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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

How did this find players? People want "more Age of Empires II" (and to some extent more Age of Mythology). In the most literal sense of those words. 0AD got there earlier.

Other previous discussions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684532) were about pathfinding in this game. The pathfinding in AoEII is something. It's neither naturalistic, immersive, nor intellectually stimulating, which would be goals of mine and probably the average game designer in 2023. I'm not going to say how I really feel because I don't want to be downvoted over something stupid. The important thing is people love this pathfinding. It's worthy of copying.

0AD: People love more of the same. Another free & open source example is Pokemon Showdown. People want original untainted Pokemon so badly that Pokemon Showdown still has concurrents in the tens of thousands. Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia? Nearly a million people a day do.

Commercially: There was an audience for "more Breath of the Wild" before TOTK: Genshin Impact. League of Legends is more than a decade old now. Counter-Strike is almost as old as 0AD. Old reigns supreme.

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AoEII has fantastic pathfinding. That and the formation system was the game's secret sauce.

In early RTS games like Warcraft, half the game was micromanaging your units from place to place. You'd send your army to a location, and if there was an obstacle in the way (such as a forest), they'd awkwardly path around the edges of it, one tile at a time (causing massive congestion, because the units at the front would obstruct the ones behind). They'd arrive at their destination one by one, and if the enemy was waiting, they'd get slaughtered.

In Age of Empires II, your army would arrive in a solid mass. It was a relief: you could actually play the game, instead of babysitting a bunch of units.

Habadakus.

prostagma

Vulome. Etimos. Pani.

Wololooo

Much improved. AoM has some buggy pathfinder edge cases still but its enough that its an annoyance not a mainstay.

> In early RTS games like Warcraft, half the game was micromanaging your units from place to place.

This is probably the most annoying aspect of StarCraft 1 / BroodWar (1998), considering the game still has a very strong player base and is very enjoyable to watch (even if the clunky mechanics are too much to bear for me to play it).

> You'd send your army to a location, and if there was an obstacle in the way (such as a forest), they'd awkwardly path around the edges of it, one tile at a time (causing massive congestion, because the units at the front would obstruct the ones behind). They'd arrive at their destination one by one, and if the enemy was waiting, they'd get slaughtered.

In SC1, they wouldn't even arrive on location half the time, because the pathfinding is so stupid they'd get stuck trying to walk up a wall. It's so infamously bad it's still being mocked: https://youtu.be/mCEZ2hIcUW0?t=134 - still, a great game!

In SC2 (2010), the pathfinding has been massively improved. You can give orders to hundreds of units and they will all figure out how to navigate complex terrain. They will still clump up at chokepoints or occasionally get a bit stupid when trying to path around other units that are engaged in a fight but this is more easily fixable with even a tiny bit of micro.

However SC2 makes no attempt to make units maintain formation. So if you're moving your army across the map, still best to keep an eye on it, and group up / pre-split / set up before attacking. It's a bit less of an APM game, and more of an SPM (screens per minute) game.

It is amazing how well Age of Empires 2 aged. My regular gaming crew likes RTS sometimes, usually AoE2. So, we decided to try out some Brood War, since it was the decidedly superior RTS 20 years ago. Could barely finish the game! All the comforts they’ve added to AoE2 over time (bigger viewport and better graphics mostly) and the grouping/pathfinding made us spoiled.

I played a ton of StarCraft growing up and it definitely has a high rank in the pantheon of games, but I’ve been converted to AoE2 I guess. Wololo.

Blame the pro players! When SC Remastered (released 2016) was under development, they specifically protested changing literally any single thing impacting the gameplay, including resolution (the 16:9 aspect ratio can be toggled back to 4:3). They were all rightfully scared of the remaster having very little support moving forward, and getting stuck with new bugs that upset 18 years of accumulated "balance" (as in: everyone figured out how to play around the existing bugs and the game converged on a ~50% winrate in all 6 matchups).

I think it was the right call, considering (unlike the AoE series) that SC has always had very asymmetric factions and matchups. It's very easy to make a trivial "fix" and wreck that balance, leaving a significant part of the pro player community with no tournament wins = no income.

StarCraft Brood War worked on computers with 16MB of RAM.

The game was incredibly impressive when it came out: technically, graphically, sound, single player, multi player, map editor with a custom programming language that allowed to make very complicated maps (there are tens of thousands of them, including custom maps with own minigames).

On top of that the game was just nice to play in both single and multiplayer - where it had great balance of 3 distinct factions.

SC:BW is a game from 1998 yet still probably the best RTS ever. And it worked on machines back then.

> a custom programming language

You mean the trigger/action system in StarEdit? I wouldn't call it a programming language, but it was a very nice introduction to scripting, especially for me as a 10yro kid at the time. I probably owe a bit of my career to it.

Staredit trigger system allowed to make a lot great things for a game made in 1998. It was like Minecraft before Mindcraft?

Obviously fair share of problems, but there were some clever workarounds with "hyper triggers" to make triggers fire very often, instead of being recalculated every 2 (?) seconds... or stuff like counting minerals to do things (what to be honest was horrible, but worked).

Those custom maps grew as our computers grew (I cant imagine some of the custom maps working with 16mb of RAM, luckily I upgraded to I think 192) and spawned whole generes - MOBAs and Turret defense. There was even that "the unknown" map what is basically Among Us long before Among us.

Are there any games nowadays that allow such things and spawn so many custom maps?

Wc3 reforged I guess but they made it so anything you make is owned by blizz so they don't let another Dota escape.

> Are there any games nowadays that allow such things and spawn so many custom maps?

WC3 literally spawned DotA, and thus the entire genre of MOBA. It was originally just a WC3 map.

SC2's editor is also quite capable - the game is free to play, there is a lot of cool stuff in the arcade section, with some very active minigame communities (Direct Strike, Crap Patrol, etc). Sunspear Games are making Immortal, a new RTS which was initially prototyped using the SC2 engine; these same guys earlier did StarBow, which could best be described as "StarCraft 1.5", with many good elements of both BW and SC2. And of course there's that guy who's remaking all of WC3 in the SC2 engine, and it works better than WC3 Reforged (which I sincerely do not recommend to spend your money on). There's also the SC2 Mapster Discord server, some people are trying quite interesting things for regular 1v1 maps (considering how conservative normal 1v1 is), like water slides, destructible resources/watchtowers, etc.

Overall not the golden age, but it's very much alive.

DOTA was based on a Starcraft Brood War map :)

(Or there was a map with same idea before - in SC:BW).

Well it depends how deep you wanna go in the history, there is no such thing as a tree. https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

Back in the day when I was working on another RTS of the era (Dark Reign 2), pathfinding was the bane of our existence. We weren't able to dial the pathfinding in because we'd pivoted late in the development cycle from the more innovative but complex 'walk anywhere on a 3d terrain' design to the ship-it-quickly traditional grid unit placement of 2d RTS'. This was the era of 2d RTS' transitioning to 3d, so everything was new and a bit harder than anticipated.

Just that one thing of having sub-par pathfinding made the game far worse, I'd guess at least a full point off a 10-point game rating. I believe we had to slow the whole pace of the game down because the player had to babysit units as they moved, which made the game far different from its extremely fast-paced predecessor and which the players expected from a sequel. I played DR2 again recently and it doesn't hold up almost solely due to pathfinding and the pacing that results.

On the other hand, specific, suboptimal pathfinding is like 80% of a Brood War charm. The game without die decades ago if dragoons and zerglings would blob optimally.

Arguably, low tech pathfinding is what gave us the tower defense genre.

Remember playing that demo over and over as a kid! Really cool that you worked on it.

For what it’s worth, reading about one of the first true 3D RTS games (after Ground Control) at the time was really cool. Even if I never actually played the game.

> Ground Control

A surprisingly unknown title. Always wished it had a third campaign with base building or a level editor though.

Ground Control and it's sequel were great. Battlezone 2042 was also pretty good

Dark Reign 1 was the first online game that I ever played, back in 1997. I still have the manual somewhere...

I worked on that game! Started at Auran about three months before it shipped. Fun times.

Fantastic game!

Loved Dark Reign, I have the discs still, somewhere.

I'm confident that I'm not the only old crusty Australian Quake player who got a smile from seeing trog comment on hn. Hope you're well bud.

Can’t recall Trog. I was living on the Labyrinth, Netspace, Ozemail and a few other quakeworld/TF1 servers back in the day :) Omega Enzo Red was the name :)

0ad is always the first listed package of linux distro repos (in alphabetical order). That might have helped with discoverability

Ye ole Yellowpages marketing trick!

The modern version of that trick is adding "near me" to the name of your business, there was a viral pic of a restaurant called "Thai food near me".

Also as a fan of the genre when I was younger, I recall just trying to find other RTS games that I could play, including free ones. This game came up pretty often.

You are 100% correct. I remember over the years always seeing it when viewing alphabetical listings of packages in various distros.

Damn, Zero-K really missed on that one...

The pathfinding discuss was good. I remember that around 2008-2010, I read the Killzone AI related papers and presentations. Basically, all the planning, tactics were based on pathfinding algorithms. Because, if you find the shortest path by scoring the nodes, if you add multiple layers - like line of sight as a triangle- you can also update the scores, which eventually help the character move most optimal path: short but safe path.

The idea made it possible to convert the graph into either way finding meshes or influence maps, a great abstraction layer to build complex scenarios on top.

What makes me sad here is that, even though the paper written for 0 A.D. is newer than the paper I had read around 15 years ago, it is primitive. It is also a good thing as it is a low hanging fruit here for game devs. But I am not sure if there is enough interest for game devs here.

In game design terms it's interesting how old games pathfinding is so much better than modern games.

If pathfinding is too efficient, and the same for all units, then the micro aspect of the game is killed. Micro is the "real time" part of real time strategy.

If you play something like Starcraft 1, Warcraft 2, or AoE 2 you'll see the pathfinding has immense peculiarities that as you get better at the game you learn to manage. Units get stuck on each other and so on.

Starcraft 2 has a very good pathfinding algorithm but it still intentionally adds a lot of variety to how units move to recreate that cumbersome peculiar pathfinding that rewards micro. Yet if you look at Starcraft 1 you see the units still move in much more unique ways.

I think it's too easy to fall into a technical rabbit hole and try to do the best pathfinding when it actively harms the game.

Interesting. Could you give a bit more of a concrete, specific example of "good pathfinding hurting the experience"? It's an odd sounding idea, to me.

Also, you seem to be deep in this world, I'll also ask you - are there RTS games out there where the specific terrain is crucially important for various unit types - like we've seen in the real world recently, with weather updates waiting for deep mud to dry out being the main factor in when tanks and other sorts of vehicles can be useful? My experience of RTS games is limited, but I remember maps being very flat overall, with very few types of steepness modelled.

It's a well known phenomenon in StarCraft 2 that the super efficient pathfinding increased lethality and reduced defender's advantage compared to the first game. And the game is overall considered to be VERY high lethality with a very weak defender's advantage.

Small fights don't make the difference as noticeable, but larger armies are so much more efficient in SC2 compared to SC1, that it's harder to hold off a larger force with a smaller but better-controlled force. The bigger "deathball" tends to just win, it's harder for someone to come back from an army disadvantage with skillful play.

Another small example there is that "ling runbys" in SC2 are vastly more punishing for even small mistakes in leaving a gap open in a building wall, because a huge number of lings can run through a small gap extremely quickly.

If pathing efficiency is the goal, why not make every unit in an RTS extremely tiny? That would make it more efficient for sure. Or, hell, just turn off unit collision entirely. Or make units all move ultra fast, or get rid of all map choke points? All of these things would improve how efficient pathing is.

Pathing efficiency isn't the goal itself, it's part of the game designer's toolbox. Plenty of things are intentionally pathing-inefficient -- like big, slow units -- as part of the game's design and balance.

The lead designer of Stormgate, which is the closest thing we're gonna have to StarCraft 3 probably, has talked about SC2's pathing efficiency problem himself. Granted, it doesn't sound like he wants StarCraft 1-style pathing, he just wants to compensate for the efficiency in other ways, like maybe making unit hitboxes bigger.

Great insights. The gaming experience and pathfinding relationship can also be expanded to game AI in general. I found Lars Liden's slides specifically mentioning "intelligence! = fun". So, for a better gaming experience, it is better to dumb down the AI.

https://www.slideshare.net/_Lars_/ai-talk

Well, it really depends on the game and user. Personally I'd love smarter AI in some of my games, for some enemies (I realize that I'd probably hate smart AI in other games).

Like, StarCraft skirmish AI is pretty basic, having a smarter opponent to practice against would be nice. As it stands, I can practice a build vs the AI just to get the timings right, but otherwise the AI is mostly useless because it sucks too much compared to a regular player.

If you look at basic zergling vs zealot combat in SC1 vs SC2 you'll see what I'm saying. In SC2 they almost move like liquid and they don't form accidental choke points. The fight is over much faster and simply rewards the beefier army.

https://youtu.be/xPC8aIl7nek https://youtu.be/mLr1co1f5-c

For example in Warcraft 3, which is much smaller scale with 10 - 20 units per player at any time, players constantly look for ways to block each other. While the fight is happening you might sneak a unit around just to block their path when they escape. This wouldn't be possible if the pathfinding was better at steering.

https://youtu.be/2GCpjpIuSII

In terms of terrain maybe land/sea/air in Red Alert 2?

The more tactical RTS like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 use the terrain a lot, but in small scale ways like moving from cover to cover and building to building. The terrain is very complex there.

The new Dune Spice Wars only has desert but it has some interesting ideas about movement. It's a much slower RTS and has been described as real time 4X.

Spring-Recoil engine games like Zero-K and BAR have not only various unit types affected differently by slopes and water depth, some maps even has terrain like ice that makes some units faster on it ! (Also Zero-K has terraforming.)

You are only talking here about a very specific sub-genre of RTS. BAR and Zero-K have quite good pathfinding, and (especially Zero-K) advanced unit AI, and also much more powerful user commands available, yet they still manage to have unit micromanagement matter a lot.

Tangent about bad pathfinding:

Another game with really frustrating is (still pre-release) Age of Darkness.

Units typically get slaughtered if they traverse uncleared regions of the map. But you can't tell them not to, and you can't even see ahead of time what pathfinding will choose for them.

It's amazing how much cognitive load is added by having to prevent units from doing super-stupid stuff.

This stuff has been solved by middlewares like Unity for ages.

> bad

What I really wanna get into: the cognitive dissonance of being a programmer and an AoEII ultra at the same time.

Game mechanics do have a certain objective truth to them. They are also pieces of software, they follow a lot of the same rules as Gmail and Instagram and whatever. As a matter of objective reality: when your game does not aspire to specifically be clunky - this distinction is sometimes called "QWOP" - it seems valid to say, okay, this pathfinding is the word you used. I have the wisdom to not use that word you used in this forum to describe something people feel ultra about. But it is true.

People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of gameplay.

I wonder how to harness the resources poured into something like 0AD to make "Better AoEII" or "Better AoM." I'm not sure how often that question is asked and how it is answered. That's why this cognitive dissonance matters.

Your phrasing and word choice is very peculiar. It’s a bit difficult to follow what you’re saying to me. For example, you say you’re an AoEII ultra. Is this an ultra fan? Or ultra what?

> People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of gameplay.

If I had to rephrase this section based on my understanding, I would interpret it to say something like: Often, people are bothered by bugs and other issues that happen in commonly-used apps like Facebook or YouTube, but when these bugs manifest in video games, it’s viewed as part of the character of the game. For example, the micromanagement of villagers that’s required due to bad pathfinding in AoE II (to prevent them from running under turrets and such).

Is that correct? Any ideas why your phrasing would seem so foreign to me? I’m very curious why.

> Is this an ultra fan?

Yes

> you say you’re an AoEII ultra

No. I can't say how I really feel about the game.

> it’s viewed as part of the character of the game

Yes.

> I’m very curious why.

People feel very, very strongly about their nostalgic retro childhood fun cozy times like playing AoEII. They're ultras, right? It's like talking about football. It can be perilous.

I see where you're coming from, but (in my opinion) you're over indexing on the issue. If someone gets bent because you said some video game has bad pathfinding, so what? Seems like their problem. It isn't a mean spirited or unreasonable thing to say.

But if pathfinding is too smart, then it becomes hard to micro-control the units, see StarCraft 2 vs StarCraft Brood War.

N.B: Age of Darkness is an inherently player-vs-environment game (Survival RTS… it is sorta like They are Billions if you’ve played that). So, I think super high action-per-minute PVP style gameplay is not really the goal.

StarCraft is a great example because we can talk about it now without the threat of ultras. Like its audience has gone away, people only feel nostalgia for it but they don't really play it anymore. It's easier to talk about the objectively bad and clunky things about it.

I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft, is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game harder in ways that were not fun. Which is too bad, because it was a phenomenally engineered RTS engine (starting with WC3) that brought us many other game formats in its custom scenarios.

Compare to Supreme Commander, which had very sophisticated pathfinding and in my memory more interesting micro. Compare to all MOBA formats, where if you're going to have WC3/SC style micro, you might as well focus on micro of one unit. There were many ideas that came after StarCraft that are in an important way, objectively better.

It has a lot of other clunk. The way you have to manage resource gathering. The unit building queues and how spending occurs. The spellcasting. The selections. It has so much legacy.

StarCraft 2 had to cater to a very specific eSports skill base that probably led to it going into the same level of obscurity as EverQuest: Gen X people still have strong nostalgic feelings for it, but they don't play EVE Online, they're not 20 anymore with oodles of time and no responsibilities, they don't want hard permadeath single instance experiences. They want something much gentler but they still feel very positively about like, this one clunky thing they may have mastered a long time ago when their brain power was so much more plastic.

Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a technical engineering point of view? In my opinion, no. So besides the existence of an ultra audience, I don't think there's a good reason to celebrate the crappy pathfinding anymore.

StarCraft is a lot more fun to watch than SupCom though.

I couldn't disagree more, Forged Alliance Forever or Beyond All Reason are infinitely more interesting to watch if you don't care about obnoxious micro skills.

BAR (and BA, Zero-K...) have about as much micro than SC1/2 though, it's SupCom1 that is really the outlier here...

I find it really hard to believe that AoE2 "ultras" exist. It's a pretty small community with mainly older players, just like StarCraft. Many people still play SC:BW and SC2, there are still tournaments and hardcore fans that cheer for their favourite players.

> I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft, is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game harder in ways that were not fun.

That's you're opinion. I think the exact opposite. If those games didn't have the micro opportunities they did, they would have died long ago and would have been forgotten in history like most other RTS games out there.

I find RTS games without micro extremely boring. I Micro makes it exciting because it's not immediately obvious who will a win a fight. You can choose to gamble and be slightly greedier in your economy and rely on winning a fight that you should lose. It also forces you to constantly choose between where your focus should be. Do you focus on the fight or your economy? And when there are multiple fronts to a fight it gets even crazier. I think those things are core to the RTS gerne.

> Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a technical engineering point of view?

I mean you are comparing games from different eras. But I think AoE2 is extremely worthy from a technical engineering point of view. You have so many ranged units shooting many projectiles, each with it's own collision detection back in '99. It's nothing short of a work of art.

AoE2 doesn't have much in terms of simulated ballistics (and units pushed around by impacts !) though, compared to Total Annihilation (and derived) games.

What’s an “ultra”?

I think he is repurposing the term from the Euro football scene where it refers to hardcore radical fans ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras )

In this context, not the best term, due to it also being a shorthand for Ultralisks ! :p

Mostly a nitpick, but StarCraft has little to do with the WC3 3D engine, and is a full 4 years older than WC3. Perhaps you meant WC2?

Also, the SC2 and even SC communities dwarf Supreme Commander, EverQuest, or EVE Online. There are still worldwide SC2 tournaments, sometimes televized, with price pools in the millions (well, until this year, when Blizzard dumped the prizes significantly). SC is still quite popular at least in South Korea.

This sort of RTS sub-genre (of which They Are Billions is the only other example I can think of) probably needs different unit AI than a typical RTS.

In case anyone is not familiar with these games, you are building a base, the map begins unexplored and is populated by monsters which will attack you in waves, so it is a sort of inherently player-vs-environment, very asymmetrical game.

Because the enemies are basically expendable and your units aren’t, your units should… try not to sacrifice themselves so much. They should avoid the fog-of-war areas unless explicitly instructed to go there. Melee units should flee when injured. Ranged units should stay out of melee range. Total War unit AI (where ranged units typically skirmish by default) might be a better starting point than Age of Empires style unit AI.

Although, it is a niche within a niche, so I guess I’ll take what I can get, haha.

Sounds a lot like Factorio. Quite different and you generally don't do things involving pathfinding in the first place; so not sure if it scratches your itch.

I did enjoy Factorio (and also Mindustry) a bit. For Factorio a lot of the fun seems to be in really optimizing the heck out of your factory, which I didn’t really enjoy as much, so it was only good for like one or two playthroughs for me. One or two fun playthroughs though, no complaints.

It is sort of funny, I do enjoy optimizing, but in a game I prefer setups where you have to kinda intuitively optimize by your gut rather than really tweak things. The 50-80% efficiency range, rather than hitting those 80-99% targets, so to speak.

There are a few playstyles, both modded and unmodded, that will allow for more of the "we're under attack!" panic and less optimisation of your factory.

Ramping up the number of biters in an unmodded world (deathworld) can be really fun.

Modpacks like Warptorio 2 add a very different dynamic but has that same frantic feel.

I’ll have to check that out, the adding to the time pressure would, I think, probably be a big improvement.

You don't need to get in 80%+ optimization in the slightest in factorio. The jankiest factory in the normal difficulty settings in the end will get there just fine.

But in vanilla yeah, if you don't enjoy optimization for sake of optimization and building bigger there is not that much more to do once you played it once or twice.

There are few more directed mod/modpack experiences to play, but they generally also add complexity to the build and not everyone enjoy figuring out complex builds for that.

Some games have issue in moving groups of units, with some units moving slowly while others move faster, end up reaching the destination at different times, and get easily taken out by enemy units one by one, unless the player painstakingly babysits the entire movement to ensure same time of arrival.

I'd say a key element for me was that it is multi-OS (even installs on Google supported ChromeOS Linux Developer Mode), does not require any store account, does not require crazy powerful external GPUs and still supports LAN only mode.

This meant I could setup a LAN party by dusting off a collection of semi-retired Windows, MacOS and Chrome machines.

I’d love to configure a PXE boot server so you could have a LAN party in a box.

People play showdown because of easy UX for netplay on both official, fan formats or old formats. It’s not about “untainted pokemon”, and more about “build a team without grinding and have an online matchmaking with different formats”. So, that one in particular is a bad example.

> It’s not about “untainted pokemon”

It's not about original ideas in Pokemon either.

How not so? I don’t get what you mean. Supports every new thing and has new formats. Only one gimmick was disabled in the devs/smogon formats on the previous gen as it did work very well for those (but was great in the official ones) So I would really like to know what you mean by it not about the new.

I think they're trying to say that it's not trying to progress Pokémon, to make something new or better out of it.

I don't have any opinions on this (I'm not really into Pokémon).

> it's not trying to progress Pokémon, to make something new or better out of it.

But it is addressing one of its "failings": No decent online PvP play. And it's only about that.

While the 2 latest "main" games addressed this, showdown it's still important, because building a team ingame needs some time commitment (catching/breeding the mons and training them) while on a simulator its "instant". Also, there are more formats to play.

Yes, showdown doesn't try to make something new/better out of pokemon, but that misses the point. Their examples were about picking something popular and making something like that, either by the community/opensource or commercially

Showdown is not that, showdown is not alternative,a rehash or competitor to a main pokemon game, showdown is better seen as a tool rather than a game, it's where you go to validate/test your team, it's where you play some alternative format that the game itself doesn't care. So it obviously doesn't try to move game design forward, if it changed things it would no longer be where people would bring their pokemon teams online. "bringing pokemon forward" is gamefreak/nintendo job, showdown is just a tool for competitive players, and it's not a tool job to make something new or better than the original game.

It's just a glorified "online matchmaker" why is it even being lumped together?

About players, some parents are Linux users and we loved help our children develop computer skills and also play games with them in their Linux computers. In my case Gcompris for learning and pre-10 years old and TuxCart, TotalAnhiliation and 0ad when older. In 0ad case, is both gaming and learning, about civilizations and history. We played together first and networking later, which helped learn some networking skills like looking his computer IP.

I remember discovering 0AD from it being installable from package managers in various distros maybe 12-13 years ago.

I think the path finding was one of the crucial elements that lead to porting AoE1 to the AoE2 engine (which was released just this month DLC Return of Rome). So there are some cases when it produces weird behavior, but in general I like it.

Nevertheless, I admire 0AD especially for the consistent progress and commitment to the game. It has been a while since I played it the last time. Might be a good occasion to start it again!

I found it years back looking for games in the repo. The only two were tux racer, and 0ad. Been playing it off and on ever since(not so much tux racer).

Pretty sure Genshin Impact was in development as early as 2016, before Breath of the Wild was released, although after it was announced.

Contrary to popular belief, Nintendo are not the only people that make open world games...

> Who wants to play competitive Wikipedia? Nearly a million people a day do.

I wonder how many of these are bots developed by three-letter agencies trying to build their own AI.

I recently started playing StarCraft 2. Amazing game, can’t believe it is free.

I paid full price for it on release. Now they are making money with the 2nd and 3rd part of the campaign (sadly, both inferior), and also probably from the coop commanders DLCs.

(Most players never touch competitive multiplayer, but quite a lot might try playing with friends vs the AI ?)

Thank you for clarifying, yes I should have mentioned that the multiplayer / vs AI is free, but there's paid content as well (single player campaigns, unit/building skins, etc).

To me the writing of the Single Player campaigns was grating ("bout time we kick this revolution into overdrive", rawr!) but the gameplay was good, so no hard complains. I liked the unit variety on the Protoss and Zerg campaigns compared to the WoL "buy upgrades and mercenaries" approach.

> Old reigns supreme

Advancement in computing capabilities over the last 15 years seem to have gone almost exclusively to graphics and duration. We get bigger and bigger games with better and better visuals, but fundamentally the same few gameplay modes.

Maybe it's just perspective, compressing the "glorious past" of 80s/90s games (breaking all sorts of barriers and inventing new ways of gaming with every other title) over a shorter timeframe in my memory, while the last decades feel long and bare. I probably sound like a boomer talking about rock'n'roll.

If you are looking at innovation, it's not the big budget games you should look at.

Spring(-Recoil) engine and games like Zero-K have tried a LOT of things over the years, and I am going to take a guess and assume that so did 0AD ?

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