It’s been a few weeks since I basically disliked Age Of Empires 4. Lukewarm praises, perhaps, but it seems to be doing well, and that makes me happy. We need an RTS revival for the ages, right? And this is fine, if a little safe.
Over the past few weeks, I have perplexedly perpetuated the feeling that it could be more ambitious. Why do i think it might have pushed the trireme further away? Is it possible to create a modern RTS that captures the best of the classics without simply re-editing them? Is it even done and not recognized?
Let’s start with the clarification: yes, “Real time Strategy“technically covers all game ways, from Europa Universalis come RimWorld. The game classification is absurd and esoteric, let’s not delve into it. Today we are looking at Dune 2’s Descendants, Starcraft, and Total destruction. The game where you look down from your sky throne and yell at the little ones until they build a base will produce more and more good guys who will go out and kill their opponents yours and blow up their base. Games where you need to mine more crystals and build more turrets, and if I’m annoyed, the games that make me complain that they’re really just clicking on hundreds of things just to hold original.
I’ve long accused publishers of abandoning RTS in the 2000s, but I’ve also given up on it. I would say it has become stagnant, with too many attempts at blindly copying Starcraft (or worse, Warcraft 3, which is the same but somewhat confusing, generic and lackluster), like old attempts to blindly copy Command & Conquer.
But is that true? I look back today and find there are too many interesting games to easily list, but above all I see that many developers have tried to port the genre, years before I started complaining that they didn’t. do like that.
Take it The rise of nations. Although clearly based on Age Of Empires, playing it today I was struck by how much more innovative it is than Relic’s recent release. Instead of a series of scripted missions, the campaigns are more like Total War, with a Risk-esque world map where you move armies around, triggering 30-day base-building waves -90 minutes and ctrl + 2ing the wounded gang. Progress through the ages depends on studying enough breakthroughs in the four scientific/cultural fields, the balance of which depends on the strategy you’re going for this round. Improve the civilian and you get better government and more cities. Improved trade for less limits on your resource earnings. The bank on science gives you the potential for better long-term research into all the technologies that other fields will unlock, and of course military research is how you turn those archers into musketeers, then modern infantry. It felt more natural and refined than AoE ever had, and connected so neatly that I played confidently within an hour.
Honestly, it could almost fill this entire paper. You have to build many cities instead of just one, or you can build high and capture enemies. The territory is visible on the map and changes dramatically the free expansion for all other RTSs, but even these rules are defied by some factions, themselves very diverse and hard to guess. My favorite, the Iroquois, automatically become invisible and get free healing whenever they stop moving and fighting. And let’s not even talk about games that reach the nuclear age, where overly proud players can completely destroy themselves, and the game itself actually shows more respect for a “loser” who surrenders rather than destroys the planet.
However, it also suffers from the same problems. I’ve lost more than one battle that I should have won easily because a war entered the attrition phase and I got bored with pumping out and directing an endless army. While villagers are excellent at making themselves useful instead of waiting for orders, soldiers tend to run away on their own and battles still tend to go downhill to accumulate a large enough blob while hoping you shot the right amount to unlock the gun first. .
So do I want to focus more on tactics? Well, there was Company Of Heroes, The soldier, or last year Iron Harvest. Many of the complaints about the actions per minute and the spin of the economy disc disappear when you limit or completely remove the build. Winning a battle feels less binary than losing it all or destroying the enemy army before inevitably going to waste. I still remember a Men Of War level where I started with 1,000 men and only four were left. Four! The last four steals and barely breaching a German tank to defeat the final defenders may have resulted in a technical victory, but it looks like defeat in a way that destroys the center of the market. Town with all your control groups never do.
Instead of relying on a bonus multiplier or trying to pass by throwing more barracks fruit in the blender, games that don’t emphasize building tend to make the most of your forces, preserving All the more the better. Of your build RTSs, those levels are usually the most tedious, but it works a lot better with a game specifically designed for it. And that’s definitely what I’m personally aiming for. I hate lost my guy. It’s wasteful. Worse, it meant I had to go back and add another 50 units to the sodding build queue.
And… Men Of War isn’t really a Dunelike. Oh, it’s family, sure, but if you haven’t built the army yourself, you’re actually playing something more like Panzer General. You are a caregiver. Intermediate management. But I think persistence units will add a lot of depth. Enter Homeworld, of course, which gave us all 3D combat and construction, and a great story that preserves as many ships as possible in terms of narrative as well as strategically important. Every ship holds some of your last men in Homeworld. Each death is a little more than a pair of hands against the total genocide regime. Everything you build will go with you as long as you can protect it. It’s a lot more important when the story actually puts you in that role.
But that can’t be true for every RTS either. Not just because it removes some strategy and playstyle from the table (contrast, such as Command & Conquer Colon Generals’ kamikaze truck, another game whose innovations are barely appreciated) , nor because it adds to the anxiety of a possible pyrhic victory to every skirmish. But because, all of the genre’s half-brothers prove that not the same audience ever has.
I don’t mean nobody wants an old-school design with modern trappings – consider the success of Starcraft 2, Deserts Of Kharak or Age Of Empires 4 – but they always have more than one audience. Some people just don’t care about the story or campaign structure, or don’t care about the single player. And for all my sour change of how competitive online games can be, that’s perfectly valid. It’s only really a matter of precision because so many of the greatest successes have covered so many bases. Starcraft is a perfect, memorable and challenging example of it (dear God, the last few Protoss levels in Brood War) the single-player campaign to me loves it just as much as people who have spent trillions of hours perfecting their microcontrollers. And of course, there are unnoticed players who like both. It’s hard not to pity any game developer faced with a genre that requires them to make an already complicated game that somehow pleases everyone.
Even within a fan base, there is the potential for a split. Sometimes I think I want a completely different Destruction; big, spectacular battles with a variety of robots, each with some use, and an economic game of automatic input and output flows, more rudimentary than keeping track of a balance sheet . I am certainly not alone. Even the Supreme Commander discount, yes in at least No.3 remake fans prioritize different elements of an entertainment near 1:1. Even within that framework, it’s hard to know what’s needed.
“Perhaps I owe the developers an apology, because so many of them have been trying to refresh RTS all this time that I insisted they should.”
Maybe I owe the developers an apology, because many of them have been trying to refresh RTS all this time that I insisted they should. Much of that simply leads to new sub-segments because many of those audiences are no longer stuck together playing different halves of a release. Hell, even the success of Total War was partly due to assault lovers shifting to a genre that emphasized location, form, and scale instead of production and dynamics. And I’m certainly not the only Age Of Empires 4 player who finds the town buildings fascinating to be overlooked rather than ignored while the player zooms around from barracks to battle 25 times at a time. second.
I was hoping to use this column to draw conclusions about a few things. I know how I feel about 4X games, and simultaneous spins, and why I don’t like XCOM so much. But when it comes to RTS, it takes me this much scrutiny to realize that for all my complaints, I really don’t know what to expect. I want, much less than what others do. I can’t say there isn’t enough demand for vintage-inspired designs, and I can’t say there aren’t enough new ideas as there are half a dozen more unmentioned experiments and spins in my notes. me (I’m sorry, I haven’t written about you yet, Achron. You’re just too amazing and too bad to replay). But it still feels like anything else missing. Some missing link games that people will one day point to as bridges to a new generation of Tiberium annoying sims. So I once threw myself at your mercy. What is the future of base-building RTS, readers? Has it been and is it gone? Has everyone played it already and no one told me because it’s so funny?
In fact, if that’s the last one, go ahead. I’m proud of you.
