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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre more or less died in the mid 2000s with Age of Empires II, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft being the ones that left a mark.

Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene. Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.

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> Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene.

SC2 still has a fairly healthy playerbase, and even War3 and BW still have some players.

> Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

You think AoE2 is alive but SC2 is dead? SC2 has very little support and will eventually be passed by AoE2 for playercount, but I don't think it's there yet. Pretty sure SC2 still has more players.

SC2 is certainly smaller than it was in its heyday, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I think going f2p is largely what's keeping it alive. It's still a hard game to learn, but I think it's got a fairly well thought out on-ramp with custom maps, co-op and 4v4s as relatively "safe" modes and a series of logical steps for eventually getting comfortable with 1v1.

There is the free and open source Beyond All Reason (BAR) inspired by Total Annihilation, which is very polished and a lot of fun. It's got features I've not seen anywhere else yet (in terms of possibilities for commands and customisation) and also has a growing competitive scene. It's worth checking out

Why do people want constantly new games otherwise they think that something is dead? This is like saying basketball is dead because basketball people only play basketball and not something else.

Because in the time between Warcraft I (not the first RTS but let's take it) and Starcraft, each new game was amazing compared to the previous. People who grew up in that loved that; but we've kind of leveled off, you can't really make things as amazingly better than current iterations graphically as the difference between WarCraft 1 and even StarCraft.

C&C is another hugely popular one. Though I was in the minority of not enjoying Westwoods RTS so much. I much preferred Warcraft and StarCraft. But my favourite was The Settlers.

This was also an era when business simulation games (you could argue as another “style” of RTS but not combat based) were popular too. Like Transport Tycoon, Theme Park, etc. From past conversations on here, it sounds like City Builders are still popular.

I feel Westwood's games were always more about the single player experience. The maps were pretty well designed as sort of puzzle boxes you needed to figure out. The amazing soundtracks and cheesy FMVs were also very good at building atmosphere. Multiplayer felt unbalanced in a not very fun way.

Agreed, StarCraft and friends got a big multiplayer scene that I was never into; I'm not a good enough player.

But C&C were fun to play through, and felt accessible to scrubs like me. (To be fair to Blizzard, StarCraft 2 is the ONLY Blizzard RTS I ever completed - or at least the episodes I bought ; they did exceptionally well on the difficulty scaling for that game.)

Competitive multiplayer was always meh for us, we loved comp stomps, and I somewhat am sad that the AI was so "bad" that you never really could get a good balance between "destroyed you instantly" and "easily overwhelmed".

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/04/the-armageddon...

I picked up a copy of C&C red alert a year ago. Sadly, it's unplayable on modern PCs. At least it was for me. Too many issues, crashes and the game speed not being changeable before game launch and by the time you can change it in game, it's too late and you're basically already way too behind to catch up. It's a shame because it was one of my favorites from the era.

Both the first C&C game and Red Alert were remastered in 2020 as a part of the "Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection".

That version should run on modern machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remaster...

They're currently on sale for a few bucks on Steam too.

There are open source engine reimplementations which use the original assets to play the c&c games on modern machines. See https://www.openra.net/

Capitalism 2 also, I played that extensively.

> The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.

Stormgate, Tempest Rising and Sanctuary are ones that RTS fans are looking forward to. A lot of people also like Beyond All Reason (a recent TA-like fan game).

Which is a damn shame because RTS games are my favorite genre, with Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 being my favorite games of all time.

It's really a shame to me that the most popular multiplayer games these days seem to be FPS games, or games where you just control a single character. Don't get me wrong those games can still be fun, but they entail a fraction of the strategy as RTS games.

I hope one day we'll see a resurgence of the RTS genre.

'Beyond All Reason' regularly ranks second place behind SC2 on Twitch.

> seeing no new games worthy of note to this day

I think Stormgate[0] will be interesting here, when it comes out.

[0] https://playstormgate.com

Northgard is pretty good and the devs are very active.

Northgard is more of a City builder that an rts.

I loved empire earth II as well

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