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RTS Starcraft

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Prophet
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Neat setting. Great soundtrack. Gameplay was good for its time, has aged badly, but that goes for basically every older RTS since SupCom demonstrated how to do the genre properly.

RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.

Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.
 

JarlFrank

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Neat setting. Great soundtrack. Gameplay was good for its time, has aged badly, but that goes for basically every older RTS since SupCom demonstrated how to do the genre properly.

RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.

Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.

Eh, still feel roughly the same in how the economy works and how you basically just toss massive armies at each other.
 

Pocgels

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Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.

It's a good comparison, and even the games you listed above probably have more overlap in their players than SupCom and starcraft. The die-hard Supreme commander crowd doesn't engage much with the rest of the RTS community in my experience (except to argue about which game is better, of course)
 

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Eh, still feel roughly the same in how the economy works and how you basically just toss massive armies at each other.
Naw, the eco is very different and the army sizes are hardly comparable.
The die-hard Supreme commander crowd doesn't engage much with the rest of the RTS community
Same with 2d/3d fighters, it's usually one or the other for people.
 

trais

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Neat setting. Great soundtrack. Gameplay was good for its time, has aged badly, but that goes for basically every older RTS since SupCom demonstrated how to do the genre properly.

RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.

Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.

Eh, still feel roughly the same in how the economy works and how you basically just toss massive armies at each other.

No, not at all. There are 3 major "strains" of games in RTS genre.
First one is Command&Conquer style, started by Dune 2, where you usually have a base you need to manage, but the game is mostly about microing your units after you've found a right combination of them, necessary to win the mission.
Second one is Starcraft style, originating from Warcraft, which is more about expansion and map control, mainly due to resources being very finite. It's about being efficient and finding right balance between army and economy, expanding and defending.
SupCom is the third one, evolving from Total Annihilation, which is more of a tug-of-war kind of strategy. Microing is rarely worth player's time, because you have infinite and relatively easily available resources to build massive armies in order to push-back->gain momentum->overwhelm your opponent.

So SupCom is more about managing front lines where opposing armies slowly grind each other down, while Starcraft is more like conducting or defending against series of raids. It might look similar, but it has completely different feel to it.
 

JarlFrank

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Neat setting. Great soundtrack. Gameplay was good for its time, has aged badly, but that goes for basically every older RTS since SupCom demonstrated how to do the genre properly.

RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.

Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.

Eh, still feel roughly the same in how the economy works and how you basically just toss massive armies at each other.

No, not at all. There are 3 major "strains" of games in RTS genre.
First one is Command&Conquer style, started by Dune 2, where you usually have a base you need to manage, but the game is mostly about microing your units after you've found a right combination of them, necessary to win the mission.
Second one is Starcraft style, originating from Warcraft, which is more about expansion and map control, mainly due to resources being very finite. It's about being efficient and finding right balance between army and economy, expanding and defending.
SupCom is the third one, evolving from Total Annihilation, which is more of a tug-of-war kind of strategy. Microing is rarely worth player's time, because you have infinite and relatively easily available resources to build massive armies in order to push-back->gain momentum->overwhelm your opponent.

So SupCom is more about managing front lines where opposing armies slowly grind each other down, while Starcraft is more like conducting or defending against series of raids. It might look similar, but it has completely different feel to it.

I derped out, I misread SC as Supreme Commander instead of Star Craft and thought you considered Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander to be different beasts.

My brainfart, sorry.

I agree, TA & SC (standing for SupCom) are completely different beasts from other RTS games.

My favorite strain is the Age of Empires style, which is somewhere between TA and Blizzard style.
 

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They looked up to Aliens for Terran/Zerg inspiration. You can recognise the dropship line.

Protoss are clearly inspired by Eldar and Zerg bear more resemblance to Tyranids than Aliens. Yes, "five by five" line is taken from Aliens but there are many references to pop culture like that in Starcraft and other Blizzard RTS games.
 

Arbiter

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Supreme Commander is good, but it is in 3D, so when there are too many units on the batlefield, it still lags. 2D graphics over 3D is better.

Blizzard at that time had a policy of releasing games with low system requirements, hence the decision to build Starcraft as a 2D game, even though some competitors were already experimenting with 3D.

At that time it was a conscious decision (Rob Pardo mentions that in one of his conference speeches). Ironically, later Blizzard games had dated graphics because their development simply took too long.
 
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RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.

Yeah I've tried to get into SupCom 3 times now, because I like the idea of it. But every time I end up being bored as hell.
 

trais

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No, not at all. There are 3 major "strains" of games in RTS genre.
Interesting theory. How does, say, CoH2 play into it?

I consider CoH and all the successors and spiritual successors (e.g. first WH40k DoW, Iron Harvest etc.) as RTS/Tactics hybrid and thus different genre. Definitely closer to its RTS roots than let's say DOTA-like games, but nonetheless different enough.

But if you want to place them next to the classics as 4th, slightly more modern "Relic style" strain, I don't have any rock solid arguments against that.
 
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No, not at all. There are 3 major "strains" of games in RTS genre.
Interesting theory. How does, say, CoH2 play into it?

I think it's reasonable to regard the CoH series (as well as Dawn of War 2) as Real-Time Tactics rather than Real-Time Strategy. I don't think there's an exact hard and fast rule where you'd distinguish RTT from RTS, more of a "know it when you see it" type thing mainly based on scale and focus, but CoH is definitely not the same genre.

And while we're at it I'd honestly lump Homeworld and BFG Armada into the RTT category. Homeworld barely has any economy or basebuilding, BFGA has no basebuilding plus its skirmish mode is that godawful ticking-score-for-holding-areas crap that RTT games seem to gravitate towards.
 

Pocgels

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Usually base-building is used to distinguish RTS from RTT. More generally, there's not really "macro" in RTT like there is with RTS. 60% of your supply limit isn't going to be used by builders in a RTT game.
 

Marat

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Definitely closer to its RTS roots than let's say DOTA-like games
I had the opposite observation. Entire gameplay of both of those consists of positioning and timing your abilities. The only difference is that in CoH you do it in multiple places at the same time. As for your classification, I find the three "styles" you outlined to be one and the same, having no fundamental separation between them apart from some (Starcraft) doing the formula well and some (SupCom) not so much. All have the same fundamental premise: establish an economy to support the war effort, disrupt enemy's efforts to do the same, shield yourself from your opponent doing exactly that, field a fighting force/just cannon rush that bastard -> cripple opponent's ability to continue resistance. While Starcraft lets you make use of deception, surprise, superior decision-making or just raw speed, SupCom does none of that. All you can do is throw bodies into the meatgrinder and hope for the best - more a clicker game than anything strategic.
 

Marat

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I don't think there's an exact hard and fast rule where you'd distinguish RTT from RTS, more of a "know it when you see it" type thing mainly based on scale and focus, but CoH is definitely not the same genre.
Usually base-building is used to distinguish RTS from RTT. More generally, there's not really "macro" in RTT like there is with RTS. 60% of your supply limit isn't going to be used by builders in a RTT game.
It's not that base-building makes an RTS over an RTT. It is a matter of simple definitions: strategic decision-making is when consequences of actions taken are delayed in time, with subsequent decision with consequences of their own being made in the meantime and tactics refers to. To illustrate: in CoH: you didn't dodge a grenade? Your squad gets wiped; in Starcraft: you decided not to build detection? DTs will come and rape your mineral line. So, in CoH the decision to move the squad is immediately prompted by enemy throwing a grenade while in Starcraft you build an Observer in preparation of a possible future prospect of contending with Dark Templars, counting that this decision will keep you safe in the future and pay off by means of having your enemy waste time and resources on a tactic that would have no results. Tactics = immediate; strategy = delayed. Base-building, gathering resources, recruiting units is what creates that offset in most RTSes, so the genre is typically(not necessarily correctly) defined through this aspect. Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub.
 

Stavrophore

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Are people really comparing boring supcom same robotic faction vs starcraft much distinct variety between protoss, zerg and terran? I've played SC at early 2000, same for starcraft and while SC being mechanically superior with real time bullets, no limit of unit selection, bigger maps, more units, it still didn't have the starcraft charm.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Are people really comparing boring supcom same robotic faction vs starcraft much distinct variety between protoss, zerg and terran?
Are people really comparing a game with destruction physics with collateral damage and things like foliage fires, persistent wrecks that influence battlefield and can be scavenged, proper ballistics with huge differences between kinetic and rocket weapons, different chassis performing differently depending on terrain, proper power grid simulation with different sources of energy (wind, solar, nuclear, thermo, hydro) performing based on conditions, planes behaving and fighting like planes, radar warfare, proper long range artillery and rockets, including decent simulation of deploying and protecting from tactical nukes, naval warfare including things like sub warfare, sonars, torpedo planes, unprecedented options for automating units orders, behaviors, queues and whatnot, great mod support and many other things (all of which came in SupCom's predecessor that was released a full year before SC) to Starcraft? What jokers!

But really, such comparison is weird, because those titles are pretty much in a completely different ballpark. One is an actual real time strategy game with many things that were never successfully replicated well over two decades later (sort of like what Myth is for rt tactics), the other a fun, apm-infused multiplayer romp. The real issue is that SC becoming the rts for proverbial normies had a pretty catastrophic impact on the genre (which doesn't mean that it wasn't a very good game, of course).
 

Johannes

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They're honestly not that different. In the details yes, for sure, but it's still the same skill set p much that makes you good at either starcraft, supcom or any of the rest.
 

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