Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation
beyondallreason.info
beyondallreason.info
Second of all, nostalgia time! I didn't play TA, rather TA: Kingdoms, the medieval-fantasy version. I think today it might qualify as a re-skin but don't quote me on that (edit: I just checked Wikipedia, and no, it isn't a "re-skin" by any means). I started for the story mode but eventually I found myself drawn to the RTS mode. It's my very first RTS and, without aid of the internet, I independently developed tactics and strategy, identifying map choke points and which "kingdom" is best suited for which terrain.
With the traditional human faction, the best result I managed was this stalemate of a scenario in a labyrinthine map. I only ever managed to win with the dark/evil faction. I didn't like how they looked or their back story but their stats and abilities suited my style.
Good times! I didn't really keep up with the RTS genre but maybe I'll give these games a spin when I have the time.
2nd one being this one ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28204948
> How did so many Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup players miss such an obvious bug?
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Also, (BA/)Spring is totally from last decade (especially diversity-game-wise !), IIRC top activity there was circa 2008 ?
Oh, it's actually about BAR's engine, not "another game" :
Spring is a free RTS game engine :
I think the original Balanced Annihilation had the feature/problem that it used a bunch of a original Cavedog models and Reloaded is carefully avoiding that in addition to visual and gameplay improvements.
I played a ton of Balanced Annihilation like a decade ago and it was already a "better TA" than TA or SupCom in many ways.
The scale of the game has never been replicated by any other game/series as far as I know. There is so little micromanagement. It's almost half economy planning and half strategy. Once you have enough energy production and MOHO metal makers, the economy can basically scale infinitely. I basically just queue up my factories with the different unit types and automate their orders to patrol certain areas and watch the mini-map to see how the front line is shifting.
I think I might be willing to buy a Windows box just for this as I've waited long enough. I haven't had a Windows box in 20 years but for TA, yeah. Any recommendations?
TA was a marvel when it first appeared. The gameplay was very much, for me, a revolution.
At one point I used the version sold by gog.com
That version worked on OSX for a while but it doesn't look like that's the case anymore: https://www.gog.com/game/total_anihilation_commander_pack
BTW: I've run TA on a VM before. I think I used VMware Fusion. You'll still need a Windows license but at least you won't need extra hardware.
Hmm, maybe some 4X ? Even excluding the non-RTS ones, you have the likes of AI War (1&2), Distant Worlds (2 to be released soon) and Star Ruler (1&2) ?
Whereas most RTS devolve into micromanagement matches, TA seemed to be more about high-level strategy since automation really let you focus on theatre management.
I love the idea of being able to program a collection of routines which you can change the parameters of, or swap in and out, depending on how the battle is progressing.
There's probably a danger, though, that by making the programming language/runtime too capable, the game ends up being "solved" or at least ends up only leaving boring work for the human to do.
This would imply that war and generalship in reality are already "solved" problems. It's not a real concern.
Typically this is used to set a destination for new units, so they assemble automatically. But because you could set the commands to loop, and because you could authorize them to auto-engage (using the built-in AI to track and follow targets they run into), you could hack it to have the new units do routine patrols without further player action.
This definitely doesn't "solve" gameplay. It just gives the player access to the game's built-in AI for their own purposes. Of course it's much more useful playing against the computer than other players.
It's the first and probably only RTS game where I don't even care about my individual units and just send them en mass to the front line automatically. I literally count on the wreckage of the dead units to clog up the spaces where I am defending. In some sense the game is not tactical at all but really more about strategy and economy planning. There is very little micromanagement on my part and I love it.
I can't quite put my finger on why I don't like PA, but something about it just feels off. Which is a shame, I really want to like it, and the planet-smashing aspect of it seems like it would be a lot of fun.
I think the problem was that they worried too much about making it Twitch-friendly and forgot to, you know, create a fun game.
Also, looks like they jumped on Twitch bandwagon very early, Twitch coming out in 2011, and PA in 2014 ?
I guess that this comes from their previous game being some crossover between DOTA, Team Fortress 2, and a (proto-)Overwatch ?
Games need to be short. Games need to be fast and have continuous action. Buildup phases need not apply. Rushes need to be viable. Unit counts need to be restricted. Attack uber alles--defense need not apply.
A game design article recently had a good word for it: homeostasis.
Twitch-friendly games are ferociously anti-homeostatic. They want balance to be metastable--easily knocked off and then the imbalance snowballs to defeat.
Supreme Commander, on the other hand, is practically the anti-Twitch. It is strongly homeostatic. If you rush an opponent on a large map, your L1 units are running into L2 defenses. If you don't knock your opponent out, there is now a LOT of quickly harvested scrap metal sitting really close to his base and really far from yours. Defenses are strong and problematic. Unit counts are large.
Because they are in a different category, not (usually) played as PvP ?
In a team game you can gift units to allies so if one ally gets knocked out but the game isn't over then you'll often find them being given units to rebuild with.
Each player working together as one is quite the experience and different from each building their own base/having their own eco.
So do expect a lot more on this in BAR.
You could build more units and you could command larger groups of them compared to something like SC where you couldn't group more than 12 per hotkey. The sheer number of units you could crank out also had interesting strategic effects if, say, your opponent had a balanced defense but not quite enough flak cannons, say, to hold up to a giant swarm of air units. I remember having to worry more about the specifics of what they were building than in games where there was a unit cap that increased the relative value of fortifications and defensive structures.
Sequencing was great too. Tell your commander to build a factory, then another factory, then a solar plant, etc, with seemingly no queue size limit. Queue up dozens of things in each of those factories too. Etc.
It always felt less "clicks per minute" dominated because of these things for me - though I was not a high level player or anything, just playing for fun - while the industry went the opposite, way into the Micro side and turned into things like Warcraft 3 and then LoL.
(I forget the name of Cavedog's TA sequel set in a fantasy world, but even that, IIRC, backed away from the giant armies thing.)
But the music was magnificent orchestral work. It was also so depressing [ https://youtu.be/ljDyp__ejco?t=995 ] that I decided to play the game without music after a while. It's gorgeous, but too emotive.
https://soundcloud.com/ryankrause94/sets/beyond-all-reason-f...
The upshot of this is that it creates opportunities for prioritization (and opportunities for blowing past your income if you're not careful).
You also didn't have to pay up front when queuing things, like you say with the opportunity to blow past your income, so your cash flow was the counter-balancing production speed limiter, but not in a way where you had to be constantly watching that bank account dollar amount before clicking "build."
[EDIT] Not mentioned on the BAR front page but also pioneered in TA was wreckage. Destroyed units left wreckage behind that had to be navigated around or fired upon to clear a path. Wreckage could also be scavenged to recover the material used to construct them, allowing the construction of more units. In the race to build enough infrastructure to overwhelm the enemy, this could be the difference between life and death.
Or, anti-air units used as ground defense and ground assault units :). In my TA days, I had plenty of cases where I saved my base by ordering AA bots to fire on the ground, counting on weaker but much further-flying missiles to accidentally collide with the attacking force.
Also, Commander's D-gun. That one was an exercise in aiming, but early-to-mid-game, one well-placed shot could cut the attacking force in half.
I also appreciated the little things - like the solar generators automatically closing down when hit, to protect themselves.
Or, dropship bombing - IIRC when a dropship gets shot down, it crashes with all its load, which can sometimes be pretty explosive.
Maybe I'll just stop now. I have a lot of good TA memories.
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/1784?postID=189519#189519
Or maybe also this (BA?)/Spring one, dating back to the time when shields were invulnerable to plasma shots and deflecting them, featuring a shot being randomly diverted to hit a commander that was hiding in a bunch of buildings, wiping out half the base in the resulting death explosion !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5eBkn45Jo4&list=PLkuJSFWAxE...
First, map resources (metal patches) were not depletable. So, the game would see massive economic growth as every metal patch would give resource indefinitely. Big econ ramp up, and a marked ability to come back due to non-exhausting resource patches.
The second characteristic is the flow-based economy that worked with build queuing. A player could queue up as many units or structures to be built as desired, as opposed to "buy and build" where you must currently have the resources necessary to build something.
"Queue" may be an imprecise word here, as the player could, for example, have ten factories all attempting to produce a series of units simultaneously (and similarly, have a swam of engineer units all attempting to build a number of structures simultaneously). That is, it was simultaneous building that would consume resources on the fly as they came in that was the core of this model.
The flow economy model meant that a player tracked resource income and resource usage: kept positive, all the queued up units or structures could be built. Go into the negative, however, and the resource buffer would be eaten into and the player would see all currently-building units/structures slow down in their rate of build progress, awaiting resources to come in.
The last bit was disabled in SupCom 2, out of concern that newer players often bottomed out their economy and had a bad time. However, after fan outcry, the flow-model and infinite queuing was re-enabled as an option.
But I love the RTS genre and I am always excited when I find new titles.
I do hope they will develop this game further. Mods can hopefully fix the rest.
As for the AI, depending on how long ago it was we've either made lots of improvements or a few small ones. Unfortunately it's one of the areas we have fewer devs.
For comparison, I have never experienced such low frame rates on Zero-K regardless of unit count or map size, and the other player didn't complain either.
We rarely see simulation slowdowns (<1.0x speed) so this is already pretty good - though also here we're on a mission to multithread as much as humanly possible.
Also there is the number of units. Over three hundred in this game! TAs tend to have lots and lots of units whereas the other shall we say branch of RTS design tends to have far fewer.
The existence of 3 different games (counting Zero-K) really doesn't help them take off.
Zero-K splitting away certainly didn't help things...
SupCom is great, but it has its own issues....
And scale is an issue because I hate the tacticality of small-scale RTS games. I find tactical-scale gameplay incredibly boring. That is my biggest complaint/disappointment with Starcraft, Dawn of War, C&C, etc, and why TA and SupCom are #1 in my book.
Besides, micromanagement turns these games into actions-per-second showdowns, and that misses the point of RTS games entirely. I much prefer a more relaxed pace and being able to focus on strategy.
Can you recommend a couple of large scale maps that support multiple factions duking it out with hundreds or thousands of units per side?
ZK tries to cut down on busywork and pure contests of APM. If you don't want to micro then you can do things like tell your units to fight somewhat intelligently (eg long ranged units run from approaching enemies) and set them to retreat when their health is low. It doesn't replace quick tactical decision making for more intense 1v1s, but not everyone wants to play that way anyway.
the biggest issue you'll have is finding people with similar skill level to yours, as its pretty much the same design TA was back then. RTS nowadays is much more balanced so that strength of a unit correlates with its cost. this is not the case in ZK at all, as you can destroy the most expensive units in the game with just a few of the very cheapest, so trading 10_000 for 200 metal happens if you get outplayed.
its especially hard to learn the nuances in this game if you play on large maps, because it quickly becomes an economic race, and these are so much harder for people that have little experience.
/edit: disclaimer: i haven't played the game since it was released on steam, so maybe there are more newcomers now.
on a sidenote: I find it really sad that the gesture menu for buildings like you could enable in ZK hasn't really caught up. it was such a massive improvement in usability/gameplay for this genre.
[1] https://zero-k.info/Maps?mapSupportLevel=2&size=3&sea=Any&hi...
For me personally, it's the taste that's different. ZK has a kinda chaotic/weird setup/design-style. And even though gameplay > graphics, i do really love it when they match/meet/work together. For BAR it is one of our missions to make looking at the game to already be very enjoyable. (and since the basic gameplay mechanics derived from TA were already so good).
That being said it does look really nice.
If scripting is more your style then AIs can be written in lua.
One feature I liked was the ability to completely share control, so in this game I took responsibility for the economy / building, and my partner was responsible for controlling our mobile units.
Playing on a spherical map was fun and flavorful, and the potential to do things like plant rockets on a moon map to smash it into the planetary map (or send opposing forces to interfere) was awesome.
When I was active, it didn't seem to develop a large/active enough community to reliably support (evenly-matched) multiplayer games. I don't know if this ever improved because I quit.
As I recall, the company infuriated the community by crowdfunding a new game while there were still nasty bugs / missing features in the original game. Players left in disgust, and that's when I gave up on the multiplayer improving.
This frustrating experience was part of my journey towards refusing to play multiplayer games that weren't free to play (so community would be as large as possible), then quitting computer games entirely.
I didn't know about the other kickstarter game, do you mean the titans expansion?