Does anyone else love the “earn stars by completing these objectives, which force you to approach the missions in a different way” thing that 8-Bit Armies (among plenty of other games, to be sure) does as much as I do? Because I love it.
I refuse to advance to the next mission without finishing the current one on hard with three stars. The rewards are worth it.
I’ve been playing AoM EE for a couple years (mostly via LAN), and my wife and I never saw desync issues until the recent updates for the Tales of the Dragon expansion (which we didn’t buy and haven’t played, btw).
The desyncs aren’t too bad since the game autosaves when it desyncs, and it’s only happened a few times (maybe 10% or less of the games we’ve played in the last few months?) The expansion brought a bunch of other new (mostly minor) bugs that I’ve been kvetching about. Early on it seemed like the expansion had broken the AI (we had a bunch of games where both AIs failed to build Titans or Wonders and stopped attacking after a while), but after a few patches we’ve seen it play well and actually surprise us with some cunning raiding and retreating.
That is absolutely right. Every time I see the name Grey Goo I assume it was a one-man team who built a 2d sidecroller with a couple levels that would average a 50 on Metacritic. I have to manually troll my brain to say, “wait a minute… is that the Petroglyph game”?
No you have it wrong. Grey Goo is the indie darling where you drag little personality-filled goo balls to form bridges and structures to reach a goo vacuum.
-Todd
No, that’s World of Tanks.
World of Grey.
“As he picked me, my inner goddess sent a shiver up my spine, and down again. It made rounds in my body and my mind, and inside I felt myself explode in a rainbow colored in fifty shades of Grey”
You realize you really made me think I really had made a mistake and had to go look it up to see whats whatta what? Lolol
Ha! Sorry about that.
-Todd
8-Bit Hordes!
A new 8bit game from Petroglyph , also the 2 new factions can play against the 2 factions from 8bit armies.
Plus…
[quote]
Pricing will be similar to 8-Bit Armies and a launch-day discount is also expected. Most importantly, for all of those of you that have supported us and already own the current game, we are working with Steam to make the game available at a substantial discount reserved exclusively for our current players.[/quote]
On the subject of Warcraft clones, I wonder if anyone here has played WizardCraft and can maybe recommend it.
Have not tried it myself. I’d be curious as well.
Not sure if Wyrmsun is a clone or not, but it does have Warcraft vibe: http://store.steampowered.com/app/370070/
Wyrmsun is so fun.
[quote=“KevinC, post:132, topic:78408, full:true”]
The thing is that I don’t typically get that epic feel from most RTS games. I’m not building a city or might military fortification, I’m just plopping down a handful of buildings in a certain order. The research trees in a 4X are often quite interesting and open up all sorts of options, but RTS it’s generally “do a bit more damage” or “have a bit more armor”. Boring. If you factor in building requirements for units you can think of that as part of a tech tree, but even then you usually just have a couple very short paths to take and it’s just a matter of what you build first vs second.
That’s kind of my problem with traditional RTS games. For my individual tastes, I really feel a lack of some sort of metagame or customization. I like a good skirmish mode but at the end of the day it’s just a skirmish. I do my battle and then I’m done. I can play again, but it plays out fairly similarly each time and it’s just a matter of getting better at executing. [/quote]
Some of my favorite gaming moments have been in MP RTS’s, whether it was the thrill of sneaking commandos/engineer’s into an opposing base, or blocking roads with stealth units whilst I built another base, getting a spot of land and building a ton of Big Bertha’s in range of a turtle’s base, etc., but there is a good point here, which ties into campaigns and stories now. RTS’s aren’t always good at this and Ashes had some fun scenarios in the campaign, but there’s no character.
Ditto with the meta-unit armies.
One of my favorite touches in a recent game was the way X-COM soldiers would earn their nicknames - have a heavy get a great rocket strike - hello Boom-Boom Rodriguez!
In Ashes, maybe a way to do this is have named areas on maps, and if an army takes it/defends it/loses it then they/their general gets a nickname. Maybe add personalities to the army in the form of generals and some sort of off color scheme to indicate your separate armies with generals on the minimap, and a variety of canned 'zug-zug’s for the army, leaders and units based on these.
Could even go with some split tactics if the AI/AI programmer is up to it (Brad? :)) that would lead to a better meta game with armies - needing to get the right army in place to counter an enemy’s army/leader as well. Also give more weight to smashing an enemy’s army - think Montgomery and Rommel in the desert, etc.
Well, just some thoughts at least.
This is now available. If you own 8-bit Armies, check your Steam inventory since I received a 67% off coupon bringing Hordes down to $4.45 for me! Awesome deal for previous customers and a no brainier impulse buy for me.
So I’ve had the opportunity to talk to other game developers who make RTS games and one recurring theme is the challenge of keeping a multiplayer community going.
A huge chunk of these games budgets are spent on multiplayer but in practice, a tiny tiny percentage of players actually play multiplayer (who seem to represent half the forum population).
I like multiplayer games but it is so expensive to support multiplayer when it seems like so few people play these games MP. Everyone tends to gravitate to the #1 or #2 title (Classic 80/20 rule) in the genre (StarCraft, Dota2/LoL, Overwatch, etc.).
I wonder if it would make sense for studios who make RTS games to simply make a free to play multiplayer client for these games that’s seperate from the main game.
I’ll admit, once upon a time I played many RTS games, but quit for the very reasons you hint at: I don’t do multiplayer. Pause now! is the mandate of my gaming life, such as it is with a two year old. Plus I tend to get my kicks from the greater depth afforded by RTS games.
But as for making the multiplayer FTP? I dunno, would that make sense financially? Because once you decouple the multiplayer development, then wouldn’t it be fair to say that it is truly a tacked on feature at that point? No longer is that your primary design emphasis, which admittedly suits me just fine. I’d rather have single player be polished.
But I suspect many RTS games would simply drop multiplayer completely at that point.