After playing a lot of RTS games recently, one thing hit on me as something to keep in mind:
TA was great because there was essentially no endgame - just an expanding middlegame. In most games, you hit the end of the tech tree, and then you just throw units at each other. In TA, especially on large metal maps, it was expand expand expand expand - build more turrets, more production facilities, more economy, more tanks - and the battles just got bigger and bigger. I think the “food” paradigm that started with Starcraft (let’s limit your amount of units!) is mostly to blame for that. Once you take that out, and make the difference in unit costs several orders of magnitude (it takes 100 metal for a flash, but 10,000 for a huge tank), and have 40 different - different - units, you have a game that works well. The UI and such were just icing on the cake.
Now that TA was amazing I very much agree with. But then again … Dungeon Seige. So a Chris Taylor game is not a guaranteed slam dunk. (thanks to John Keefer for pointing out that Chris Taylor had nothing to do with TA: Kingdoms; I will no longer blame him for The Iron Plague).
As for what happened to RTS design, I submit the following loosely associated thoughts (I’ll spare you the powerpoint):
[ol]
[li]More Action [ul][/li][li]More clicking - more unit abilities, more micromangament. [/li][li]Focus on units, so construction is secondary. [/li][li]No speed slider - if you’re not clicking, you’re not having fun! [/li][li]Time to age up! (so again, there are no big ticket items you can put resources into - I’m thinking fusion generators, etc from TA). [/ul] [/li][li]Turtling is Bad [ul][/li][li]Defensive structures can be destroyed by cheaper units, or cheap but vulnerable units at range. [/li][li]The tech tree maxes out. [/li][li]Unit maximum means you have to fight sooner or later. [/ul] [/li][li]Campaigns are about Drama [ul][/li][li]We don’t need a campaign, we’ve got multiplayer [/li][li]We don’t need a campaign, we’ve got skirmish maps [/li][li]Who cares that the campaign is all the same mission - don’t you want to know what happens to Kerrigan? [/li][*]No, you see, in this one, you’re Joan of Arc, see those are French trebuchets. [/ul] [/ol]
Nice backpedal, particularly the way you tried to make it sound like it was something you’d written before by “speaking slowly”. But it’s still an inane point, even if it’s the first time you’ve tried to make it. You can say that about any good game. Here, I’ll do it now:
“There’s a huge list of things that Starcraft did right that no other game has picked up and ran [sic] with.”
Doesn’t really work, does it?
Wait, you disagree that “games that are already out bear a similarity to TA”? I’m not sure I ever made that point, but I guess it depends on how restrictive your definition is of “similarity”. And also whether you’re willing to pretend TA: Kingdoms doesn’t exist, which I know a lot of you TA fans would rather do.
As for disagreeing with me that Chris Taylor is overrated, well, you’d have me on that one if I had ever said any such thing.
You TA people are a touchy bunch. Quick to take umbrage about things that haven’t even been said.
Chris Taylor was not responsible for TA Kingdoms. He had left Cavedog by that time to start Gas Powered Games. TA Kingdoms was the work of Clayton Kauzlaric, who later went on to do Voodoo Vince.
(1) Patrols and return to base to repair if they are damaged and then resume patrol. This allowed me to queue up a scout plane to zip around my territory as a form of early warning.
(2) Effective radar posts, radar jammers.
(3) Kbots and tanks having different travel characteristics over terrain - Tanks have problems scaling hills.
(4) Traverse speeds of turrets, different projectile speeds impacting targeting and accuracy, with experience granting a certain ‘prediction shooting’ to veteran units. Nothing like seeing my Kbots swarm over and pepper a Bulldog faster than he can track and kill them (and the occasional unlucky L1 Kbot blowing up like a candle when he gets nailed by a heavy shell). I don’t know why more RTSes don’t simulate this, but use the ‘instant hit’ formula.
(5) Debris littering the battlefield causing obstruction to further attacks. Sometimes there’s so much debris that the battle takes to the skies! You can of course place Dragon’s Teeth to artificially create these obstacles.
(6) Proper heavy naval bombardment by battleships. When you’re being shelled, you will want to stop it. IMMEDIATELY!
(7) DGuns discouraging early rushes.
(8) A brilliant energy/metal resource system - which other game uses resources just to open fire?
(9) Huge variety of units, both official and fan-made.
(10) Buildings which have a defensive mode which takes time to transition into - and you can catch them open if you’re fast enough (bombers).
I haven’t really seen much of the like in newer RTSes at all.
Now it’s my turn to be genuinely baffled about the point you are trying to make. Seriously, what is it? Also if any outsider clarifies it, I promise I won’t respond to them saying ‘This is probably the point Tom was trying to make. And I don’t disagree in the least.’ And then continue to harp on with snide comments about how I don’t understand the syntax. Given that it’s a one man dog-pile on me and that many others have chipped in with more and more things that TA has done that other games haven’t, can you try to be a bit more gracious?
I guess I misconstrued the following comment as you inferring Brad not to get excited because games out there have the features that Brad mentioned:
But then we’ll get into an infinite loop, because you will say ‘That statement is absolutely correct’ and I will say ‘One feature in five separate games isn’t the same’ and then you’ll accuse me of dodging and being disingenuous despite doing so yourself. And so on.
You’re right, I did block that one out, but really, TA kingdoms got rid of many of the things that TA did right. It was not a worthy successor.
Hmmmm, got me there. I didn’t realise that you were actually saying that Chris Taylor has a good rating according to you. Silly me.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get a rise out of me.
I think part of the problem here is the lists the pro-TA side is putting up are many times highly specific to the game, and I can make a similar list about almost any RTS I wanted to pick. For example I’ll use Sacrifice (since I’m pretty familiar with it)
1.) True terrain deformation where you could do things like create mountains, craters and bottomless pits.
2.) Special attacks and abilities that took great advatage of 3d movement. Attacks that flung enemy (and friendly) units hundreds of feet into the air or dropped them into one of the aforementioned bottomless pits.
3.) A branching free form capaign that let players create their own tech tree.
4.) Eliminates the slow build up period at the beginning of most other games.
5.) A unique supply line resource system using the souls of enemy units.
6.) Voice acting by Tim Curry playing a god that looks like a baloon with a smily face on it strapped to a helium tank. (I’d like to see any other game in existence top that…)
7.) A unique experience system where you advance up the tech tree by doing well in combat.
I could go on but it seems rather silly to do so. Let’s all just agree that TA is the best game ever and that Chris Taylor is God and be done with it. In other news Supreme Commander looks like it has potential doesn’t it? I’m looking forward to it.
If you were to avail yourself of the vertical scroll bar, you might find the following where the conversation started after your initial post:
I don’t know why you’d be baffled at what point I’m trying to make, since I must have typed variations on this at least ten times in this thread.
Also, I think you’re smarter than to trying to twist this quote into me saying Chris Taylor is overrated:
Just to clarify, here’s the point of the analogy: Star Wars fans got burned extrapolating from how much they liked Star Wars what the prequels might be like. But many of us had no such expectations. I went into Phantom Menace curious to see what a man who hadn’t directed in many years could do. Similarly, I will play Supreme Commander curious to see what a man who hasn’t made an RTS in many years can do.
And just to keep TA fans from getting their Kbot underoos in a bunch, I can just as easily put it this way, but it wouldn’t have nearly as much geek cachet:
“You can’t bank on Chris Taylor’s reputation as an RTS developer any more than you could count on Terence Malick’s reputation as a director.”
Don’t be so quick to look for a slight when all I’m doing is trying to put things into perspective.
I guess this is a little off-topic, but back in the '97 era, I bought Starcraft instead of Total Annihilation. I bought TA a couple of years ago in the bargain bin, but the singleplayer missions are one area where the game doesn’t really shine. Anyone want to play this game online sometime?
Same question for Sacrifice, although I’m playing its singleplayer again and again right now.
Tom, at least I agree with you about Sacrifice. I wish it would work when I install it though (I tried a few months ago). Did you have any problems getting it to run, RightWrong?
Seems like you kids have setteled down now, so I’ll hold my big post on TA.
But as for a game that captured the TA experience for me (which I defined as big maps with big battles with lots of units with little need for micro) I found Empire Earth to fit the bill. Especially when you played it at the near future epoch. You had nukes and a shitload of units and big maps to go crazy on. And the cheap, rock hard towers made turteling very easy, and gave the TA effect: drawn out battles resulting in a total carnage with lots of units.
EE had some serious flaws to, but it excelled in the above.
TA and Sacrifice are both pretty unique. Blizzard RTSs aren’t after using the same interface, same resource system, same research system, same unit selection limit, same unit limit, queue limit… Ditto for most of the C&C franchise.
Supreme Commanders zoom capabilities will be exactly what the genre needs. TA Spring has a pretty good zoom function already. It’s so natural that it now hurt when I can’t simply zoom out to get the “lay of the land” in other RTSs. I’m stuck kissing the ground so to speak.
Warzone 2100 had this, though, I don’t think you could actually make a bottomless pit. Most maps had a series of underground tunnels that could be used to launch a suprise attack on the surface.
Myth. :P
Sacrifice you say?
www.amazon…
Reading the write up in CGM something Chris Taylor quoted was that the biggest maps were…absolutely enormous. He said even with the fastest? planes in the game, Mach 3 capable bombers, it took 7 minutes to fly from one side of the map to the other.
Well, this may be hard to believe, but some people don’t like being wiped out in the “punk-bitch-rush-of-the-month-club” in the first 5 minutes of a “game”.
I happen to be one of those, so, the fact that a “rush” in Supreme Commander will come not in 5 minutes but more like 25-30, whatever it takes to research? the tech and then build the units.
