goal rather than extra thing you play after doing the campaign
My problem is that the campaign is like playing a castrated tutorial version of the game for 90% of its duration and that sucks. MP is actually the full game. Skirmish against AI is also the full game but AI in most RTS games I've played can't really keep up with the genre so playing against it is either a compstomp which gets boring fast or the AI outright cheats with more resources, faster production and so on which can make fighting it arbitrarily difficult but at the same time destroys part of the appeal of a strategy game when you're no longer fighting on even ground.
You're not good enough to get matched up against people who have 300APM, so you don't need 300APM to beat them either.
This is true, though. SP has always been what's essentially a training session before going MP. Dripfeeding you tech and units, increasing challenge curve.
Campaigns where it's ACTUALLY something else were, are and will be rare. People praise Rise of Nations/DoW Dark Crusade for it's risk-style SP which are essentially just skirmish games with very few extra steps, which I have always considered dumb. I can't find any fun in exploiting objectively dumb AI, especially when I know all of the maps already AND I get an advantage in the form of stronger commander or honor guard. Sometimes that is enough to win a fight without even really building your base.
Multiplayer doesn't just extend a game's lifespan, it is THE lifespan. Every single successful traditional RTS has/had active multiplayer for a reason.
Your anxiety actively kills RTS.
The only way for a game to be predominantly SP is for it to have a large degree of replayability, like Total War or Paradox games. Or actual choices in the game.
>Every single successful traditional RTS has/had active multiplayer for a reason.
Every single successful traditional RTS was before MOBAs.
CoH2 does pretty well despite releasing after Dota2 and LoL.
>less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
so who's to blame? Surely not MP players. It's not my fault that you suck, don't want to improve and don't want to accept that you're the only one to blame. In a game with MMR, this really should not be an issue.
>CoH2 does pretty well despite releasing after Dota2 and LoL.
Impressive, very nice, now let's compare it to other RTS games
>The only way for a game to be predominantly SP is for it to have a large degree of replayability
Or you don't have to play the same game forever and can move onto the next one
Then you can't "kill a genre", which seems to be the idea.
Buy it and frick off. Let others play MP. You'll surely enjoy your scripted as frick 6 hour campaign.
>Let others play MP.
Too bad nobody does hence why RTS is dying you stupid frick
less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
>less than 25% of any RTS community even plays a single match of MP
citation on that statistic? Because even when I was 14, I learned how to set up computers in lan with my friends because we were so fricking hype to play warcraft 2 multiplayer.
Because once again, presentation and getting to actually play the game is EVERYTHING
Skirmish maps by themselves without that are only good for messing around with a few friends and tormenting (or being tormented by) the AI
elaborate before the thread sinks
I played rts games as a moronic child and had plenty of fun.
AoE2 still nails campaigns. The newest ones, Armenia/Persia/Georgia, were all kino. Some missions are better than others, but the overall experience is great. Glad they are still putting out good campaigns.
it's shocking to me aoe2de was the only one to get campaigns are a big draw. so they just kept releasing more and more.
>play these pre DE
>75 pop cap
>mfw
Decent scripting, or just decent map layouts?
Scripting as in what? In general I thought the recent three campaigns had a lot to do in each mission, it wasn't just build up base and kill enemy base every time. Supporting allies, optional enemies, stuff like that.
One of the Armenian missions left a big impression on me, it was a 2v2 but at one point one of the enemies declares a ceasefire. If you accept, it lets you focus on the one enemy for around 20 minutes, but once the ceasefire is up you have to face a much more powerful enemy, so you better hope you did a lot of damage. With a major bridge chokepoint, an ally to defend from one of the enemies, man that was a fun mission.
A good custom map/scenario editor and way for people to play on them together is important too.
Problem is everyone wants you to KEEP spending on the game. Just getting game sales is not good anymore due to "leaving money on the table" moronic mindset. Hence additional monetization in every single way.
>Make a good campaign
>Then make a good expansion pack with more shit and another campaign
>You get more cash for doing less
It's almost like this approach worked well before
This is what carried halo wars despite the game being am inarugable unbalanced buggy mess
Autistic micromanagement and a good solo
Remove asiatics, streamers and women.
being realistic and adding options to rape women and kids, soldiers do that in wars
So uh
Any word on the Age of Mythology remake?
https://www.ageofempires.com/news/new-year-new-age-announcement/
proseche!
Til aareste slaag!
eisvoli
Volome
Skepaan
VULOME
It's an inherently gay genre because it will always be about APM
apm is a meme
Everything is about apm. Do you expect to beat someone who doe smore than you?
i expect a fun campaign, with a decent story and set pieces. frick off with your eports shit.
Everything should be about strategy because the name of the genre is real time strategy.
In every game that is not Starcraft, APM is useful but its about meaningful decisions, map control, intel, and execution rather than move things quickly. You can play slow but precise and win. SC on the other hand, its about moving units back and forth, and doing attention checks due to the game design.
Everytime someone mentions APM is talking about Starcraft, because that's what Starcraft is about. Like shooters to aim %
Some of the best AoE2 players are 'slow' by pro standards. You can click 1000 times a minute but that won't help you at all if you don't know what you are doing or don't have a plan of action. And no, following build orders doesn't count.
>play ranked
>land on your "natural" rank
>now you play with people with the same APM
And that's assuming APM is all. I always wonder why this argument exists, in other games, let's say league majority of players are between silver and plat, they don't play like gods they still play it, and yet when it comes to RTS people watch top 1% of players play and decide they're not that good they won't bother playing.
because league is for babbies, top 1% is turbo autistic mega nerds with 800 apm from having played starcraft since they were in the womb
Obligatory.
That fricking horse mount was ugly as hell. We deserve how gaming has become because we're morons who buy into mocrotransaction shit.
Every other company is going to see that ROI and of course it's going to go the way it's been going.
>allegedly
>allegedly
>A former blizzard developer who need attention
Mandātum?
Why do the Britons scream DICK WILLIN all the time instead of God willing.
"Ic wille" actually, it's "I will" in old english.
>the chad strut
>Saracens pissing and shitting themselves
Bring back Command and Conquer
?si=9TqcNIRXON4b0dy1
There isn't much to fix, they got it right the first time. The genre doesn't really gain anything from better tech gameplaywise, and games like BW and AoE2 have unique quirks that would never be copied intentionally today. I don't think we'll ever see another RTS with workers that are useful the way SCV's are in the first ~5 minutes of a BW match for example, the obsession with "streamlining" tracks everything to becoming more like League or Dota. You'd have to make a game that's both beautiful/pleasant to look at as well as implement counter-intuitive gameplay hooks to pull people away from AoE2, and I don't think anyone is going to figure it out. Even if they did, the audience could easily turn their nose up at it for being archaic, being gameplay that's only acceptable when it's grandfathered in.
>AoE2 have unique quirks that would never be copied intentionally today.
Name a few.
There are tons of indie RTS games coming in the recent years, but all of them look like they belong to 25 years ago mechanically. There's nothing that could challenge late C&C or AoE. RTS needs more than indie devs.
One negative aspect about RTS games is that there'z absolutely no downtime, even the most fast paced shooter, there are several moments of you just camping, waiting for some thing, talking a quick break, but in RTS if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing, it's just too demanding, it's exhausting to play.
>is that there'z absolutely no downtime
Sounds like a personal problem. do you expect the other player/ai to just sit on its ass and wait for you to catch up?
He just explained the main reason RTS is not a huge mainstream thing, and he's 100% right.
Most people don't enjoy the korea-bot autism where the apex of gameplay is to condition yourself into becoming a literal build-order script.
With no down-time it also means that gameplay will require less strategy in the moment as well, simply because it's limited how much more you can multi-task if the gameplay already has 0 downtime for you to strategize mid-game. You can't really make huge pivots in strategy without losing out on the 300 apm autism so any changes you do has to be fairly small to not mess up your macro-game.
what the frick do you morons ever mean by strategy
turtling
>I'm going to sit in my base where it's comfy
>no I'm not going to expand on the map I need to be prepared first
>it will take me literally 2 hours to max out because I only built 20 workers
>nice now that I have a completed tech tree I will pick the most expensive unit with no counters to mass produce
>time to lean back and max zoom out to reward myself to an epic battle while I pat myself on the back for thinking of another art of war-esque play
if I can't do this the game is esports without real strategy. if you attack me before I can complete this you are a tryhard. only easy computer and human players who agree to play the same way I do understand how rts is meant to be played.
Eh, it depends really. TibSun for example is very slow with a lot of downtime.
>take the Low ELO Legend pill
>play a chill city builder for 2 hours in ranked until we have a gentlemanly skirmish in the middle before going back to city building
Age of Empires 2 has tons of downtime, you just have to get your ELO low enough
That's what I don't get from anxiety gays
Ranked systems are exactly for that. You're always gonna play with people as good as you. If you're bad or slow, you're gonna play with people that are the same as you. There's no pressure to climb as it will come naturally with every game.
I mean that's the point of a Ranked match. Nobody really cares about you being bronze or platinum but you.
because for a lot of these people, their skill level is lower than the bottom
and smurfs will frick you at every elo even if it's not exactly a common occurrence
>and smurfs will frick you at every elo even if it's not exactly a common occurrence
Could it be that you're just not even trying?
Play quickplay, protip: quickplay matches have a hidden ELO that nobody knows about and nobody cares about. It's the only place you can find people who legitimately wait until 200 population before sending their army forward anywhere that's not Arena.
When I discovered this, my enjoyment of the game went up immensely
>You're always gonna play with people as good as you.
That's kind of the thing. If you're at a particular ranking you always have to play your best or you go on a losing streak and people don't like that. You play the game more and naturally get better, but this never changes. Whenever you slack a bit, it's assrape time. Take a 2 week break to play another game so you're a bit out of practice, assrape time. Want to play a new race that you're not so good at, assrape time. You might wish to call this your "rank correcting" but most people don't like losing 10 games in a row until their rank is "corrected" no matter how you phrase it.
If the game matched you against whoever was available randomly rather than based on skill, then your improvement at the game would directly be visible in your win rate and how well you do in an average game. If you've gotten good and slack a bit, you're probably still better than the average. Play a new faction, again you're not playing at your peak but having game knowledge and good core mechanics will probably mean you're not going to be terrible either. Of course the flip-side to this is that being bad at the game is also going to be more punishing. If you're legitimately bad and significantly below average then you're not going to be relegated to the steering-wheel controller RTS underhive, you're going to be matched against people randomly and most of them are going to push your shit in. In any case getting good would feel a lot more rewarding since being good = winning more, whereas with ELO matchmaking being good doesn't change how much you win or need to tryhard and the moment you slip the system is eager to apply "correction" instantaneously.
If you're not playing to win then you weren't really playing
Luckily, Ranked isn't the only way to play
Quick match is the same shit, except they don't show you a shiny badge. The same kind of ELO matchmaking is going on in the background. You can of course play FFA, team games and so on as well. I don't really know how FFA is handled but team games tend to be handled with an ELO system too so it's not much different.
You're saying that you want to play a game but don't want to lose at all?
You want to play a game but ONLY against people that will let you win half, if not all the time?
What about the other guy?
No? Are you projecting?
You're saying that it's a problem to lose, and specifically that people feel bad about losing, so they won't play a game at all, and it's a problem
Is it really a problem the "lose" state?
I wouldn't feel anything if I couldn't lose. I know the other guy is trying his best. I WANT to try his best. Losing slow or fast doesn't change the fact that it was a fair match. Whenever I lose I think about what can be optimized and what did I learn about it. Certainly, there's a skill ceiling for me though, where I really have a hard time breaking out. But up to that point, the game was played, fair and square. That's kinda the point of a game.
Some games though aren't fun at any level, but that's game design. What I mean is that I don't really get your rant.
>In any case getting good would feel a lot more rewarding since being good = winning more, whereas with ELO matchmaking being good doesn't change how much you win or need to tryhard and the moment you slip the system is eager to apply "correction" instantaneously.
That would be an ELO system failure, where as in LoL it's not even about skill but "engagement" and that's kinda bullshit
In any case, any match you play, the game wasn't rigged and it is what it is (unless you're playing CoD lmao that shit IS RIGGED and bullets do less damage from time to time)
I'm explaining why people have "anxiety" when playing 1v1 RTS, did you even read the entire reply chain? Yes, people would rather win than lose. Is that a big revelation to you? When you play any 1v1 if you lose you know it's on you, you lost because the other guy is better than you and a lot of people don't like their entertainment showing them that they suck ass. You can see this in what games become massively popular, if they're competitive MP then they're not 1v1, they're team games where everyone can screech about how it's the team's fault even when it isn't or they're massive 100-player FFA clusterfricks where random luck is as important as skill if not more so, therefore every player can cope with rarely winning.
>I wouldn't feel anything if I couldn't lose. I know the other guy is trying his best. I WANT to try his best.
OK but then you're not the guy with 1v1 anxiety and you're not the guy who wants to play 2h long sim city matches either because that's not "trying your best" so this discussion is clearly not about you.
>Yes, people would rather win than lose. Is that a big revelation to you?
Kinda it is, i'm really surprised about the anxiety problem
>you lost because the other guy is better than you and a lot of people don't like their entertainment showing them that they suck ass.
Well, it's an RTS. It's a versus mode, like fighting or an arena shooter. I would guess people know what they're getting into.
Reading into the thread I realize that the anxiety seems deeper, but is it truly that much of a thing IRL? I mean, every RTS has AI and SP activities, but people buy their games for what they are, not for what they want them to be, and RTS are multiplayer at the half, or even at the core.
Meaning, for instance, If we entered a Street Fighter thread, people is indeed b***hing about something in the game, but community knows it's a fighting game, and wouldn't even entertain the idea of a "turtling" chill not even trying match. And even so, they DID add a single player campaign with a Beat Em Up style. So even then, there's something for everyone.
But in RTS threads the anxiety is to die for, and rife with negativity or outright denial. Strange.
Competitive MP anxiety is a huge thing. It's not even RTS exclusive but RTS games are big and complex and mechanically difficult to play well so it's very applicable, look at other games like fighting games too. Player population is tiny compared to shit like DotA & clones, CS, CoD, battle royales and so on. All the massively popular competitive MP is either team-based or FFA, not 1v1. 1v1 is extremely unpopular in comparison.
Shit like turtling is genre-specific and for low skill players it's a symptom of not being able to play well (certain factions in certain games can actually turtle well after all), I don't play fighting games myself so I don't know much about the genre but I'm sure there are things bad fighting game players have their own things to complain about. I'm sure there are people out there complaining about character X or Y being OP or whatever combo being impossible to block or some shit even though it's just a symptom of their lack of skill and not actually true. There are other things to consider too, a fighting game match is shorter, maybe it's easier to swallow when you lost in 2 minutes and move on than it is when you lose after 10-15 mins, or 30 or 1h+ even.
>I would guess people know what they're getting into.
They do and that's why they don't get into it, hence the general lack of popularity and only having a small audience.
That's AoE2 DE
Then it's all about how RTS are niche and will always be niche because they're complex games for "moderately" competitive people.
It's not bad though. They are what they are. Like Dwarf Fortress, people that is into it it's because it's complex and autistic, and not for the casual passerby.
What actually need is to be even MORE complex, more indepth, and with much more options. Campaign is nice but only if the base of the game is already superb. Campaigns are just tutorials and challenges, if the underlying game is already good.
Case in point, listening to casuals is bad. They never liked them in the first place. But nothing stops anyone from joining in and learn the game. If it was the other way around, being super casual, super friendly and super "le comfy" it comes around as dull, shallow, and in fact, not even a real game inside the genre. So there's no point in listening what people that aren't into it have to say, if you really want to do a red blooded new RTS like AoE2, SupCom, or C&C.
>Then it's all about how RTS are niche and will always be niche because they're complex games for "moderately" competitive people.
Yeah, pretty much.
>What actually need is to be even MORE complex, more indepth, and with much more options.
Yeah, I'd like this. Especially on the economic / macro side I'd like to see something a bit more in-depth, for instance having an economy that's a bit more complicated than "resources go in and out of universal, global storage" like actually having mechanics to move things from source to destination and so on. Think of it like some sort of Factorio-lite thing, not as much depth as Factorio itself of course but maybe if you want to build a tank then you need to make an engine and a gun and a chassis and take them to the tank factory rather than the tank just costing X credits or whatever. It would have to be pretty basic to fit in a single RTS match but it would be quite interesting. Spellforce 3 does something kind of like this.
I remember playing some early access demo of an RTS which actually had shit like conveyor belts and you'd have to process and smelt ore and such in order to get resources. It was meant for 3v3 where each player had their own role, like one guy was supposed to build the base, one guy handles mining and the smelting / resource processing machinery and the 3rd guy controls the army. That was pretty interesting as well but it was extremely rough around the edges.
Yeah, I know about it. IIRC DORF is also supposed to have some similar elements, but neither is out yet.
>listening to casuals is bad. They never liked them in the first place
Casuals are 90+% of the people that buy/bought rts games and are even the majority of people that still play them. Ignoring them in favor of e-sports gays is what all but killed the genre
These same casuals are the kinds of people who think the normal ai in any rts is too hard. They're fricking stupid and don't actually learn how to play the game.
>They're fricking stupid and don't actually learn how to play the game.
But they're still the primary audience. That's not say you should make games easier in some kind of attempt to appeal to them. Fighting games have already definitively proven that their is no correlation between how easy a game is and how much casuals like it. But having things for these players to do besides an endless ranked grind like campaigns and a scenario editor are important if you want your rts to succeed.
>But they're still the primary audience.
Lmao they're not
They are not my dude
You want sales doing what doesn't sell what you sell. You want to sell something else.
Even if it was your audience, you still don't listen what they say, you give them what they need.
It is the audience though, the sales audience.
>sell game
>90% of sales don't play game beyond a minimal point
>10% continues to play multiplayer
if you only appealed to the 10% you get way less sales. Appeal to that 90% and you get way more sales. Makes no sense to appeal to the esports stuff exclusively.
>Fighting games have already definitively proven that their is no correlation between how easy a game is and how much casuals like it.
Dude did you get the memo? Fighting games are dead.
Shooters replaced them as staple PvP genre.
You vill buy the RTS
You vill get stomped
You vill not get it easier
And you vill be happy
But people do argue about the importance of single player content in fighting games and for exactly the same reason. Fighting game devs have been gutting the mechanical complexity of their games for quite a while now precisely to try and make things more accessible and improve player retention. And one of the primary counter proposals against this strategy is to provide more robust single player (or at least non-tryhard multiplayer) content rather than fixating on how hard the game supposedly is.
And this isn't even exclusive to vidya, let alone RTS games. I used to get nervous before soccer games as a kid. Regardless of the context, no one ever wants to frick up and lose.
Some genres are just really susceptible to small differences in skill compounding exponentially during a match, and this causes frustration for the majority of potential players.
RTS is a particularly egregious case.
Personally, I've only really been interested in single player campaigns partly because of this reason.
it's entirely an ego thing. anyone that complains about elo systems or skill based matchmaking is really complaining because they don't want to be told that they are bad. with strategy games it is even worse because people see the word "strategy" and think "I'm a smart person so I expect to be pretty good at this game." then they get sent to wood league and can't accept that it's their fault. look at the shit that goes on at the absolute bottom of the ladder. it's impossible that anyone with room temperature iq who is even playing half seriously can't win against people playing like this.
Your downtime is during resource collection. Having no resources is the moment to breath and do the mental checklist: your main resource should always be close to zero. 'Strategy' players now have been conditioned to 'make number go up' instead of keep it down.
>Your downtime is during resource collection.
No. If you currently have no resources for army you should harass enemy. Even with the single drone, forcing opponent to lose APM dealing with that. You APM bar should be filled to your max all the time. Its the name of game: who can click faster.
idiot
your reaction is why RTS is doomed to be niche forever
>if you are not executing 300 actions per minute you are losing,
This is how I know you've never played RTS games competitively and instead just regurgitate shit you see and hear.
Sure you can relax, but you can't let your guard down, APM isn't the most valuable thing in aoe 2, that doesn't mean you can't expect to be attacked
Retvrn to Tradition as a weird mix of real time tactics and city builders.
RTS died the sweatier the gameplay loop became. Casual players just want to build cities and watch hordes march into each other.
Put together an amazing story campaign and mod tools/map creator and you've got yourself a winner.
if they buff handcannoneers in aoe2, it should be fine.
Are there any recent Classical style RTA games? You know, ones that actually have base building, multiple resources, and workers?
Tired of relicslop 'point control' game design. Dawn of War was a fricking mistake. If only Warhammergays weren't smoothbrains incapable of playing a complex strategy game.
Age of Empires 4?
Planetary Annihilation?
BAR?
ZK?
>AoE4
Have it
>Planetary Annihilation
Doubt it's good, sounds like a cheap cash grab based on the name alone
>BAR
I'm not into F2P phone games, nothing free is ever good
>ZK
What's that?
BAR is the best rn though
But it's better you don't get into those, they're TA successors and not what you're looking for
It had an abysmal launch, but TITANS made it really good, still, not quite as engaging as one would like to, because navigating planets gets tiring even though exploding them is fun AND achievable. Still it's pretty good and playable with a healthy scene.
why did people hate planetary annihilation again? dropping moons on a planet is fun.
AoE4
unironically if blizzard get their shit together and make a perfect starcraft 3
but it will never happen
and it will be shit and full of wokeism when it does
evergreen reminder
>You don't need APM
I know I play Goths
rts players pick one game and only play that for 40 years and call everything else shit so who the frick wants to develop for that demographic
it's really only the aoe2gays that are that obnoxious
You mean Starcrap gays
They're banished to the Shadow Realm in RTS discussions
You're literally moronic if you think AoE2 fans are anything but the most obnoxious homosexuals in the RTS spectrum. Starcraft homosexuals are also insufferable, but they are angels in comparison to talking about any RTS around anybody who plays AoE2.
>Just read AoE2
Tbh I do agree to an extent
AoE2 is really good, but there's more to life. AoE4 is pretty much AoE2 but better in many, many aspects
Stormgate is gonna save the genre bro
Where do I fit in?
I don't really like to play single player campaigns in RTS games, and don't like to play against other people because of cheese builds.
The first thing I look for in an RTS is map generation. I go straight to skirmish mode. I don't really like small multiplayer arena maps, so I love random generated maps like what Age of Empires 2 does. DoW was an exeption because the gameplay is fun and it's fun to watch kill animations in it. I also like to roleplay as the factions I play as. I still to this day play old RTS games that have a modding community.
Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion for example is a game I've been playing since vanilla sins in 2010. It has random map generation, it has no campaign, but has a few conversion mods. All I do is fight against AI and it keeps me entertained.
Fellow Sins Enjoyer here too.
Sins is fricking amazing. They absolutely knocked it out of the park a decade ago and only made it better. I still play it with the GF. TEC for life, I belong to the cult of the Autocannon.
>that screenshot
How do you get it to look that good? Every time I tried it the pic comes out looking like pixelated shit in a BMP format. Also based and TECpilled.
Just bring back WC3 in all it's glory with all the modding tools and cool casual multiplayer modes
RTS games peaked at Age of Empires 2, and the release of Definitive Edition was the "fix" the genre needed.
AoE2 isn't even the best RTS.
It can't come back because Starcraft 1/2 killed the genre by ruining it and turning RTS into RTT.
On the flip side, it doesn't need to come back because no RTS will ever be created that manages to surpass the absolute brilliance of Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. Kind of like how the stealth genre is dead because every new stealth game is just shit compared to Thief.
RTTchads took over
No build orders, just points and going wild with whatever. Means they can focus on units and maps instead.
RTT has no reason to come back either because Age of Kings and Dawn of War (not 2) already exist, which haven't been topped.
You're not entirely wrong. WiC got it right and that came out in 2007. Only thing that came close was Wargame and even those guys managed to run their studio into the ground.
Meanwhile massive is stuck in the ubisoft slave farm making the division
We have this thread every fricking week and we come to the same conclusion
RTS games started to suffer when they took the casual element out of them.
The most popular RTS game right now is AOE 2 definitive, and that game has literally hundreds of hours of single-player content. It has the largest, most expansive single-player campaign of any RTS game ever made.
Go online, and it is catered to the casual experience. hit quickplay and you're not pitted against the people in ranked who have been playing for 20 years but other people who play the game casually, just like most people who aren't neckbeards or autistic Fins
Meanwhile you look at other obvious flops coming out and it's all "asiaticCLICKasiaticCLICKasiaticCLICK" advertising peak performance at 145APM minimum with little to no strategy just micromicromicro. All designed to be redbull bait with no real reason for anyone who won't invest 20 hours a week playing it to even touch the game.
THIS shit is why RTS games fail. People want RTS games to be this huge e-sports endeavour and not only did RTS games get beaten at e-sports they can't even retain a casual playerbase anymore because of the asiaticclick homosexuals who have surely flooded this thread and will yell at my post because they know I'm right.
I'll yell at your post just because anyone who seriously uses the term asiaticclick as a pejorative is pathetic
Anyone who thinks apm is the only thing that matters is moronic and doesn't even know what strategy is. Even in starcraft this isn't true. The fact that you look at esports autism then think it's how most people paly the game is moronic.
No no, you're right.
The worst thing to happen to RTS was Starcraft, because then everyone decided to copy it. Starcraft (and SC2) worked in its own niche which is fine, but what they failed to realize is that the vast majority of RTS games are not the enormously high APM 3 hitpoint unit games that Starcraft is. Company of Heroes (1) and Dawn of War, even TibSun and Red Alert 2, all of your units are fairly resilient and to a given point reward deliberate informed reactions. 'Shit, my marine squad is getting munched, I need to get them out of there.' 'My Airborne ran into an emplaced mg42, frick, half the squad is gone. It gives you the time to make choices and choose what to do. The alternative, IE: Starcraft etc, is that almost every unit feels and acts like they have 2-3 hit points before they explode. Suddenly all of your units are cheap and ultimately expendable because there is barely any investment into them whatsoever. It feels good when you make a mammoth tank. Its great when your Knights Cross holders reach max rank etc. At no point do you feel the same for anything like that in SC or SC2, or any of the variety of copycats. Stormgate is made by the same devs and its literally more of the same and I fricking hate it.
Another thing people don't realize is that Starcraft has always had an expansive, high-quality campaign to draw people in as well from the very beginning.
Didn't it also always have always-online DRM in the form of blizzard's battle.net cancer? So you could forgive people for thinking it was a multiplayer only game.
No not really, LoV even got a sexy ass cinematic trailer. You're just moronic lol.
wow the first thing I look for in a video game, a movie
Nothing sold me on red alert 2 like the movie. I have watch this movie more then actual movies in my life.
There is always a disconnect between a vocal online playbase and the reality of a game.
Diablo 4 is a great example, the game is absolute dogshit for anyone looking to invest serious time into it, yet for casuals like Elon Musk it's the perfect game because he can sit down play maybe 50 hours and forget about it for a year and then come back.
>the only real strategy is sitting in your base for an hour and getting the perfect expensive army, everything else is asiaticclick
Why are morons on Ganker like this?
>playing RTS games with less than 145APM and in a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor
NGMI
>selects and deselects a control unit rapidly
My apm is now 30000000
>I use an autoclicker
you lost
Just normalize decent WASD camera controls schemes. Also make more big team modes that support drop in/out like popular FPS games. Basically just do what World in Conflict did
Why would you need WSAD camera control when you can just hotkey select all your units or use the mouse to move the camera?
muh APM
moving the mouse to move the camera takes up precious microseconds of my asiaticclicking
Its more natural for people that come from non strategy games.
RTT chads rise up
What is this?
act of war
lying b***h
a game for ants.
broken arrow
i hear the infantry in this game is pretty shit. my favorite part of RTS games are infantry with some AT or AA launchers.
>tfw you play command and conquer generals and realize there's no unit cap
MINI GUNNER REPORTING FOR DUTY
People who scream about 'asiaticclick' are just ass blasted shitters that are lower than the lowest elo level.
they're just suffering from anxiety at the idea of a fricking competitive multiplayer game.
Broken arrow is unironically really good for this. 5v5 is the only gamemode available.
Focus on good campaigns and custom maps like Warcraft 3.
The thing with the competitive scene is that you shouldn't actually pander to sweatlords. You should make it popular with regular gamers and then the sweatlords will be lured in and find a way to make it competitive. Then post-release you can appeal to the sweatlords with official tournaments and balance patches.
RTS is alive and well.
>stormgate comin (might be good might be shit but lots of interest)
>aoe 4 and 2 have plenty of players (4 is fun dont @ me)
>sc2 ever popular
>BAR reasonably popular for a game not on steam
If we get a decent C&C like (tempest rising looks ok but controls arent great and im not overly hopeful) or a remake of 2 we'll have everything we could want.
If you really want RTS to take off again for normies you need mass varied co op content for shitters like me to feel good about themselves against decent ai challenges. They are billions kinda had the right idea but make that co op.
>They are billions kinda had the right idea but make that co op.
>tower defense
GIVE ME RED ALERT AGAIN.
I WANT FMVS AND CHEESE AND RECOGNIZABLE FACTIONS WITH PERSONALITY.
EVERYTHING IS SO GOD DAMN BLAND THESE DAYS.
No seriously the reason why so many RTS are liked was the fact that the factions, lore, and basic normie stuff was on point. Yes the esports, balance, and all the crap is nice but that audience is very different and only 10%. You need the 90% of people to buy your FPS for the campaign just like Call of Duty.
call of duty is in the minority for still having a campaign.
It's also in the minority of begin a FPS game thats actually successful and not SaaS.
not really.
Name one literally.
https://steamdb.info/charts/
All of the most played fps games have no campaign except for call of duty.
I'm taking about being non SaaS you idiot
>CS
>PubG
>Apex
>Rust
>Warframe
>Destiny 2
>Dead by Daylight
These are all live games with constant updates.
The only odd ones out here are Left 4 Dead 2 and TF2 being literally abandon ware by Valve. Yet somehow still 100k people daily play them.
There isn't a single shooter on the list here until Halo: The Master Chief Collection that has an actual Single Player campaign.
call of duty is a live game with constant updates. LMAO.
That doesn't mean it's not successful btw.
Are you seriously comparing Call of Duty to that you buy every year for $70 to Density 2 or Counter Strike?
considering how many people who loved Command & Conquer are now adults in gamedev I'm surprised there's no indie spiritual successor with intentionally cheesy green-screen FMV cutscenes
I'm sure the free version of Davinci Resolve has chroma keying and everyone has a high-quality camera in the form of your phone
Starcraft 2 killed RTS for a while because it fricked up the custom games really, really hard.
The graphics should be good and detailed, but it should still have an isometric camera (and maybe no camera rotation).
It should have a satisfying gameplay loop of iconic units that counter one another.
Finally the scope needs to be fairly large with a long singleplayer campaign spanning several ages.
That's really all it would take, in my opinion. And if you only focus on 2-3 factions like a Command & Conquer game, the story becomes even more important, since it's more difficult to make interesting fictional factions than real historical ones.
Problem is most people who like RTS are deeply stupid. It genuinely needs to attract a new audience that can actually handle the genres mechanics.
I only play RTS games where I can turtle.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Supreme Command FA
If I can't take a chokepoint, fortify the frick out of it, and then play tall until I can steamroll the map... I don't play.
Bubble shields are so cool.
SupComm didn't have any right to be that great. It spoiled anyone that played it. The first time you hear the "strategic map expanded" will forever stay with you. At that point you are just hyped that this game will open the floodgates and a new wave of massive scale RTS is coming but no. Thats the peak. then sup comm2 happened and yeah, frick you.
Maybe Tower Defense is more for you
I unironically think it's over for rts in a similar sense to how people say it's over for mmos. there are just tons more online video games competing now and they've carved away the audience.
make it so no one knows who lost ahead of time.
Just make a good fricking game that has fun base building for the casual player, a decent campaign for the solo player, and a variety of maps for the multiplayer.
Every RTS now comes out with moronic gimmicks like no base building, or only microing 4-5 super units, or moronic MOBA style multiplayer lane maps. Look at the latest Age of Smegmar RTS developed by Frontier. Absolutely atrocious. Only 4 factions even though the entire appeal of the setting is the huge variety of armies. No base building. Just point capture. For fricks sake guys.
>Every RTS now comes out with moronic gimmicks like no base building, or only microing 4-5 super units, or moronic MOBA style multiplayer lane maps. Look at the latest Age of Smegmar RTS developed by Frontier. Absolutely atrocious. Only 4 factions even though the entire appeal of the setting is the huge variety of armies. No base building. Just point capture. For fricks sake guys.
This
These shits weren't even RTS to begin with, but people insist on calling them those then say hurr hurr RTS are le ded
what rtsgays always wanted was a city builder with combat
they day they admit that to themself is the day they will get it
Anno 1800 is basically this, I came to this conclusion for myself when I finally got into that game.
what game is this?
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition. It's the first level of the Barbarossa (The Teutons) campaign.
Devs need to stop making the same game.
>The game where 'number go up'
Make it slower, allow me to upgrade my units without having to click one million times per match lmao
That is if you want pvp, otherwise just make singleplayer decent
Mechanical simplification for PvP is cope. It doesn't matter how simple and slow you make it, if the other dude you're playing against does it better and quicker than you then you still get your shit pushed in even if the game is simple. All you're achieving in the end is making a duller, more boring game with a lower skill ceiling.
Then it must die
Well it hasn't died, but it kicked you out instead.
I play AoE 2 and I have this problem where if I put the AI on one difficulty it is too easy but if I put the AI on the next difficulty up they fricking rape me.
what do??
Answer me!!! How do I make the AI challenging but not unfair without resorting to looking up build orders, which basically ruins the entire game?
Stick to black forest. The AI no matter how hard never cuts a path through the forest so you can bottleneck the one approach to your base while turtling your army and then make a break for it through the bottleneck or open up a second front by catapulting a path through the forest.
Make the factions interesting. It feels like most factions in strategy games nowadays are le generic guys who have fast units and le generic guys who have tough units.
And the architecture just looks totally bland.
This
Basically every RTS has
"Strong, expensive, slow guys"
"Swarm of cheap shitters"
And
"Weak units, good abilities" along with the vanilla faction, with basically no deviation that isn't unequivocally the best or worst faction in the game because they can't into balance.
Divvy up the racial traits of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 as you please, with an occasional extra gimmick thrown in.
>What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
make more ball units.
>THE PIONEERS USED TO RIDE THESE BABIES FOR MILES
>Classic RTS action meets modern production and performance in Tempest Rising.
>Inspired by RTS greats of the 90s and 2000s, Tempest Rising is a classic, base-building real time strategy game set in a modern day alternative history war scenario.
>It features 3 unique factions, each with its own approach to combat and economy and offering a variety of strategies for players of all stripes, deep and rewarding gameplay that keeps a focus on strategy while rewarding skill, and built-in customization options that allow players to approach the game their way in both single player and multiplayer game modes.
hm...
calling it now that it's going to have a bunch of hero units to appeal to the dotards.
>"Why walk when you can roll?"
>Cuck box vs the superior shape
There are literally zero weak points in a sphere
Looks fun... but
>volumetric fog in an rts
Bruh... readability in 3D RTS is already difficult
just turn it off in the options. play it in the lowest settings with no foliage, no trees, no special effects like a real sweaty pro.
That's the thing, I've never played a game where you can just turn it off.
>complaining about readability in TR
wait till you see the clusterfrick that is stormgate. you have to take several minutes to tell your units apart from the enemies.
My issue with stormgate is that it just doesn't look fun, them again I didn't think the sc2 co-op missions were fun either I just liked playing the campaign
make several builds viable in multiplayer and non meta based. I can't think of a single RTS game which does it right. I hate playing meta so much.
> I can't think of a single RTS game which does it right.
broodwar is balanced enough you can get away with almost any strategy
yea but you can't outplay meta builds anyway. I wish there was some random element in-game which encourages non-conventional strategies and tactics instead of mindlessly repeating the same handful of build orders every time.
It's impossible to not have a "meta" because the meta is just the current understanding of the playerbase of how to best play the game. It's impossible for such a thing not to exist. The meta shifts and changes as new styles are discovered naturally, so there are probably ways to play that are good but not meta, but nobody good enough has discovered them yet. That's why the meta changes after all, beyond shit like patches. You can add some elements of randomness, like the random maps in AoE for instance and they will shake up what players do to some degree, but you can't go too hard on randomness because it's still a game of skill after all, not of luck.
>it's still a game of skill after all
I wouldn't call people being skilled at maining a faction as skilled in the game as a whole. I want an RTS game which tests the skill of a player to adapt and improvise (which is what strategy is all about) instead of one main vs another main, which at point is no different than a fighting game.
You can do that, some maps will favor certain factions. If the rush distance is very short, that's good for factions which can rush. If it's not then maybe it's better for turtle factions. Some are better defensively, some offensively, some maps have safer resources which are hard to harass, some are more exposed and so on. You can definitely play multiple factions and choose which one fits to extract a benefit, most people don't do that because playing 1 faction well is hard enough, but if you look at good AoE 4 players for instance they definitely pick and choose between multiple civs depending on various factors.
>You can add some elements of randomness, like the random maps in AoE for instance and they will shake up what players do to some degree, but you can't go too hard on randomness because it's still a game of skill after all, not of luck.
You could theoretically break up meta stagnation to some extent without having to resort to randomness. Just look at how map dependent the viability of different aoe2 civs is. If you you were to lean in to that and design your game such that things like map differences have an even greater effect on build orders and overall gameplans and also somehow actually get people to play on more than a handful of maps (ideally introducing new ones over time) you could make it a lot harder for an agreed upon meta to be established for any given map.
That wouldn't really mean there's no meta, just that the meta is more convoluted. On map 1 you do X, on 2 you do Y and so on. People would still try to figure out what the "best" way to tackle each map's unique features is and then gravitate to incorporating that solution into their play.
You're just not going to get huge numbers in difficult and highly competitive games. Most people don't engage in entertainment that leaves them feeling like they suck ass (even if they actually do). RTS doesn't really seem more dead than other highly competitive titles. Look at the numbers AoE 4 has on Steam compared to new fighting games like SF6 or Tekken 8. Very similar peak player count, AoE 4 and SF6 have very similar avg counts currently too, Tekken is brand new so it's higher still but it'll go down inevitably. All of these games have similarly small audiences, though having like 70k+ peak and 10k+ avg even now isn't particularly small, it just isn't world-changing huge like more casual genres.
>that wouldn't really mean there's no meta, just that the meta is more convoluted.
That's more or less what I said. You were right when you said you can't prevent a meta from forming. But you can make it take longer while also regularly introducing enough new things that you don't end up with as calcified a meta.
>You're just not going to get huge numbers in difficult and highly competitive games. Most people don't engage in entertainment that leaves them feeling like they suck ass
There is no correlation whatsoever between how difficult a game is at the highest levels of competition and how much casuals enjoy it. What actually matters to them is all the other content in the game. Many of them will never even touch ranked games so the fact that they'd get stomped there is irrelevant. They're interested in things like campaigns and goofing around on custom maps. This is why fighting games are actually in a worse situation long term than RTSes, because they've yet to figure out what they can offer casuals other than the ranked grind.
>how difficult a game is at the highest levels of competition
This is where you're the one who's wrong because the highest levels of competition don't come in the equation at all. RTS is complex and difficult at any level because it demands a lot of multitasking, decision making and mechanical execution. The fact that you're not at the top level skill-wise doesn't mean you engage with fewer or less complex systems, the fact that you're not good at it doesn't make it easy to play and it doesn't mean you can't tell you're struggling.
In any case this is mostly besides the point, because my point is about competitive 1v1 and not the inherent complexity of the RTS genre. When you play a skill-based 1v1 game and lose then you know for sure you lost because of your lack of skill compared to the opponent, you need to own that and accept it and most people aren't looking for that kind of experience in their entertainment, like I said. Other games are team-based or battle royales where you fight 100 people rather than 1 guy so you never need to own quite like you do in 1v1.
>random element in-game which encourages non-conventional strategie
roguelike mode which has a roulette of troops could maybe help but balance would become an issue.
I don't think it really needs to reinvent the wheel. Give me an RTS that looks like AoE2 or Stronghold, add a bunch of modes to the game on top of an excellent campaign mode, multiplayer, and that all it would take for me to buy it. Also, invest in marketing (streamers + youtubers). I never hear about any rts game coming out anymore, but I know dozens of them are coming out each year.
Is this game fun like another AOE? I saw it on sale on Steam.
It has one of the best campaigns in all of RTS games but multiplayer is basically this
. also be warned that a definitive edition will be releasing in a couple of years.
Yes. I enjoyed the uniqueness of the factions
Age of Mythology and Rise of Nations both presented future evolutions for AoE formula.
I don't care, what we have will last me a lifetime. I'll list some favorites. Aoe2, planetary annihilation, TA, RA2, AI War, Wargame Red Dragon
Ai war is one of my most played games by hours, easily have 2k hours in it
>Ai war is one of my most played games by hours, easily have 2k hours in it
never played it
how is it
It's different but I love it for that. Buy the original not the sequel. Only play if you have time to learn something new, steep learning curve
thanks for the qrd
might give it a try, i like quirky games
You don't. You just make a clone of Starcraft 2.
RTS suffers from the same issue as arena shooters and fighting games. No-one wants to play a straight skill test. They just don't. That kind of game devolves into a small sweaty tryhard community. The average gamer wants to feel like they're accomplishing something, even if it's an illusion. That's why MOBA and Battle Royale are so popular, you get to feel like you're progressing for 20-40 mins until your skill is tested. You can easily dismiss a loss as bad luck and get back on the treadmill. RTS doesn't let you fool yourself that way, so it turns people off real fast. To revitalize this genre it needs some BR style revolution, like letting the players build up their bases for longer, or avoid conflict somehow. Perhaps you could take the Rust meta game and apply it to RTS somehow, like extend each game out over a week or so before it resets.
I don't think investing more time into getting wrecked would make it sting less, or less of a skill test. I'm not sure how week-long RTS would even work. Maybe some sort of TBS like people used to play chess over letters they'd post or something, but RTS involves both players being active and playing at the same time and there's no way you'd sync up with some other guy online every day for a week to play a super-long RTS match. I think there are RTS games out there which allow MP saves too, so you could probably already do this if you wanted to, in something like Sins of a Solar Empire maybe.
>That's why MOBA and Battle Royale are so popular
No, I think these are super popular because they're fundamentally not 1v1. If you lose in DotA or whatever you can blame your team or at least share responsibility so each player can literally cope by knowing it's not strictly their own skill and nothing else which lost the game. BRs can be played FFA as well of course, but those games basically tend to be a clusterfrick of randomness and you've got 99 opponents or something, not a single one, so when you lose it's not like you went up against one other guy and got wrecked in the first place, then secondly you can still cope by relying on bad luck as an excuse.
I haven't seen a lot of gameplay but what I have seen looks extremely reminiscent of SC2 and WC3, to the point where I'm not sure why you'd play Stormgate instead of either of those. Even the graphics don't really look like a step up, I mean yeah it's clearly higher fidelity than OG WC3 graphics but I don't think the style is as good and SC2 looks outright better to me.
Desynced? That's more a Factorio-like than RTS I'd say, though you certainly can make combat units too.
>I'm not sure how week-long RTS would even work
Rust servers reset every week or so, it'd work the same as that. Rust is already about base building/raiding, so it's a perfect fit really.
I've never played that. So what, you log out of the game and then you come back and your shit is wrecked so you lost for the week?
yep that can happen, usually you try to adequately protect your base before logging off
Palworld is on the right track with their automation
The issue is that these days something has to be accessable in order to maintain public interest. Niche genres like RTS and fighting games are really difficult to make accessable while still maintaining their core appeal.
Won't stormgate save it? inb4 muh korean clickers
the graphics in stormgate just look so bland. Why does it literally look less detailed than a game from the 90s? we're devolving
no. It will fail because it's just riding the coattails of other RTS games (in a bad way) instead of being its own thing. also because it is a asiaticclicker.
stormgate is literally just
>we have starcraft 2 at home
and starcraft 2 was already a bad game
Frick no. Have you seen it? It looks like garbage.
RTS doesnt need fixing.
It's not going to happen. Audiences don't go back to complexity once they're accustomed to simplicity. I suspect in another generation you won't have anyone familiar with the genre to develop future RTS. Like MUDs of old they'll just fade away.
RTS is a fish with legs. when the genre was big people didn't actually like playing RTS, they liked specific parts of RTS
>People that liked building up a city moved to city builders or civilization
>People that liked smashing big armies into eachother ("no rush 20 min") got into total war
>People that enjoyed the stategy aspect moved to more squad level games like x-com or strategy rpgs
>People that liked micro moved to mobas
>All the other custom modes that weren't dota/moba have also received their own dedicated games. you don't need to download a tower defence map, you just play bloons
Very few people liked the specific combo of base building AND unit micro AND build orders AND strategy AND were okay with losing a 20 minute game because they choked at the 10 minute mark and the other guy didn't, they either put up with it because the game offered enough stuff they did like and used house rules to downplay as much of it they didn't like. Just look at how many people have said "asiaticclick" in this thread - people didn't actually enjoy RTS games.
>they liked specific parts of RTS
yeah and that's why we got different rts that focused on various things. there is no one-size-fits-all rts out there.
yes and people realized that even the specialized RTS games still had too much of the rts stuff they didn't like and moved on to fully dedicated games to offer what they like. someone that doesn't like unit micro and tried stronghold is only going to like it until they realize they just lost their entire army to fire traps because they didn't react in 1 second to move them away - then give up and go play civilization
I think there's still a niche market for indie single player RTS games with low budgets. AAA RTS games are gone forever. Blizzard just stopped giving a shit about SC2 and HotS because it took so much to develop and maintain and one WoW mount makes more profit than all of SC2.
>AAA RTS games
I don't think those ever got a chance. No RTS ever came anywhere near the budget of what we consider AAA releases.
It needs to have a good map editor at launch so people can make their own fun.
warcraft 3 isn't remembered for it's esports scene
it was remembered for having great custom games, one of which became so popular that it became a genre of it's own
nobody is going to spend the time to make a really compelling custom map when they could release it for cheap as an indie game using unity - the genie is out of the bottle and instead of using a fricking RTS map maker to avoid learning how to code their own engine they can just use the same premade engine even AAA studios use
>play 8 player FFA with AI
>everyone attacks me first
Has there been anything like Majesty in recent years? Or any game that is a twist on the typical RTS formula.
Majesty, you say?
God shave the queen!
>any game that is a twist on the typical RTS formula.
I guess against the storm. I haven't played it but heard it is a different kind of RTS game.
what's that game called where you can script your units to make them do shit automatically like an AI?
nothing good unfortunately. I went back and played majesty recently (majesty 2 sucks) It's heavily carried by its absolutely fantastic voice acting.
is majesty an rts? I feel like it's a different type of game, but I don't know what to call it since it's pretty unique
it's an rts like the settlers games.
Make single player content for casuals, and some of them will stop being casuals over time. That's how it has always worked, and how it always will. In every genre.
I miss Tom Clancy’s Endwar
remember that whole era where you were going to control units with voice commands and kinect and shit like that, that never actually worked well?
I feel like the only game I ever played that did voice commands well was Star Trek: Bridge Crew, and Ubisoft had to rent IBM Watson for it.
RTS was once the genre which pushed limits of creativity and gameplay. every old major game studio would have definitely done an RTS game or two in their past. It was a trampoline of a genre, which was popular with the techphiles of that age. due to games becoming mainstream, the audience of RTS is but a drop in the ocean now and therefore there aren't any games being made.
If not pandering to casuals was the problem then why not just play 8-bit armies the deathball making simulator? Imagine taking the strategy out of strategy games lol
just tried this but it's not being as fun as I thought it would be
You'd think with some of the reviews of it its the next coming of christ in terms of city builders but its literally just Dawn of Discovery/ Anno/ Settlers with a different coat of paint. It was dull as shit from the tutorial onward and it doesn't even look as good as those titles. Like what is offering something new?
yeah I couldn't get into it at all, maybe I'm just moronic but it all seemed so complicated and tiresome
It's impossible. Zoomers and mass appeal normalgays just aren't interested in RTS. You'd have to create an engaging hybrid game where you can step into the shoes of one of your units and shoot in first person or something. But as is, it'll always be niche.
I just want to say that Age of Empires campaigns were one of the reasons I almost never had to study for social studies classes as a kid. Having basic cable and nothing else to watch during the evening except PBS helped, but Age of Empires was a heavy lifter.
There's sadly just no topping the king.
You need too fricking much revitalized at this point.
>Good campaign
>Scenarios
>Fun and interesting factions
>Co-OP
>Smart AI
>AI with personality
>Modability and map creation toolkit
>How does the RTS genre get revitalized at this point? What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
stop b***hing on the internet and actually playing ages of empires and Homeworld 3 would be a great start
Unironically one of the best RTS campaigns I've played in years is a mod.
Blows the actual campaigns of the game out of the water in terms of quality of scripting, objectives, etc.
If you like MOWAS/Gates of Hell try Last Grenadier.
Here's a massive recent RTS that focuses in hard on people's favorite thing about the genre. Could do with more interesting enemies with more interesting enemy bases, though.
Am I the only one who wishes for a true dungeon keeper revival? Evil Genious is in the same category but has no multiplayer like dungeon keeper does. Leaving the fighting to minions and instead focusing on securing gold/portals and outmanouvering the other player with elaborate digging and traps and using your spells tactfully. No apm crap, just pure tactics with a slight chance of rng with the AI of minions who play by themselves but can be picked up and dropped off or forced to march to a location using a spell.
Isn't dungeons 4 a spiritual successor to it? I've also played another game that tried to reignite it, but I dropped it at random at some point. Forgot its name. I've tried to play it with a friend online against AI, and even on normal we got completely crushed. Not sure why they made it so hard.
Turn off the esports and sweaty gamers.
Every genre that has them dies.
Esports don't kill games.
Building the games around the goal of esports kills games.
Make a good competitive multiplayer game that's fun to play first and foremost. If it grows a base and people are organically forming competitions, consider monetizing them. Never make those competitions the main goal of development or focus on the top 1% of players at the expense of the majority.
This is literally how they killed my boy Heroes of the Storm. Frick e-sports or estrogen sports as I call it.
I don't understand why people keep insisting that esports killed rts. literally no one except for worst koreans and a few nerds on teamliquid cared about esports until sc2 came out, but by that time rts was already pretty much dead. sc2 came out in 2010. ensemble was shut down in 2009 and westwood had been kill since 2003. relic and chris taylor were still around, but they always did their own thing. plus sc2 has every feature that casual players say they want like big campaigns, custom games, and coop modes.
>doesn't count! doesn't count!
>WAAAHHHHHHH
THIS is why rts "died". aweful fanbase that keep crying instead of just playing the damn games.
>It's not the e sport and the players that get attracted by it that killed it, I swear!
>Can't play any match without being ranked and put in place
>People conditioned to only want to win
>People conditioned to only care for ranked mode
>Barely anyone creates maps anymore
>Smurf accounts to stomp noobs
>Casuals drop out after getting stomped repeatedly
Sweat lords don't want to realise it, but they are part of the reason why these games died. Next to devs catering to them of course. Is there even any benefit of all these systems to create a ranked match in today's climate?
Casual masses only go so far when they get stomped time after time. Can't imagine anyone going back to it when every match they have played turned out to be a stomp.
The follow up is of course that sweats cannibalise themselves after that until they drop the game for good. You can observe this process in all sorts of games, mind you.
>people before ranking system
waah, I will be curbstomped!
>people after ranking system
waah, I will be curbstomped!!
>play ranked competitive mode
>get mad at ranked competitive mode
and if there aren't any modes other than ranked competitive that's 100% on the devs, but you clearly aren't their target audience if you don't want ranked competitive
>Join a lobby called "only beginners" "noobs welcome"
>It's a vet who wants an easy win every time
what game are you even talking about though? most rts games that released before sc2 didn't even have a ladder with ranked play. what major rts came out after sc2 that were ruined by esports? surely not fricking planetary annihilation.
stop complaining, play games
Total War-type games are basically the only way RTS games will ever some real traction again, and Total War games are run by turbojews that expect you to fork out $600
Make Majesty 3
did anyone ever play this piece of shit? ubishit doesn't even make games anymore, they exclusively manufacture slop.
Dont remind me. Frickers killed whole series.
>hehe, campaigns are not necessary for rts games!
>Try out Iron Harvest and drop it not even halfway through the first mission because it is so unappealing without base building and drags on forever
Ough
I personally believe that campaigns are essential to pull me into the world and make it feel like the MP battles are a part of the wider conflict surrounding the campaign. It's so much more meaningful that way instead of just some factions fighting without any context.
>without base building
It's funny that the missions with limited units and no base building which were considered awful in traditional RTS games turned out to be their own genre with a big following.
go watch a mr beast video and realize the modern generation will NEVER have the patience to play an RTS
watching a mr beast video is like having schizophrenia, its fricking insane
rts are alive and well
they're just not popular as earlier that's it
trends come and go
electronic music isnt as popular as 20 years ago, yet it's still alive and well
in 20 years other types of games wont be as popular as they are now
make a tiktok about it go viral.
make it more about resource management, logistics, environmental and less about le epic mgl micro for the tournament audience.
Play Sins of the Solar Empire
>Pretty much everyone agrees that shitty single player is at fault
>Most of the thread is people shitting it up with multiplayer 1v1(the worst way to play an RTS) talk
Check out the video posted somewhere in the middle of this thread. It concludes that the masses want a single player campaign and fun maps/modes away from try hard PvP bullshit.
>Pretty much everyone agrees that shitty single player is at fault
Bullshit. When rts switched from fun big campaigns and skirmish modes to e sport the genre died. In the 90´s and early 00`s rts was one of the most mainstream pc gaming genres.
maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he meant that "games having a shitty singleplayer" is bad not "shitty singleplayer games"
100% based and truth pulled, if the campaign fricks I will buy your rts game, but when was the last time one had something decent? Wings of liberty from fricking 2008?
Cautiously optimistic for Age of Mythology Retold. Hopefully they don't frick up anything major but we'll see how it goes.
If anyone trustworthy got the LOTR IP I'd love to see War of the Ring again. Kino Warcraft clone that one.
Wdym?
>Stormgate
>zerospace
>tempest rising
>homeworld 3
RTS is fine, you people literally don't play games
>What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
Re-release Dawn of War and all the expansions but make them run flawlessly on modern PCs. Literally all it needs because that game was the pinnacle of RTS.
coh is better, warhammer is gay
no u.
40gay more like
you're mom gay
gayet
I've been meaning to replay DoW 1 campaign for a while now
/signed
>your rts end
>this start playing
>yfw
I want a new Star Wars RTS
ignore compgays
This
Ive played dozens of rts games and the only one I tryharded in was sc2 and I was masters league. Its ultimately more fun to play campaigns or co-op/team battles
I have never played the Homeworld Multiplayer, not even against bots. I watched a YouTube video of a game being played and it looked gay as frick.
The problem with targeting campaign gamers is that they are not typically return customers, they one and done. You want a successful competitive scene, because it drives sales and advertises for you for free if competitive players actually enjoy playing the game. The goal most RTS gamers have had since starcraft blew up was "Lets try to make a solid campaign as a way to get people into playing competitively for fun"
Nah.
Campaign players will happily return for dlc and expansions if the game was good, skirmish modes/map editors are just fun extras on the side and should have minimal resources directed to them
>You want a successful competitive scene, because it drives sales and advertises for you for free if competitive players actually enjoy playing the game
this is bullshit though
>Competitive scene
>Driving game sales
Since fricking when
Look at AoE2. Its still alive, one of the largest rts currently and selling dlc´s over 20 years after release. It releases big campaign packages. Yes it has a big multiplayer community. But the game is not a classic e sport title. Its design is very different from something like SC2. SC2 is imho much tighter designed and overall "better" multiplayer game. But for most people its not fun having to train every day to play a game. They want to play 1 or 2 evenings a week and have some fun and comfy mp games and watch units go boom.
so, just play with friends
aoe2 is "alive" because it is a fun game to play competitively, moron. People are not just replaying the campaigns over and over again.
if it didn't have fun campaigns it would never have become popular
And whats your point? I said the current goal design of campaigns is to have people get into playing the game competitively. Long term fans of a game are ones that either play it competitively, Or like to play silly casual custom games, which AoE2 also has, but is much worse than Warcraft 3, which is essentially its own game engine you can script entirely new games in.
It's the compgays who aren't return customers. They'll play one or two games for twenty years straight and won't ever need any other RTS because they don't care new SP content.
Neglecting SP is suicidal in the long run because new multiplayer communities never last long as the players always abandon fotm and go back to their ancient classics. And once MP is dead, there's no reason to get the game. Meanwhile, you can pick up any SP game old or new and it's always playable regardless of how many fans it still has.
>The problem with targeting campaign gamers is that they are not typically return customers, they one and done.
AAA games dev go away
>The problem with targeting campaign gamers is that they are not typically return customers, they one and done
What does that matter if you aren't charging money on an ongoing basis? If you're selling the game as a one off purchase, then you should target one-off customers.
That's a good thing. Generals 2 tried to do that but the community pushed back so hard the game was cancelled. Some say it's a shame that happened, I think RTS dodged a bullet here.
Generals 2 even back then would have been so neutered and soulless that I'm glad it was shitcanned
Generals and zero hour are like a precious time capsule to when you could have fricking hilarious racial caricatures in games because Americans everywhere were still in full salt the earth mode fresh after 9/11
Just make the campaign replayable by having some choice and variety in it. Problem solved.
Still waiting for the source on this, homosexual, it's not the first time of you posting the image and just vanishing
SC2 co-op was the right idea, people want to play with friends and build armies and crush stuff, I hope stormgate is good but the art style looks garbage
holy shit what the frick is going on with that game? its just literally wc3 without textures or shadows what the frick
Safe ESG friendly design
Yeah I don't know what this artstyle is called, "Unity Game" or whatever but its fricking horrible.
I don't want pastel colours AT ALL at this point.
>Gameplay is not looking at the action but clicking buildings and workers
I want to go back
I physically cannot get into any RTS game where the units are freakishly bigger than the buildings. Banished was the last RTS that I was able to play.
Stop pretending PvP is anything but terrible or just rare goofy fun between friends.
your gay. team games between rando shitters are fun too
You are jaded.
The games are shit because pro players like Hera and Viper sell other players spreadsheets and then they come to terrorize lower elo players with Frank knights or egalos and/or castille drop
ASL soon bros
If you can't fully understand why the Corruption mechanic is disliked in Empire at War: Forces of Corruption, you will never truly understand why RTS games died.
You become the units.
No. Silica is the best current thing and it still feels bland.
Savage is just a blockfest.
>muh campaigns got ruined by esports!
>meanwhile the only RTS games with decent campaigns are asiaticclickers like SC2 and AoE2
>anime avatar
>moronic opinion
every single time.
This is true. The vanilla DoW1 campaign can be easily won by just spamming regular SM blobs and kiting around.
Dawn of War has fricking stellar presentation and the rts is perfectly playable however you want even if you don't play perfectly and that's all that matters
I agree with the skirmish gameplay and the way the whole game is presented. Got introduced to it at a LAN party, just smashing all these diverse races against each other was a blast.
The DOW1 campaign was always criticized for being short and weak. The game became famous for being the first of its kind of rts (not CoH) and having a very good presentation. I loved the game but was disappointment by the campaign.
Just write next time "I'm moronic", and spare us the time.
I'm only interested in WW2 games.. with tanks.
focus on the spectating ai vs ai experience, give ff12/dragon age origins style "programming" scriptability to players to allow one type of ai's procedure against another's
also generals zero hour style main campaigns
Sounds fun, but extremely niche.
Remastering Red Alert 2 will do the job
Hybrid gameplay with continuity.
Right now the rts genre is missing the key elements of popular games.
Is rts a fast game? No. Compare it to things like call of duty, Fortnite, overwatch where you can drop in and get to the fight right away. Rts takes much more preparation and build up.
Is there a continuity? Do the matches help towards some ultimate goal? No. Unlike RPGs or even just skin-based progression, rts games rarely have progression in a measurable way.
What about drop in / drop out? No. If you want to play rts you normally have to be there from the start, unlike battlefield or call of duty type games.
If you want rts to be popular in current year you will at the very least need to adress these issues in a smart way. Warcraft 3 added some minor continuity with heroes gaining one level per map in the campaign; warlords battlecry added persistent heroes between campaigns/multiplayer; spellforce did the same. I don't know of any games that used unit skins or such to demarcate progression but there probably are some.
Hybrid games, where some players handle the strategy layer and others fight as units with rpg elements that are persistent, would be the most obvious fix. There have been some low budget attempts like this without the rpg part (natural selection 1/2), and an amazing c&c game that never caught on.
The benefit of a hybrid approach is that you can get way more players that way, and it would support drop in play.
RTS is inherently toxic design. No matter who you try to skin it it would stay as a game about APM overload. Who can spin more plates. And spinning plates game is a chore and stressful.
Target marketing towards people who have above 50apm doesnt make sense economically
>Modern mechanics
>Auto macro settings in your base
>spread out command for your units instead of microing them individually
Worked for fighting games
The problem with AOE2 is it is not remotely representative of medieval combat in Europe. Going out of your way to kill working peasants is how you got all the other barons/kings to unite against you and annex your lands, not how you get ahead and win. If there were a resource raiding mechanic instead and actual battles were primarily line up your forces on opposing hills and THEN outmaneuver each other away from the civilians, it would be a worthy simulator.
It‘s not a simulator.
autistic subhuman
Your post is meaningless. Just random words thrown out into the room.
Hes fricking right though, its a mechanic-based RTS , not a medieval world simulator, and is not trying to be.
if you want aoe2 to be more realistic you better start by making it so all of the Black persondoms they added can't advance past feudal age
>AoE2
>100s if not 1000s of hours of campaigns
>WC3
>every campaign is kino, plus endless custom campaigns and custom games
This was all I needed growing up
>What would you need to do in order to "fix" it?
apparently mass effect style romance as per the kickstarter of the asiaticspace game
At least they're trying something new. Adding RPG elements worked for WC3, maybe romances is what the genre is missing.
I hope they add playable sex scenes where the outcome depends on the players APM.
Classic RTS formula mostly morphed into other things. Compgays still play some old games or switched to MOBA. Comfygays get lots of sp-only games with plenty of basebuilding. Players who only care about combat and explosions have tower defense and autobattlers. Numbers-go-up folks have idle games and sims.
I guess we simply just peaked in 1999 with AoE2, no one's fully recaptured the magic ever since
RTS are dead not because they're bad but because people nowadays are lazy, they don't want to think, they can't think and live for the moment, they only want their constant dopamine shots and this is why gacha is so popular.
RTS simply evolved into what most players actually wanted, management/simulation games, or they just skipped over to city builders
>open SC2
>find a match within 5 seconds
Crazy how this is still relevant after 20 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ss1KSdDxE&t=243s
EA kills games while Blizz keeps them alive.
Man I miss how everything outside was way more silent and cleaner, in general back then. People seemed to be way more leaned back then as well compared to today.
>doesn't count! doesn't count!
Ill speak in terms of C&C Generals.
>longer campaign than the 5 missions per 3 faction
>secret/optional missions for each faction
>failing mission doesnt mean failing campaign - you are put at a disadvantage or an alternative path/route
>scenarios
>challenge missions (like general challenges) or more general challnge missions (because demolition and infantry were cut out).
>asymmetrical skirmish maps
>huge unit variety
>unit customisation (you can choose from multiple different loadouts and upgrades)
>no rock-paper-scissors balancing/parity
>more than 9 generals
>relatively realistic damage/range/durability/cost for units (add logistics and supply for extra difficulty/challenge).
There. Its a lot of work though, so devs may be quite averse to that.
>frostbite engine
>completely physics based destructible environment
>live service model
would it have been successful?
>frostbite engine
Absolutely the frick not.
why not?
Considering all the slop people stomach these days, it might just well have been. There was no campaign and it added MTX + faction purchases. The engine switch to frostbite was forced by the higher ups just because it's was a fashionable engine at the time. Now in hindsight we can see that even RA3 made with SAGE looks better than this.
Some interesting dev commentary on the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rTK_DZG-oE
>finish 99% of the game
>cancel its release
I swear the CnC franchise was just used as method of tax evasion for writing off loses by EA.
>live service
Maybe, if it had decent campaign, co-op, challenges, and scenarios.
How come no one made a roguelite RTS yet? That sounds like a fun mix and interesting idea per session, with more varying units than you could bring to the battlefield each mission.
You generally want to avoid RNG in RTS, since it's all about fair game and execution, building an RTS fundamentally on RNG is not something that the playerbase would want.
But there's something that you may want to check out
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2610770/Dust_Front_RTS/
>Dust Front is a classic RTS with elements of grand strategy, procedural world and non-linear campaign.
>Procedural. Missions are combined with procedural map generation and external rules.
Thank you anon, that one looks interesting. I'll put it on my wish list.
Homeworld 3 is going to have such a game mode.
AoE3DE could easily do just that if only the devs made a special mode/campaign for it because it has the elements like deck building/unlocking new cards. You can already play on Unknown random map to have a bit of randomness.
Infested Planet has random maps/enemies/mutations, especially if you play the Planetary Campaign.
Against the Storm is more of a city builder but it does have experimental ideas like randomized building blueprints.
I am enjoying the Broken Arrow beta a lot. It's an RTT, but honestly frick base building. CoH is close to the most I can take when it comes to base management. I just want to get right into the command action, but micro some fricking morons plowing fields and chopping woods.
It's simple: make a good rts.
What makes a good RTS, though?
Detailed campaign? Modding tools? Multiplayer focus?
Opinions differ, perhaps too much even. Catering to one alienates the other and those who focus on one aspect generally avoid the rest.
>hat makes a good RTS, though?
Lack of MOBAs competition.
So you can't make a good RTS these days, I guess.
I firmly believe most C&C games fail because they devalue the life of a pawn on the power scale of the battle. What made SC so popular was the usefulness of core units. What makes AoE so popular is the harsh rock paper scissor balance as well and cultural complexity + variety due to specials in a large tech tree.
Most RTS multiplayer is designed for 20 to 1 hour engagements. The single player needs to reflect that possible frenetic pace. There are too many oldfossils who desire downtime but that's always an unrealistic factor in war unless the timing is vital.
I suggest give environmental objectives and small missions on the map that these old timers can pursue. If they hold off the enemy and those missions succeed the enemy should have global cripple effects that last the entire game. This encourages the mentality to be a bit better than actively staying passive all the time. Alternative game play elements should exist and could be map based for example, they don't need to be balanced completely well just an established meta should exist. I fricking hate mirror maps there's honestly no real world equivalent of it to promote competitive fairness.
By giving hybrids like Battlezone 98 and Sacrifice another chance.
Or by leaning harder into the 3D element, like Homeworld, Ground Control or World in Conflict.
Is the second battlezone game any good? Is it good in coop? Maybe I can get one or the casual into it.
We need a decent Age of Empires game
Don't we have 4 of them already? All are at least okay.
Nothing can be done at this point. Just make C&C, Starcraft and AoE again. Owait, they already did. So see ya in another ten years for next round.
Is there literally anything more comfy than booting up an AoE/AoM, building a massive city, reaching population limit and then just having a giant war?
One of my favourite gaming memories was AoM against the max number of AI on the islands map. Then just slowly conquering the islands moving from one to the other and wiping out the entirety of the enemy team. Incredibly satisfying and fun.
Is this autism? I dont think I could enjoy an easy computer stomp like this.
Probably. I've been playing RTS's since I was really fricking young (I think the first Age of Empires was the first game I ever played) and that's literally how I've always played them.
Lowest difficulty/second lowest for AI, build big cool base, research all the technology and shit, build massive army and attack. Maybe throw in some cheat code units.
I only just started playing the campaigns as an adult recently and while I enjoy them; having to actually have a strategy in a real time strategy game is stressful
I'd get bored pretty quick. I do in fact. After beating all AI on the highest difficulty you're either impressed by how shit they are or how much cheat they need. If some guy can play 1v7 against expert AI in WC3 and still win, I do wonder why people think that it's interesting gameplay, when it's all about exploiting, whether the bad scripting or just genuinely lobotimized enemy.
Nooooo you're not allowed to do that noooooooo compgays get him!!!!
For me the thrill is surviving the early raid and reaching my elite units and pushing back the invaders
Why is it so hard for Devs to just make an RTS that
>Has more than 10 buildings
>Worker-driven economy
>Encourages expansions/secondary bases
>Minimal to no RPS counter nonsense
You want something like Mindustry?
Looks like a factorio clone
>hell march playing in the background
where's the fricking remaster?
not looking good. petroglyph might probably shut down in a couple of years.
why aren't there aby RTS games with a slavery focused faction?
RA2 addon
thats mostly mind control though. I'm talking about abject slavery.
Free Cities with preg mod
good one but it's not an RTS.
you dont need games for that. just open a business in america
There are a few games where your workers are essentially slaves and there are a few games where you can capture enemy units.
IDK what you mean by "slavery" to be honest. How would you even implement it
like using a slave workforce and slave army with a few commanders keeping them in line. a faction which is centered on neutralizing enemies, capturing them alive, etc.
Mostly balance, I guess. You can larp with monk spam and converting entire armies in Age of Empires but I know that it's not the same. If it's a game with asymmetric faction design then what you can capture depends entirely on what you're facing, and you need some units to do the work before you can start the enslavement, which can't be too strong because otherwise you wouldn't need to enslave at all, but can't be too weak because you'd instalose.
Chaos dwarfs are such a faction but instead of only having greenskin and goblin slaves, if they could subjugate others as well (each slave unit having different utility for the economy and in battles) I think that would be a good example.
never played WH TW
Doesn't it that mean that they just start with enslaved units, which is basically just lore paint for their normal roster? As in, they're "enslaved" only because they're from a different race and are named so? Are there any mechanics to that enslavement?
their core army consists of chaos dwarf warriors who are elite and expensive but their numbers are far too less. they use the slaves as the cannon fodder and meat shield. the enslaved greenskin units are not repainted units but they are look like slave miners with crude weapons and no armors. the issue is the mechanics aren't very detailed, you can capture slaves after battles and you need to maintain the slaves in line in your settlements with some buildings or standing army else they'll rebel. I wish it had more mechanics to it.
and also their entire economy is based on slaves.
Warband allows you to capture enemies as PoWs and recruit them later, especially if you use blunt weapons to knock everyone out, you can also sell said PoWs to slave traders in a few mods, so I guess it sort-of works?
>Warband
>capture high tier enemy unit
>choose "persuade to join"
>he says "piss off"
>says the same thing every time.
every single time.
put some points into charisma anon
Strongholdgay here: I been playing AoE2 for the first time and I completed the Incas, Bohenians, French, Spainish, Hun and Dracula campaings,and now Im playing with the Indian Devapala trail.
Which one is a good Race to pick for MP?
Also why the frick siege machines outside the Bombard like operators? Feels very weird for a game trying to be "realistic"
>stronghold gay
byzantines or really any civ that catches your eye.
Base building is fun, but the actual RTS "meta" gameplay is fricking aids.
I just want to build bases and armies at my own pace, frick the 150 APM meta bullshit RTS games tend to devolve into at higher difficulties or online.
>nooo you need to build in this exact order, and memorise 50+ hotkeys so it can all be placed as fast as possible!
>you didn't place all of those buildings and scout the map before the 72 second mark?
>Frick you, you may as well quit, you're too far behind.
literally never happens, you're just a shitter and need excuses to stay mad, AOE2 and SC2 players get to top ranks with 60 APM and less, as well as suboptimal tactics.
150 APM was an exaggeration of course, but 60 APM isn't much better, anon. That's still very sweaty for building bases and shit.
60 APM is the bare minimum you actively do unless you just do everything with one fricking worker and never do any scouting or raiding.
You're making up problems. You don't play the game.
>You don't play the game.
I thought that was obvious. I don't play RTS games because the sweatiness and metahomosexualry is not fun.
>if you don't currently play them then you can't say bad things about them 🙁
I have played them which is how I feel this way.
>>if you don't currently play them then you can't say bad things about them 🙁
This but unironically. You haven't experienced the game, really. Shitter opinions don't count.
>I just want to build bases and armies at my own pace,
so, just play in solo?
I've beaten my friend who has far higher apm than me with muta and shit because he never scouted properly.
Sounds like turnbased strategy games may be more your style, like Civ.
Same sort of building up, no APM shenanigans.
No point trying. Zoomers don't play RTSes and neither do Alphas.
Die, rts chuds.
Kane lives