Why did Real Time Strategy genre die out?

[Mangoose]

Company of Heroes 1 gave me Red Alert 2 vibes. The series still exists, there was a sequel.

Can't get more RTS than Red Alert 2.

What I like about Company of Heroes is that you control squads. I think this is because gives you some macromanagemnt, which I think is important in an RTS because provides efficient use of units that lets you work on general strategy and tactics.

Heck, consider the Total War series. You don't individually control the position of individual soldiers. But you can set general formations, loose/tight/etc, for your unit in a very efficient manner.

 

[Nutmeg]

Yeah CoH is a very low APM game due to the low unit (but not model) counts, but is still micro heavy (due to all the weapons with facing and set up times). BfME (2) is similar for similar reasons.

 

[Mangoose]

Yeah CoH is a very low APM game due to the low unit (but not model) counts, but is still micro heavy (due to all the weapons with facing and set up times). BfME (2) is similar for similar reasons.

Yes, yes I forgot the cover mechanics. The targeting system is smart enough to position each individual behind an obstacle, you just tell them to do it and they do.

If you will, it is somewhat like micro/macro because you are playing the role of a squad leader. A squad leader who coordinates 2 or 3 fireteams. A fireteam 4 troops - because you want to be able to able to buddy up for suppression and assault, for bounding movement.

Btw this is why a guy won't be able to do much unless you have a buddy pinning him down so YOU can assault back. Obviously you've got 1-man robber unprofessionals.. But if you have.. 9 armymen dropping in (1 squad leader, 2 fireteams).. you're screwed if you think you can shoot your way through it. No, no you can't because 1 of those fireteams is shooting at you from range, meaning shooting around them and pinning their movement. That provides the "assault squad" the opportunity to insert at where there is the least amount of cover.

This is riflemen combat, from lectures by John Boyd, by Marine corps war manuals, but studying the history of how the strategy of combat changed. (I started playign chess when I was really little. Chinese chess probaby before that. Started winning trophies when I got to middle school. BTW not an attempt to brag, just that this is a subject I am highly invested in.

To the degree where I like to analogize non-war things to military strategy terms.

In fact, Col. John Boyd's OODA theory is literally used business.

Because strategy and tactics.. aren't only on the battlefield.

 

[Mangoose]

Yeah CoH is a very low APM game due to the low unit (but not model) counts, but is still micro heavy (due to all the weapons with facing and set up times). BfME (2) is similar for similar reasons.

This is one reason why I like 40k Chaos Rising so much. More than vanilla and retribution.

Well, the other reason that there IS a big choice consequence event, which pretty cool (depending on what you do, any of your squad can turn out to be a traitor).

Steve Blum voices one of the squad leaders.

That being said, it's good to get a mod that increases your squad sizes, "Wrath of the Blood Ravens" for example.

BTW man this reminds me of fps with good squad command systems. BROTHERS IN ARMS!!!

 

[Mangoose]

I heard Supreme Commander did a good job of this.

But I've never played.

I also enjoy a game that uses squad mechanics both usefully and without frustration. It's especially fun if it depends on you saying it. Binary Domain man (though I did set up one fr Republic Commando which was fun)

 

[Cadmus]

I stopped playing them because of the excessive APM requirements.
Secondly, the same starting position really gets boring after many years.

Imo they were replaced by MOBAS, the genre was really stagnant and naturally evolved into MOBA.
In fact I played some CC Generals some weeks ago and was suprised by how difficult the game was.
I much prefer turnbased because the dexterity component is gone.

 

[what am i doing]

I heard Supreme Commander did a good job of this.

SupCom had really nice commands with a lot of quality of life features. Orders you give are visible on the map by holding Shift; you can click and drag them or cancel them, rather than having a bunch of invisible queued orders that can't be altered without just re-issuing all the unit's commands. If you've set up a complex patrol route you can easily tweak it and change its shape on the map. You can set up ferry orders for transports that'll have them automatically fill up units that are ordered to the ferry order and drop them off at the end point; you can target ferry orders as rally points for factories; you can order more transports to assist an existing rally point and they'll join in moving units. You an easily loop, reorder, and increase or decrease quantities of particular units in a factory's queue. Etc. All of this is stuff that should be standard in RTS, yet somehow is not.

 

[Hellraiser]

All of this is stuff that should be standard in RTS, yet somehow is not.

My guesses are:

They're at odds with the competitive crowd's idea of what skills should decide who wins matches, and the autists from that one screech loudly online.

Christ Taylor really fucking cared, SupCom was his big great vision that was brewing for years with all the "I have more CPU power now so I can finally do X" and "I should have done Y in Total Annihilation" thoughts he gathered during that time. It was his Magnum Opus that he had to make reality and luckily THQ did decide to fork over cash for it (remember when he was fishing for a publisher during early development? I do, SupCom could have never been made).

QoL doesn't make money, especially not when you're on a deadline.

Because the market leader, that is Blizzard, didn't do it. Every industry, every creative medium, has very few people with actual vision that can innovate and do their own thing, most are copy-cats with minor twists going along the current fads. This is how you get major artistic trends... and this is why most indie games are trash even if they have no suits limiting their vision (see all the deckbuilders and other current fads on steam).

Starcraft: Brood War got too popular. Basically the same thing as with World of Warcraft, it dominated in popularity too much over the genre and it becomes difficult even for Blizzard to replace it as a "gold standard" in the minds of the public, especially if it was their first RTS.

 

[what am i doing]

All of this is stuff that should be standard in RTS, yet somehow is not.

They're at odds with the competitive crowd's idea of what skills should decide who wins matches, and the autists from that one screech loudly online.

Because the market leader, that is Blizzard, didn't do it. Every industry, every creative medium, has very few people with actual vision that can innovate and do their own thing, most are copy-cats with minor twists going along the current fads. This is how you get major artistic trends... and this is why most indie games are trash even if they have no suits limiting their vision (see all the deckbuilders and other current fads on steam).

It's these two. Starcrap niggers are so fucking retarded they think that having a loop button on your factories is a bad thing because in Real Time Strategy you should be... going back to click and add more units to the queue. They protest against anything that shifts the genre away from fucking around the UI to focusing on strategy, so Blizzard abstains from fixing their games, and then every other developer looks at Blizzard and goes "oh, well if Blizzard isn't doing it, we shouldn't either" and then they wonder why RTS games keep flopping.

Now I know what the first thing out of their slack-jawed mouths will be: "more micro makes the game harder and requires you to split your attention more, so that's a good thing!" and my answer to that is that if you want to make the game harder, require more attention, more things to focus on and keep track of and do, you should be adding more strategic elements, not intentionally making your UI dogshit. Piling on bad gameplay elements that aren't strategic does not make your RTS better. Piling on more actual strategic things to keep track of - like missile defence networks and power grids that can actually crash (you know, stuff that SupCom does) - does make your RTS better while also increasing the skill and attention required.

 

[adddeed]

Me and my nephew started playing Empires Dawn of the Modern World and Act of War Direct Action over LAN, and its been super fun.
Sometimes i get stompted, sometimes he does. There's rage quitting, crying (he's only 10), but man is it fun.
We dont really care about apm and crap like that though.

 

[Faarbaute]

Me and my nephew started playing Empires Dawn of the Modern World and Act of War Direct Action over LAN, and its been super fun.
Sometimes i get stompted, sometimes he does. There's rage quitting, crying (he's only 10), but man is it fun.
We dont really care about apm and crap like that though.

My friends and I have this gentleman's agreement that we don't look up strats and builds etc online, if we're going to be playing together.

It's one of the ways we actively try to foster that same atmosphere. It's great.

 

[JarlFrank]

Playing meta is lame. I play AoE2 ranked ladder occasionally, and am perfectly content being at low-mid Elo. It's a lot more fun to play whatever strategy you wanna go for against other middling players who know the game's basics but haven't studied specific build orders and trained the meta strategy so perfectly it's basically just a game of who executes it better and more quickly, rather than actually trying to come up with a strategy.

 

[SugarBone]

Playing meta is lame. I play AoE2 ranked ladder occasionally, and am perfectly content being at low-mid Elo. It's a lot more fun to play whatever strategy you wanna go for against other middling players who know the game's basics but haven't studied specific build orders and trained the meta strategy so perfectly it's basically just a game of who executes it better and more quickly, rather than actually trying to come up with a strategy.

IMO, the problem's that modern multiplayer games are largely hyper-competitive. RTSs are great when played casually, but the competitive environment (fixation on meta, APM and etc) just sucks all the fun out of them.

 

[Great Deceiver]

All this talk about "meta" (a bullshit word btw) and nobody said that the balance in broodwar was because of the map makers
If you have followed competitive broodwar back in the day, the evolution of map design was really interesting.
The Korean pro leagues actually paid people to make interesting and balanced maps for all three races.

The truly old maps from release would be completly unbalanced nowadays. Lost Temple had like thousands different "balanced" and "updated" versions and it was still considered to be a joke map for pub games.

Also one cool thing about oldschool RTS is that they didn't have those stupid weekly/monthly balance patch like Mobas. People were not rewarded for being little bitches on forums.

In Wc3, Lost temple was a fine enough map that produced some of the most entertaining games ever played, even with the issues it had.

One funny thing about it that made it pretty uncompetitive though, which to my knowledge still hasn't been fixed is that it isn't guaranteed that you end up opposite one another which means that in 2/3 games someone spawns right next to their opponent's natural expansion...

afaik the tournament/competitive version of LT has opposite side spawns.

 

[Multidirectional]

Playing meta is lame. I play AoE2 ranked ladder occasionally, and am perfectly content being at low-mid Elo. It's a lot more fun to play whatever strategy you wanna go for against other middling players who know the game's basics but haven't studied specific build orders and trained the meta strategy so perfectly it's basically just a game of who executes it better and more quickly, rather than actually trying to come up with a strategy.

Yeah same reason why I stopped giving a shit about ranking up in Strarcraft II after reaching Diamond 3 with all races few years ago. It seemed like I would actually have to study more complicated build orders and follow metas if I wanted to go higher, as opposed to just learning a basic opening for first 2-3 minutes and doing my own thing from there like I've been. Why would I put all that effort to turn the game from good casual fun into something that feels more like a job where I have way less freedom of playstyle? It was actually quite liberating to stop giving a shit about MMR as the losses became way less upsetting. Sometimes I even wish I was worse player so I could be in even lower leagues, where people are a friendlier. But my macro muscle memory has gotten too good for that.

 

[Nutmeg]

Larping that poorly designed games are actually well designed -- that's such a codex thing to do

 

[Oreshnik Missile]

All of this is stuff that should be standard in RTS, yet somehow is not.

They're at odds with the competitive crowd's idea of what skills should decide who wins matches, and the autists from that one screech loudly online.

Because the market leader, that is Blizzard, didn't do it. Every industry, every creative medium, has very few people with actual vision that can innovate and do their own thing, most are copy-cats with minor twists going along the current fads. This is how you get major artistic trends... and this is why most indie games are trash even if they have no suits limiting their vision (see all the deckbuilders and other current fads on steam).

It's these two. Starcrap niggers are so fucking retarded they think that having a loop button on your factories is a bad thing because in Real Time Strategy you should be... going back to click and add more units to the queue. They protest against anything that shifts the genre away from fucking around the UI to focusing on strategy, so Blizzard abstains from fixing their games, and then every other developer looks at Blizzard and goes "oh, well if Blizzard isn't doing it, we shouldn't either" and then they wonder why RTS games keep flopping.

Now I know what the first thing out of their slack-jawed mouths will be: "more micro makes the game harder and requires you to split your attention more, so that's a good thing!" and my answer to that is that if you want to make the game harder, require more attention, more things to focus on and keep track of and do, you should be adding more strategic elements, not intentionally making your UI dogshit. Piling on bad gameplay elements that aren't strategic does not make your RTS better. Piling on more actual strategic things to keep track of - like missile defence networks and power grids that can actually crash (you know, stuff that SupCom does) - does make your RTS better while also increasing the skill and attention required.

While I agree in principle, unit production looping in the case of Age of Mythology led to mindless same-unit spam and replacing it with manual training led to more variety in production and area of deployment. edit - or at least I hope so, maybe that's only an optimistic impression I got.

 

[Multidirectional]

It's obvious that automating macro tasks would lead to less variety of skill expression. At my level in SCII I can meet people who are decent at macro or people who are complete shit at it an rely on micro and being annoying with constant aggression. A player who sucks at micro but has solid macro can still overcome these hyper aggressive players if he doesn't allow himself to get too distracted by them. Making macro automated would lead to everyone being "good" at it and less variety in how matches play out. Not that I'm against QoL features in general though, that's why I don't play Brood War as I prefer fighting my opponent to wrestling with shitty controls. But there is a limit in how much automation RTS can have before it becomes just straight up boring.

 

[what am i doing]

But there is a limit in how much automation RTS can have before it becomes just straight up boring.

Out of curiosity which RTS did you find had too much automation and became boring, and where would you say that limit is?

 

[Multidirectional]

Out of curiosity which RTS did you find had too much automation and became boring, and where would you say that limit is?

I don't know where the limit is. The RTS that had the most automation out of the ones I tried was Supreme Commander and it bored the shit out of me. Another one I tried recently was Battle Aces, David Kim RTS that has no macro and is all about fighting. Also got bored pretty fast.

 

[what am i doing]

Out of curiosity which RTS did you find had too much automation and became boring, and where would you say that limit is?

I don't know where the limit is. The RTS that had the most automation out of the ones I tried was Supreme Commander and it bored the shit out of me. Another one I tried recently was Battle Aces, David Kim RTS that has no macro and is all about fighting. Also got bored pretty fast.

Seems like a subjective matter then because Supreme Commander is by far the most fun RTS I've ever played. I don't think automating out the micro so players can focus on the macro is a bad thing.