I can't both manage my base and command an army, it's just too complicated :kitty-cri-screm:
This problem is because this was a huge problem rtses had historically, so the only people who stuck around to play them were the psychopaths who enjoy that feeling. So the genre continued to develop to appeal to said psychopaths, instead of actually fixing the problem.
Graviteam Tactics avoids this problem by being so realistic that if you micromanage things and spam commands your men get confused and will start having trouble coordinating with each other and generally being effective in combat. Like real people do when micromanaged like that. I wish more games punished micro like that.
Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm is turn-based, but it has a similar system. You control literally dozens of not hundreds of units, but the number of commands you can issue per turn is limited, so you're encouraged to move units in large groups and only micromanage where absolutely necessary.
Also, it has a campaign where you reunify Germany as the DDR. :honecker-interesting:
punishing micro is so wack what. it’s a game you should be able to express skill
If it's a strategy game you shouldn't be able to win because you can physically click faster than your opponent.
in the newest age of empires there was (maybe still is?) a way you could get ranged units to have a faster rate of fire by clicking on a unit and then clicking away to retreat for like half a second and then clicking again. Strategy lmao
There are also several units that are designed to only be used this way, and are literally worthless if you don't constantly do bullshit like that. Which are in turn countered by your opponent hitting the button even faster than you are.
This leads to the fun gameplay of constantly watching this one unit to make sure you are hitting the button fast enough, and if you blink or look away for the wrong three seconds you lose your entire formation of said unit. Said unit is also the only effective counter to infantry spam that doesn't lose you just as much resources as it took your enemy to build said infantry.
Why not? I agree if it's a round based game, but in a real time game your actions in real time determine the outcome. Of course you can put a limit to the complexity, but that will very quickly put a skill ceiling to what is possible in your game.
Also you don't need to be hitting those 300 APM to enjoy the game. There are people with one hand that reached decent ranks in StarCraft 2 with barely 70 apm. The limit for most RTS players is a mental one, getting disorganized and distracted like OP. Not a matter of finger speed.
The Starcraft Model deliberately bakes excessive complexity & hyper-specific unit functionality into the game rather than allowing complexity to evolve naturally out of otherwise simple to understand principles
StarCraft units are mostly, apart from the spellcasters, very basic. Fast weak ranged unit. Fast cheap melee unit. Flying unit that can hit ground. Flying unit that can hit air. Slow splash damage unit. I can explain every unit except maybe the Dark Archon and the Defiler in like 4 to 5 words and you would get it.
The reason people still play StarCraft isn't because it's complex unit design but precisely because of the insane emergent gameplay and strategy that is STILL developing after 23 years of being played to death in a million professional matches.
I'm not arguing this is going to be fun for most people. It's certainly not. The UI is unbearable if you played any game in the last 15 years. But it's probably the most beautiful competitive game ever made.
Because it's bad when the interface is the antagonist and not the other player. You shouldn't feel like you're fighting to make the units do what you want them to do. Your skill is just overcoming bad design.
I hate to do this, but Day9 (probably the only good gamer) has this covered extremely well in this video: Pathfinding and Micro in SC. I know it's rude to just link a 35 min vid, but it's well worth your time.
Long story short: Better UI/Pathfinding/Simplification doesn't equal a "better" game. Just because something feels easier, doesn't mean it's actually for the better of the game or your enjoyment.
micro is important but Starcraft just has a shitty UI that makes basic shit take 40 extra clicks.
It's not skill though. It's more like an IQ test that's is less trainable. It's practically a measure of your working memory and nothing else. True APM(not spamming commands) isn't trainable like most things that are classically considered skills is.
That's a very bold claim. What makes clicking buttons in a certain way different from other muscle memory exercises (i.e. almost every single sport)? You learn the required moves, you automate it and suddenly you free your brain to do something else. Certainly there are talents, but everyone can learn to play StarCraft if they choose to. It's not magic.
You just have to keep track of all the units in your head at the same time, keep them in the right order, and recall them all consistently with the correct timing. That is literally the definition of working memory. This is not a trainable skill. You can train yourself to be faster at turning your memory into action, but you cannot improve your memory, your timing, or your precision. Those are all things that your brain sets a hard limit on at a biological level, and it is not something that can grow once your brain is done developing as a child.
This is the main limitation of your performance in classic rts games like AOE, StarCraft, etc. It's the equivalent of having a game where you have to identify color patterns that are invisible to colorblind people and saying that fixing this removes skill from the game. It's disguising intrinsic biological factors as skill. Except in the case of the colorblindness example, it would be a lot easier to just change the color pallette of a game to fix this, and in a classic rts the game is broken at a fundamental level.
This is something Starcraft does wrong, Starcraft 2 never fixed, Dawn of War (at least the first) did perfectly, yet the entire industry pretends like SC is the only game that exists.
Big ESports is dedicated to repeating the same destroy-your-mouse cave-man style gameplay and resists innovation at all costs.
This is probably why the genre is dead.
There are also games which avoid this by simply not having a base building component.
I know there are others, but Myth and Myth 2 are the ones I thought of first (of course, the trade off is you have to be much more meticulous while commanding because you only have a set number of soldiers per map)
Total War games also mechanically separate grand strategy from battlefield tactics. Too bad the fandom is full of roman bust weirdos
that's why you manage your base obsessively for the first half of the game& play nice only to then completely switch over to being a war-mongerer who cares not if his farms are razed to the ground at the first provocation
Hey now to be fair I have only ever lost Stellaris games but the strategy does work in Civ V
One of the coolest things in Supreme commander is the way you can split your screen
And that's among a long long list of cool things. There is a Open Source "remake" of a similar engine, by the way; it's called Spring. It has been more than a decade in the making (though it was already perfectly playable at least 10 years ago). It is very very good - it's truly an engine: you load a game file that completely changes the game depending on what you want to play.
For the supcom/total anihilation feeling, Balanced Anihilation is great.
And here is a list of the most popular games you can load in the engine.
It goes without saying the engine runs on Linux natively (as well as Windows), of course.
I played Evolution RTS and that's what made me realize how cool RTS games are. Haven't played many since though. Planetary Annihiliation mostly.
Planetary Annihiliation
how is that game? I've heard the AI sucks, do you just play it online?
I played it online a while ago, didn't do single player much. Had some issues with some games and it takes a long time to load in but it was pretty fun. I haven't played many other RTSs to compare it with. I just really like how it uses a solar system with planets and you can build satellites that serve a couple different functions, and send units between planets, and crash planets into other planets (in addition to nukes). It feels a lot more three dimensional than other similar games. The game can get laggy eventually as would be expected, and the menus are laggy, and they kept changing the UI design. I don't think there's many players in it these days. The studio developing it could have done better but it was a Kickstarter funded game I believe.
This takes me back to my old C&C days when I didn't bother to read the manual and would just send wave after wave of riflemen to slowly whittle down the enemy
Select Barracks -> Set rally point in middle of enemy base -> Que up basic infantry for the rest of the game
:is-this: Real-time Strategy?
Lmao I used to sneak in with engineers and build walls around enemy units. Since the ai sucked so hard, they couldn't even react before I engineer rushed their buildings and sold them off under their nose
Edit: also known as the IMF slide
When I was a child I remember trying to amass my army in my GDI base and almost getting annihilated everytime Nod sent 3 rifleman and a small tank.
For me it's the speed factor. I loved the army building mechanics from the Wargame series, but god, was it nearly impossible to keep up in game. If I paused for a second to see what the enemy had, or what the enemy was doing, it was already game over. You had to basically be throwing shit at the wall and hoping it stuck.
Yet another reason to reject multiplayer games and embrace single-player where a pause button is possible.
I desperately wish they would make more games that can be played like words-with-friends. I don't like scrabble, but the game's multiplayer design is spot-on (or was last I played it, 10 years ago).
Imagine if you had your android/iphone, open up a game similar to fireemblem or advanced wars (if you don't know what those are, pretend I said WWII and fantasy themed chess/checkers), play your turn, when the other player places their move, you get a notification that it's your turn. Async, turn-based, multiplayer.
Autochess combined the worst of real time with the worst of turn based. The game is fundamentally turn-based, but you instalose on disconnect (despite that the game is mostly "autoplaying" itself), you disconnect easily, games take 20 minutes, and the entire 20 minutes is 55 seconds of waiting for everyone's autoplaying to finish then 5 seconds of rush tapping to manage your deck/lineup/inventory for the next 55 second waiting around. Overall terrible experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Play-by-email_video_games
this actually used to be a thing back in the day before fast and reliable internet was super available, and some game franchises have inherited the feature and kept it going in their more modern installments. It's mostly for 4X games and wargames though, which are suited for a much slower style of play, where it might take a lot longer until the other player sends their response (especially in the real hardcore wargames, where you have to manually manage the entire Eastern Front, it takes like hours to make a turn there). Frozen Synapse apparently had it as well, that's a pretty interesting cyberpunk squad tactics game, which actually has both players' turns resolving simultaneously (and has this really cool simulation feature, where you get to play out various scenarios and decide your course of action based on that)
AFAIK none of these exist for android, or there's not really a way to find them on android if they did. Probably also true for iOS.
Yeah, it's mostly PC strategy games. Phones could definitely be a good application of the concept, but alas, it doesn't seem like anyone's doing stuff like that.
Every rts works very nearly the same as every other one. That's how people who play them avoid that problem. Learn one, you have learned most of them. Of course this means the genre is stuck in the past and can't change things to fix problems without alienating most people who would buy the games, so 90s rts clunkiness is baked in even to new ones.
Offworld Trading Company manages to be fresh without scaring away everyone by not having much direct combat. Like, technically there is combat because you can hire pirates to sabotage your competition and they can in turn hire security and they will fight under player control, but it's simplistic and a very small part of the game.
Used to play 2v2 in Starcraft II years ago with a friend. I can still manage a semi decent APM in pretty much all RTS games if I actually care. Gotta just learn the new hotkeys and everything else translates over really well.
Mostly I just put things on super easy, put on a podcast and try to keep all my little dudes alive :comfy-cool:
I love Warcraft 2 since it's fairly fast-paced but basic enough (no heroes, few buffs, etc) to the point I can comprehend.
RTS games need to lean into being a sort of programming/scripting game where you can build up larger and larger groups of buildings and units to manage, so it's more about organizational skills. Most RTSs seem to just have like unit grouping, rectangle select, patrol, and stuff like that. Ideally you should never even need to tell your units to move around the map.
Ideally you should never even need to tell your units to move around the map.
That ruins like 60% of the fun of starcraft
I feel like this doesn't really scale, eventually you just have "top scripts" and everybody pastes them into the box or memorizes them.
A game where players continually iterate on their AI script, then send the latest build of their AI to 1v1 someone else's AI, is probably an interesting next generation RTS.
It would hopefully be more of an arms race type thing. If you're using a standard strategy it would be vulnerable to non-standard ones or anything a player does out of the ordinary.
Mindustry has this. You can program your units with computer blocks, they do 120 instructions / second and if you need more you have to pay more resources or progam synchronization between several computers.
And the units not only do combat but there are several classes, some can haul resources inside your base and most of them can build, you need to program all that in a shitty assembly-style language.
Dwarf Fortress has a surprising amount of support for that kind of thing
In any rts I care about I can normally pull it off against even the hardest AI but as soon I join PvP I get absolutely stomped. I just only ever play single player or co-op anymore for anything other then FPS.
I think I used to be able to do it when I was younger, but now it feels so stressful I would just rather quit.
i can't deal with rts on PVP but i feel it like fighting games that it is just that there has been constant developments and technical stuff learned for years so me coming in without that know how just can't compete
