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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

0 A.D. is great. I used to play a lot of RTS (real time strategy) games between 1995 and 2005. Sadly the whole RTS genre died because of the shift of PC game developers to consoles and their casual softened gameplay (HaloWars, C&C4) didn't work out. And the free-to-play AoEOnline / C&C Generals 2 (beta) were failures and SC2 drifted into a hardcore online niche. Not everyone wants to play repetitive Moba/tower defence style games. There would be a huge market for RTS games.

I loved the Age of Empires series, as well Empire Earth, C&C Generals. And building games like The Settlers, Anno 1602, Sim City.

0 A.D. is similar to Age of Empire/Mythology. Keep up the good work!

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Act of Aggression came out recently, and you've got AI Wars from a few years ago - I believe they've got a new RTS out soon as well. Supreme Commander and its sequel were proper RTS and still fantastic even if they are a bit older now.

Then you've got a new Anno game last year, Cities Skylines, Age of Empires got a re-release on Steam, and if you can find a copy Settlers II 10th Anniversary Edition completely reimplemented the original with modern graphics and UI.

If anything digital distribution and crowd funding is bringing about a resurgence of all those genres big publishers shunned.

I know. See my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640337

I played all of them. The Total Annihilation series is a niche sub-genre. Anno 2070 just come out this month but has little in common with the old Anno 1602 or Anno 1404. The AoE "HD" releases were a quick buck for Microsoft and get boring again a few hours later (when you own also the original versions).

What the world needs are new RTS games inspired by AoE/EmpireEarth/C&C with a good singleplayer campaign and random maps with good offline KI that can play various game-modes. That's why 0 A.D. is so great!

I've been playing AOE since the original and still play it often, I've recently found Total War to be a sufficient RTS/Turn based game for me, a nice mix between Civilization and AOE.

That being said you should look again at AOE3, there is still a small online community that I hope will continue for quite awhile.

I miss all of the C&C games a lot. Are there any modern successors to them?

The recent Act of Aggression is a inofficial successor of C&C Generals. I just had time to play it for a few hours, but it seems to be almost as good as Generals. Though it's more complex (more unit upgrades, more ressources) and unlike Generals the building part of the game is less advanced: it limits buildings to a grid and building cannot be placed everywhere.

And Cities Skylines is the best city building simulation. It was a big surprise that a small team managed to create such a superior game. EA's SimCity 2013 with fake simulation was a failure.

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