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.
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.
IMHO best strategy game! Good old days...
Probably a strong reason why there isn't much competition - why build a new game, when you can weave less competitive mechanics on top of an existing engine and game universe that already has fans?
I suspect I’m quoting a post I read on gamasutra. Very good site for those interested in game industry anecdotes.
I would argue that they bifurcated into "optimized for esports" and "optimized for whale revenue".
I have played quite a few RTS-like games on mobile which were cool and neat and it was fun to optimize for not spending money. Of course, when whales get beat by players with skill, the whales get angry. So, the games optimize out skill except at the pro levels--which very quickly makes for a really crappy game experience for the rank and file.
> And still, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation et al were not so long ago.
Planetary Annihilation is an abomination that does not belong in that list. And PA is a prime example of trying to optimize for e-sports and forgetting that you need a decent game at the core.
I think some people on reddit argued that this happened with fortnite, and was part of why Apex Legends got so popular; the casuals that liked to pvp got driven out by the experts and tried to start again in a new game.
I find this to be a really interesting point. Many people would ask why they are playing a PvP game in the first place, if they're not interested in competing. I think it makes a lot of sense though, because they're not actually all that interested in playing against players. They just want more of a human-like challenge than what AI can provide. The only option there is to play against other players.
The AI in most games is utterly banal and predictible, and as soon as you go past the easy or medium settings it cheats ruthlessly. Of the big recent ones (StarCraft 2, Company of Heroes 2), it's been a very disappointing experience.
For SC2, it just keeps rushing you, so you end up turtling until the AI runs out of resources.
For CoH2, again it just constantly rushes you with much better stuff that you can afford. CoH2 is actually really annoying as you can never afford anything, and so don't get to play with different units, you're always seem to end up playing the same composition.
What this means is that every game is virtually the same, you're just trying to establish a line, wait until the computer runs out of something (or uses the artifical unit cap for stupid things, effectively running out of an army), and then you roll them.
The only game I remember with a little variance was Dawn of War 2.
Maybe co-op Vs AI is something they just don't care about, but it feels as if it's got worse over time, becoming extremely predictable.
This meant that subterfuge and concealing your intentions was legitimately a huge part of the strategy - if you intentionally let the AI see a lot of a certain kind of unit and then build a different kind of strategy, you'd often see success, but because of the way the AI strategised it could sometimes meet you head on with an unexpected surge because it briefly saw you building up from an unspotted recon unit hiding somewhere.
Ultimately it is relatively easy to defeat with a little experience, but I still several years later occasionally boot it up with a friend to try and beat the hard AI 2v4 - we've only managed a handful of times, and the experience of slowly being whittled down back to back is a great experience to have in a friendship
Out of curiosity, in what ways in particular did they do this?
I think one of the largest changes I noticed was an increase in the hardness of counters as well as an increase in the APM necessary to properly wield certain units.
For the first point, in SC1, if I had suboptimal army composition against my opponent, I would likely lose any battles that ensued unless my tactics were quite superior- but I'd likely due some damage in the process, at least. In contrast, in SC2, it always felt like a failure to properly anticipate army makeup would frequently lead to completely lopsided battles where my force might be completely annihilated without doing measurable damage to the opponent.
This was aggravated by the second point. I'm not a professional player and my APM has never been amazing, and I'm fine with that. But the more complex required army composition put a higher emphasis on APM and in-battle tactics, especially with heterogenous forces and units, like blink stalkers, that really benefit from very high levels of micro. I'll be the first to admit that, when watching replays, the things that skilled players could pull off in SC2 was pretty amazing to see- but that didn't really help my playing experience.
There result was a game that felt significantly more frustrating than SC1, even if my win/loss ratio wasn't actually all that different.
Whether the counters are harder, I don't have enough knowledge to say.
I put SC2 down and never picked it back up after playing the third timed mission in a row.
Supreme Commander dealt with this by having genuinely large maps and resource flow rather than a fixed amount of resources. If you tried to "rush" someone or go after their resources, you generally ran into units a level higher and got annhilated.
I don't think any RTS game will be able to deal with this naturally, only by adding rules like NR20 or even NR40 can you avoid early aggression and turtle in peace, and even then the winning strategy will always be to expand as aggressively as possible and to defend with units instead of static defenses.
People don’t want to play long online games though, so they don’t set up maps with enough resources to play for hours.
I recall a LAN party where we used two mods, one for the field of view (2x wider), and increased the unit cap (again, by 2x).
It made for some pretty epic (and laggy) games.