want5
Call me crazy but WBC meets Kohan would be great.
I can be super fast clicking individual units anymore these days.
I’d love to see and play a new Kohan game.
Right now, what I’d like to see is Ashes of the Singularity made very moddable so that people can use it to create any RTS they want and share it. This is, afterall, how we got MOBAs (Dota was a Warcraft 3 mod).
I love the sound of that!
A strategic view feature makes it more hardcore? That’s an interesting concept.
I would argue it makes it more casual friendly: a way to have a general overview of the match and be able to give simple orders from there should reduce micro and “APM” skills.
So I guess a Age of Empires Definitive Edition was announced?
I wonder if that means they’ll upgrade the graphics for Aoe2 on its 20th anniversary.
Was looking at 30 day player average stats for RTS games on Steam while in a discussion elsewhere:
Ashes of Singularity: 121.8
Grey Goo: 24.4
Dawn of War III: 1,521.2
Dawn of War II - Retribution: 344.0
Company of Heroes 2: 4,137.2
Company of Heroes: 1,915.4
Age of Empires 2: HD: 6,318.7
Age of Empires 3: 1,269.0
Age of Mythology: EE: 793.0
Rise of Nations: EE: 451.9
Halo Wars - DE: 184.1
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance: 414.2
Supreme Commander 2: 293.0
Planetary Annihilation: Titans: 226.4
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak: 36.4
Homeworld: Remastered: 167.1
Offworld Trading Company: 129
Star Wars: Empire at War: 691
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion: 689.7
I have no idea what the numbers are for Starcraft: Brood War and Starcraft 2, but I imagine they blow these out of the water. This also doesn’t include numbers from folks that play via Voobly or elsewhere. What is the path forward for the genre? Have the newer titles been that bad, or do people just like to go with what they know and head back to old favorites like AoE2.
I keep saying this- but Stardock has the tools needed to make such a game using Legendary Heroes’s units/items/world (or a variation thereof)- many things go one for one with Kohan, and you’ve got a bunch of heroes already designed.
With Ashes engine and multithreaded AI, you could have larger armies than what Kohan had, and avoid some of the townstealing exploits that Kohan had with an UI that could adapt to human cheese.
If you put the game out there flat out as both a spiritual successor to Kohan and “an accessible RTS game without peon management or excessive micromanagement”, I could see it doing well. I’d also advertise it a bit to the MOBA crowd as an alternative game for them to try. I see Kohan as sorta an ancestor to MOBAs in general as well.
In terms of keeping the community going, it has to have the addictive people want to keep playing it factor. Going F2P is an option. Have a founder’s option that gets new content first, and make your money off of cosmetics. (you might need to go the fanservice route some)
(Allow F2P folks to ban content they aren’t going to get yet to avoid crying though)
Heh. They didn’t pick the scifi theme by random choice. It’s much easier to animate vehicles like ships, tanks and robots than humans and beasts. Hell, AoS is specially cheap even by the scifi RTS standards, with 100% of units being floaty ‘antigrav’ vehicles or flying units.
Looking at that list, I own 9 of them, and still looking for a worthy successor to Supcom FA, which I play way too much. PA was executed well, I’d probably still be playing it if it wasn’t a sphere - I loved the idea, but my old brain just can’t handle being attacked from 360 degrees. I like defensive points I can establish & inch out (I’m a solo/coop only).
Ashes was scratching quite a bit of the itch, except it had a deal-breaker for me in how it handles radar. Brad and company never respond to my complaints, they’d rather listen to the chorus of fanboys on their forums so I uninstalled it.
I didn’t realize Dawn of War was an RTS, so I’m off to look at that.
Are you sure Brad was aware that you are the Prophet of Radar and that all those fanboys were completely wrong?
What was the issue, out of curiosity?
I think the problem Tman had was that it functions more like an actual radar rather than extending line of sight. So you know there is a mass of units in a location, but no idea what the composition is.
I’ve only seen streams of people playing the campaign, so I don’t know how well DoW III compares to traditional RTS games. The fact that it has only been out a little over a month and the 30-day average is already down to 1.5k looks really bad for longevity of the game.
I have Grey Goo, and I should spend some more time with it. From what I remember it didn’t seem bad, but it didn’t really stand out either. I don’t have DoW III or the new Homeworld. I’ve enjoyed Ashes when I’ve played it. I think my favorite of the new titles has to be Soren’s game and I wish it was getting more love from people.
With very few exceptions, this has been my take on most the RTS games of the past several years (games like OTC stand out in this regard). They all leave me feeling “Yeah… I’ve done this before. A lot”.
I enjoy Ashes a lot more than some of the other modern RTS games, but even that leaves me with the same feeling. Technical achievements aside (and there are very impressive technical achievements, don’t get me wrong), from a gameplay/mechanic point of view, what’s new? Why doesn’t someone just play Supcom:FA, especially if they already own it or can pick it up for a few bucks? Yeah, there’s cool stuff like meta-units, but that nicety doesn’t really alleviate the “I’ve played this game before” feeling.
I have the same issue with Dawn of War 3. Sure, it adds a couple minor new ingredients, but it fundamentally just feels like the same Dawn of War, just with a little less here and a little more there. It’s not bad per se, but I drift away from these games very quickly because I don’t find anything new or innovative to hook me.
Do you fall back to playing your old favorites or just not play rts games at that point?
I played a ton of RTS games in the past. These days, I might dabble with the new ones but they usually fail to grab me due to them feeling very samey/derivative. For that reason I usually don’t fall back on old RTS games either. I loved them, but I played the hell out of them.
I want something new. Sacrifice was a very atypical RTS. OTC is a different sort of RTS as well. I liked the Wargame series, but it’s also gotten to the point for me where it’s “Okay… so… more Wargame?”.
I might like them more if I was still a competitive gamer, but those days are gone (I played hardcore back in the war2kali.exe, Starcraft, and Warcraft 3 days). What hooks me in a strategy game is discovering new mechanics and trying to figure out how how I can use all these pieces and tools in my gameplan. Very few RTS games offer anything really new in that department, it’s mostly rehashes of previous RTS games and memorizing build orders, working on your APM, etc.
Oh I’m sure, I’ve replied in the ashes thread & the only reply I receive is “working as intended”
I really don’t care who likes it, I don’t, so it’s a deal breaker. I can’t stand playing games where enemy movement / direction is not known. The way Ashes works, the “blob radar” only works for a very short distance. If you like it, great keep playing but as the stats above show, people are not playing decade old RTS’s more than Ashes. It may be for a variety of reasons for a lot of people. For me it was all about radar.
Yes, and the fact that it is such a short distance - I had zero time to react. I tried using aircraft to give me LOS but they are too expensive + they don’t live very long. There was one campaign level - it was really tough where you defend a hill for a set amount of time and I was building a radar right at the front lines and the enemy units were still able to shoot at my guys and my guys just sat there, not reacting.
So I switched over to doing skirmishes vs the ai, and it just grew tiring on maps trying to figure out where they were going to attack from. Trying to set up defensive points on 6 paths doesn’t work when the enemy masses & comes at one with zero time to respond, then it all goes dark again and it’s like playing in the dark.
By the way, one inventive RTS hybrid is a game called Warshift - it’s done by one guy and it’s pretty impressive, and I’m really hoping he gets around to updating it some more, because I think it has a lot of potential:
If this is true, where’s Freelancer, Billy?