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It's a shame technical limitations are keeping them from implementing co-op, seems like it'd be dope to play with friends.
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Jun 8, 2019 16:45
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I think the success of SC2's co-op mode hints at the fact that a natively team-based RTS in the same or similar mould could do gangbusters. Like, SC2, War3, and BW have all been popular for team games, but they've existed as an afterthought: each game was designed and balanced around 1v1, and it shows. 1v1 games are basically always less popular, or rather have less potential popularity, than team games, just look at the most popular solo vs team sports, it's not even close. Hell even ones most known for solo competition like tennis are often more popular among casual players as team games (definitely true for at least tennis and badminton). Take something like SC2 co-op and imagine it as a flagship mode: scalable to 3 or 4 or 5 players, more variety in missions, customizable armies, unlockables and loot, hand-crafted and procedural campaigns/narrative missions, "raid" missions that require multiple teams, competitive co-op (racing or score-based), ranks and challenges and leaderboards, etc. Basically the looter shooter model, but with RTS. I don't think it's true that RTS intrinsically has low mass appeal. Just look at how many players mobile pseudo-RTSes like Clash of Clans got. It's just the 1v1 ranked ladder serious business RTS playstyle that has relatively low mass appeal, and as far as I can see most of the biggest names in the genre have had multiplayer designed around that. It's similar to how arena shooters haven't really made it huge, but Overwatch and Counterstrike and Destiny and Borderlands have.
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Jun 8, 2019 18:35
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Relic's games always felt fairly unpolished compared to Blizzard's RTSes. It took them like a year to fix Jeeps loving with Kettenkrad pathfinding in CoH. Like if you just ordered the Jeep around the krad, the krad would slomo freak out and barely move. HUGE bug for competitive play, but they took forever to fix it.
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Oct 24, 2019 23:21
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PirateBob posted:I don't like the UI and font :/
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Nov 11, 2019 19:11
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What options are around as far as co-op RTS gaming? Not counting just custom skirmishes vs AI, almost everything has that. SC2's co-op mode is good, though ideally I'd like something that's more of a campaign. Gonna be playing with my 8 year old.
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Nov 12, 2019 14:53
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Mordja posted:Iron Harvest aka Company of Heroes with mechs has a demo out now. There were some interface issues that I whined about here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IronHarvest/comments/hcbae7/interface_issues_in_the_demo/ Also some AI issues: had grenadiers completely ignore my order to throw a grenade (but they still stopped shooting?), and one time ordered flamethrowers to torch an occupied building, but then instead they ran over to the fence next to the building and just kept hurdling the fence back and forth until they died. It was like watching kids at a playground. The design issues are probably the bigger problem though. The two factions in the demo seem to have near identical infantry squads, and it felt like a large portion of the game was just mashing the same dudes at each other as they very slowly died. The TTK in the game is really high, even shooting at like point blank range vs someone decapping your points, infantry vs infantry they'll be able to decap (which takes a while) before they die or have to retreat. CoH had some issues but so far this game just feels like a kind of mushy clone. Maybe I'll feel differently if I play it more though.
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Jun 20, 2020 00:37
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A bunch of Starcraft modders have launched a (already successful) kickstarter for their game, Immortal: Gates of Pyre, hoping to make classic base building RTSes more accessible without major changes to the skill ceiling: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunspeargames/gates-of-pyre I backed it because one of the guys, Jakatak, made TheCore, a custom hotkey layout that I use in SC2. Well, it's more like a series of hotkey layouts, as they've periodically updated it in the hopes of more efficiency. Anyway, anyone who can nerd out for so long at that level of detail is someone I want helping design an RTS, so I'm in, even though I have qualms about some of their design decisions.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:34
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Holy poo poo someone made a remake of Battle Realms?? ...but why? No but seriously, that's very surprising.
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Mar 21, 2021 00:13
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The Immortal: Gates of Pyre team did an interview on the Pylon Show with Artosis. They really get into the nitty gritty of RTS mechanics and systems during it. While I couldn't watch the whole thing at the time, I watched a lot of it, I was impressed with their analysis of RTS issues, particularly with the problems in Starcraft 2 (a lot of the team are former SC2 modders, so there's a ton of comparisons to SC2 or BW). They say their aim is to lower the skill floor in a Starcraft-like RTS without impacting the skill ceiling too much. They're also putting more of an emphasis on team games (Starcraft is somewhat notoriously balanced around seriousbusiness 1v1) and co-op. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQw80Reh2ps
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Mar 21, 2021 00:19
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That game looks cool except that, like They Are Billions, it has no co-op. I have a lot of interest in playing this kind of game with my friends, and zero interest in playing it by myself. In other news, there's a kickstarter with a standalone Sheep Tag game! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lunawolfstudios/sheep-tag-2 Hell yes, I loved Sheep Tag, and from talking to the devs it looks like they're aware of the various implementation problems it had as a Warcraft 3 custom map and had some different solutions in mind.
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Oct 7, 2021 21:29
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skaianDestiny posted:Age of Darkness ATM is basically the survival mode of They Are Billions but better, and I'm all for it.
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Oct 9, 2021 23:06
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Immortal, the *craft-like RTS being made by former SC2 modders, is doing a pre-alpha stress test next weekend for kickstarter backers, which includes me! No NDA, so I'll be able to talk. So far it looks sort of in between StarCraft and Warcraft 3 in terms of game focus or flow.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:51
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As someone who greatly enjoyed CoH1, despite its varied problems, I'm looking forward to this test.
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Nov 29, 2021 22:48
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I tried Dwarfheim — the RTS that splits each player into miner/producer/commander roles — and oof. I was mining, and while conceptually I appreciate the idea of a mini Factorio for the mining role, the UX is bad and mistakes are far too punishing. If something gets hosed up in your supply line, it seems like you have a blow up a bunch of your parts to try and refactor everything. And when something does go wrong, the game does nothing to alert you of this. To explain it using StarCraft as a base, it’s like if floating too many minerals could block you from mining any more gas, except the origin of the problem would be non-obvious — you’d just see gas ceasing to come in and would have to click around to debug the issue — and you had to go blow up some of your supply depots to fix the imbalance.
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Dec 28, 2021 07:19
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ninjewtsu posted:Yeah I gave dwarfheim a shake a little while back and while it's an incredible idea the execution is pretty bad. Miner in particular is a "this is an extremely difficult role until you've put a few hours into figuring it out, and then it's exactly the same every time" situation The second layer with the underground was pretty neat though. I think having that as a second gameplay layer instead of Starcraft-style air units -- which are basically just "same as ground units, except collision isn't a thing" -- would be an improvement.
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Dec 30, 2021 09:09
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The Purple War playtest is open to anyone on Steam. Watched a couple games then played a couple, I've never seen such a blatant Starcraft clone (and graphics are very Warcraft 3). So yeah if you wanna try indie knockoff Starcraft go here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1582500/Purple_War/
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Apr 27, 2022 07:09
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Mordja posted:That kinda middling Crossfire RTS is floundering in Early Access if anyone's interested in Starcraft-likes. I'm not really, but I'd played the beta and my general thought was "I'll check it out if it's free"...which it isn't.
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Jun 6, 2022 06:17
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Frost Giant is revealing their new RTS tomorrow during the Summer Game Fest for anyone who likes *Craft-style RTSes.Negostrike posted:They really should stop trying to make an RTS focused on "competitive multiplayer" though, that's pretty stupid. Starcraft and other successful RTSes got popular on multiplayer because they have solid singleplayer content.
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Jun 9, 2022 05:43
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Purple War is StarCraft (2), not Warcraft 3. This is obvious literally from the start of any skirmish, even just by watching a VOD. It doesn't have heroes, creeps, or upkeep; other than the art style/theme it's basically just StarCraft in its mechanics. Honestly it's so close to Starcraft I'm not sure why they made it. I'm fine with incremental innovation but the game just felt like a clone with 1/10th the feature set.
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Nov 1, 2022 18:40
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Jazerus posted:yeah idk why total annihilation style gameplay never really caught on. i guess it's true that supcom was niche and planetary annihilation flopped, but i feel like supcom released in the shadow of wc3 custom map stuff that eventually spawned mobas, and planetary annihilation just wasn't a well conceived or executed project from the start as far as I could ever tell RTSes could use a better onramp and more PvE support (especially of the endless variety, ala SC2 coop), but neither base building nor being able to use more APM are fundamentally problems for getting more users. The only problem with those things is how heavy understanding and mechanical execution is required for base building in a way that's not true for army control. A newbie can get away with just attack-moving a bigass army and then slowly improve how they maneuver it and use unit abilities, but with base building you have to understand the whole thing right from the start to get anything done. You can't attack-move your macro. Basically everyone's identified a problem correctly -- base building can feel overwhelming, especially when you're new or under pressure -- but the solution of just getting rid of it or simplifying it to something more basic is bad. It's the interface to base building that's the problem, not base building itself. Edit: If I wanted to aim for a more popular RTS: * Keep base building depth, high skill ceiling/APM, custom map scene. * Natively team-oriented for its multiplayer. And not just a bunch of 1v1's slammed together into one map, players should feel naturally complementary to each other. Games like Overwatch and Deep Rock Galactic as the model. Or maybe something like archon mode. * Endless PvE/coop GaaS mode, like SC2 coop but expanded a lot more (customizable armies, more variety in missions/maps, procedural campaigns, loot/equipment, raids, flexible team size, competitive coop). This mode was very successful considering that Blizzard put only limited effort into it before launch. * Let players attack-move their macro: the base handles itself to a limited extent, but inefficiently, and you can intervene to do it better, just like army control. Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 19:06
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Corbeau posted:The most popular RTS designs became MOBAs, which built a gigantic audience specifically by removing the multitasking and basebuilding. So you might be right now, but only because the genre is a pale shadow of itself after most people stuck with the now-separate MOBA format. Within games that are recognizably RTSes, the most popular ones are mechanically demanding and have heavy base building. RTSes that reduced demands by simplifying mechanics or lowering the skill ceiling have been less popular, rather than more, so the evidence is that that's a dead end.
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Nov 1, 2022 19:30
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The thing about APM seeming "needed" is mostly just an artifact of having a big competitive scene anyway. SC1 wasn't particularly known as a really hard RTS in its early days; that reputation only came after it exploded in Korea with the eSports scene. Ditto for what's happened with AoE2. As long as you have decent automatch, and other non-competitive modes, it's a non-issue.ninjewtsu posted:If I wanted to make a popular rts I'd design it around the idea that most casual players are going to slowly turtle in their start location and find a way to make that fun instead of trying to force them out of that behavior
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Nov 1, 2022 19:33
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That's basically the opposite of reality. The fact that you have to manage so little is, to many people, an advantage, especially since it comes in the form of "only control one dude", which is immediately intuitive in a way that managing a whole rear end base with a bunch of resources is not. Even competitive MOBA players don't need APM/multitasking nearly to the same extent RTS players do. Like, if they drained off most of the "APM crowd", the remaining most popular RTSes would obviously be the ones where high APM/multitasking is useless, but that's not the case. The clever thing MOBA's did well is that they transferred a lot of depth away from multitasking/individual complexity to team coordination and raw knowledge (the sheer number of heroes/abilities/items is insane, especially since often the key thing is how they interrelate). It's not impossible to make a game that's immediately more approachable that has you controlling a whole base and army, but it's certainly a lot harder. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 20:25
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Oh, another thing that (some) RTSes could probably learn from MOBA's: the onramp within an individual game. The sheer number of heroes to know about is problematic for newbies in a MOBA, but the way the creeps and towers work means that you get to see new-to-you heroes in action first for several minutes in a relatively calm environment, before you get to the stage with teamfights in which players set off two dozen abilities at once and if you're standing in the wrong place at the start you get instakilled. Meanwhile on the SC2 ladder you better already know the signs of at least a half dozen cheeses per race and the details of how to counter them immediately, otherwise you're gonna just die a lot really fast to stuff that you don't understand at all. Wait, they can build barracks right outside my own base? Since when?? Like even when you're moderately decent at the game, it's easy to lose to a cannon rush because you were one second too late responding to an early probe in your base and welp there goes the three pylon wall, you're dead now I guess. That's definitely an aspect of Starcraft that I dislike, when there's too many "gotchas".
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Nov 1, 2022 20:34
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ninjewtsu posted:i think MOBAs drained the high APM crowd off of RTS' in the sense that most players who care about APM are perfectly satisfied with the difficulty of stutterstepping + timing a skillshot and don't actually need or want more than that. quote:isn't starcraft 2's playerbase mostly co-op/SP with the actual competitive ladder well overshadowed? how much APM is needed in those game modes? It's probably true that coop has more potential to hit mainstream players though if it gets proper investment, not gonna deny that. Endless PvE modes haven't been that common of a thing in the RTS world, lots of potential there. ninjewtsu posted:i'm gonna need a pretty convincing argument before i believe that high APM requirements are the secret sauce for mass appeal edit: to elaborate, I think high APM potential is a good thing for games to have. Not so much because knocking out wins with 300 APM is great in and of itself -- though obviously this does appeal to some people -- but usually to get that kind of game you need to have tight unit control and lots of potential skill expression, and those things are nice to have even at lower levels of play. Being able to win games with lots of APM means there's lots of stuff to do, lots of ways to engage with the game, and even part of the skill becomes "where do I spend my attention". The idea that this means high APM is required to play is a myth spawned as a result of people watching super serious pro players that do actually need 300 APM to win. A big pro scene can rapidly become the most visible part of a game's community -- just look at what happened with Brood War -- and that shapes people's perceptions. Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 1, 2022 |
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Nov 1, 2022 21:10
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toasterwarrior posted:This may come off confrontational but I think the idea that "APM trumping good strategy is bad game design" is honestly laughable and reactionary AF. It really does feel to me like a lot of people are convinced they're better players than they actually are just because they know strats and counters and are only limited by their physical speed and ability. Execution of your ideas matter and should matter, and whatever sins a game has in that respect emerges less from bad gameplay and more from insufficient accommodation from the UI. There's this common thing of lower ranked players thinking, "I'm great at the knowledge and strategy, I just can't click fast enough" and it's basically never true. First off, the limiting factor on effective APM (real actions, not clickspam) tends to be how quickly you make decisions, not literally how fast your pointer finger can click a button on the mouse, or how fast your wrists are. Stronger players are better at keeping track of game state and making approximately correct decisions really fast, that's a huge part of why they're able to hit higher APM and have better mechanics. The APM, the clicks and keystrokes, are the end result of the decision making process, it's not some purely physical element divorced from the mental part of the game. I remember watching a friend cheese his way up the SC2 ladder, and seeing the reactions to scouting info get progressively stronger the higher he went. E.g. people in diamond would drop a bunker when they sniffed out a baneling bust, meanwhile people in mid-high masters were dropping three bunkers + a few other buildings for multiple layers of wall. For myself, when I'm stomping into a fellow protoss' natural with a 4gate all-in, it's very noticeable that the higher MMR players react both more quickly and more correctly.
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Nov 2, 2022 20:53
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DarkAvenger211 posted:That being said, I much prefer the style of games where you can leave a lot of boring management stuff like keeping queues running in the background and auto producing your workers and armies and where queuing stuff up doesn't immediately take your resources like Supreme commander and many other games I saw mentioned earlier. I like focusing on commanding armies effectively and choosing good locations for new bases that will help with my overall grand strategy. Take early game in SC2 vs CoH1 for example. In SC2, "how greedy is your build" is a big decision with huge variety. Some players will make literally zero workers from the start, just going straight into 12 pool and sending lings over to attack, while other players will make very little other than workers for the first few minutes and will have to either defend with minimal army or hope their opponent doesn't exploit their weakness. These are radically different openings that cause the game to play out very differently. E.g. if someone's playing very greedy, that gives you both an opening and incentive to attack. Meanwhile, because CoH's economy exists out on the field as capturable points, "make more guys" and "get more economy" are essentially the same thing. You can't sacrifice army to get a stronger economy, you need to immediately produce lots of guys in order to get any economy. Thus, that entire dimension of decisionmaking is mostly gone (Of course there's still some economic management and differences in CoH, it's just drastically reduced). Now, CoH instead has a lot of tactical depth, and compared to SC2 you're engaged in fights near-constantly, it almost seems like it never lets up. Which isn't a bad thing, and CoH is quite a good game, but it's also very different, which I guess is my point. Minimizing base building loses depth, and you can replace that depth with other mechanics elsewhere, but then you get a very different game, it's not simply "the original game without the boring parts". tl;dr play Company of Heroes because it sounds like what you want, it has minimal base management and lots of army maneuvering and some building forward defenses.
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Nov 2, 2022 21:42
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DarkAvenger211 posted:Oh for sure, Company of Heroes is one of my favorite games. CoH2 is still relatively active too.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:01
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It sounds like the issue is that the game mechanics support a form of auto-attacking but not auto-defending.Corbeau posted:That kind of thing is just playing an RTS, I don't see why it's "cancerous" at all. Player attention is explicitly a resource.
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Nov 2, 2022 23:08
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Frost Giant released a video with some engine details for Snowplay, which is their gameplay engine that sits on top of UE5 for Stormgate: * 60 tick rate (SC2 is 22.4, AoE4 is 8, MOBA's usually 30) * Rollback netcode * Mass async spectating with fast forward/rewind capability * Game logic is compiled into webassembly, modders can hot reload Also some art was released: https://imgur.com/a/8Ujnduu
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Dec 7, 2022 20:02
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Noosphere posted:I'd just like to point out that in practice, the very low tick rate of AoE4 has a tangible upside: distance related latency is basically unnoticeable. I play from Europe with my brother in Japan and the game feels exactly the same as playing with Europe based players exclusively. I think it's neat Edit: I think when Strive came out it got glowing reviews for its rollback implementation, people were talking about how US East coast to Japan felt really good, which is super unusual for a fighting game. Would love to see something similar for Stormgate. Cicero fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Dec 8, 2022 |
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Dec 8, 2022 09:03
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Is the beta open to anyone?
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Jan 7, 2023 07:22
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Frost Giant just announced that they'll start closed external pre-alpha testing for Stormgate in July, it'll be under NDA but they said they'll at least show off gameplay before that starts.Mordja posted:
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May 17, 2023 18:38
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Jank huh? Sounds like it's a true C&C successor then
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Aug 13, 2023 08:15
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Okay I played it. Pros: * Production values are really excellent. Almost everything feels really cool and the game is beautiful. Lots of polish to the visuals and audio. * Basic controls are fine, I didn't really see fundamental issues with pathing or getting guys to do stuff. * Mostly easy to understand both gameplay and UI, just like classic C&C games. Cons: * Infantry having substantial acceleration doesn't feel great. Doesn't feel like you'd be able to micro them very well in a fight. * The bottom left UI area on my screen was tiny and the UI scale caps out at 1.0 so I can't make it any bigger. * No option to change edge scroll speed, and the default is fairly slow. Though at least it doesn't have any acceleration, thank god. * Can't queue up building production like old C&C games. * Some units apparently have a 'specialist' unit cap (and not even super or hero units). Capping unit types like this is a lame balance band-aid. Limits creativity, and if massing something is overpowered, it should be dealt with more organically. * When a building is finished in the UI, it takes several seconds for it to actually complete on the map and start doing stuff. Weird, I don't understand why they would do this, it just feels like a strange delay. Overall it's fine enough, at least judging off that one mission, though it really felt like the kind of experience I'd like to do co-op, not just by myself. More broadly, I have two major criticisms: 1. They're involving external players in testing REALLY late in the game, if they're planning to launch this year as I've heard. And they haven't shown the third faction at all, and the testing they are doing right now is just showing a single mission, no multiplayer or even skirmish. That's really limited and late as far as bringing in the future player base to make sure poo poo is working. This is setting my expectations low when it comes to balance, options, and making sure mechanics feel right. It's simply not possible to get those things done really well without substantial external input, you will have blind spots as a developer. 2. The demo hasn't really changed my mind on how I perceive the game's intent, which is that it seems like an okay C&C spiritual successor, but also really unambitious. Other than being new and having really strong production values, it's hard to point at what's supposed to be exciting (or innovative) about this game. Whereas, say, Stormgate has a laundry list of new or unusual stuff they're doing with modes and the engine. Too early to judge whether that'll actually work out, but Frost Giant is clearly trying new stuff even as they're making a traditional RTS, whereas Tempest Rising so far just looks like it's retreading old ground. edit: Assessor of Maat posted:nah, it's not the good C&C type jank, it's half-baked SC2 wannabe type jank Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 20:15
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The way it controls is nothing like Starcraft, the UI and unit mechanics are way closer to C&C. Starcraft ground units usually have instantaneous response, having acceleration is like blasphemy in a Starcraft-style RTS. Obviously the demo is only a single campaign mission, but it didn't seem like you'd be able to micro like you do in Starcraft, not even close.
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Aug 14, 2023 03:43
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Assessor of Maat posted:Momentum's only part of the equation, the way units and particularly infantry moves as a group, bunches up slides and around each other is very Starcraft like.
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Aug 14, 2023 07:25
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Theotus posted:Speaking of Starcraft, has there been anything new on whatever that Frost Giant game is? Already forgot the name. Assessor of Maat posted:suspiciously low funding goal, ai generated artwork, and pretentions of being starcraft; I'd say approximately 250% chance of it being vapourware They're self funding so far and just using Kickstarter for marketing, basically. sirtommygunn posted:It's a story based campaign focused rts, but also it's going to be a persistent mmo, but also its going to have 4 unique factions with a half dozen subfactions, but also it's going to be perfectly balanced and esport ready, but also it's going to have a unique coop mode. Personal take, I think the fights looked great, but it's doing the thing 95% of RTS devs have done for the past nearly two decades of "base building isn't fun, let's simplify it so you can fight more" which I hate. It's especially stupid because developers still treat this like it's some new revelation, when the reality is that most RTSes have been doing simpler macro for longer than the golden age of RTS games ever lasted. Maybe it was a unique selling point for Dawn of War 1, but that came out in 2004. It also has creeps, which is apparently trendy now since both Immortal and Stormgate also have them. Between the two of these things, economic playstyles seem to be tossed to the wayside, gotta get out on the map immediately and contest those creeps, every match. Cicero fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 17:01
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Theotus posted:Honestly haven't been into RTS since Broodwar. Kind of want to get back into that. Any of you all play it these days? BW is still like the second or third most popular RTS. It's SC2 in first place, then AoE2 and BW (not certain which is more popular), then AoE4 I think.
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Aug 19, 2023 17:17
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Sometimes it seems like Relic is getting increasingly bad at making RTS games. Do CoH3 or AoE4 have map editors? Edit: looks like they have that at least. Not having replays day one is bizarre though, if you've made multiple RTSes before. Cicero fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Aug 26, 2023 |
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Aug 26, 2023 00:49
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