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GyverMac posted:Cossack 3 has a truce timer. I like to use it for exactly what you described.  Turtles unite.
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Oct 29, 2022 21:02
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GyverMac posted:Cossack 3 has a truce timer. I like to use it for exactly what you described. How is this anyways? I have it but I was sort of put off by the number of different resources you had to manage for it being an RTS.
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Oct 30, 2022 19:01
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Rynoto posted:Modded SupCom 1's MP is still alive and well and I still don't understand why more RTS didn't steal more ideas from it. Controlling hundreds of units is far more fun than small squad and being able to set a dozen factories to all produce units forever without worrying about efficiency is just such good design. Micro is boring, macro is exciting as you get to watch the pretty explosions more. yeah idk why total annihilation style gameplay never really caught on. i guess it's true that supcom was niche and planetary annihilation flopped, but i feel like supcom released in the shadow of wc3 custom map stuff that eventually spawned mobas, and planetary annihilation just wasn't a well conceived or executed project from the start as far as I could ever tell please, somebody, save the genre with a total annihilation remaster
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Oct 30, 2022 20:39
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Rynoto posted:Modded SupCom 1's MP is still alive and well and I still don't understand why more RTS didn't steal more ideas from it. Controlling hundreds of units is far more fun than small squad and being able to set a dozen factories to all produce units forever without worrying about efficiency is just such good design. Micro is boring, macro is exciting as you get to watch the pretty explosions more. When the AoE4 open beta was happening, I saw a feedback post from a guy, I think they were a Starcraft vet, who said that "houses should take longer to build so that missing your timing on them hurts more". Which made me realise that, like, at least some fraction of the RTS community is made up of people for whom the genre isn't defined just in very high level terms like "games where you give tasks to many little moving things in order to achieve some goal", but also by the hyperspecific contours of the gameplay of existing games. Things like limits on how many units you can select at once or needing to manually keep a production queue going are core parts of the gameplay loop they want and expect to receive from these games.
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Oct 30, 2022 21:08
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I don't think PA flopped so much as it didn't make big explosive waves, and last I checked still has an active community somehow I really liked PA but once you got to late game (so anything involving multiple planets, the entire selling point of the game) so many systems just kinda fell apart and that's where all the people not playing starcraft want to be. But I still had a lot of fun in 1v1s or hopping into custom matches with some friends to pull some team shenanigans, that game was really good before you got to the "economy is completely off the rails" part of it. I don't think I've ever had more fun in a strategy game than playing shared teams with friends in PA.
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Oct 30, 2022 21:31
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Jazerus posted:yeah idk why total annihilation style gameplay never really caught on. i guess it's true that supcom was niche and planetary annihilation flopped, but i feel like supcom released in the shadow of wc3 custom map stuff that eventually spawned mobas, and planetary annihilation just wasn't a well conceived or executed project from the start as far as I could ever tell Beyond All Reason or Zero K though Zero K is actually pretty different from TA
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Oct 31, 2022 19:59
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BAR is well beyond what I would expect out of a professional release of a TA remaster, at this point. It's also the closest to what I'd call a spiritual successor. I'd say the main menu stands out as a rough work-in-progress but it's not like AAA menus are all that usable anymore
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Oct 31, 2022 20:16
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From their steam roadmap they've got some serious ambitions to polish it up. I'll be happy to have a campaign and some AI options, I got bored of playing Scavengers and no of my friends were interested at getting better at the game aaaand I hate playing internet randos so I haven't played in a while. Would probably be up for playing goons as long as nobody is going to go all esports on me.
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Nov 1, 2022 03:58
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Purple War is StarCraft (2), not Warcraft 3. This is obvious literally from the start of any skirmish, even just by watching a VOD. It doesn't have heroes, creeps, or upkeep; other than the art style/theme it's basically just StarCraft in its mechanics. Honestly it's so close to Starcraft I'm not sure why they made it. I'm fine with incremental innovation but the game just felt like a clone with 1/10th the feature set.
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Nov 1, 2022 18:40
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Jazerus posted:yeah idk why total annihilation style gameplay never really caught on. i guess it's true that supcom was niche and planetary annihilation flopped, but i feel like supcom released in the shadow of wc3 custom map stuff that eventually spawned mobas, and planetary annihilation just wasn't a well conceived or executed project from the start as far as I could ever tell RTSes could use a better onramp and more PvE support (especially of the endless variety, ala SC2 coop), but neither base building nor being able to use more APM are fundamentally problems for getting more users. The only problem with those things is how heavy understanding and mechanical execution is required for base building in a way that's not true for army control. A newbie can get away with just attack-moving a bigass army and then slowly improve how they maneuver it and use unit abilities, but with base building you have to understand the whole thing right from the start to get anything done. You can't attack-move your macro. Basically everyone's identified a problem correctly -- base building can feel overwhelming, especially when you're new or under pressure -- but the solution of just getting rid of it or simplifying it to something more basic is bad. It's the interface to base building that's the problem, not base building itself. Edit: If I wanted to aim for a more popular RTS: * Keep base building depth, high skill ceiling/APM, custom map scene. * Natively team-oriented for its multiplayer. And not just a bunch of 1v1's slammed together into one map, players should feel naturally complementary to each other. Games like Overwatch and Deep Rock Galactic as the model. Or maybe something like archon mode. * Endless PvE/coop GaaS mode, like SC2 coop but expanded a lot more (customizable armies, more variety in missions/maps, procedural campaigns, loot/equipment, raids, flexible team size, competitive coop). This mode was very successful considering that Blizzard put only limited effort into it before launch. * Let players attack-move their macro: the base handles itself to a limited extent, but inefficiently, and you can intervene to do it better, just like army control. Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:06
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Cicero posted:Semi-related, but: people, including the RTS community and devs, are bad at being able to see what's popular here. Everyone talks about the route to more genre popularity being games needing less APM and/or less base building, but the three most enduringly popular RTSes are mechanically demanding base building ones. The most popular RTS designs became MOBAs, which built a gigantic audience specifically by removing the multitasking and basebuilding. So you might be right now, but only because the genre is a pale shadow of itself after most people stuck with the now-separate MOBA format. Focusing on solo/coop RTS design seems entirely correct to me though, especially for indie developers. There is already a gigantic mountain composed entirely of the rotting corpses of competitive multiplayer indie games. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:23
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If I wanted to make a popular rts I'd design it around the idea that most casual players are going to slowly turtle in their start location and find a way to make that fun instead of trying to force them out of that behavior They are billions was an ok game that had a (somewhat brief) explosion in popularity, and also has as its main selling point "set up a big fortress and watch tons of zombies crash against it" That's the kind of thing the people not buying strategy games want from a strategy game
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Nov 1, 2022 19:27
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Corbeau posted:The most popular RTS designs became MOBAs, which built a gigantic audience specifically by removing the multitasking and basebuilding. So you might be right now, but only because the genre is a pale shadow of itself after most people stuck with the now-separate MOBA format. Within games that are recognizably RTSes, the most popular ones are mechanically demanding and have heavy base building. RTSes that reduced demands by simplifying mechanics or lowering the skill ceiling have been less popular, rather than more, so the evidence is that that's a dead end.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:30
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I def wanna second the idea of including an "endless" or proc-gen coop to RTS games. It's pretty much an instant selling point, casual fans can just see how far they can get with their friends and hardcore fans can go for their personal records. Since you're playing an AI there's not the stress/anxiety of playing against humans (especially if you're new to the genre or a casual player, you don't have to worry about getting your rear end kicked). I'm pretty open to grab any RTS that has a feature like this. Tbh i'd love some recs for games that have this stuff.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:30
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The thing about APM seeming "needed" is mostly just an artifact of having a big competitive scene anyway. SC1 wasn't particularly known as a really hard RTS in its early days; that reputation only came after it exploded in Korea with the eSports scene. Ditto for what's happened with AoE2. As long as you have decent automatch, and other non-competitive modes, it's a non-issue.ninjewtsu posted:If I wanted to make a popular rts I'd design it around the idea that most casual players are going to slowly turtle in their start location and find a way to make that fun instead of trying to force them out of that behavior
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Nov 1, 2022 19:33
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Kvlt! posted:I def wanna second the idea of including an "endless" or proc-gen coop to RTS games. It's pretty much an instant selling point, casual fans can just see how far they can get with their friends and hardcore fans can go for their personal records. Since you're playing an AI there's not the stress/anxiety of playing against humans (especially if you're new to the genre or a casual player, you don't have to worry about getting your rear end kicked). I'm pretty open to grab any RTS that has a feature like this. I've enjoyed solo playing the survival/wave defense mode of Beyond All Reason, and I bet it would be pretty fun in co-op also.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:34
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Cicero posted:Which is why it's frustrating [They Are Billions] didn't have multiplayer, and so far neither does Age of Darkness. Age of Darkness! I've been trying to remember that game's name precisely because it was on my short list to buy... when it got multiplayer. Which it still doesn't appear to be even close to having yet, according to the roadmap, which is insane to me. Bolting multiplayer on later rather than building for it from the start seems so much harder.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:40
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i would say that mobas drained off the bulk of the APM crowd. total annihilation style gameplay is a good fit for emphasizing the strengths of RTS because APM is less determinative...yes doing things fast still has material benefits, but you cannot micro an army of 100 little dudes the way people would manipulate ranged encounters with tiny movements in blizzard games. it's equalizing
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Nov 1, 2022 20:17
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That's basically the opposite of reality. The fact that you have to manage so little is, to many people, an advantage, especially since it comes in the form of "only control one dude", which is immediately intuitive in a way that managing a whole rear end base with a bunch of resources is not. Even competitive MOBA players don't need APM/multitasking nearly to the same extent RTS players do. Like, if they drained off most of the "APM crowd", the remaining most popular RTSes would obviously be the ones where high APM/multitasking is useless, but that's not the case. The clever thing MOBA's did well is that they transferred a lot of depth away from multitasking/individual complexity to team coordination and raw knowledge (the sheer number of heroes/abilities/items is insane, especially since often the key thing is how they interrelate). It's not impossible to make a game that's immediately more approachable that has you controlling a whole base and army, but it's certainly a lot harder. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 20:25
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Look, the only thing that matters is that Age of Mythology's finally getting a proper remaster and will most likely have a ton of post launch support too. Therefore we don't even NEED any other rtses!
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Nov 1, 2022 20:26
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Cicero posted:but the game just felt like a clone with 1/10th the feature set.
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Nov 1, 2022 20:30
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Oh, another thing that (some) RTSes could probably learn from MOBA's: the onramp within an individual game. The sheer number of heroes to know about is problematic for newbies in a MOBA, but the way the creeps and towers work means that you get to see new-to-you heroes in action first for several minutes in a relatively calm environment, before you get to the stage with teamfights in which players set off two dozen abilities at once and if you're standing in the wrong place at the start you get instakilled. Meanwhile on the SC2 ladder you better already know the signs of at least a half dozen cheeses per race and the details of how to counter them immediately, otherwise you're gonna just die a lot really fast to stuff that you don't understand at all. Wait, they can build barracks right outside my own base? Since when?? Like even when you're moderately decent at the game, it's easy to lose to a cannon rush because you were one second too late responding to an early probe in your base and welp there goes the three pylon wall, you're dead now I guess. That's definitely an aspect of Starcraft that I dislike, when there's too many "gotchas".
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Nov 1, 2022 20:34
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i think MOBAs drained the high APM crowd off of RTS' in the sense that most players who care about APM are perfectly satisfied with the difficulty of stutterstepping + timing a skillshot and don't actually need or want more than that. isn't starcraft 2's playerbase mostly co-op/SP with the actual competitive ladder well overshadowed? how much APM is needed in those game modes?
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Nov 1, 2022 21:04
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i'm gonna need a pretty convincing argument before i believe that high APM requirements are the secret sauce for mass appeal, and that the 3 extent examples aren't the result of other factors
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Nov 1, 2022 21:07
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ninjewtsu posted:i think MOBAs drained the high APM crowd off of RTS' in the sense that most players who care about APM are perfectly satisfied with the difficulty of stutterstepping + timing a skillshot and don't actually need or want more than that. quote:isn't starcraft 2's playerbase mostly co-op/SP with the actual competitive ladder well overshadowed? how much APM is needed in those game modes? It's probably true that coop has more potential to hit mainstream players though if it gets proper investment, not gonna deny that. Endless PvE modes haven't been that common of a thing in the RTS world, lots of potential there. ninjewtsu posted:i'm gonna need a pretty convincing argument before i believe that high APM requirements are the secret sauce for mass appeal edit: to elaborate, I think high APM potential is a good thing for games to have. Not so much because knocking out wins with 300 APM is great in and of itself -- though obviously this does appeal to some people -- but usually to get that kind of game you need to have tight unit control and lots of potential skill expression, and those things are nice to have even at lower levels of play. Being able to win games with lots of APM means there's lots of stuff to do, lots of ways to engage with the game, and even part of the skill becomes "where do I spend my attention". The idea that this means high APM is required to play is a myth spawned as a result of people watching super serious pro players that do actually need 300 APM to win. A big pro scene can rapidly become the most visible part of a game's community -- just look at what happened with Brood War -- and that shapes people's perceptions. Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 21:10
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As an avid ladder player in Age of Empires 4, I'd like to add my perspective here. The way I see it, Cicero hit the nail on the head here :Cicero posted:Semi-related, but: people, including the RTS community and devs, are bad at being able to see what's popular here. Everyone talks about the route to more genre popularity being games needing less APM and/or less base building, but the three most enduringly popular RTSes are mechanically demanding base building ones. For me a large part of the appeal of playing the RTS is the base building management, balancing my economy, making sure both my micro and my macro are on point. Now, I'm not particularly good at any of that, but them neither are my opponents. But, having an insight, adapting my base and eco for what I want to do and then executing on it is an absolutely amazing feeling. These kinds of games are unbelievable punishing and hard to get into, but they give a high like League never quite did. I totally understand the perspective of people who are put off by the complexity and the extremely punishing failure states you can end up in during a game. I have to struggle with it whenever I lose, especially when I get blindsided by a new strat or unit composition. But now that I've really gotten my head around the complexity, more streamlined RTS just feel simplistic and dull, and they can't hold my interest. A quick note regarding APM : in AoE 4 at least, APM is far from the determining factor in deciding the outcome. Szalami1 is solidly among the top 40 players in the world. His APM hovers around 150.
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Nov 2, 2022 07:43
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This may come off confrontational but I think the idea that "APM trumping good strategy is bad game design" is honestly laughable and reactionary AF. It really does feel to me like a lot of people are convinced they're better players than they actually are just because they know strats and counters and are only limited by their physical speed and ability. Execution of your ideas matter and should matter, and whatever sins a game has in that respect emerges less from bad gameplay and more from insufficient accommodation from the UI.
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Nov 2, 2022 08:44
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toasterwarrior posted:Execution of your ideas matter and should matter, and whatever sins a game has in that respect emerges less from bad gameplay and more from insufficient accommodation from the UI. Oh absolutely. Execution is such an important part of the skill and fun. For example, if my opponent goes spearman + archer into my knight + archer, battles become this dance where I try to flank with my knights and run down his archers as my archer pick off his spearmen. Meanwhile, my opponent is trying to kill my archers with his while his spearmen fend off my cavalry. It's a fantastic feeling when I do it right, but more often than not, I mess up in some way. But I keep trying to get better at it and that's a motivating goal.
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Nov 2, 2022 10:00
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I feel like there's two arguments going here, where one side is saying "Eh, 1v1 skirmish multiplayer ain't where the future is for RTS" and the other is going "1v1 skirmish multiplayer must have an APM focus". These can both be true at the same time.
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Nov 2, 2022 11:42
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lol “reactionary” game takes. Everyone calm down, nothing discussed in the thread reaches that threshold.
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Nov 2, 2022 17:33
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I didn’t enjoy AoE4 because the art style and color pallet was off putting.
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Nov 2, 2022 17:35
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RestRoomLiterature- posted:I didn’t enjoy AoE4 because the art style and color pallet was off putting. reactionary AF
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Nov 2, 2022 17:37
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RestRoomLiterature- posted:I didn’t enjoy AoE4 because the art style and color pallet was off putting. I didn't enjoy AoE4 because it looked like a drab mobile game yet somehow was the most demanding GPU performance hog of a game that I own. You know how people say that art direction can make up for low fidelity? AoE4 is the opposite: flat art direction applied with unreasonable fidelity. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Nov 2, 2022 |
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Nov 2, 2022 17:41
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AoE4 also had a campaign that was about as fun as watching paint dry with its baffling discovery channel history documentary presentation.
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Nov 2, 2022 18:28
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chaosapiant posted:I personally don’t play RTS games to get better. I just like building cool units, exploring neat tech trees and upgrades, and crushing the CPU. If there’s a cool campaign and story, that’s a huge bonus. Same. I also want fun goofy combat barks from my units. Dawn of War and Warlords Battlecry were really elevated by the hammy voice acting for units, IMO. Red Alert 2 was probably peak fun voice acting. I hope Purple War's single player campaign has some fun VA for units. I picked it up on Steam, but I haven't tried it yet.
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Nov 2, 2022 19:03
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toasterwarrior posted:This may come off confrontational but I think the idea that "APM trumping good strategy is bad game design" is honestly laughable and reactionary AF. It really does feel to me like a lot of people are convinced they're better players than they actually are just because they know strats and counters and are only limited by their physical speed and ability. Execution of your ideas matter and should matter, and whatever sins a game has in that respect emerges less from bad gameplay and more from insufficient accommodation from the UI. agreed. not dancing your marines? gulag
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Nov 2, 2022 19:06
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Moving Warcraft 3 players ahead of landlords in the schedule for peoples' trials
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Nov 2, 2022 19:42
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Why even wait for a trial? 
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Nov 2, 2022 19:47
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I'm just gonna weigh in with my personal hot takes on PVP RTS's here as well using AOE4 as my example. I only really enjoy playing against other players because it's more fun for me to try and bouce off another person's strategy rather than trying to overcome the challenge of a (typically) cheating AI player. That being said, I much prefer the style of games where you can leave a lot of boring management stuff like keeping queues running in the background and auto producing your workers and armies and where queuing stuff up doesn't immediately take your resources like Supreme commander and many other games I saw mentioned earlier. I like focusing on commanding armies effectively and choosing good locations for new bases that will help with my overall grand strategy. With AOE4 I feel like the game just wants me to babysit my Town Center and smash a series of hotkeys every 20 seconds to make a villager, and maybe smash some more hotkeys to queue up more units. But what I actually want to do is smash some armies together and build some castle walls over vital points. I can do all of that, but my ADHD brain just drops stuff like forgetting to queue up villagers and now I'm behind on econ, or forgot to queue reinforcements so now I have nothing to fight this counter attack, etc. I get that that's the point for some people. They like this contest of who can manage this busywork the best. But for me I just actually want the contest to be who has the best overall strategy and army control. I know I can't be the only one who thinks like this, but any time I might ever bring this up in the AOE forums I just get told to go play Dota or some poo poo and this game just must not be for me. It kind of seems like the current way of thinking is also just driving new players away from the RTS genre as a whole. The PVP playerbase dwindles quickly and ends up being filled only with the die hard fans, and the matchmaking pool is too shallow to make fair games anymore so any new player will always be smashed by long time players who have all those hotkeys burned into their muscle memory at that point. And because of that I don't really have many other PVP RTS's to choose from which is a shame because that's the genre I enjoy the most.
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Nov 2, 2022 19:51
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bring back world in conflict, the best pvp rts that ever was or will be
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Nov 2, 2022 19:56
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