RTS Five Nations - Singleplayer oldfag RTS in space

[Monstrous Bat]

Somehow I'd never heard of this game until now. A very traditional RTS in the vein of StarCraft and C&C, with resource gathering and base building. Features 5 factions and 5 resources and a big campaign, but no multiplayer. Doesn't look particularly great, to be honest, but a new traditional RTS being released is such a rare occurance nowadays. Anyone tried this?

(Actually got a demo too, but it kept crashing on my PC for some strange reason)

 

[JarlFrank]

Reminds me of Conquest Frontier Wars at first glance:

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Totally forgot this exists! Anyone played yet?

It's 50% off:

 

[thesheeep]

Totally forgot this exists! Anyone played yet?

It's 50% off:

I did play it when it came out, but apparently only for like 2 hours?
I don't even remember why I stopped.

Maybe I should give it another go.

 

[thesheeep]

Well, I did give this another whirl and I'd say it's not bad, but it's chock full of amateur game dev mistakes that are really unnecessary and will probably get more and more grating the longer you play.

Here are the negatives I gathered from playing a few hours again:

- No rebindable keys (in an RTS! What is this I don't even)
- Options menu in general will make you sad
- Can't pause the game without manually clicking the menu button
- Control groups are a thing, but not shown on the screen
- Dialog is only skippable entirely or not at all. You can't skip the current "paragraph" once you are done reading, you'll have to listen to the terrible-to-meh voice acting for it all or skip everything at once
- Voiceover can not be disabled (unless you want to disable all audio)
- The writing is fanfic level - not a catastrophe, but you won't get any peak writing here.
- Apparently, the entire game is written in JavaScript and delivered in a browser (press F12 to see the debug console like in Chrome ). This is not bad per se, but a very weird choice for game development, I have a feeling some of the issues relate to this as well.
- Something that many Scifi-themed RTS struggle with: Everything looks the same, you can't tell at a glance what unit/building is what
- The game does not capture your mouse. If you are on multi-monitor like me, forget moving the mouse to the borders in order to move the camera. It won't work, not in the direction your mouse can go to another monitor anyway. At least you can drag the camera around with middle mouse button...
- Only two difficulties, "story" and "hard" - very poor naming choices, for sure. Story is already pretty hard sometimes and "hard" will make sure you'll fail everything until you know exactly what will happen. At least that was true the first few missions I played
- Small units can fly over terrain. This is incredibly annoying and means you'll constantly have to micro your resource gatherers because they won't stop gathering under fire. Ugh. I hate it!
- Units cannot have their gathering point set to buildings. Which means you'll have to manually assign units coming out of factories to their target buildings (eg transporter units transporting resources from mines to your base)
- Unit hotkeys are a mess. All over the place, no proper grid-hotkeys, have fun trying to memorize the correct keys for each button in the UI...
- You cannot shift-construct multiple buildings at once
- There ARE auto-saves, but they seem few and far between. You better save manually when you think it's going well. Obviously, there is no quick save *sigh*

As I said, I don't think it's bad, I'm actually still having fun.
There is a lot of good about this game, too.

But I have a feeling I will not be completing the game this time around, either.
There's just too many QoL features missing for me. I have very little patience nowadays for games that waste a player's time with a lack of QoL features.

 

[thesheeep]

Regarding the cursor issue from above, if you pick the "Custom Cursor" when launching the game, it'll capture your cursor properly.
Likely another bug of only capturing the cursor if that custom cursor is enabled.
Downside is of course that that custom cursor is not a hardware cursor so it'll lag behind if your PC is busy.

 

[Alpharius]

Played it a while ago, seemed like a half decent janky Starcraft 1 clone. The story is meh but the gameplay is similar.
If i'm not mistaken the difficulty is good, hard is about the same as hard in Starcraft 2, which is pretty rare in the current year. Especially for an RTS camaign.
Its easy to lose a mission if you fail improve your economy in a timely manner or forget to micro your units.

So i even finished all the campaings.

 

[thesheeep]

I also finished the first campaign (humans) now.

Most points I made before still stand.
However, I'll retract my point about difficulty. For some reason, the first missions just were unusually hard and depending on you knowing what's coming.
The last missions of the campaign I actually found too easy on "story" difficulty (again, that's the game's "normal").
Not sure what to make of this - I can't stand missions where you have to know in advance what's going to happen in order to do them properly, but I also can't stand missions that are obviously supposed to be hard, but are just too easy.

Also, another few issues I noticed:
- The game clearly has a memory leak issue. It slows down noticeably (on a 3k€ rig, no less ) after running for a few hours.
- If you queue multiple workers to build something, then back to mining, it only works for one of the workers. The others will start idling after building
- Some unit abilities can be set to autocast. Others can't - there doesn't seem to be a logic to this, it is arbitrary.
- Some "hero missions" can only be done by making heavy use of abilities. Which is fine, but energy recharges so slowly that you end up spending 70% of the mission time waiting for mana to recharge...

The jank is very real, indeed
But the classic basebuilder RTS genre is so sparse I'd recommend giving it a go anywayy.

 

[thesheeep]

About 20 hours in (not even half of the chapters done, assuming chapter 3 and 4 are as long as 1 and 2) and I feel I'm about done with the game.
The story itself is decent, if you can live with the writing.
I'm actually curious how the story ends, that's something I guess.

But now that I've played 4/5 races, I must say that I really don't like any of them particularly much.
They are basically all slight variations of each other when it comes to how they play. Some might need resource transporters from "mines" to your base. Others might have combined buildings for energy/population.
Some have buildings that can repair, others don't, etc.
I'd say the variance is higher than e.g. in AoE2 (where factions are practically identical except a few units and some research) but a lot lower than in Starcraft 2 or Warlords Battlecry.

More issues off the top of my head:
- One race has stealthed melee units (yes, really, in a spaceship game )... but their auto attack just straight doesn't work. They might not attack at all sometimes. And even when you do order an attack, they'll attack once and then fly around forgetting their orders.
- The same race has separate units for mining and building - but both show up in your "idle workers", meaning you have to cycle through those to find idle miners as your builders will always count as idle (unless currently building). And you will have MANY builders as those are the only thing that can repair buildings and units.
- Another issue is that you cannot attack-move with your units if any selected unit cannot attack. Which is obviously a massive problem if your units have "healers" or support units that cannot attack. You'll have to painstakingly handle them separately.
- Selection rectangle selects all units, not just military ones, so have fun picking out one from a group containing both.
- Projectiles are physically "simulated" - and dumb. It is impossible to hit a unit that is "on top" of a building (not garrisoned, just the sprites happening to overlap).
- There are just too many missions - and they have very little variety. It's basically "survive X time", "eliminate enemy" or a "hero mission" with a limited amount of units. The maps basically all look the same (it's all in space with some asteroids as "walls"). Which is fine for a classic RTS, but maybe there shouldn't be 40-50 missions, then

Almost all issues are small, as I said.
Since the campaign is so long, though, these many issues become more and more grating, as I suspected and in the end just wear you down.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

50% off:

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The writing is fanfic level - not a catastrophe, but you won't get any peak writing here.

The story is meh

I probably shouldn’t, but I find myself compelled to ask. What RTS has good storytelling, writing and worldbuilding that you would use as a point of comparison?

 

[Alpharius]

The writing is fanfic level - not a catastrophe, but you won't get any peak writing here.

The story is meh

I probably shouldn’t, but I find myself compelled to ask. What RTS has good storytelling, writing and worldbuilding that you would use as a point of comparison?

Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2 (i think 1 was good too), maybe dawn of war 1 vanilla.

 

[thesheeep]

The writing is fanfic level - not a catastrophe, but you won't get any peak writing here.

The story is meh

I probably shouldn’t, but I find myself compelled to ask. What RTS has good storytelling, writing and worldbuilding that you would use as a point of comparison?

Spellforce 3 writing is probably some of the best I've ever seen - all of the campaigns, too.
Spellforce 1 and 2, I don't quite remember tbh, but I doubt it was bad?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Starcraft 2 is widely known for its awful writing.

Warcraft 3 opens with a cliché loony prophet telling the kingdom to evacuate without any compelling reason and being surprised nobody takes him seriously.

I don’t remember enough about DoW and Spellforce to comment.

Where do you think Five Nations has deficiencies by comparison?

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Starcraft 1 must be considered good right?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Starcraft 1 must be considered good right?

What does the script do better than Five Nations?

 

[Alpharius]

Starcraft 2 is widely known for its awful writing.

Warcraft 3 opens with a cliché loony prophet telling the kingdom to evacuate without any compelling reason and being surprised nobody takes him seriously.

I don’t remember enough about DoW and Spellforce to comment.

Where do you think Five Nations has deficiencies by comparison?

Well idk, maybe its more of a presentation+literary quality for me. Like stacraft 2 or warcraft 3 story may be compared to a half-decent tv series.

Not sure what exactly i didn't like about the story but i've got the impression that it was while stacraft 1 with which i compared it to had at least .
Still remember that cutscene about two marines looking at the battleship leaving orbit while the zerg are coming from all sides.

Edit: ah it was an intro akshually

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Well idk, maybe its more of a presentation+literary quality for me. Like stacraft 2 or warcraft 3 story may be compared to a half-decent tv series.

Without going into a whole spiel about it, again, I would say that RTS storytelling standards in general are low. At best, they’re campy junk food. At worst, incoherent nonsense that is overrated af due to childhood nostalgia and lack of anything better for comparison. I don’t think of RTS stories in terms of good or bad, but in terms of “capeshit” and “everything else”.

Blizzard had a high budget for art direction and voice acting, so their games have great presentation. The scripts, on the other hand, are capeshit where the civs are reduced to accessory superpowers for the superhero protagonists. Which I find to be a complete waste of the RTS genre, squanders its potential as a storytelling tool. I don’t like any RTS story that is capeshit.

Five Nations is an indie game that doesn’t have the budget for amazing art direction, voice acting, localization (the game was made by Hungarians who speak ESL and wrote the script themselves, so there are mistakes here and there), game design, etc. The worldbuilding wears its influences on its sleeve, which is fine.

What I will give it credit for is that doesn’t fall into the trap of capeshit. The plot revolves around astropolitics, such as alien robot invasions of Earth, a dying civilization trying to find a cure for their sterility and accidentally releasing vicious carnivorous space whales on the galaxy, a false flag operation that tricks one civilization into attacking another, a faction of the robots rebelling and trying to acquire organic bodies, etc. The civilizations actually feel like real civilizations, or at least as much depth as you can get with this budget. The closest comparison I can think of is Homeworld, but with named characters to convey the plot through dialogue.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

The expansion pack Five Nations: Renegades is now available on Steam.