Zero-k: A libre sci-fi RTS game, with an economy based on metal and energy
zero-k.info
zero-k.info
We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP.
Eventually I got into creating new units for the game. You had to animate them with a C-like language, and I was trying to teach myself C at the time so that was part of my programming journey.
The 'Swedish Yankspankers' were a clan that had a channel on the IRC server, and my recollection, which may be wrong, is that they started building an app, 'TAreplay' that we could use to record and rewatch tournament games. People used to pass the exe around - not very secure, but those were the times!
It's amazing to me that those players hacking little apps together for themselves, have spawned a lineage of RTS engines and games that are still going all this time later.
A small but incredible example of hacker culture.
I myself learned how to code writing .bos scripts and hanging out at Annihilated, TAU, and #gnug
If you want to see some of the stuff still possible and being done in the TA engine, check out TAUniverse.com
They even created a Coop-Campaign and a completely new faction.
Supreme Commander's budget was about $50M USD (circa the mid-2000s), and Mavor was lead engineer on the project.
Beyond All Reason is arguably more similar to Total Annihilation than Planetary Annihilation.
By that same token, Sanctuary is the closest thing to a complete remake of Supreme Commander. Granted, Forged Alliance Forever has had such incredible work put in by the community that it comes close, but it's ultimately stuck on the same engine.
Turns out Mavor has a new company now, and I'm elated to hear someone's finally combining Factorio with a decent RTS component:
> IA is a unique blend of genres: deep factory building combined with real-time strategy action.
(Most, but not all of these are shared with other Spring-Recoil games.)
Or mines that were actually useful. I played a game were my opponent got super paranoid after running into the first mine field.
Good times :-)
BAR units are generally similar to TA units. It captures the feel of "what TA would be if it was full 3D and high resolution". Of course, balance is different, but TA balance was very odd.
ZeroK seems to have terrain modification mechanics which is not present in TA.
In BAR terrain can be damaged by big explosions, but it's very limited.
FWIW I never played ZeroK but based on their intro video BAR seems to be closer to TA visually.
BAR used to stand for "Balanced Annihilation Reloaded" - so it's sticking very close to TA, while Zero-K has been experimenting much more freely with what is possible in the Spring/Recoil engine.
It's also probably a factor that BAR has spent a decade in development hell (under a different team than now ?), so it just didn't have the velocity to fork away sufficiently, even if it wanted to.
The first indicator of that popped up, when valve ended greenlight, and just greenlit all the things. Which propped Evolution RTS upon the steam front page for half a day, flooding the original lobby system and showing how inadequat the whole ecosystem was for that. The original Evo dev Forb learned from the whole mess after he returned from his day job.
Zero-k then learned the lessons, developed a ingui lobby, started the whole matchmaking and better server deployment, detached from the whole "one central server" thing of the spring eco system.
BAR did some graphical overhaul, with Floris, Beherith, Sprung and the whole original crew supported by new faces like Teifion and on and on. They optimized the Spring engine into a new version- more tailored to BARs needs and reworked alot of the stuff.
Its gpl open source, so the project order and who invented what is pretty flowy.. everybody copies from everybody, one progress is everyones progress..
I disagreed about «BAR is more of a unique game (for better or worse), while ZeroK is much closer to an HD remake of Total Annihilation.»
P.S.: You might also be mistaken about EvoRTS' Steam release being specifically behind the motivation of Zero-K splitting up, since according to lead ZK dev the second at least partially predates the first ?
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/236480#236480
> 2012(ish): Zero-K splits off to its own infrastructure after disagreement with infrastructure developers. From my perspective they were very stubborn regarding extending the protocol to allow for new stuff (Eg matchmacking, more advanced planetwars) and would make sudden changes that broke our autohosts.
> 2013-2014: Evolution RTS is greenlit on Steam and released in 2014. I don't think Steam was on my radar at the time, but now it looked like a possibility. Looking back at the dates we actually put up a greenlight campaign five days after the Evolution RTS release.
(Lobby interface issues being another thing, but then IIRC EvoRTS had already tried to improve on this before release, though not successfully enough ?)
I don't know how it compares to Zero-K.
But it perfectly captures the spirit of the original Total Annihilation.
This lineage of open-source games started from Total Annihilation, which had a lot of mods that ran into engine limitations. This resulted in a bunch of enterprising open-sourced devs to develop a compatible engine, without those limitations. This engine (Spring Engine) has then evolved into something much more impressive and capable. Zero-K was implemented on this engine. Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine, which is a fairly recent for of Spring.
What started out as a viewer, escalated into a 106.0 version long engine, providing a war that consumes planets, each side with only one final wish - Total Annhilation at Zero-k, beyond all reason.
Naw, the community comes and goes ebbs and flows. Its mostly on recoil discord, some are still on the irc server, the rest is on the BAR discord.
Presuming that the main code contributions also come from the Swedish scene I'm not entirely surprised that this happened. It sort of fits my impression of the gamer/programmer culture here (although I can't quite express why)
Surprisingly, that was only one metal band and every other metal band hates them for it. I have been told the average metal fan freaking loves churches and their acoustics. They might not like The Church, but they love churches.
Overall fantastic experience, really impressive for FOSS
(Without commercial levels of advertising, a lot of Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander / RTS fans had never heard of them, word of mouth can only go so far... at least until Twitch streamers became super-popular ?)
Zero-K allows 16 vs 16 battles (and it works!), each player controls a relatively smaller number of units. In Beyond All Reason, there are 8 v 8 battles and each player controls a larger number of units, maybe 200 or so at the peak of battle. (There are some strong, but predictable AIs for both games.)
Zero-K has more units that are less realistic and have more variety. BAR has more realistic units and less variety. BAR has tanks, Zero-K has flying tanks that can also turn invisible (this is a made up example, but illustrates the idea).
Zero-K has a limited economy, you have to control land to to generate income, and fighting has more influence on who wins. In BAR, the economy is more exponential, and at high tech levels controlling land doesn't matter, you can generate a huge income in a tiny corner of the map and win because your economy is exponentially stronger than anything your opponents have.
That sounds like poor RTS design.
Popcap is one of the simplest and most effective "anti-snowballing" mechanisms. Once you're "maxed out", you cannot get further ahead - you must attack and trade to build new stuff. If you can just keep making stuff without ever being forced to trade, whoever gets ahead first, eventually wins.
Supply also serves as a comeback mechanic - you were even, but took one bad fight, so you can immediately spend all your money to get a new army. Meanwhile your opponent must construct additional pylons before they can get much further ahead - they grow stronger slower than you regrow the lost limbs.
Total Annihilation and its ilk balance that by having the commander unit, which is game-over if lost. There are a lot of really underhanded tactics one can employ to sneak a win here. (My favorite is picking up the enemy commander with a transport and then scuttling the transport...) Plus the large army size means the player likely has exploitable gaps in their defenses as their attention is split so many more ways.
I guess what I really don't like in RTSs is turtling. If I wanted to play SimCity, I'd be playing SimCity.
Turtling lets me build up my base and economy and nurture a curbstomping offense after which I can overwhelm my opponents. If I wanted to play a tactical RTS there are a million options out there that limit you with horse-blinders
It's easy to be too optimistic when balancing a game. It's easy to imagine "oh, this unit will be nearly indestructible, and I can watch it destroy my opponents and their bases". But what really happens is "my opponent destroyed me, I tried everything I could but his unit was nearly indestructible".
(This is why we need strong AI for RTS games. First, we get strong AI, then we find ways of dumbing it down in fun ways. In the end we have a creative AI that offers a few surprises, but is content to let the human player win 95% of the time.)
> there's not much you can do; is that fun?
since when is losing supposed to be fun? I don't want to give my opponent chances at a reversal. I want to win, reliably and assuredly.
I don't know what the 'indestructible' unit has to do with any of this, even the most impenetrable fortress has weaknesses. You have to declaw a turtle slowly and methodically, or just straight up overwhelm their defensive lines. A turtling player cannot be everywhere at once, they have weaknesses.
> since when is losing supposed to be fun? I don't want to give my opponent chances at a reversal. I want to win, reliably and assuredly.
This comment explains why this theoretical opponent of yours doesn't exist. You want to play against another human who you can defeat reliably, and who has no fun being defeated. Why would anyone ever want to be your opponent? It's not fun for them, and they have little chance of winning. This is why, as you observed, there's many tactical RTS games that people are playing, but nobody plays games like you imagine.
the fact that any popular game attracts a bunch of sweaty gamers that want to optimize every little thing is not related to the viability of turtling.
http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Detriment
http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Flea
Not sure why you would expect that turtling (porc(upine)ing) would work in a competitive game with 2 teams, the opponnents will just take the rest of the map and then crush you using these extra resources. And a lower population cap would make it easier to turtle, not harder, so I'm kind of confused as to how it worked in your example ?
"Playing Sim City" is a common insult thrown at team mates BTW in TA-derived games (too).
That's exactly the issue, when playing in a random team. Matchmaking can be a real dice roll in a small playerbase (which SC2 4v4 is). Sometimes I get teammates 500MMR below me, where the metagame is almost always turtling to T3 behind infinite static defense.
Being the only aggressive player in a game with 7 turtles feels extremely unrewarding. Sure I can go expand first into 80+ workers before making a single army unit. I just think games like this suck.
Even if you execute your initial greed correctly, you're still vulnerable because they've been building T3 units, you have more places to defend, and a bigger part of your popcap is taken by the workers. Maybe it would actually be good here if SC2 didn't have a popcap (so that you continue to capitalize on your initial greed for the rest of the game), but that would make Zerg incredibly broken - they make more stuff (including workers) faster than any other faction.
> And a lower population cap would make it easier to turtle, not harder, so I'm kind of confused as to how it worked in your example ?
Lower popcap means you don't get to continue building an even bigger, more unbeatable army behind a wall of turrets or cannons. Static defense doesn't really help against armies (only deters harassment), because siege weapons. Sitting on a maxed army is throwing away a temporary advantage. It incentivizes to attack first, because even if the opponent is maxed too, any time you take an even fight near an enemy base, you get to deal a little bit of damage to their eco or production (the win condition is to destroy all enemy structures).
SC2 recently rotated the entire team map pool; many maps now have very few bases and a very short rush distance. Some people still try to turtle, but it's difficult as attacking early is so much stronger. The average quality of the games has IMHO gone way up.
I just personally hate to play against turtles ;)
That said, BAR is trying to balance the game to reduce spam currently. Having an endless stream of trash units charging ahead is great for scouting, even if they don't do much damage.
I guess because economy still requires territory control, and a bigger territory is harder to defend ?
Also it's probably not a coincidence that these games have a lot of units dealing area damage, and most importantly, units cannot shoot through each other, and when they try it can often end in friendly fire, which makes snowballing weaker ?
Anyway, desperate situations where the underdog eventually manages to turn the tide are not uncommon. I even recently seen it happen in an AI vs AI match !
Zero-K solves the problems solved by popcap in other ways. Income tracks map control, and controlling more of the map is hard, so players that are ahead don't have the freedom to sit back and build up an overwhelming army. Armies are fighting or jockeying for position throughout the game and army size and composition keeps escalating. Defenders advantage shifts to attackers advantage as things escalate, so people can't just sit in their base. The overall effect is that, while there is a pop cap at the technical level, it is 10x higher than the unit counts that even the largest battles tend to equilibrate to.
Talking about the lack of popcap is a bit backwards in a way. There are just so many subtle things that mean the question of popcap never has to come up. Maps are pretty open, units don't fire through each other, AoE exists... the list goes on. A better question might be why games with a popcap couldn't be designed away from the failure mode of people sitting in their base making larger and larger armies. Having to put a hard cap on army sizes, that people regularly reach, is sort of a drastic measure.
On supply, I'd say what you said about supply is pretty important. But the aspect of it you bring up isn't limited to popcap. Eg C&C games have power plants that act as construction supply. Rebuilding your base is easier the second time around, as long as you keep your power plants. There is something similar in Zero-K with energy. Metal comes from points around the map while energy can be built in your base, and both resources are used for construction. When you take more metal spots you also need more energy, and the energy is nowhere near as vulnerable. That is the main supply-like comeback mechanic, which works since part of your economy is always vulnerable. Reclaiming wrecks for metal is another comeback mechanic.
Comebacks in high-level SC2 games don't usually happen as you say. More often, the losing party relies on their opponent overlooking some peculiar tactic like using DTs (for those who are not familiar with SC: invisible units that can only be detected with specific means). Otherwise a bad engagement very often means defeat in short/mid/long term.
Finally, ZK does have very long range static weapons that can hardly be countered (unless you destroy them). If the opponent "camps" in their base, you just start to build one that will either vaporize their army or buildings, or slowly wear them down. But really, camping is usually newbie-level strategy.
Zero-K went a different route. They simplified the economy (metal cost = energy cost) but added a whole lot of mechanics like overdrive grids and made every unit unique. There is a lot of variety with mind-control, jumpjets, shields, unit-throwers, self-replicators, teleports, terraforming, etc.
Zero-K has been on Steam for a few years, I think BAR is working towards it. They are both good worthwhile games, they share some common elements, but they are both worth trying in their own right.
Was the BAR peewee-launching gun inspired by Zero-K ?
https://supcom2.fandom.com/wiki/Noah_Experimental_Unit_Canno...
But if I'm not mistaken Zero-K's pulling/pushing beam weapons predate SupCom2 (combined with terraformed ramps you get a unit cannon, though making the unit survive on landing is an additional challenge), though Lobsters came out after :
I definitely would recommend although can have a steeper learning curve than others.
Of course it’s just a link to an older game. I guess the days of the RTS really are behind us. :(
Your complaint would have more merit if the many innovations of Spring-Recoil engine games had been adopted more widely in the genre, but even Supreme Commander 1 came short (except for polish maybe).
You cannot expect RTS to become one of the biggest genres again, but it's still quite lively (yes, even outside of SC2 and AoE2) :
RTS is fun, actually (and you can learn it): a video essay - CloudCuckooCountry :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl4myN8q_KM
A list of upcoming(ish) RTSes :
The Most Anticipated RTS Games in 2023 & 2024... SO MANY! - GamerZakh :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKujSK4FRWk
(Notably, including BAR, another Spring-Recoil game.)
(Yes, most of them will suck and fail, such is life.)
That seems the direction RTS is heading in general, hybridizing with other genres.
Update: They have taken my money. There are few groups that have kept my trust as well as these folks. I know they'll deliver.
It reminded me of an old game : Mechanized Assault & Exploration (M.A.X.) :
https://www.gog.com/en/game/m_a_x_m_a_x_2
Gameplay : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TdjQZz0lFY (stretched, sigh...)
So you need to use surveyor units to scan for underground resources (metal, fuel, gold), build mines that extract them, but then also have to transport them (also ammo) to the place where they will be used (buildings, constructors, units) either by using specialized units or via connectors (think Factorio's overground pipes).
It's quite complex, so it's turn based (either simultaneous real time, or sequential turns). M.A.X.2 also experimented with real time (as well as 3D map, inspired by Total Annihilation ?) but sadly it's basically a rushed mess.
Annoyingly this brilliant game has been plagued for decades by memory issues :
https://www.gog.com/forum/m_a_x_series/changing_dos_extender...
But it looks like we finally have the solution as a "port" !!
https://klei1984.github.io/max/
Seems to be working as advised (the only thing not working yet would be network multiplayer and some of the various non-critical bugs already present in the original game).
As wheelerof4te suggests, I'd keep my eyes on Stormgate. It's being developed by the ex-Blizzard team that worked on SC2 and WC3. More big names involved than I care to drop. <https://playstormgate.com/>, <https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012510/Stormgate/>
ZeroSpace came out of the blue a couple months ago with pre-alpha gameplay videos, kickstarter, tournaments, etc. They have several SC2 pros and community figures involved in development (Scarlett, CatZ, PiG, GiantGrant, Maguro). Their kickstarter just raised over half a million dollars. <https://www.playzerospace.com/>, <https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/>.
There's also Immortal, which has been in development for a longer while. The team has previously built some great SC2 mods, and the pre-alpha got some attention from SC2 pros. <https://sunspeargames.com/>
The big "problem" with RTS is that the genre in general is not very accessible. SC1 is clunky (1998), SC2 is extremely lethal (splash damage vs glass cannons), team modes like 2v2 are not considered seriously (people want to play with their friends), getting good at the game requires learning all the rock-paper-scissors of dozens of units per faction that make Pokemon type charts pale in comparison. The 1v1 ladder is designed to give you an average 50% winrate, hence it demands that you consistently play at your best or deal emotionally with a giant lose streak.
The team making Stormgate is aware of these (and many other) problems, and takes a lot of input from the community on Reddit. It's gonna boil down to execution, but I have faith that they can make a fun game that's gonna be appealing to a much broader crowd than the hardcore RTS fans.
One important economy management aspect is matching your metal income with at least as much energy income and buildpower so you can actually spend it (excess energy is turned into a bit of extra metal). And then yes, you should spend it, but the factories support queues (including automatic re-queueing), and you can of course shift-queue buildings.
Another important aspect is that dead units leave behind metal scraps. This can boost your metal income substantially (e.g. if a failed enemy attack leads to a bunch of dead units near your base).
In short, balancing metal income (/territory expansion) with energy income and buildpower is the core economy management loop. But because units have pretty capable AI (e.g. auto-kite when applicable), you can devote a lot more of your attention to this aspect, as well as higher-level decision making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0lYXap5rbM
Still, there are just too many differences from both SC1 and 2. Starting with a higher importance being placed on team games.
For a similar, yet different gameplay, see Beyond All Reason.
Though in WC3 (and SC1/SC2) IMHO this was enabled by a very easy to use «map» editor, combined with a tremendous popularity of the base game.
So if even, in theory, you can do even more (libre software), in practice what you see is not as ebulliently diverse.
You can also compare it to the Spring lobby games - Zero-K has improved on the presentation, but something has been lost by not being able to easily fork the game yourself, build on it, and then just put up whatever the resulting mess is, start a game, and it being listed in the list of games :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8by5C6dJDA
Including «Com Shooter» FPS using the built-in «possess unit and use FPS controls» showcased here : https://youtu.be/MpKqQxTURik?t=107
Which shows another tension in game development : more recent Spring-Recoil games disable that feature outright, because of the balance headaches it causes, and potential modders can't use what they are not aware exists !
But modding scene does exist in ZK : http://zero-k.info/Mods
(In addition to the game setup itself being typically WAY more open than what you find in other RTS.)
What you're usually after in these games are huge battles on massive worlds with thousands of explosions leaving craters and debris everywhere.
You can also reclaim metal from dead units and structures.
SpringRTS is actually older than the first Supreme Commander game.
The most straightforward method to compile the engine reliably I'd say is with the docker container: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring/wiki/SpringRTS-B...
Edit: spelling,links
> linux port is riddled with bugs
That's... interesting... as many of the engine and game devs also play on linux (and a considerable part of the playerbase)
If you're looking for the codebase Zero-K and most previously spring mods are based upon you should look at: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring
Just tried BAR, and the build templates would be really handy.
Edit: clarity
I've toyed with Total Annihilation, but the graphics were too old, even for Brood War fan such as myself.
Looks like the big advantage of this is that the unit AI is supposed to be quite clever rather than really stupid at how it carries out the tasks you give it...
We will see, I've just downloaded the game. Hopefully, the AI is better than Blizzard's 98's Brood War brain-dead computer :)
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...
Speaking of which, you might be in luck, this just happened this weekend, and in my on-and-off experience with Spring games, I don't remember seeing AI exhibition matches very often compared to regular human competitions :
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1981220857
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36943
P.S.: Don't confuse unit AI (that even players have direct access to) with general AI.
Now the issue is that it doesn't have the unit caps that SC2 does, and the number of players (now up to 16vs16 in a normal game, sometimes even 32vs32, while in 2009 8vs8 would have been the max), map sizes, and number of units (typically up to ~0.5k in 2006 compared to topping up at ~5k-10k today) only kept growing.
So if you want to play big team games, and have a much worse CPU than the average player, you might not have the best time in the endgame.
I will first start versus AI, then take it from there. Not really a competitive player anymore. Playing Brood War kinda makes you dislike multiplayer RTS after a while, haha.
All games : http://zero-k.info/Battles
All games with 8 players (though not only 4vs4) : http://zero-k.info/Battles?Title=&Map=&PlayersFrom=8&Players...
Processor: 2.0 GHz dual core CPU with SSE (Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent)
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 512 MB graphics card with OpenGL 3 support (GeForce 8800 or equivalent)
Storage: 6 GB available space
Intel i5 11th gen, Intel Iris UHD graphics, 16GB RAM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfVdH02RUQ8&list=PLi9_tXwdXO...
Don't expect an extraordinary story though, it's much more focused on being a series of puzzles showcasing various game features.
There's also a campaign that introduces units progressively. I'd recommend to start there.
I feel like such a pedantic nerd asking this, but the debate over people vs. sentient robots was the whole reason for the war!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IP1mp3cgRo
(I'm not exactly sure what the current official lore is - at some point it has been added to the campaign though, but also of note : both TA faction have been compressed into one and then split into 11+1+1 factories for gameplay reasons.)
But a birds’ eye view of a somewhat sci fi RTS? So far removed from real life and practical considerations that it doesn’t even blip the radar for me.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...US instigated wars aren't evil enough for you?
Sorry, let's hope for a quick and just peace then.
> About > > Open source RTS game running on the Spring engine
In the place where code is present, things pertaining to code are present. You don't need to throw technical details to potential players at your front page.