
What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre? - ingve
https://probablydance.com/2019/09/11/what-happened-to-the-real-time-strategy-genre/
======
b0rsuk
Am I the only person missing the old C&C style games, before Generals?

I'm not saying C&C:Generals was a bad game - it was quite popular - but from
design point of view it was a Starcraft clone. They abandoned the old, quirky
Dune2/C&C design with low count, remote harvesters, multiple factories which
only sped up the rate of production, instantly deployed buildings, instant
selling etc. These things had some flaws, but also advantages, and most
importantly - they resulted in a different experience. I think C&C: Red Alert
2 was the high point of that design. Optimal action speed, counters that
weren't too hard, varied units.

~~~
SeanBoocock
You might be excited then by Command & Conquer Remastered:
[https://www.ea.com/news/details-command-and-conquer-
remaster...](https://www.ea.com/news/details-command-and-conquer-remastered).
We're working with the community and regularly updating it on
/r/commandandconquer (ie
[https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/ct1oz8/r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/ct1oz8/remaster_update_and_mission_selection_preview/)).

~~~
mcphage
What year is that press release from? Is this a game that is out now, did it
come out 5 years ago? Is it 2-3 years out from now?

~~~
SeanBoocock
Pretty sure the press release is from the end of 2018. The game is still in
development and you can follow along with development updates on the
subreddit. Can’t comment on the timeline but it’s making exciting progress and
I can’t wait to play it when it’s released (I’m tangentially involved on the
EA/publisher side).

~~~
mcphage
Thanks. It would have been really awesome if the page mentioned that, too.

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dleslie
IMHO, the core series focused too heavily on maximizing the experience for
esports, and that spoiled the genre for the mid-range gamers that were its
bread and butter.

And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary
Annihilation et al were not so long ago.

And OpenRA itself has been somewhat of a success.

BTW, C&C has a Red Alert reboot coming out before too long. It will be classic
in design.

~~~
nitwit005
You seen to either get games where the multiplayer scene is non-existent, or
hyper competitive like SC2, where you feel a bit brutalized.

One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I
was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to
get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more
attractive.

~~~
AstralStorm
That is the main reason I liked Total Annihilation, you could be decent with
only some practice, and the scene wasn't hypercompetitive.

~~~
vasili111
> Total Annihilation

IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...

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caymanjim
> Blizzard had a long distraction with WoW, then they made Starcraft 2
> followed by the MOBA Heroes of the Storm. They’re still insanely successful.
> Now they’re remaking their old games, recently releasing a HD remake of
> Starcraft 1 and are about to release a remake of Warcraft III.

Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW steadily over ten years,
appealing to the lowest common demoninator. Modern WoW is boring,
unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by
a vocal but dispassionate player base.

If you look at a chart of subscriptions over time, it peaked with an expansion
ten years ago, and has declined steadily since. This coincides with changes to
the game that made it require less time, less thinking, and less skill. I
imagine they felt they were broadening the appeal, but they turned off the
players who made the game a blockbuster. If you removed people who still pay
for it but don't play, or people clinging to nostalgia, the numbers would tank
even more.

I was surprised when they re-released the original game as "Classic WoW".
While I don't know what the subscriber numbers look like, the servers are
overflowing, and the player base is even more passionate than when it was
released 15 years ago.

I think the same thing happened with other recent Blizzard games. They went
for mass appeal in a way that turned off the players who helped build their
empire. Chasing the MOBA fad didn't work out for them. I'm glad they're going
back to their roots.

Maybe I'm just a crusty old gamer nostalgic for the past, but there are a lot
of us out there.

~~~
temporaryvector
>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the
lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears
designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate
player base.

I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was
the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as
the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the
time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the
PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs. At the
time MMO developers were doing a lot of interesting things with games like
DAoC, Star Wars: Galaxies, Anarchy Online, etc. There was something for all
tastes, in particular games like SWG were starting to feature persistent
player-build towns, non-combat focused professions that actually made sense to
use, interesting skill systems and a more social experience.

At the time WoW felt like a return to the old days of Everquest, only even
more simplified and polished (which makes sense since some of the same people
were involved). There was even a sort of a competition (more of a shouting
match) between Everquest II fans and WoW fans before either game got released
as to which would be the future of MMO games. We all know how that fight went.

What I and many MMO fans at the time failed to understand is that WoW wasn't
for us. It was for people who had never player a MMO game before. It wasn't an
attempt to get MMO fans invested in Warcraft, it was a brilliant move to
introduce all the Warcraft fans to MMOs (and the marketing material at the
time was very clear about it). It was all designed from the ground up for
people who had never even known that MMOs existed, since the MMO market was
pretty small back then, and what little there was was pretty divided.

This is also why many people these days have fondness for "Classic WoW,"
because it was their first, and you never forget your first. Incidentally my
first was a pretty shit game called The 4th Coming and I still remember it
fondly, while ignoring most of its faults (what kind of casual needs an
interactive map anyway, just look at this still picture that roughly resembles
the world and navigate using landmarks, much more immersive that way). This is
also the reason why all the WoW clones never caught on. The people making them
(or changing their game to be more like WoW, looking at you New Game
Experience) failed to realize that most WoW players don't really like MMOs,
they like WoW, specifically.

Writing this has made me feel pretty old, but I very clearly remember scoffing
at WoW players as casuals and their game as an Everquest clone. Here I was
playing much better games like UO and SWG and they didn't even know better.
Well, time passed and now I'm the one that didn't know better, but I'm still
kinda bitter that the success of WoW massively contributed to the death of the
type of MMO I liked, and even if it looks like WoWs influence over the newer
MMOs is slowly fading, I don't think I'll ever get to enjoy any new MMO the
same way I enjoyed the originals.

~~~
Mirioron
I find it interesting that MMORPGs didn't actually develop in the direction
that MMORPGs portrayed themselves as. The idea of an MMORPG was to be an
_entire world_ and the player would simply be a participant in it. Ultima
Online, at first, tried to have some form of an ecological system where
carnivores eat herbivores etc. This didn't work out, but you can clearly
imagine that the goal was to create a world. However, somewhere between that
and modern day MMOs things seem to have changed. The goal doesn't seem to be
to create a world, but to simply provide a multiplayer game with a bigger map.
It's as though it's meant to be social media with a game attached.

I'm not sure if I worded things correctly, but it just seems to me that
MMORPGs aren't trying to build a game world anymore.

~~~
empath75
The only game that successfully did that was eve and I always find it amazing
that nobody else tried it.

~~~
RugnirViking
Oh people _tried_. It's just that the effort required to develop these kinds
of game worlds relative to the amount of fun gained is often very poor. That's
not to say it's nonexistant, it's just that its easy to say something like "I
want NPCs to go about their lives in the world convincingly and be affected by
player actions", but it's quite another thing to program such a system, pay
voice actors, hire writers to write thousands of possible permutations of
dialog, with high chances of it ending up having little concequence for the
players except as an idle curiosity while they wait for something else.

~~~
jogundas
I would call those "scaling issues". Let's see if deep learning advances along
the lines of gpt2 can start solving them. I think that we will know the answer
in 5 years.

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isostatic
Total Annihilation holds a big part in my history. It was a great game for one
thing, but annihilated.com inspired me to get into running a website.

Thanks to TA and annihilated, I ran my own website based on a game (a Star
Trek one), which at peak in 1999 was getting 2000 uniques a day. Taking USD
cheques (like $40) from doubleclick into my UK bank in my school uniform in
1998ish was a unique experience.

Thanks to that experience it drove me to where I am today.

As far as actual RTS game play, Red Alert was best in my view. One disc for
soviet, one for allied. Tanya, Dogs, and Tesla Coils. So many hours, so little
to show for it.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
I liked TA much more than RA. The strategy felt deeper, plus I liked the idea
of the Commander unit representing you on the battle field. Sending him into
battle was a risky move. The D-Gun made him extremely powerful, but if he
died, you lose.

The nukes in RA were also just plain pitiful and not really worth the time to
build.

~~~
diydsp
we used to play TA at lunch...but cut it off abruptly after an hour.. . so
we'd spend 55 minutes building up epic armies then send them to apocalypse for
the last 5 minutes :)

I tried to fire up my TA disk in a Win7 machine a few years ago, but the
graphics came out all wrong :( any suggestions for reviving it?

~~~
rangibaby
Try this patch:
[https://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43735](https://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43735)

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Dumblydorr
It's too hard for most players. Dota and LoL have similarity in being real
time, but you get the comfort to blame teammates for your loss and it's much
slower paced. In starcraft, you are literally playing by yourself as fast as
possible for the entire match, win or lose, no breaks for respawns or waiting,
and you can lose in some spectacularly frustrating ways. Ever move command
your army into theirs and lose it all? Ever hit yourself with a spell? Find
their hidden tech or hidden base way too late? I love it but it's seriously a
masochistic genre of gaming.

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wanderer2323
The 'combined arms' approach where your 'macro' is turn-based and your 'micro'
is real-time is doing very well in Total War franchise (briefly mentioned in
the article).

Turn-based aspect of settlement/empire management flows much better than real-
time base-building aspect of the classic RTSes. Battles being fought in a
separate real-time ux means that you can field thousands of troop models while
micro-managing tens of 'squads' \-- and you don't have to worry about
strategic side in the middle of the battle.

Both aspects are richer as a result of separation.

~~~
Dylan16807
You say "richer", I say "removes important difficulty". Part of what makes the
genre interesting is balancing your attention between these different aspects.

But more importantly, it's critical to an RTS that you can use micro to
disrupt enemy resource gathering. If all unit movement is decided on a turn-
based world map, you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a
strategic point. Micro still influences who wins a battle, but you have to
have a head-on fight. A combat is stuck in one grid cell instead of having
access to the entire world.

(The hybrid design can make the macro richer. But troop movement and micro
suffer a lot. It's not win/win.)

~~~
matthewowen
> you can't sneak around a distracted army to take out a strategic point

Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war,
move your army another to suck in units.

I would argue that sneaking based on "the human playing the video game was
focused on something else" is a less compelling dynamic than sneaking based on
"real" dynamics.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Sure you can. In civ for example, sail your fleet one way under fog of war,
> move your army another to suck in units.

That's not getting around a _distracted_ army.

Even if we ignore player focus, and pretend everyone can multitask perfectly,
you're still losing options. You can't engage in a big fight on one side of a
map just long enough for a flanking force to hit a critical target, then
immediately retreat out of the main fight to avoid losses. With turn-based
movement, that big fight is either unnecessary or it's likely to get your army
crushed by the non-split-up force from lack of retreat options.

And you can't dodge an intercepting force with most forms of turn-based
movement.

~~~
azernik
There are indeed retreat options in Total War.

~~~
Dylan16807
Can you retreat fast enough to avoid the entire fight? If so that falls under
"the big fight is unnecessary"

If there's a time limit before you can retreat, it all seems rather...
artificial, compared to having full control on a single map.

~~~
jtanderson
I’d also point out that you can adjust the “speed” of army movement — at least
in TW: Warhammer — so that if they’re moving more quickly, like a forced
march, they are less likely to spot hidden or sneaking armies. This does leave
the mechanic depending on user choice of where to focus, not just ambient fog
of war. It at least gives a similar state of mind as in SC where the player
says to himself “do I go in with blinders on or do I proceed with more
attention to surroundings” with real pros/cons for each.

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chrisco255
I played StarCraft 2 for nearly a decade after it came out. It was always a
solid experience. It is surprising that in all that time, there hasn't been a
serious competitor to SC2 in the traditional RTS format. This article does a
great job of breaking down why that might be. I mean, the mobile revolution
did take some steam and excitement out of PC gaming for a while there. As the
author points out, game devs tend to chase the trends and in some cases, they
have to. I agree with the author's conclusion that the industry is missing out
on a big opportunity. They remain to this day my most satisfying gaming
experiences. And if they're done right and well balanced, people will play the
same RTS for decades, so they have a lot of staying power.

~~~
Fr0styMatt88
I remember when the iPad came out I was incredibly excited. This was surely
perfect for RTS games!

There was Command & Conquer: Red Alert Mobile, then....

The only other one I remember was an actually really good StarCraft clone by
Gameloft (I forget the name).

I always thought mobile would be great for RTS and then it just wasn't. Though
when I think about it, the keyboard is pretty important and that kind of fast
control is really difficult on a touchscreen, so maybe that explains the lack
of 'classic' RTS games on touch devices.

~~~
nlh
You wrote exactly my thoughts! I was so excited for a new generation of touch-
optimized RTS games when the iPad was released and I’ve been disappointed with
the options.

Do you (or anyone) know of any iPad games that fit the bill these days? I
played Vainglory for a while but that’s not a RTS - it’s a MOBA (and was fun
and worked super well on touch).

~~~
Can_Not
Someone else mentioned Rusted Warfare.

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nestorD
Small shoutout for 0AD which is a fully open source RTS in the style of age of
empire and now very polished (my little brother, who was used to starcraft, is
now playing it happily) : [https://play0ad.com](https://play0ad.com)

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b0rsuk
I think it boils down to four things:

\- RTS games, since the first C&C, used an interface for selecting rectangles
and pointing them at a single target. It scales extremely poorly. Innovations
in this area have failed to catch on. Keyboard used for shortcuts only. Come
on, we can do better than that. We have Vim. Action, range(movement key).
Alternatively, the Kakoune way: selection first, action second. Either way
games lack a fast way to select only certain types of units, and especially -
to point them at targets of certain types. Harvest: Massive Encounter is a low
budget tower defense games which allows you to set targetting priorities for
each type of your tower, but RTS games need much, much more systems like that.

Meanwhile Starcraft has been busy embracing and glorifying primitive user
interfaces. It has its caveman charm, but - by design - it scales only by
clicking faster.

\- RTS games were popular at a time when computers were predominantly used by
nerds. RTS games appeal mostly to people willing to get better at a game.
Publishers discovered less demanding games sell better.

\- RTS games are highly demanding to make from technical point of view. You
get all the joys of pathfinding at large scale. Optimizations are very
important.

\- RTS games are not that immersive. This is true for all "topdown"
perspective games.

~~~
b0rsuk
I just came up with a 5th: \- RTS games work poorly on consoles. They need a
precise input device.

~~~
celeritascelery
That is only true if Starcraft style RTS games.

~~~
gmueckl
As opposed to which other style/styles?

~~~
real_escape
Arcade. As the godfather of all RTS, Herzog Zwei, used.

Gameplay:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYfYrhT82RM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYfYrhT82RM)

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brunoTbear
The fact that Homeworld wasn't mentioned until the last paragraph was a major
case of "they had us in the first half not gonna lie" for me.

Cannot wait for the sequel. I spent so many hours playing HW1. Great balance
of macro and micro strategy.

~~~
chanon
Loved Homeworld too. There really was nothing like it when it came out.

~~~
dnautics
there isn't anything quite like it still. There's something about it being
2.75D that makes it approachable even though it's 3-D, and the attention to
the art was a big deal, too.

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tomc1985
It makes me sad to see no mention of Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander
anywhere :(

IMO both are far superior to Starcraft or even AOE

~~~
willis936
Supreme commander was the first RTS I really sunk my teeth into. Planetary
Annihilation is an excellent spiritual successor and still gets updates.

------
someexgamedev
I've heard the RTS genre described as three sliders.

1\. Amount of control over units

2\. Amount of control over a hero

3\. Amount of control over building infrastructure

By that definition, RTS is still alive and well. It's just that the particular
position of those sliders has changed over time. We have MOBAs which set all
the sliders to zero except the hero one. Mobile games like Clash of Clans and
Clash Royale provide two more popular configurations.

As for what happened to the classic RTS config many grew up with in the 90s
and oughties? My best guess is snuffed out by shifts in game dev economics.
AAA single player games only work on consoles (where the controller never
played well with RTS) and the near-requirement for every PC multiplayer game
to present as an esport raises the buy-in too high

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farah7
I've been waiting for Warcraft 4 for 15 years now (can't believe it's been
that long!).

Warcraft III/Frozen throne are quite simply the best games that I've ever
played, none have ever come close. I'd give honourable mention to Age of
Empires/Rise of Nations.

I think it was killed due to the success of World of Warcraft.

~~~
pcdoodle
Same here. It has everything and more character than any other RTS ever made.
The damn menu music puts me into Warcraft Meditation Mode. When playing on a
CRT monitor the particle effect are "lickable". Major sense of accomplishment
playing hard in single player too.

------
russellbeattie
The domination of StarCraft has always bewildered me. I really loved the
Battle for Middle Earth games back in the day as they were much more slow
paced than SC. I absolutely loved spending an hour in total silence
frantically constructing a base or two with massive armies before sending them
off en masse against my opponent(s) - usually a friend or two connected via a
LAN so you could hear their occasional grunts and chuckles, before cries of
dismay or triumph. So fun!

Actually, when my son was little 10 years ago, we used to play Lego Battles on
the Nintendo DS, which was a mini RTS and that was surprisingly fun as well!
Definitely sad the genre disappeared.

~~~
nestorD
Battle for Middle Earth 1 is definitely one of my favorite RTS, I love how the
constraints on buildings played into the mecanics of the game (not a fan of
the second one which was more classic).

By the way, if someone is still playing out there, the dwarf hold mod was a
great extension to the base game : [https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dwarf-
holds](https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dwarf-holds)

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yellowapple
I'd count Paradox's games (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Stellaris,
etc.) as "real time" strategy; they're certainly not turn-based. And as far as
strategy games go, they're nowadays the gold standard, IMO.

Looking forward to Homeworld 3. Fingers crossed for a Linux-native version,
but if not, then hopefully it's as Wine/Proton-friendly as Homeworld:
Remastered (and more so than Deserts of Kharak).

------
Steven_Vellon
2004, 2006, and 2007 for Dawn of War, CoH, and SC respectively. More well
known titles like Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer Generals, and Warcraft 3
were even earlier than that. Starcraft 2 was the last "AAA" RTS game that I
can think of. Deserts of Kharak is probably the only RTS game I've played in
the last 8 years that I really enjoyed. I tried CoH 2, but the micro
transactions put me off. Eugen's Wargame series and Steel Divison had
interesting and deep nuanced mechanics, but single player was very rough and
the multiplayer player base wasn't big enough to sustain a good matchmaking
experience.

Personally, I think the main culprit is that MOBAs like DotA 2 and League of
Legends are too similar in genre and won over much of the RTS player base.
Anecdotally, most of the people I knew that were into SC 2 started playing
League or Dota 2.

Edit: I totally blanked out on the Total War franchise. That's definitely a
staple of mine, and still playing Rome 1 and Medieval 2 mods to this day.

------
sueders101
The most popular, recently released RTS I can think of is Factorio. It seems
like RTS game elements have been splitting into their constituent parts and
forming a game around those.(e.g. production to Factorio, or combat to DOTA)
It may be that way there’s a greater ROI on smaller/simpler games than
building out all the components involved in an RTS game.

~~~
FrozenVoid
Today gamers don't like to multi-task and Starcraft(and its clones) is a
multi-tasking monster(scouting,economy, building, combat), so similar RTS
which force multiple issues at same time are outfoxed by simpler game mechanic
games where attention is more deeply focused and players can gain skills
easier. Another factor is RTS are anti-casual, they don't forgive mistakes and
only a tiny % of gamers can handle the stress of constant losing/failing, in
context of highly demanding, multitasking heavy game. The genre doesn't accept
game style variations either - a single cookie-cutter build order is the best
one, the rest is suboptimal and loses you either time or money.

------
nyhc99
I never liked the move to really fast-paced, micro-intensive play. Real Time
doesn't have to mean such a flurry of movement and clicking. From Starcraft on
it seems like the genre has pushed more and more towards the micromanagement
game. Heroes exemplified that in WC3.

A battle with more, slower moving units and simplified commands makes for a
more tactical match-up that's less about hotkeys and razor-sharp reaction time
and more about the art of war.

Does anyone know if there's a franchise out there moving in that direction?

~~~
SteveNuts
The total war series is pretty close to what you're talking about. The problem
with your opinion is someone who _does_ do those things will always have an
advantage over someone playing more passively.

~~~
nyhc99
Oh of course, but that added advantage can be minimized as the lag increases
between the time you issue commands and the time you see results. You wouldn't
want to eliminate that advantage though--all things being equal, you want the
person who is more actively engaged to have a small edge. You just want the
impact to be largely outweighed by broader tactical decisions.

------
clord
I blame the rise of more effective DRM and the removal/demoting of lan play in
favor of hosted servers. All of my favorite RTS games were discovered while at
a friends house. We’d do a quick copy and have an epic game session, creating
a legend game that I’ve bought multiple times since. Studios should allow
copying of games for some purposes like local multiplayer, but protect single
player and internet content with IAP, so that the game spreads virally,
creating a large market and a strong brand.

This was exactly how many of the classics got started, but back then it was in
spite of the studios intentions. I think a good rts could still spread that
way but now players would welcome the IAP, as long as core mechanics are
available and it’s not pay-to-level-up.

------
azernik
> Some people from Relic split off to found Blackbird Interactive. They made a
> prequel to Homeworld which is apparently really good. They’re now also
> working on Homeworld 3.

Said prequel is Deserts of Kharak, and is indeed quite good. Am replaying it
right now, and despite being land-based and 2D rather than space-based and 3D,
it still feels like the original Homeworld in terms of pacing and strategy.

~~~
gmueckl
Yes, they manged to carry over essential design elements into their land based
setting: there are no stationary bases. You have a huge, unique carrier
vehicle instead of a mothership. The harvesting mechanics are almost
identical. The biggest difference really is the terrain. The game has an
easier time shaping the challenges by making use of terrain. In space,
breaking the uniformity of the map was more challenging and the original
Homeworld series didn't do too well in that regard. Finding in-universe
reasons to make space non-uniform is apparently hard. There are resource spots
and regions which affected ship systems, but that's it.

------
rs23296008n1
Can't believe no one has mentioned Factorio. Programmer crack.

------
dwighttk
Don’t know if it counts but did anyone else like the close combat series? I
only ever played the first one because the others were PC only. I’ve even
bought a few of the later ones recently on GOG, but I can’t get them to run
with WINE.

~~~
GeneralTspoon
CC3: The Russian Front was amazing! It feels kind of like it fits into a
separate genre of “digital tabletop war games” (due to the fact that you pick
your units from a large roster using points, rather than build them in-game,
and had a focus on campaigns where the balance of power swung back and forth).

The demo of the British one (CC2 maybe?) was the one that got me into it.

I think they were remade by another company a few years back actually - but
I’d definitely throw money at a modernized take on a similar concept.

Does anyone know other similar games?

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billfruit
Though this is a blog post, I thought the article was rather amateurish, and
does not analyse the matter with the depth and precision required.

I used to like rts while I was younger, but now I find them too gamified, in
the sense there is too much of abstract ion. You give a building order and a
fully built ship materializes in seconds. Each of your men-at-arms are having
the exact same stats, personal lity and skills. Individual units are pea-
brained. The number of units are too less to how historical battles actually
happened.

Sometime I thought paradox style grand strategy was the answer to these flaws.
But playing them now feels like playing cashgrab mobile "waiting games", you
essentially set something up and are just waiting most of the time for the
clock to tick till the progress bar reaches 100%, that is, it had kind of
ended up even more gamified.

Perhaps there is a divergence in player interests, some want simulations with
toy soldiers, while others want a competitive experience, and may be there is
no easy way to cover both these aspects in a single game.

------
dchuk
I don't play games much anymore, but when I did, I always had an affinity for
RTS games(Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Warcraft, etc), and Action RPGs
(Diablo, Torchlight).

It's exhausting to find games nowadays that don't nickel and dime you to
succeed. I like the Kingdom Rush Tower Defense games on iPad when I'm
traveling. Any other suggestions?

~~~
elihu
0AD is pretty good.

~~~
edgarvaldes
I second this. It can be played with a very modest laptop, also.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It's also surprisingly complete and polished for an open source game.
Recommended.

------
neverminder
I like RTS games just as the next guy and I am also disappointed that cult
franchises such as Age of Empires, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc stopped releasing
new games. But I like Turn Based Strategy even more, franchises like Heroes of
MIght and Magic, Age of Wonders, Civilization, Total War are my favorite and
they are also consistently releasing new games all the time.

Recently I've been playing Total War: Three Kingdoms. Total War is a hybrid
game - adventure man is turn based, but battles are real time. I was both
skeptical and curious about this approach, but when I tried it I liked it.
Then I read somewhere the reason of why the creators did it this way - it's
because controlling a huge map with 10+ armies, economy, diplomacy, etc real
time would be impossible. So essentially TBS allows the player to go at their
own pace which could be one of the reasons of why RTS lost it's popularity.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
If you like the Civ and HOMM series, you might wish to try Endless Space 2 as
well.

It's perhaps the best TBS I've ever played, and I started with the original
Civ.

(Actually, before all that I played Might and Magic on my C64, but that wasn't
TBS.)

~~~
projektir
Want to chip in here, love Endless Space 2! It takes a bit to get used to but
it's so fun to just play even if I'm not winning.

------
hartator
I don’t have an answer either. Playing a lot of SC2 and waiting for Homeworld
3. 2022 ETA though. My main explanation is more recent strategy games have
been a let down and as graphics don’t matter as much, players stick to old
games discouraging even more game studios to try again.

------
nlh
I posted something similar in a child comment but wanted to see if anyone had
suggestions:

I bought an iPad excited for a generation of touch-optimizes RTS games and
have been...disappointed. I played around with some of the MOBAs (Vainglory,
etc) but that genre isn’t for me.

Are there any great (or even decent) iOS games that fit the RTS bill? I see a
ton in the App Store that match the description but most just end up being
free to play micro transaction gambling/monetization pits of despair, not
actual RTS.

Suggestions appreciated!

~~~
twright
I have two: “rymdkapsel” is very in the category, no multiplayer but single
player kept me occupied for a time. “Mini-Metro” I think is kinda in the
category but with a lot more replayability. Neither have iaps but have a small
upfront cost.

~~~
nlh
Super cool. Thanks for the suggestions! Will check them out.

------
everyone
Theres a really good community made client for 'Supreme Commander'

[https://www.faforever.com/](https://www.faforever.com/)

~~~
willis936
This is pretty cool. Did they fix issues that caused games to crash after a
few hours? Even loading up the state of a game that had been long would cause
it to crash again. My guess is a memory leak.

~~~
heelix
I suspect so. I play a lot of this and things are pretty stable. They did a
lot of patching and reworking in combination with the original files. The
reason for tying your steam copy of SupCom:FA to the FAF code is to avoid
legal issues with the community patching using the original assets.

------
bni
RTS works surprisingly great in VR.

One of the best games I have played in recent years is Hidden Paths Brass
Tactics.

I really don't understand why this game didn't get more attention than it did.

------
n_ary
For AOE fans, AOE has a DE in Steam, pretty graphics for large screens and new
music, though underlying game remains the same it seems.

AOE-2 has a HD version for large screens, but DE with pretty graphics are
coming this November(2019).

Even though I haven't played games for years, coming back to AOE was nostalgic
and last Friday I was lost in the game for 5+ hours, still as fun as ever. (:

*DE - Definitive Edition

------
m463
I play older games, the ones without a forced online requirement or telemetry.

I wonder if this colors the author's statistics, because he is getting his
statistics from games that collect them.

I have a library of steam games I downloaded then have been playing in offline
mode for quite some time.

free to play? (grind or pay) bah.

I would love to hear people's suggestions for favorite offline games.

~~~
blihp
Myth II was my favorite game of the era. There were also a number of community
created scenarios created for it. Highly recommended if you can get you hands
on a CD for it. Not sure how well it still runs (or not) under Windows but it
still runs great on Linux under Wine.

It lives on as Project Magma
([http://projectmagma.net/](http://projectmagma.net/)) but the scenarios that
shipped with Myth II are what made the game for me.

~~~
ebg13
While both great games (we ignore III), the Myth games were better classified
as real time tactics, not real time strategy. There is no growth past the
beginning of a campaign. There is only range, terrain, and formations (veteran
survivor prowess notwithstanding) until your units die. Also carpet bombing,
remote lightning, and phantom trow kick glitch attacks. I'm not crying, you're
crying.

To this day, though, I don't think a better pair of games has been made, and I
will always be sad about Bungie abandoning the franchise during the Microsoft
purchase.

------
pmoriarty
The last RTS I really enjoyed was Total Annihilation, but recently I gave
Factorio a try and got pretty addicted. Great game.

~~~
eihli
Have you tried Supreme Commander? It's the spiritual successor to TA and is
amazing. There's a community lobby, Forged Alliance Forever, that has a solid
number of active players.

~~~
Kiro
Should I play 1 or 2?

~~~
heelix
[https://www.faforever.com](https://www.faforever.com) is a community
lobby/patch for SupCom:FA (first series). They continue to patch it and
support the multiplayer lobby.

SupCom 2 was hot trash. An attempt to make an RTS xbox friendly. Some of the
worst voice acting in decades of gaming.

------
bge0
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance: I have yet to find anything that comes
close to the scope and joy induced by this game.

~~~
willis936
You should look into Planetary Annihilation if you haven’t already.

------
thefounder
Warcraft Reforged is about to be launched so it's not all lost

------
tholman
Late to the party, but worth throwing the browser rebuild of tiberium wars out
there.

\- [https://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-
and...](https://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and-conquer/)

~~~
lucb1e
Tiberian Dawn, not Tiberium Wars. TW is CNC3 and in 3D, TD is the very first
one.

For a minute I got excited...

------
mmonster999
The rise of internet enabled microtransactions and the masses bought drm laden
games they didn't own like mmo's...

Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the
software and could insert bs monetization.

All game design has been effected since game companies took control of game
software starting from 1997 onlward with the release of ultima online.

The whole project was to undermine game ownership from the very get go.

Here's the game industry gloating of it's great victory of the PC gaming
masses:

[https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-
pir...](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-piracy-and-
preowned-games-problems-of-the-past)

------
isostatic
Not RTS, but certainly real time, and as old as the hills.

Railroad Tycoon

The sequels never really did it for me. Transport Tycoon sucked up the hours,
but nothing really did it as much as the feel of that first game. Maybe it was
the time — the CGA monitor (which couldn’t cope with Civilisation), no mouse
of course. I did play it years later and it want the same.

I doubt that feeling can be recaptured. It probably never existed - its a
sepia tomes memory of a feeling from a different time with different
expectations - but for some reasons the original Railroad Tycoon really stuck
with me.

~~~
temporaryvector
I think this is a common enough sentiment. Your first games leave more of an
impact and that feeling is often not really related to how good the game is.
Just like comfort food, they're comfort games.

I never player Railroad Tycoon, my first in that genre was Transport Tycoon
Deluxe, but I feel pretty much the same way about it, and I'm pretty lucky
that OpenTTD exists.

Similarly there's a game called Star Reach (also known as Space Federation)
that was the first strategy game I played. In retrospect, it was pretty bad,
but sometimes I want to play a space game and not even much superior games
like Masters of Orion or more modern games like Sins of a Solar Empire will
satisfy the particular craving like Star Reach.

~~~
klingonopera
Playing TT the first time, was the second time of my life I've ever done an
all-nighter. I think I must've been 13 or 14 at the time. I'd only realized
how much time had passed when my mom walked into the room at 6AM in the
morning.

Then I was lucky to find TTD on some abandonware sites, shortly thereafter,
the first TTD-Patch became available, and a few years later OpenTTD
development started. I still remember playing it on a Nokia 5530 XM, they had
actually ported it to the Symbian OS.

A few years ago, I learned that Chris Sawyer had programmed the entire thing
in Assembly. It ran super-smooth on almost anything.

------
openfuture
I've been meaning to cash in on this for a while.

Too bad that I overcomplicate everything I try to do and accomplish nothing...

Anyway, great post! This guy is very right, hopefully we start getting good
strategy games soon.

------
Pfhreak
Starcraft is still very much around.

But I suspect people went to mobas like League of Legends because they wanted
a more social, team based experience and they liked playing a hero.

~~~
mdorazio
I think Starcraft was actually part of what pushed people away from the RTS
genre and into MOBAs. Blizzard deliberately made WC3 and then SC2 much faster-
paced and more micro-based variants of their predecessors. Then they started
pushing the e-sports angle, which in my opinion made it even less about the
traditional strategy elements of RTS and more about APS, multi-tasking,
ability matching, etc.

MOBAs are then the natural step from fast-paced micro-heavy RTS - strip out
the base building part and make it 100% about micro, abilities, and squad
control. It's the evolution of what happens when RTS gets ADD. In a way, I
think Blizzard basically gave kids candy instead of vegetables and now the
mainstream player attention span isn't there for traditional RTS games
anymore.

~~~
furgooswft13
Heh, Brood War is FAR more micro intensive than SC2, mostly by virtue of the
game interface; terrible unit pathing, 12 unit selection limit, no "smart
casting" etc. Add to that more cumbersome macro mechanics and the game is much
more difficult and twitchy to play effectively than it's successor. Though
I'll agree that SC2 is faster paced, especially with the 12 worker start since
LOTV

WC3 was more hero focused, like MOBA's, which of course had their start in WC3
as custom maps.

It is of course ironic that Blizzard inadvertently spawned a genre that ended
up crushing them in a field that arguably they also pioneered, e-sports.

------
Kiro
They Are Billions is amazing.

------
JDiculous
As someone who's favorite game genre is RTS and all-time favorite games are
Warcraft 3 and Age of Empires 2, I've been wondering the same thing. I
genuinely believe that RTS games are the most intellectually stimulating due
to the incredible amount of strategy involved, and thus the most fun.

Recently I went to a PC Cafe after having stopped playing games about 10 years
ago. I started off playing CS:GO due to having loved CS 1.6 as a child, but I
didn't find the modern version fun, and after an hour I was bored. Then I
played a game of Warcraft 3, and next thing you know I spent the next month
completely addicted to the game, watching professional commentaries and
playing nonstop. It got to a point where I literally had to uninstall the game
since it was taking over my life.

The reason I think I found CS:GO boring was because it felt like there was
little to no strategy. It's basically just a game of reflexes and hand-to-eye
coordination, and you only control a single unit. Meanwhile I think I found
WC3 so fun because there's so much to it - what buildings/units to make,
whether to harass, rush, and/or turtle/tower up, scouting your opponents and
adjusting to their strategy, when to expand, whether to creep / level up your
heroes or go in for an attack, etc. It's like a game of chess on steroids,
where your opponents' pieces are completely different (if they're a different
race), yet somehow the game is remarkably balanced.

I hate to sound like an arrogant old crank and my RTS bias is definitely
clear, but I feel like most of the mainstream games today suck, and are of a
lower intellectual bar. I can't understand the whole MOBA thing (eg. League of
Legends) - I never got into DOTA because I always found it extremely boring,
and I think it's just less intellectually stimulating (and also probably
because the games are an hour and a half).

I'm glad that WC3 and AOE2 are being remade and released this year (though
unfortunately I'll probably have to opt out due to how easily I get addicted).
I hope that more game developers will see this and try their hand at the RTS
genre. As much as I love WC3 and AOE2, they certainly have their flaws as
well. For example, I feel the beginning in WC3 is too slow, making
buildings/units is a bit too slow, and I find it a bit too micro focused
(particularly for orcs). But I absolutely love the RPG element of heroes, and
it's probably one of the main reasons why I've spent more time playing WC3.

------
Andr1
Unfortunately the article doesn't mention Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance,
which is a game still played today with more than enough players and some very
good casters.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xny10Dvp_00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xny10Dvp_00)

------
temporaryvector
My take on this is that RTSs are generally unpopular because of their long
feedback loop. In an FPS game, or even a modern MOBA, the decisions you take
result in an almost immediate death (yours or the opponent's). If you're doing
something wrong, you'll know pretty much immediately, rarely will you have to
wait more than a minute between doing something wrong and getting punished for
it. This also means that you tend to know what exactly you did wrong, maybe
you shot too soon, maybe you aimed wrong, maybe you didn't jump enough, etc.
In most game genres you go through encounters quickly: spawn, die, repeat
until you get good.

RTSs are almost unique among game genres in that you're forced to make
decisions quickly but the results of those decisions don't become apparent for
anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. A single "encounter" takes a good
chunk of your time and your reward for that time can often be that you get to
watch for 10 to 15 minutes as your best laid plans are ripped apart and
everything you've built up is methodically destroyed, and at the end of it
all, you can't even be sure what is it that you did wrong because you made so
many decisions without seeing their immediate result. Add to that the fact
that most RTSs are pretty unbalanced at any level above absolute beginner. So
in the end, you're left wondering if the other guy won because you built too
many kbot factories too early, or because you didn't scout enough, or because
he rushed you with Flashes and those are overpowered? Did the map favor him?
How do you counter a Flash rush? All those questions crop up and are really
hard to answer. This makes for a frustrating experience for new and medium-
skill players alike.

That said, I don't think RTSs got less popular with time in an absolute sense,
I think they only got relatively less popular because gaming itself has become
more mainstream. It is my belief that it takes a certain kind of personality
to enjoy RTS games, which represents a certain percentage of the total human
population, which is much less than the percentage of the population that can
enjoy video games in general. As gaming became mainstream, the number of
people enjoying RTSs stayed roughly constant, but as a percentage of all games
it became smaller and smaller, thus it made no sense to keep developing RTSs.
Multiplayer RTS has always been a niche genre that few people enjoyed, but
when gaming was also niche it still made sense to make RTS games.

Now, when it comes to the question posed in the article, why did Blizzard's
RTSs, Brood War and later WC3, got popular and stayed popular? Some people
will say is that it's because it's balanced, quick and varied, but Starcraft
didn't start out balanced, and it didn't get balanced until map makers learned
to make balanced maps. In a sense, Starcraft is still not really balanced
because you can easily make a map where one race will dominate (just try to
find an Island game anywhere on ladder and you'll see what I mean, for
example).

My theory for why Starcraft (and later WC3) succeeded where the others failed
comes down to two things: Use Map Settings and Battle.net. I said earlier that
few people enjoy multiplayer RTSs and I stand-by that, and if you spent any
time on Battle.net in the early 2000s, you would see that most people didn't
play Starcraft the way it was intended. UMS always had a lot more games going
than regular Melee, and a large percentage of regular Melee was 7v1 computer
or Faster Map Ever, No Rush 20 minutes or other things that changed the base
mechanics of the game to make it a lot more forgiving. The amount of people
playing actual, competitive 1v1s or 2v2s was tiny in comparison. So why didn't
all those people who didn't really like RTS stuck around in an RTS game? Well
because their friends were there, and all the other UMS maps were fun, if you
got stomped in a bunch of 1v1s and got frustrated, you could go play some
Bounds, or a Cannon Defense. Maybe an RPG or an Open RPG map, maybe The Thing,
maybe Aeon of Strife for that early MOBA experience. Everything was available
within that same game, and the best part was that all your friends were just
an /f m away, later on even if they were playing Diablo 2 or WC3. It was
pretty seamless, and other gaming services couldn't really compare until
things like Steam and Xbox Live came about. You could stay in the game without
ever touching the RTS portion of it, and I know a lot of people who did, and
you could meet people and become friends without ever needing another method
of communication besides Battle.net, all from within Starcraft (unlike most
other gaming services of the time). Somewhat ironically, what made Starcraft
(and later WC3) so popular are all the parts that weren't an RTS, it was a do-
everything game that had a little something for everyone. All the balancing
and the e-sports came later, after Starcraft had already gotten big enough and
gained enough of an audience for people to learn to make balanced maps. Brood
War was released in 1998, and the patches where they finally nailed the
current balance came somewhere around 2001 (1.08), and by that time it was
already pretty popular. I'm not sure Starcraft would have ever gotten to 1.08
without UMS and Battle.net.

This got a little long-winded, because I've spent considerable time thinking
about this very topic, but my main point is that RTS (particularly the
competitive multiplayer kind) as a genre has always been niche and will remain
a niche genre, and the wild success of Starcraft and its successors is
specifically due to the fact that it had a lot more to offer than just RTS.

~~~
ece
I can't help but compare RTS to TBS more: Civ 2 came around the same time as
SC, and the Civ series has kept growing in popularity. People are ok with the
long feedback loop IMO ie. chess. The gameplay just needs to be fun and
challenging-enough, which SC/BW and AOE2 had in spades for both beginners and
experts. Like the OP says though, subsequent games in the original RTS mold
just weren't as good.

Certainly F2P, and genre-mixing happened, but those players could still come
back to playing RTSs. My main point is: what truly distinguishes Brood War
from everything else is the level design and gameplay. Which is what games
like They Are Billions is bringing back even if only in part. RTS level design
peaked with BW it seems, and is only now making a come back. Over the past ~20
years, you can see the evolution in action/RPG/platform/sim/puzzle/TBS games
as they have added to level design and gameplay where RTS games didn't and
thus lost out. Focusing on what made BW good; make better level design and
gameplay than BW, and you'll get people playing again.

I played Warcraft 2, SMACX, AOE2, and SC pretty much when they came out, and
I've only recently played Paradox games, Homeworld and Total Annihilation.
People have their favorites, and I can see liking any of these games based on
the type of gameplay and story you enjoy the most. I just hope AOE4 has enough
new ideas in level design and gameplay compared to AOE2 like the difference
between Civ 2 and Civ 4.

You can also see what the major studios have been up to: Valve went into
publishing tech, Blizzard is going more and more into F2P (Tencent is almost
all F2P), but it's the studios/publishers like Square Enix, 2K, Sony, and
Ubisoft and indies which keep making games that aren't lootbox filled.

------
monster99
The rise of internet enabled microtransactions and the masses bought drm laden
games they didn't own like mmo's...

Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the
software and could insert bs monetization.

------
dainchi
Its worth mentioning that there’s still some active nultiplayer communities
for older RTS games around. FAForever for Supreme Commander und Massgate for
World in Conflict have been around for quite some time.

www.faforever.com www.massgate.org

------
larrydag
Warzone 2100 is my favorite RTS. LAN play a lot with my kids.

[https://wz2100.net/](https://wz2100.net/)

------
senectus1
It died on the alter that EA sacrificed C&C on.

they milked that cow and then cut it up for meat.

------
LorenPechtel
Does he not consider Ashes of the Singularity a RTS game??

------
ris
> What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?

Total Annihilation

------
throwaway-1436
Blizzard cleaned it all up. Their games were so good no one even bothered to
compete. I spent countless hours playing starcraft and warcraft. The other
games didn't have the same addictive elements.

~~~
BuckRogers
Agreed, it's a huge reason. Blizzard is the Nintendo of the PC space.
Developers have noted for ages that competing on Nintendo platforms meant you
had to match their 1st party titles. Which are held to a higher standard than
others and don't get the reviews they deserve. There are few true competitors
to the Mario games, Smash Bros, Mario Party, and Mario Kart for the same
reason most people don't want to be compared to Blizzard's efforts.

