Real-Time Strategy all purpose discussion thread

It helps that the survival-crafter market is greatly enabled by Unity. A literal teenager making his first game can put together a mediocre crafter with the assistance of Unity assets and templates. This contributed to the other point that helped that market, which was price. Most of those games were $20 or less right out of the gate.

As a single player RTS person who occasionally twists the arms of friends to play the occasional COOP game, I have been so excited for the new RTS’s coming on board. I’m searching for that new RTS that can give me variety but still do it competently.

For example, I was so excited for PA and pre-ordered it. When it came out, I jumped in & played many skirmish games (not a single MP game or COOP game). I was surprised to find that while it did so many things exceedingly well, the spherical nature of the maps was just too overwhelming for me.

What I decided I like is maps where I can control the flow with a few decisions. For example, a good map typically will have 3 or 4 ways to proceed to attack and initially, I’ll set up defenses protecting 3 of the 4 routes and set up an offensive push on one of the routes. As my abilities increase, and I can start getting better radar / scouting, I can see how my enemy is proceeding and begin to adapt to their strategy. Are they going air? Where are they building / amassing troops?

for example, the Supcom map Fields of Isis was always great. At the beginning, you were lucky to have radar that covered half the field. Air factories are expensive early on and T2 Radar even more so. the first 10 minutes are a guessing game, and then as you progress, you’re able to get more intel - which typically coincided with the base building leveling out and you’re into T2.

For PA, the number of routes is nearly infinite, and my brain just couldn’t cope. I finally gave up but damn I was sad, because on a more constrained map, I think I would have enjoyed it immensely.

For Ashes, the radar is what broke it for me. It is just too hard to get and maintain intelligence.

I just bought 8-bit armies, so I’m going to give it a go.

I tried Warshift - and I think this is VERY promising. I’ve played a few hours and am looking forward to how the developer evolves this.

Seems like whatever game comes out today needs to be (for lack of a better word) sexier than the old stuff still on the market. Isn’t that what the FPS games do?

That, and, I know I do eventually get tired of playing the classic games. That’s reason enough (for me) to move on

[quote]Supreme Commander - Peak concurrent players last week: 138, players in the past 2 weeks: 5, 134
(I should note I still play this on the original exe, not going through Steam and I can’t imagine I’m unique)

Forged Alliance - Peak concurrent players last week: 674, players in the past 2 weeks: 13,747

Supreme Commander 2 - Peak concurrent players last week: 580, players in the past 2 weeks: 19,047

Ashes of the Singularity - Peak concurrent players last week: 139, players in the past 2 weeks: 7,122

Homeworld Remastered - Peak concurrent players last week: 385, players in the past 2 weeks: 19,378

Homeworld Deserts of Karnak - Peak concurrent players last week: 124, players in the past 2 weeks: 3,313

Ages of Empire II - Peak concurrent players last week: 8,902, players in the past 2 weeks: 216,476

Ages of Empire III - Peak concurrent players last week: 2,161, players in the past 2 weeks: 57,307[/quote]
Hmm, the setting might play a role too in those player numbers. If there’s one genre where sci-fi themes are being used way too much then it must be RTS. What is the last great historical/low fantasy RTS you’ve played? For many folks that is still Age of Empires II (for me I’d say it’s Knights & Merchants, a much slower but more visually rewarding game), those HD re-releases surely must have made Microsoft some decent money by now? Although probably not enough to get Age of Empires 4 underway.

So I tried 8-bit armies and it’s a bit frenetic for me. It’s got so many maps in the campaign, to be honest, it’s a bit overwhelming looking at that long list and thinking wow, that’s a big committment ;-)

I’m only on the 4th or 5th map, and the game really seems to want you to create huge hordes and attack with masses of units. Of course, it’s still doleing out units, so I don’t even have everything yet.

It does have resources (oil) and power that you have to balance, and interestingly enough the resources deplete over time, so the harvesters need to venture further & further from base to get the resources.

The games are really fast-paced, I got over-run a few times until I just kept producing units into a big horde, large enough to repel what it was throwing at me.

Has anyone else tried this? Impressions?

Got about halfway through the campaign and then got distracted with other stuff, so I don’t know how/if they implemented the heavy tank and rebalanced campaign missions to account for multiplayer balance patches. You’ll start seeing map repeats after a while (in different configurations) which will help keep the maps from being too daunting. You’ll also be able to stack up rewards from mission objectives that you can carry back to earlier missions if you’re a completionist like moi and want to have all the goodies.

Personally, I refuse to move on to the next mission in line until I can get all of the objectives on the current one. It’s always possible, but stacking rewards from future missions makes getting those timed bonus objectives much easier if any give you trouble.

All in all, it’s the closest retail game to a Red Alert-style game in a long time and I appreciate it for that even if it has nothing unique to its name.

Yes, some of those early silver / gold goals seem pretty hard with where I’m at and I kind of assume I’ll go back to them.

One thing I do appreciate from the game is that they seem to have pathing down. With so many little units vying to get to where you point them at, it’s kind of fun watching them. LOS is a bit tight right now and I see there is a radar that gets unlocked later, as well as aircraft, so I’m interesting in seeing where they go with it.

I know everyone here says that RTS is dead (WillyWonka_OhReallyTellMeMore_Face.jpg) but this game announcement sends happy chills up my spine. I will keep my fingers crossed.

A console RTS, now there’s something we haven’t seen in a while. Is it the first one this decade?

Halo Wars 2 is already in closed beta. I think it will beat this to launch.

https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/games/halo-wars-2

http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Randy_4b32ea_1152423.jpg

In my case you have to go all the way back to Kohan.

I really think Brad is making a mistake by not doing an Elemental series RTS. I think there’s a market for that- and the world setting seems really suited for an RTS.

Sure, it’ll probably be just as successful as Warlords Battlecry 1 through 3 (another RTS spin off of a TBS game).

I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not. I guess it depends on your opinion of WBC3

While probably not successful in financial terms, wasn’t WBC3 excellently done and well reviewed?

WBC 3 benefited from being a WBC 2 expansion.

So as some of you know, Stardock just merged Ashes of the Singularity and Escalation into a single RTS (Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation).

The original Ashes of the Singularity had massive scale:

and Escalation introduced somewhat more hard-core RTS features:

So everyone who bought Ashes of the Singularity now has Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

You can read more about the WHY of it here:
http://www.stardock.com/community/article/481856/ONE-COMMUNITY-Merging-the-Singularity

A reimagined Kohan would be an almost instant buy from me.

So say we all.

Any chance I get to roll over people with the Ceyah is welcome.

I had a dream last night you added gigantic juggernauts and didn’t even bother to tell anyone. Loaded up the game and they were there and I couldn’t help but wonder why they didn’t coincide with the great mergening. There was this brain juggernaut that was pretty sick as its neural material was overflowing and draped down the sides of its vessel.