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Comment by cmcaleer | Hacker News Reader

This game actually holds a ton of significance for the RTS genre as a whole. A very typical view of the RTS genre is that you have peasants who harvest resources that you gave to protect, and the Dune RTS was a real progenitor in this.

But it was only like that because of the book. Were it not like that, maybe RTS as a genre would have gone down a different path. Maybe it's inevitable that it would have eventually gone down the path that it took eventually, but there's a good chance that it would have been unrecognisable. Maybe you'd have gotten resources by just harvesting your base's resources instead so opponents would have harassed you by harassing your buildings instead. Maybe there would have been different bonuses for map control other than better access to resources.

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To be clear the article isn't about Dune 2; it is about Emperor: Battle for Dune.

As someone else pointed out, this is a follow-up to Dune 2 which I believe you're thinking of.

Dune 1 laid the groundwork there though; initially it's a point-and-click adventure game of sorts, but later on in the game it changes and becomes a game of resource management / harvesting, army building and combat, as well as terraforming.

I could never wrap my head around the late game though; I believe the objective of the game is to make the world green again, but green areas don't produce spice. But the Emperor demands ever-increasing shipments of spice, if you don't meet the quota it's game over.

Mind you I was young when I played it so I probably didn't fully understand what was going on. I'll do a readup on it, it probably didn't age well / takes significant time to do a full playthrough.

edit: I didn't realise they released Dune 1 and 2 in the same year; this either means development on Dune 2 was already underway, or they built the engine and game within that one year. Unfathomable nowadays, even with the indie space and tooling being able to move fast.

re Dune 1 and 2 in same year: At some point Dune 1, developed by Cyro interactive, was officially cancelled and Westwood (so a totally different studio) got a crack at developing it. But it turned out Dune 1 kept on getting secret funding as well, and wasn't cancelled when the higher ups found out. So we were kind of lucky to get both of them.

It was two teams working in parallel the one from Virgin and the other from westwood. Both publishers had the "dune license".

The wiki page about dune 2 reveals more insight into the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II#Development

Funnily enough the developers of Dune 2 thought Dune 1 was cancelled and were suprised when the Cryo team released early.

From memory - spice fields aren't infinite. So you convert spent fields into greens.

And I think the game ends when you take out the Harkonnens anyway.

I always thought of The Settlers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_(1993_video_game) ) as the first RTS game. It was published in June 1993, so a few months later than Dune, but both games were in development at the same time, so maybe it was a case of multiple "inventors" coming up with the same idea? The Settlers was apparently influenced by "God Games" such as Populous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous_(video_game)) where the players has god-like powers (e.g. reshaping the landscape), but doesn't manipulate his "units" directly.

You also didn't _really_ manipulate units directly in the 'Settlers' games, did you?

Dawn of War is a good example of an RTS that deviates from the genetic ore mining paradigm.

Blood and Magic works like this:

1. There's one resource, mana.

2. You can create a basal golem from your forge for 40 mana.

3. An idle basal golem will slowly generate mana. For this to occur, the golem cannot be moving. It can be located anywhere, as long as it's idle.

4. To create a building, you move 4 basal golems onto a site and select the building you want.

5. To create a unit, you move the appropriate number of basal golems next to the right kind of building, pay the mana cost, and select the unit you want.

Doesn't this just shift having to protect the gathering unit to having to protect the resource itself? How does this result in a different player experience? Honest question, have not played the game and I am curious, since I am a bit bored with traditional RTS games.

> Doesn't this just shift having to protect the gathering unit to having to protect the resource itself?

I'm not really sure what this means; you still need to protect the unit, but you can put it anywhere you want. Mana exists in your inventory and doesn't need to be protected. Golems will fight back while under attack and therefore don't generate mana during that time, but they become productive again immediately when the attack is over.

This strikes me as fairly different from, say, Starcraft, where workers can only function within particular small areas and having them outside those areas deals severe economic damage in the form of opportunity costs. The fact that everything you ever build is made of golems mirrors the Zerg mechanics, though.

But I am not a big RTS person and I find the overall conceit of the genre pretty annoying. There's no such thing as a battle where technology levels change mid-battle. In an actual battle, if you have infantry and you want artillery, what you want doesn't matter because you have infantry and that's not going to change. In an actual military campaign, if you have infantry and you want artillery, you do that by getting artillery shipped to you. You can't make your own.

Civilization focuses on technological development and includes military engagements that can't stand up to even the friendliest critical analysis. RTSes go the other way; they focus on battles and include a rump technology mechanic that can't stand up to analysis. The problem here is that technological development is measured in decades, or longer, and battles are measured in hours. You can't have a working game that does both things.

Never played Blood and Magic, but it sounds like map control would be a lot less important. Most RTS games are all about expanding and controlling resources as fast as possible, so you can out produce your opponent.

Turtling might be more viable in this game?

I think that maybe it would've always been like that. History sort of leans on the peasant as resource base, ruler as strategist trope.

While Dune itself is like that, so is all of history.

For RTS it's a question of scope: How much of the resource base do you model? It could've been abstracted much further than this, and just grant resources passively based on territory held, or some other metric, and fully focus on battles. Instead we got a genre where resource collection is fairly involved, and a vulnerable spot for enemies to go after to cripple opponents early.

I don't think it was inevitable that the latter style of RTS would be dominant, and only a few outliers focus on simpler economic models, it very well could've been the other way around.

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