RTS essentials

[ArchAngel]

I would says Zero Hour Generals make a bigger impact than AoE civilizations. For example does AoE2 have any faction where change is as different as all your units and buildings becoming invisible?

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

The issue is that a strategy game should be about strategy. You should be expected to outplay your opponent. RTS games that make themselves all about stutter-stepping, fighting with unit AI, and generally fighting with the game mechanics in order to actually accomplish anything just get in the way of the strategy and make it more tedious to pull off, which makes for horrible gameplay. All RTS games have various degrees of this, but StarCraft with it's limited unit selection, extremely wonky AI, super zoomed-in camera and general jankiness is very micro-intensive, which I feel has a major negative effect on it's depth and strategy, which is why I feel like it's extremely overrated. People like to focus on the atmosphere, balance and story, which are all good, but the actual gameplay is very crusty and outdated and people can't see it because of nostalgia.

Games like Supreme Commander, which let you automate basic unit creation and focus on things like resource management offer a lot more opportunities for strategy and depth as a result. It's a smart-persons RTS.

Dota is probably the best of both worlds in this regard. Although it suffers from a related problem where the super micro-intensive characters are about as effective as the ones who play themselves, so there's no real benefit to taking the hundreds of hours required to master a hero like Chen or Meepo unless that complex playstyle somehow appeals to you.

This push towards more automation and more focus on strategy has been a slow, gradual goal for RTS games in general. One could argue that things like Attack-Move, Formations, control groups, and other essential RTS features are "automation", and since they weren't in older RTS games, it's clear that people care about these things because they want to actually play the game, not spend hours memorising keystrokes and mastering tiny nuances of AI.

In this regard, StarCraft is the vim or RTS games, except that vim is useful and powerful, StarCraft is just old and crusty. Great campaign, though. Just a shame about the gameplay.

IMO, there's no necessary causal relationship between fussy unit micro as in Starcraft, and constraints to player attention (camera zoom) or constraints to player command (absence of order queuing).

Not sure what you meant by DOTA being the best of both worlds (which worlds?) but now that it's come up, have you played Airmech? It's a modern take on Herzog Zwei, not a MOBA, but it's similar enough to compare in the context of this discussion. Better yet is to compare it to a typical, what I call, "abstract cursor of command" RTS (as distinct from a "reified cursor of command" RTS like Sacrifice, Citizen Kabuto (? I think) or Airmech). Airmech is a lesson on how even extreme command constraints do not mean a lack of strategy, or even fussy, high APM micro. In fact, because the "cursor" is actually a game object (kind of hero unit), it has a speed of movement limit (much lower than what non geriatrics can achieve with a mouse) which puts a hard ceiling on unit micro APM. The result is that, with a little bit of practice, even a beginner will be on an even APM playing field with the best players. Now how intelligent they are with their micro ration, and if their speed of thought can keep up, is a wholly separate matter.

So while I agree that RTS shouldn't be about APM, they can be about rationing commands and attention without making themselves less strategic (I haven't really talked about the latter, but Company of Heroes is an example of a low APM game where the camera only lets you see a small fraction of the big picture), and in fact enforcing limits to both can actually make the game less about APM.

Yeah this is true. I have played AirMech and games with more emphasis on tactics and limits on control can be quite strategic.

I guess the point I was trying to make (and failing) is that StarCraft's limitations are more technical frustrations and less strategic gameplay decisions. Not being able to control a large number of units doesn't add anything to the game, it's only annoying. In a game like AirMech having actual unit limits forces you to choose the right unit types in your loadout and emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of the units - each unit you pick inherently restricts your ability to use other ones and there's not enough to cover everything. StarCraft has no such limitations other than a very basic supply limit which is so high it often doesn't get reached. Generally units only cost 1 supply and there's no discernible distinction between units compared to one another in regards to the limit. There's no depth to it at all. Instead, it's just "you can't select more than a small number of units because we say so".

That's the core of my issue. It's not that all games need to offer thousands of units and tons of automation, it's that StarCraft's limits are artificial and make the game feel more skillful and deep than it actually is. It doesn't offer depth, only the illusion of depth, propped up by a thin veneer of user-unfriendliness masquerading as "intentionally limited gameplay".

It's like if Age of Empires removed unit formations or quick garrisonning. Doing so wouldn't add any depth or strategy to the game, it would only make units more annoying to control.

It's important to distinguish between limitations that exist in a game in order to foster unique strategies, vs bad design. People think StarCraft is the former, but when you analyse it objectively for more than a few seconds it quickly becomes obvious that it's the latter. I don't think the developers of StarCraft were idiots, it's more that the game had several technical limitations which have since been eschewed by RTS games in general but which purists have retroactively reclassified as some mega-brain design, and use that to declare it as "the greatest RTS ever made".

I guess I just irrationally hate StarCraft for being so highly praised despite largely being an APM test for simpletons. Almost all of the interesting design in StarCraft is in the unit and faction design, the balance, and the singleplayer campaign, but in terms of the core gameplay loop, it's awful. I wish people would stop pretending it's not.

I would says Zero Hour Generals make a bigger impact than AoE civilizations. For example does AoE2 have any faction where change is as different as all your units and buildings becoming invisible?

Yeah AOE civilisations were always the least differentiating factions of any game in my opinion, especially AOE1 where there were no unique civilisation units.

The issue in Zero Hour though is that the different generals are generally extremely unbalanced. What would you rather, Aurora Bombers that drop nuclear warheads and cheaper/better superweapons for the cost of slightly more expensive infantry, or tanks that are marginally better but COST POWER TO RUN!

Half the generals are completely useless, the other half are extremely overpowered, and there's 1-2 decent ones that don't get played because the more powerful ones are just better.

It's a shame because ZH has a lot of potential and interesting aspects to it. But I usually enforce a "standard factions only" rule when playing it, since they are at least (mostly) balanced.

 

[Malakal]

I would says Zero Hour Generals make a bigger impact than AoE civilizations. For example does AoE2 have any faction where change is as different as all your units and buildings becoming invisible?

Bigger impact on gameplay yes but for actual other games inspired AoE is way more influential. Impact on the genre is massive while ZHG is just a gimmick. Same as games we had before that happened under water or something.

 

[ArchAngel]

I would says Zero Hour Generals make a bigger impact than AoE civilizations. For example does AoE2 have any faction where change is as different as all your units and buildings becoming invisible?

Bigger impact on gameplay yes but for actual other games inspired AoE is way more influential. Impact on the genre is massive while ZHG is just a gimmick. Same as games we had before that happened under water or something.

I was not talking about that. Good job strawmaning it.

 

[Nutmeg]

Completed the campaign in Battle for Middle Earth 2 (2006).

The campaign is not very good at all. There's one or two OK missions in both the good and evil campaigns (mostly the good campaign), but the rest are just amateur and not designed around the engine, which I can't fault as it's the same SAGE engine that powered the amazing campaigns in Generals (2003).

Firstly the levels have all sorts of glitches with wall defenses and pathing. If you destroy a wall with a catapult on it, the catapult will fall to the ground and become invincible to anything but siege weapons, because I guess it still thinks its on the wall? (N.B. you can't ever put a catapult *unit* on a wall outside the level editor). As for the pathing, it is especially horrible in the final (Dol Guldur) mission in the good campaign, and the Fornost and Withered Heath missions in the evil campaign, again probably due to the level designers pushing what can be accomplished with the map editor past breaking point in order to include monumental architecture into the maps.

Secondly, some missions have naval units, which are too large and janky (especially the siege ships, which you have to manually position in order to use the bombard command, because so help you god if you try using a simple attack command) and even if they weren't so janky, the naval combat and unit design is just far too simplistic (common problem in the genre), and the tasks you have to do with the ships far too unchallenging, that it's hard to see it as anything but a mistake that they take up so much mission time where they appear. They look beautiful, and obviously they are there to facilitate these "epic" landing scenes in the campaign, but aside from "it's better than having it be a cutscene", no attention was payed to having them actually integrate into the game proper and in general and indeed ships are unavailable unless dock buildings are placed on the map by the map creator. Waste of "assets".

Thirdly, in the evil campaign, the AI just throws in the towel at some point and stops producing units. This happened in exactly half the missions for me -- Fornost, Mirkwood, Erebor and Rivendell. And it might have happened in Withered Heath too. You can tell they tried to make both Erebor and Rivendell good siege missions, with multiple scripted events spawning enemy waves coming in to attack your rear, but that's the only opposition you get -- the AI player that actually has production buildings in their control does nothing. In the good campaign, it might have happened in Erebor and Dol Guldur as well, as in the former the enemy establishes a base in its second wave of attack, but then doesn't build anything, and in the latter the enemy is just completely passive. That said, Erebor in the good campaign was an OK base defense mission otherwise, with a particularly brutal final wave.

Lastly, scripted events just refuse to happen sometimes. For example in Blue Mountains in the good campaign, I got absolutely rekt by a scripted event during my first attempt, then took measures to counter it in my second, but it just didn't trigger that time around. As an aside, this mission is fundamentally badly designed, despite the map being nice and it playing well, because this game is an infinite resource game, and in this mission you get production buildings, but your opposition doesn't. So, really, there's no way to fail unless the scripted counter attack on your base happens (which it sometimes doesn't, obviously) and you failed to prepare.

So in total there are maybe 2 OK missions in the evil campaign -- Lothlorien, the inoffensive but very basic opener, and Shire which has you genociding hobbits, aggroing too many archers, and then fighting the campaign's only intra-alignment matchup -- and maybe 6 OK or at least somewhat redeemable ones in the good campaign, 4 if you go strictly with no jank as criteria.

As for the game itself, it's excellent. It has a real miniatures feel to it with the way units are positioned, managed and how combat resolves.

There are 6 factions (7 in the expansion, which I started playing yesterday), 3 good and 3(+1 in the expansion) evil. All factions have archers, swordsmen, pikemen, mounted units and siege units, though they differ greatly in quality. Siege units can be either machines or beasts, with evil factions having a mix of both and good factions only having machines. Some factions have flying units (e.g. Elves have eagles, and Mordor have fell beasts), but most don't. Good factions have "aura" buildings, evil factions do not. So, there are pattern differences between alignments, but there are also significant differences between factions within the same alignment e.g. Dwarves are unique among the good factions in having tunnels (like the GLA in generals).

It's a low unit count game as most units come in squads. At most you'll be managing a dozen or so units across the map, so while micro is important, it doesn't require very high APM to perform. The micro consists of positioning, stance management, and abilities.

In terms of positioning, the game provides a handy way to form up pikes in front of swords in front of archers with mounted units on the wings, and face that formation a certain way. In battle, when the opponent's mounted units join the fray, a common tactic is to move your pikes into your archers and turn on tortoise formation. This is because mounted units can charge to trample small units, but pikes (if facing the right way) do massive damage to charges. One unnecessary kind of micro, though satisfying to do, is to optimize attacking buildings by telling your units to move behind it, and then attack when they have arranged themselves in single file (well not entirely) around the building. This way they all (again, not quite) attack at once, as opposed to only the first of several rows. Issuing attack orders to archers sometimes requires them to reposition, which you don't always want as it eats into their firing time, so it's not a good idea in lieu of simply positioning them.

This gets us into stances. Stances are very important in this game, because not only do they change unit behavior, they also give bonuses to attack or armor. One of the first things you learn is that you want your archers to be in aggressive stance, and your pikes to be in defensive, of course changing as the moment to moment situation calls for it.

Like in Dawn of War (2004), squads are upgraded individually. They also level up to a max level of 5, with level 5 squads being very precious, so you want to keep them alive. There is no handy retreat order like in Company of Heroes (2006), but you'll do so manually, as squads replenish automatically with time, and your fortress is a safe place for them to heal up (with good factions getting healing rate bonuses). There's also a global powers system like in Age of Mythology (2002), Generals (2003) and Company of Heroes (2006), which at this point in the history of RTS games, seems to have almost become part of the genre. I've mentioned miniatures, and I think a reference to Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995) and Dark Omen (1998) is also warranted, as there are some similarities in unit handling (though thankfully, there is no assinine button mashing in Battle for Middle Earth).

The game has a nice UI, with great use of radial menus.

Finally, about the audio visual aspect to the game. It's great. The Battle for Middle Earth series runs on the same SAGE engine as Generals (2003), and, as I said before, I really like playing games made during this era (the DirectX 8 and 9 era), today. They look absolutely amazing displayed on a 4K screen with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cranked all the way up. For my campaign playthroughs I am using a window editor and mouse locking tool to run them in a 4:3 aspect ratio in a resolution of 2880 by 2160, the way the campaigns were designed to be played (the multiplayer focused fan patches add widescreen support). I also used DSOAL to enable EAX, which makes the sound more positional, I suppose, though I didn't compare EAX on to EAX off. The unit voices are good, especially in the expansion, where all the Angmar units are constantly wishing death to the West (a sentiment I greatly approve of). The music is from the films, I think, or at least uses the same motifs. It's fine. I wasn't the biggest fan of the Lord of the Rings movies, but outside of the cinematic world with its cheesy actors, the visual design translates very, very well e.g. I did like the Games Workshop miniatures, and I do like the buildings, units and monsters in Battle for Middle Earth. Though I haven't played the first game yet, I do know they used stills from the movies for icons and portraits, which I find very cheesy. Thankfully, in the sequel, they changed it to drawings, though sadly sometimes still drawings *of* the actors.

 

[Nutmeg]

It's a shame because ZH has a lot of potential and interesting aspects to it. But I usually enforce a "standard factions only" rule when playing it, since they are at least (mostly) balanced.

I think balance is a very misunderstood topic in gaming, and in the RTS genre in particular. Balance is seen as some kind of gold standard, but really its not necessary at all. As long as its not literally impossible for one faction to win against another, balance is not necessary, even for competitive gaming. For example in a tournament, or a "best of n" game series, you can give more points for wins in unfavorable match-ups. A further innovation is to have draw conditions through the use of time limits. For example you could have games limited to 1 hour or 45 minutes or whatever, and if you force a draw with a shit faction against a good faction, you get a point, and lots of points if you win.

This is just very obvious stuff, but it's a lack of developer consciousness and player education (through e.g. game acknowledged cross match scoring systems -- how many games allow you to set up a "best of" series and track points for you?) that has kept the competitive RTS culture primitive (fighting game community is more advanced, with "tiers", though still not advanced enough) in this aspect, with both players and developers chasing balance leading to, IMO, boring games with samey factions.

 

[Ironmonk]

There was a RTS starcraft-like clone made in Brazil in 2000 called Outlive

I don't remember if I played only the demo or the main game... I only remember it having a bunch of very interesting game mechanics... I think it had one ability to make a unit scout the map and upon being attacked it would activate the turbo and come back to base automatically or something like that... there was others but I don't remember very well.

Its a pity GOG never picked it... although I got a ISO many years later and never bothered trying it.

 

[Nutmeg]

RTS friends, I have completed the campaigns in Rise of the Witch King (2006), the expansion to Battle for Middle Earth 2 (2006).

Actually, it's a lot better than the campaigns in the base game, by a wide margin. All missions bar the last (or second last, if you count the epilogue) are interesting. Sadly one of my favorites (where you and the opposing force race for the palantir shards) was let down by the pathing (the AI managed to get two of the shards before me and would have gotten the better of me, but then the shard carriers ironically got stuck behind some units the designers placed guarding the shards to make it look like you got to the shard just as the AI was about to snatch it). The very last mission (again, not counting the epilogue) is a siege mission that suffers from the AI being scripted to man all three gates with a large force, especially the main gate, thus pop-capping itself and allowing you to slowly eat away at one of the flanks (30% of total forces) till victory. But even so, it's much better than all the siege missions in the base game, as it only had a couple of towers positioned in such a way that they would break the pathing. Aside from the palantir mission, there were two cool king of the (multiple, in the later one) hill type missions I enjoyed, due to the fact that they had time pressure (like the shard mission). No real foibles, beyond the two I mentioned. So, I was happily surprised after the disaster that was the base game's campaigns.

I like the new Angmar faction. Cool sorceror and thrall master units with interesting subversive abilities. Death to the West!

Note that these games have a "War of the Rings" mode which is a turn based over-game which I guess generates skirmish missions with twists, similar to the ones in Rise of Nations (2003) (was RoN really the first RTS to do this?) and The Dark Crusade (2006). I am going to guess this was where the actual thought to the single player game design went, and that the campaigns were a box ticking exercise, especially given how enduringly popular and well regarded the BFME games seem to be in multiplayer, and how far the campaigns (not so much in RotWK, but in the base game) deviate from the kind of game the engine was clearly designed to facilitate.

FYI, this is the video that bumped the BFME games up my to play list. I liked what I saw in terms of unit movement, how dynamically the game played out, and ofc. the visual design of the map and the ambient wind howling. Just seemed p. good.

Anyway next game will be Tiberium Wars. After that I might play through the first BFME, which will complete my tour of the SAGE engine games. I will not play C&C 4 or Red Alert 3, unless I can be convinced otherwise, and will instead play Petroglyph's contemporaneous Empire and Universe at War games, to see what the other half of Westwood managed to accomplish.

 

[ind33d]

RTS friends, I have completed the campaigns in Rise of the Witch King (2006), the expansion to Battle for Middle Earth 2 (2006).

Actually, it's a lot better than the campaigns in the base game, by a wide margin. All missions bar the last (or second last, if you count the epilogue) are interesting. Sadly one of my favorites (where you and the opposing force race for the palantir shards) was let down by the pathing (the AI managed to get two of the shards before me and would have gotten the better of me, but then the shard carriers ironically got stuck behind some units the designers placed guarding the shards to make it look like you got to the shard just as the AI was about to snatch it). The very last mission (again, not counting the epilogue) is a siege mission that suffers from the AI being scripted to man all three gates with a large force, especially the main gate, thus pop-capping itself and allowing you to slowly eat away at one of the flanks (30% of total forces) till victory. But even so, it's much better than all the siege missions in the base game, as it only had a couple of towers positioned in such a way that they would break the pathing. Aside from the palantir mission, there were two cool king of the (multiple, in the later one) hill type missions I enjoyed, due to the fact that they had time pressure (like the shard mission). No real foibles, beyond the two I mentioned. So, I was happily surprised after the disaster that was the base game's campaigns.

I like the new Angmar faction. Cool sorceror and thrall master units with interesting subversive abilities. Death to the West!

Note that these games have a "War of the Rings" mode which is a turn based over-game which I guess generates skirmish missions with twists, similar to the ones in Rise of Nations (2003) (was RoN really the first RTS to do this?) and The Dark Crusade (2006). I am going to guess this was where the actual thought to the single player game design went, and that the campaigns were a box ticking exercise, especially given how enduringly popular and well regarded the BFME games seem to be in multiplayer, and how far the campaigns (not so much in RotWK, but in the base game) deviate from the kind of game the engine was clearly designed to facilitate.

FYI, this is the video that bumped the BFME games up my to play list. I liked what I saw in terms of unit movement, how dynamically the game played out, and ofc. the visual design of the map and the ambient wind howling. Just seemed p. good.

Anyway next game will be Tiberium Wars. After that I might play through the first BFME, which will complete my tour of the SAGE engine games. I will not play C&C 4 or Red Alert 3, unless I can be convinced otherwise, and will instead play Petroglyph's contemporaneous Empire and Universe at War games, to see what the other half of Westwood managed to accomplish.

I bought BFME1 at a Target back in the early 2000s. Finding a copy of BFME2 is impossible. It's absurd that the Tolkien estate will make a shitty Amazon TV show but won't republish BFME2.

 

[Nutmeg]

The community hosts ISOs (check gamereplays.org or revora.net) and makes unofficial bug fix, QoL and balance patches that also remove the disc check. The matchmaking client everyone uses also does not give a shit about keys AFAIK.

Piracy is good. Pirate everything.

 

[JarlFrank]

If you mention Starcraft (one of the most overrated games of all time) but don't mention Total Annihilation, you fucked up

Honestly I never really understood Total Annihilation. I had it as a kid, and found the amount of units cool because I always loved quantity, but the graphics were ugly and the gameplay pretty much just consists of spamming the enemy with units.

I replayed it in recent years and still feel the same about it.

I tried its off-shoots like Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation, and they all feel the same. I don't even see a functional difference between them, they all play exactly the same. It's all about spamming shitloads of units, there's no real tactics to it other than unit composition (but ideally you'd be spamming many different unit types so even that becomes a non-issue).

 

[Endemic]

If you mention Starcraft (one of the most overrated games of all time) but don't mention Total Annihilation, you fucked up

Honestly I never really understood Total Annihilation. I had it as a kid, and found the amount of units cool because I always loved quantity, but the graphics were ugly and the gameplay pretty much just consists of spamming the enemy with units.

I replayed it in recent years and still feel the same about it.

I tried its off-shoots like Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation, and they all feel the same. I don't even see a functional difference between them, they all play exactly the same. It's all about spamming shitloads of units, there's no real tactics to it other than unit composition (but ideally you'd be spamming many different unit types so even that becomes a non-issue).

Supreme Commander has a larger scale, but I never got the impression that unit spam won any games at a competitive level. I haven't kept up with the FAF meta in the last couple of years, my comments are based on my own experience in Supcom and from watching 2007-2018 replays.

But even ignoring specific tactics (such as SCU/engineer drops) from multiplayer, unintelligently throwing massed units at your opponent's killzone means you are literally feeding him wrecks that translate into production arrayed against you (in stock Supcom, wrecks are 80% of the original mass, in TA it's about 60% of metal which can be reclaimed). Also, unless the map is tiny with one chokepoint, you need to divide your attention between multiple points of interest as mass\metal is typically highly dispersed. Then of course there's the commander\ACU, which in Supcom can receive numerous offensive and defensive upgrades depending on your plan for the particular match\mission.

Perhaps you prefer strategy games where a small crack band of units\commandoes being micro-managed are important? I would say there's room for more than one sub-genre. I can enjoy a Jagged Alliance as much as an X-COM or Supcom/TA vs Warcraft/Spellforce/Dawn of War.

 

[JarlFrank]

I prefer strategy games where my units have more character than just different flavors of robot with gun. I dunno, I just never "felt" Total Annihilation and its clones.

I love large scale strategy, Total War games for example are among my favorite strategy games of all time, and in RTS my favorites are Age of Empires and Cossacks.
But TA... yeah, I dunno. Just feels bland to me.

It's all about the macromanagement but controlling large amounts of units feels clunky compared to something neat like Total War.

 

[luj1]

Starcraft is not overrated, its literally the best designed RTS of all time

 

[luj1]

I remember Total Annihilation but its like a footnote in the history of RTS

 

[Vyadhis]

Do you guys mostly enjoy rts games for the campaigns or the vs?

 

[Nutmeg]

Do you guys mostly enjoy rts games for the campaigns or the vs?

Multiplayer by far, though I enjoy single player modes for the creative twists on the base game, to familiarize myself with the game for multiplayer and also, ultimately, light speed running and challenge crafting.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I would says Zero Hour Generals make a bigger impact than AoE civilizations. For example does AoE2 have any faction where change is as different as all your units and buildings becoming invisible?

Bigger impact on gameplay yes but for actual other games inspired AoE is way more influential. Impact on the genre is massive while ZHG is just a gimmick. Same as games we had before that happened under water or something.

To be fair, Generals brought in the now commonly accepted RTS mechanic of "generals abilities" in games like Company of Heroes. It could be argued that levelling up your commander is an abstraction of the Warcraft 3 hero concept, but everything builds on everything.

"Levelling up" your general has sort of fallen by the wayside more recently, though, but I think it's because RTS games are going through the "oldschool" meme design that FPS games have been going through for the last decade.

Do you guys mostly enjoy rts games for the campaigns or the vs?

Depends on the game. In CnC style games and StarCraft I find the multiplayer gets quite boring because of how the games are designed, but CnC games are renowned for having excellent campaigns, and StarCraft has one of the best stories I have played in any RTS.

On the other hand, games like Supreme Commander have amazing multiplayer because they have actual depth, but it's campaign is a boring collection of uninspired missions.

It seems to be a universal impossibility for someone to make a good RTS game with a solid competitive core that also has a great campaign.

If you mention Starcraft (one of the most overrated games of all time) but don't mention Total Annihilation, you fucked up

Honestly I never really understood Total Annihilation. I had it as a kid, and found the amount of units cool because I always loved quantity, but the graphics were ugly and the gameplay pretty much just consists of spamming the enemy with units.

I replayed it in recent years and still feel the same about it.

I tried its off-shoots like Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation, and they all feel the same. I don't even see a functional difference between them, they all play exactly the same. It's all about spamming shitloads of units, there's no real tactics to it other than unit composition (but ideally you'd be spamming many different unit types so even that becomes a non-issue).

Supreme Commander has a larger scale, but I never got the impression that unit spam won any games at a competitive level. I haven't kept up with the FAF meta in the last couple of years, my comments are based on my own experience in Supcom and from watching 2007-2018 replays.

But even ignoring specific tactics (such as SCU/engineer drops) from multiplayer, unintelligently throwing massed units at your opponent's killzone means you are literally feeding him wrecks that translate into production arrayed against you (in stock Supcom, wrecks are 80% of the original mass, in TA it's about 60% of metal which can be reclaimed). Also, unless the map is tiny with one chokepoint, you need to divide your attention between multiple points of interest as mass\metal is typically highly dispersed. Then of course there's the commander\ACU, which in Supcom can receive numerous offensive and defensive upgrades depending on your plan for the particular match\mission.

Perhaps you prefer strategy games where a small crack band of units\commandoes being micro-managed are important? I would say there's room for more than one sub-genre. I can enjoy a Jagged Alliance as much as an X-COM or Supcom/TA vs Warcraft/Spellforce/Dawn of War.

This seems mostly accurate. Traditional RTS games focus on specific units countering other specific units. Your enemy might build some helicopters, so you respond with SAM sites. Your enemy might then park the helicopters just out of range and pick off parts of your base that are unprotected. That still happens in SupCom, but it's not the focus.

In Supreme Commander, it's a more "slippery" situation. Instead of countering a very specific group of units with another group of units, larger scale tactics play against each other.

Enemy is massing artillery at a chokepoint? Respond with shield generators. They are building Tactical Missile Launchers, or have battleships looking to pummel you? Build TMD.

Supreme Commander is more about mobilising your economy in the right direction and producing and controlling groups of units that can counter other groups of enemy units. This can be somewhat automated too - their factory might be endlessly churning out T3 Heavy Assault Bots using autobuild, which will drain their economy, but not producing any anti air. So you can set up a factory to pump out T3 Strategic Bombers and easily counter them.

To an uninitiated viewer who expects the small unit numbers and micro from traditional RTS games, this can look like mindless spam because individual units won't look to be doing much other than standing there and shooting, there's no stutterstepping or specific shot timing most of the time. You do see a lot of micro from ACU battles and T1 fights, but people tend to spend more time focusing on their unit compositions and groupings rather than individual unit effectiveness.

Every aspect of the game is built around this concept - resources are measured as rates rather than amounts because the level you produce matters more than managing individual unit costs, features like autobuild mean you can focus on the micro where it matters while producing an army rather than having to babysit your barracks, and things like long-range radar let you plan and respond to threats on large 40km by 40km maps where unit groupings and compositions are everything.

I guess my only response to the original comment is "you don't seem to understand the game and may need to look a little deeper".

For the record, I do enjoy micro-intensive games like CnC where you have a smaller number of units which you need to manage carefully. The only reason I dislike StarCraft so much is because it's such a clunky game where babysitting things gets in the way of adequate unit control, and everyone says it's great specifically because of this bad design. It comes across to me as very pretentious, like I'm not "smart" enough to understand the secret genius of only being able to select a limited number of units at once. Games that aren't nostalgia'd so hard (like CNC95, which is considered very dated even among CNC fans) don't have this problem, despite similar technical annoyances. I do have a preference for games where looking at the big picture and countering the other players overall strategy is important, vs games where you need to spend hours practicing stutterstepping and learning unit ranges to make every soldier as effective as possible, but I do have respect for those kinds of games and have gotten enjoyment out of them in the past. Usually though, if I want to play an agility-focused game where very fine-grained controls and timing matter, I will have a much better experience with an FPS or a fighting game or something where that's the focus, rather than having to deal with that sort of gameplay in an RTS where I am supposed to be outthinking my opponent. But I can get over that and enjoy them nonetheless, and I had a lot of fun with Red Alert and other games as a kid. It's just StarCraft that bugs me because of how annoying it is to actually play.

 

[Nutmeg]

Starcraft is not overrated, its literally the best designed RTS of all time

I will weigh in more forcefully on this debate after a fresh revisit of the game but I am firmly in the Starcraft is far from the ultimate RTS camp.

Starcraft is perhaps the best you can ever do with its kind of simplistic combat, control and spatial model, for a certain type of competitive gaming, but I'd argue that even within these confines there are alternatives that are just as good, though in a different, IMO, more noble way.

Combat is simplistic in that one unit deals damage over time to another if that other unit is "in range" i.e. no more than a certain number of tiles away, and, in some cases if the unit is tagged as flying or not. The twists to this are the rare AoE weapon such as the siege tank cannons and some units' special abilities, or the rare projectile weapon such as the dragoon's shot, and of course the very unique lurker. There's also the concept of high and low ground, which I will get into when I mention spatial models. There's nothing like flanking bonuses, crushing (not even crushing, for shame), charging, arcs of fire, vehicle physics (with the minor exception of acceleration on flying units), component damage or many other aspects that could have made the combat more interesting and less fussy (more on this later). Many of these innovations precede Starcraft e.g. in the simulationist Total Annihilation, but also in Shadow of the Horned Rat and Myth on the fringes of the genre.

Control too is primitive. You can issue an attack, move, attack-move, order to 1 to 12 units at a time, and also queue a certain number of orders (they have to be of the same type, I believe). You can also aim a special ability, and there are hotkeys to avoid clicking on GUI elements, and ofc. create control groups. There are no formation or facing controls, no planning modes, no scatter commands, no unit stances, no reversing, no limited attack-move commands, no retreat orders.

Finally the spatial model is a 2D tile world consisting of 3 flag tiles, though their graphic varies for cosmetic purposes. The flags are passable or impassable, high or low ground, and creep or non-creep, with flying units ignoring these flags. Again, there's no multi-level elevation, nor a simulated space for things like projectile arcs, nor terrain deformation, or even simple things you could do with 2D tiles like terrain where units are hidden, or more vulnerable. Again, the early 3D games were more advanced here, but so were (admittedly later) 2D games like Tiberian Sun.

Of course, a more complex game model does not mean a better game, far from it, but in the case of Starcraft all these things combine to make for a very fussy tactical game, where it's all about quickly optimizing your units' positions in a small 2D grid of engagement, as opposed to making use of momentum, arcs of movement, maneuver space, geometry of fire and other broad stroke things where you still pit players' speed of pattern recognition abilities against each other but not in this irritating fussy way.

But it's not necessarily the fault of the game model, because even games similar to Starcraft w.r.t combat, control and space sometimes do an IMO better job at facilitating more strategically and tactically engaging play, e.g. OpenRA's Tiberium Dawn mod, simply due to the speed in which units zip around the map and can disengage from unfavorable confrontations to focus on strategic goals, or even the first Warcraft where control limitations put a ceiling on fussiness per unit of time.

So really, the issue is Starcraft gives undue emphasis on tactical fussiness, favoring it over more interesting tactical micro due to the simplicity of the game model, and favoring it over broader strategic considerations due to lack of constraints in control and the numbers game (unit speed, health, weapon ranges etc.).

Ofc. if you like 2D tile grid tactical fussiness and a high APM bar in said fussiness for competitive play, then Starcraft is perfect. And this is a perfectly legitimate thing to like and it is competitively sound. It's just not what I personally enjoy in terms of tactics and strategy, or even pure action.

 

[Nutmeg]

To be fair, Generals brought in the now commonly accepted RTS mechanic of "generals abilities" in games like Company of Heroes. It could be argued that levelling up your commander is an abstraction of the Warcraft 3 hero concept, but everything builds on everything.

It was Age of Mythology with its god powers no? Here casting was tied to a gatherable resource (worship) and acquiring tied to "teching" (advancing ages), but the format of locking yourself into powers as the game progresses was established here. Earlier games had some globally invokeable effects (air strikes, nukes, ion cannons) but they were building abilities.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Starcraft is not overrated, its literally the best designed RTS of all time

I will weigh in more forcefully on this debate after a fresh revisit of the game but I am firmly in the Starcraft is far from the ultimate RTS camp.

Starcraft is perhaps the best you can ever do with its kind of simplistic combat, control and spatial model, for a certain type of competitive gaming, but I'd argue that even within these confines there are alternatives that are just as good, though in a different, IMO, more noble way.

Combat is simplistic in that one unit deals damage over time to another if that other unit is "in range" i.e. no more than a certain number of tiles away, and, in some cases if the unit is tagged as flying or not. The twists to this are the rare AoE weapon such as the siege tank cannons and some units' special abilities, or the rare projectile weapon such as the dragoon's shot, and of course the very unique lurker. There's also the concept of high and low ground, which I will get into when I mention spatial models. There's nothing like flanking bonuses, crushing (not even crushing, for shame), charging, arcs of fire, vehicle physics (with the minor exception of acceleration on flying units), component damage or many other aspects that could have made the combat more interesting and less fussy (more on this later). Many of these innovations precede Starcraft e.g. in the simulationist Total Annihilation, but also in Shadow of the Horned Rat and Myth on the fringes of the genre.

Control too is primitive. You can issue an attack, move, attack-move, order to 1 to 12 units at a time, and also queue a certain number of orders (they have to be of the same type, I believe). You can also aim a special ability, and there are hotkeys to avoid clicking on GUI elements, and ofc. create control groups. There are no formation or facing controls, no planning modes, no scatter commands, no unit stances, no reversing, no limited attack-move commands, no retreat orders.

Finally the spatial model is a 2D tile world consisting of 3 flag tiles, though their graphic varies for cosmetic purposes. The flags are passable or impassable, high or low ground, and creep or non-creep, with flying units ignoring these flags. Again, there's no multi-level elevation, nor a simulated space for things like projectile arcs, nor terrain deformation, or even simple things you could do with 2D tiles like terrain where units are hidden, or more vulnerable. Again, the early 3D games were more advanced here, but so were (admittedly later) 2D games like Tiberian Sun.

Of course, a more complex game model does not mean a better game, far from it, but in the case of Starcraft all these things combine to make for a very fussy tactical game, where it's all about quickly optimizing your units' positions in a small 2D grid of engagement, as opposed to making use of momentum, arcs of movement, maneuver space, geometry of fire and other broad stroke things where you still pit players' speed of pattern recognition abilities against each other but not in this irritating fussy way.

But it's not necessarily the fault of the game model, because even games similar to Starcraft w.r.t combat, control and space sometimes do an IMO better job at facilitating more strategically and tactically engaging play, e.g. OpenRA's Tiberium Dawn mod, simply due to the speed in which units zip around the map and can disengage from unfavorable confrontations to focus on strategic goals, or even the first Warcraft where control limitations put a ceiling on fussiness per unit of time.

So really, the issue is Starcraft gives undue emphasis on tactical fussiness, favoring it over more interesting tactical micro due to the simplicity of the game model, and favoring it over broader strategic considerations due to lack of constraints in control and the numbers game (unit speed, health, weapon ranges etc.).

Ofc. if you like 2D tile grid tactical fussiness and a high APM bar in said fussiness for competitive play, then Starcraft is perfect. And this is a perfectly legitimate thing to like and it is competitively sound. It's just not what I personally enjoy in terms of tactics and strategy, or even pure action.

You explained this better than I ever could.

To clarify, I don't hate the game, I have finished it multiple times. I just find it gets boring quickly because of the emphasis on dexterity over strategy, and the people parading it around as some beacon of perfect strategy game design are huffing so many of their own farts that they just look stupid. If people were less pretentious about it and looked at it more objectively, I probably wouldn't be so butthurt by StarCraft discussions where people look at me like some fake gamer for not enjoying it's overly simplistic gameplay for more than a few hours before getting bored. You could say I have built some resentment for the game and it's fans because of how rabid and mindless they are, and how bad the game actually is compared to even it's contemporaries, let alone some of the better RTS games now.

I guess everyone should respond to this post with "acknowledge this users agenda", because I definitely have a bias after years of bullshit from mindless Blizzard fans (they were never a good company, stop lying to yourselves. No, Diablo 2 isn't good either).

To be fair, Generals brought in the now commonly accepted RTS mechanic of "generals abilities" in games like Company of Heroes. It could be argued that levelling up your commander is an abstraction of the Warcraft 3 hero concept, but everything builds on everything.

It was Age of Mythology with its god powers no? Here casting was tied to a gatherable resource (worship) and acquiring tied to "teching" (advancing ages), but the format of locking yourself into powers as the game progresses was established here. Earlier games had some globally invokeable effects (air strikes, nukes, ion cannons) but they were building abilities.

It might have been. They were released less than 6 months apart and so were on the market at largely the same time. Generals was the one I grew up with, but I could see how AOM might technically be the start of this idea.

Having 2 separate games from separate studios independently come up with similar ideas, along with Warcraft 3 which came out slightly before both, and the combination definitely solidified the "Hero XP" focus of later RTS games. Ironically I think Company of Heroes did the whole Commander XP thing the best, and it's the closest to the Generals model, but there were good and bad systems being added to RTS games constantly from 2002-2010 or so.

 

[ArchAngel]

Starcraft is not overrated, its literally the best designed RTS of all time

I will weigh in more forcefully on this debate after a fresh revisit of the game but I am firmly in the Starcraft is far from the ultimate RTS camp.

Starcraft is perhaps the best you can ever do with its kind of simplistic combat, control and spatial model, for a certain type of competitive gaming, but I'd argue that even within these confines there are alternatives that are just as good, though in a different, IMO, more noble way.

Combat is simplistic in that one unit deals damage over time to another if that other unit is "in range" i.e. no more than a certain number of tiles away, and, in some cases if the unit is tagged as flying or not. The twists to this are the rare AoE weapon such as the siege tank cannons and some units' special abilities, or the rare projectile weapon such as the dragoon's shot, and of course the very unique lurker. There's also the concept of high and low ground, which I will get into when I mention spatial models. There's nothing like flanking bonuses, crushing (not even crushing, for shame), charging, arcs of fire, vehicle physics (with the minor exception of acceleration on flying units), component damage or many other aspects that could have made the combat more interesting and less fussy (more on this later). Many of these innovations precede Starcraft e.g. in the simulationist Total Annihilation, but also in Shadow of the Horned Rat and Myth on the fringes of the genre.

Control too is primitive. You can issue an attack, move, attack-move, order to 1 to 12 units at a time, and also queue a certain number of orders (they have to be of the same type, I believe). You can also aim a special ability, and there are hotkeys to avoid clicking on GUI elements, and ofc. create control groups. There are no formation or facing controls, no planning modes, no scatter commands, no unit stances, no reversing, no limited attack-move commands, no retreat orders.

Finally the spatial model is a 2D tile world consisting of 3 flag tiles, though their graphic varies for cosmetic purposes. The flags are passable or impassable, high or low ground, and creep or non-creep, with flying units ignoring these flags. Again, there's no multi-level elevation, nor a simulated space for things like projectile arcs, nor terrain deformation, or even simple things you could do with 2D tiles like terrain where units are hidden, or more vulnerable. Again, the early 3D games were more advanced here, but so were (admittedly later) 2D games like Tiberian Sun.

Of course, a more complex game model does not mean a better game, far from it, but in the case of Starcraft all these things combine to make for a very fussy tactical game, where it's all about quickly optimizing your units' positions in a small 2D grid of engagement, as opposed to making use of momentum, arcs of movement, maneuver space, geometry of fire and other broad stroke things where you still pit players' speed of pattern recognition abilities against each other but not in this irritating fussy way.

But it's not necessarily the fault of the game model, because even games similar to Starcraft w.r.t combat, control and space sometimes do an IMO better job at facilitating more strategically and tactically engaging play, e.g. OpenRA's Tiberium Dawn mod, simply due to the speed in which units zip around the map and can disengage from unfavorable confrontations to focus on strategic goals, or even the first Warcraft where control limitations put a ceiling on fussiness per unit of time.

So really, the issue is Starcraft gives undue emphasis on tactical fussiness, favoring it over more interesting tactical micro due to the simplicity of the game model, and favoring it over broader strategic considerations due to lack of constraints in control and the numbers game (unit speed, health, weapon ranges etc.).

Ofc. if you like 2D tile grid tactical fussiness and a high APM bar in said fussiness for competitive play, then Starcraft is perfect. And this is a perfectly legitimate thing to like and it is competitively sound. It's just not what I personally enjoy in terms of tactics and strategy, or even pure action.

You explained this better than I ever could.

To clarify, I don't hate the game, I have finished it multiple times. I just find it gets boring quickly because of the emphasis on dexterity over strategy, and the people parading it around as some beacon of perfect strategy game design are huffing so many of their own farts that they just look stupid. If people were less pretentious about it and looked at it more objectively, I probably wouldn't be so butthurt by StarCraft discussions where people look at me like some fake gamer for not enjoying it's overly simplistic gameplay for more than a few hours before getting bored. You could say I have built some resentment for the game and it's fans because of how rabid and mindless they are, and how bad the game actually is compared to even it's contemporaries, let alone some of the better RTS games now.

I guess everyone should respond to this post with "acknowledge this users agenda", because I definitely have a bias after years of bullshit from mindless Blizzard fans (they were never a good company, stop lying to yourselves. No, Diablo 2 isn't good either).

To be fair, Generals brought in the now commonly accepted RTS mechanic of "generals abilities" in games like Company of Heroes. It could be argued that levelling up your commander is an abstraction of the Warcraft 3 hero concept, but everything builds on everything.

It was Age of Mythology with its god powers no? Here casting was tied to a gatherable resource (worship) and acquiring tied to "teching" (advancing ages), but the format of locking yourself into powers as the game progresses was established here. Earlier games had some globally invokeable effects (air strikes, nukes, ion cannons) but they were building abilities.

It might have been. They were released less than 6 months apart and so were on the market at largely the same time. Generals was the one I grew up with, but I could see how AOM might technically be the start of this idea.

Having 2 separate games from separate studios independently come up with similar ideas, along with Warcraft 3 which came out slightly before both, and the combination definitely solidified the "Hero XP" focus of later RTS games. Ironically I think Company of Heroes did the whole Commander XP thing the best, and it's the closest to the Generals model, but there were good and bad systems being added to RTS games constantly from 2002-2010 or so.

No, I will respond with "Git gud, scrub."

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Note that these games have a "War of the Rings" mode which is a turn based over-game which I guess generates skirmish missions with twists,

There's no twists involved War of the Ring mode, it's just a map or set of different maps of Middle-earth during certain historical periods. Plays like a giant game of RISK, unifying regions gives certain bonuses, but if you opt into real-time battles, they're just the standard skirmish maps (unfortunately not all of them). I really liked playing this mode as a kid and trying to build unique fortresses tailored to the landscapes and topography of the maps, however, one of the main issues is that you can only ever have two teams playing at a time. There can never be a free for all with all the factions fighting each other and you. Something else that's somewhat disappointing but understandable given when the game came out is that the maps never "remember" the fortifications you put together other than the buildings you build in the overworld. Once you win the battle, all the shit you built in the map disappears, so you'll have to start all over if the tile is invaded again. Too bad there was never a BFME III that had the power to keep a persistent map, would have been a dream come true for me.

The music in BFME2 and RotWK is a full OST by Jamie Christopherson along with many of Howard Shore's tracks from the films.

 

[JarlFrank]

Starcraft is perhaps the best you can ever do with its kind of simplistic combat, control and spatial model, for a certain type of competitive gaming, but I'd argue that even within these confines there are alternatives that are just as good, though in a different, IMO, more noble way.

Everything you said is why I prefer Age of Empires to Starcraft.

It's still a "basic" RTS on the surface, but it relies much less on quick micro (of course, on the pro level, good micro can win a game, but it's not as necessary across all levels as in SC) because you have:
- larger armies
- simple terrain factors like height bonus adding damage
- a more spread-out economy that requires defending across wider fronts

Then Warcraft 3 went ahead and made micro even more important by adding toggleable abilities to many units, and of course the heroes and their skills. WC3 is all about microing your small squad of units and less about tactical maneuvers. It's the logical evolution of Starcraft.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Speaking of BTFME:RW what do you think of the topmost mods Edain and Age of the Ring? The upcoming 4.7 version of Edain looks very promising and 8.2 of Age of the Ring released back in August this year.

Basically Edain brings back the build plot system of BFME1 into BFME2 whereas Age of the Ring has the base building system of BFME2. Both mods add tons of new content in terms of new and expanded factions.