Real-Time Strategy all purpose discussion thread

Hmmm…

Ancestors Legacy looks and sounds great, with very impressive framerates.

But it’s mostly making me want to go play Company of Heroes again instead.

There’s a lot less variety and choice than in CoH. Mass melee is a real gummy mess, and I’m trying to find any use at all for archers. Either they get charged by melee and die, or if you screen them properly then they just kill your own guys with friendly fire.

It feels like early CoH where pioneer spamming was the name of the game. Whoever spams more of the starting melee unit will get the edge and steamroll their opponent. Matches have all been decided before you advance past that.

Is there a campaign in Ancestor’s Legacy? I don’t get into rts for mp.

Yep. Quite a lengthy one with a bit of variety.

They’re great for chewing through your own troops! :-P

In all seriousness, though, archers are pretty vital, especially if you can screen them with spearmen so that the enemy doesn’t smash them to bits. (Just be sure to activate their cover ability of whatever it’s called if your own melee troops are in between your archers and their targets.)

If there was one thing that always bugged me about Relic RTS, it’s that they really obscured the math behind the units and it made it very hard to gauge usefulness. Dawn of War’s numbers where so all over the place that they were meaningless. Company of Heroes did a little better, but the damage numbers were still vague and you had no idea about health.

Ancestors Legacy doesn’t give you ANY numbers. Not for damage, not for health, not for armor, not for speed. Everything is a big “damn if I know” shoulder shrug.

I’ve tried around 30 skirmish games now.

The matches are always sewn up by early tier 2 at the latest. Maybe it’s profoundly different against humans (in an empty online community), but it’s just been tier 1 melee spam.

Know if any of the campaigns are interesting beyond the glorified tutorials that the viking one seems to be?

It is bizarre, they don’t mention any hint of a campaign on their Steam page. Why would you neglect to mention something so important? I had previously ignored the game as an option because of that.

There are four factions in the game (Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Slavs). Each of these factions has two major characters (e.g. Ulf Ironbeard and Rurik for the Vikings), and each character gets a story consisting of 5 chapters (missions) each, so that’s 4 x 2 x 5 = 40 missions in total. It’s quite generous as far as single-player content goes.

I haven’t played all the missions yet, but it’s been fun so far.

I’m reminded of Praetorians, the 2003 RTS game developed by Pyro Studios (who also did the Commandos series). The villages being the centres of your economy and the use of terrain (hiding in tall grass, etc.) are similar to Praetorians, in my opinion. You have to rely on sneaking around and scouting quite a bit, and it’s interesting having to dodge enemy patrols. It does operate more like a “proper” RTS rather than a strictly tactical game in that you have to gather different types of resources, conduct research, etc. Map control is less of an issue, but in general you want to grab as many villages as you can, scouting out which ones are the easier targets and making use of flammable objects to more easily whittle down the enemy. (Rain makes it harder to burn stuff.)

Also, the game might not show a lot of actual numbers, but the interface does give a good deal of information nonetheless. Hover over a unit and the panel at the bottom will tell you what types of units the selected one is strong and weak against. It feels like the game makes use of fairly hard counters, so bringing the wrong units to a fight is a recipe for disaster.

Yeah it tells you counters (which is kind of weird: axe beats swords beats spears beats cavalry???). I just like having hard numbers to determine whether something is worth it or not. Like armor upgrades are a super heavy investment and you don’t know exactly how much they boost you. One of my favorites Battle for Middle Earth 2 also had that problem.

Ancestors Legacy has a really weird bug: the “random” option for factions doesn’t work. The “random” faction is entirely chosen by map. Set everyone to random, and you’ll get the exact same team comp every time, and it seems to give the player Vikings every time regardless.

That’s insane!! Everybody knows Axes>Lances>Swords>Axes!!!

Joking aside, I know it’s a convention, but that would make the game hard to play for me. Too much conditioning to the traditional Japanese weapon triangle.

The most annoying bug for me so far was the fact that if you go into the extras menu, there appears to be no way back out. The back button doesn’t work, so I had to kill the program and restart.

Now that it’s out, has anyone tried Warparty [sic]?

I saw a streamer, Nakamura RTS, playing it the other day and he seemed to be enjoying it. I tried it briefly during early access and I didn’t really stand out to me, so I refunded to wait and see how it was at release.

I think I saw that video. It didn’t click with me.

He is playing again:

It just doesn’t look that exciting to me, especially with WC3: Reforged coming out. It kind of reminds me of that with the hero and creep killing.

*** 2 hours from now: “Hey Guys I got a new RTS” ***

Myth really needs to be next on the list of classic RTS getting a modern update.

Oh gosh yes please.

Amen Brother.

Oh wow, Warparty is very not good. It feels like one of the dozens of forgettable Warcraft clones of the 90s. It almost feels like a mobile game. I keep expecting to see ads pop up for slot machine games.

It’s almost impressive as a project to pump out the most generic Warcraft 3 clone ever while managing to leave out every interesting part.

Also the in game music is a slowed down remix of Pomp & Circumstance? wtf???

Wel, I decided to bite the bullet and bought the game (Warparty, that is). It’s a relatively cheap RTS with an interesting, somewhat ridiculous theme (cavemen, dinosaurs and zombies). Compared to other budget RTS games of late (Empires Apart, the 8-Bit series), this seems – with what little I’ve played so far – rather a bit better, especially with its three story-based campaigns.

It’s not a WarCraft 3 clone.

Gameplay-wise it seems closer to the Age of Empires series than anything else. You even get almost exactly the same brief sound when you click the town centre! You collect food by harvesting berries from bushes, hunting animals, or through farming (exactly as in Age of Empires, not as in WarCraft). You can even “upgrade” (read: age up) your settlement, at which point you pick between one of two “talents” to give you what seem mostly passive bonuses (sort of like picking between two deities in Age of Mythology).

Furthermore, you collect “crystals” (i.e. gold) from smallish piles that are grouped together as in StarCraft, as well as larger clusters that are more like gold and stone piles in Age of Empires. You can also capture shrines to generate power (like favour in Age of Mythology) to use Populous-like (or indeed Age of Mythology-like) special attacks like meteor strikes. I like this mechanism in particular, especially since the shrines tend to be guarded (like the treasures in Age of Empires III).

To increase your population limit, you construct houses. To improve your units, you build a special structure that allows upgrades. Upgrading (aging up) your settlement unlocks new buildings/units and tech. Again, that’s all very much Age of Empires to me, not so much WarCraft 3. Hero units were also a feature in Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III (as well as Halo Wars), so I don’t necessarily see them cribbing from Blizzard here, either. Except that Ensemble no doubt took some inspiration from WarCraft, of course.

I’ve played the tutorial and some of the Wildlanders campaign. I actually managed to fuck up a mission by trying to rush the zombie faction hero foolishly with a bunch of weak units, thereby giving him a relatively large army in turn at an early point in the game (since every unit that dies near him is turned into a zombie!). I hadn’t realized this and it wasn’t long before he chased after the scattered remnants of my fleeing army. He wreaked havoc in my base and I had no way to stop him, so I restarted and made sure I didn’t make that mistake again!

The game looks pretty good. The voice acting is mostly terrible, but in a way that I don’t find it too offensive. The UI is rather clunky and the main font (Impact, I think?) is awful, but nothing I can’t deal with. This is, after all, a budget title, so I can live with it being a bit rough around the edges. Some of the ground textures likewise are a little iffy, but the art design for all the 3D stuff is well done, I think, with cutesy dinosaurs. Heck, it’s an RTS where you train caveman cavalry that ride triceratops and sabretooth tigers into battle!

I dabbled a bit in skirmish mode and either the AI cheats like hell or it’s actually pretty decent. Reviews on Steam suggest the latter, but I haven’t played enough to tell either way yet. Otherwise, it’s all pretty well done Age of Empires-style fare so far that’s a bargain at the current asking price of I guess around $25 US (I paid ca. €22 for it). It’s made me curious as to what else the developer may do in future.

One serious issue that I need to point out is the complete lack of a way to save the game mid-mission. I had to leave at some point and was rather dismayed, after spending 15 minutes in a mission, that I couldn’t save and quite the game, only “surrender”. I hope this is something that can be patched at some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

In short, I’d recommend this so far.

I never understand this kind of criticism.