Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
beyondallreason.info
beyondallreason.info
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
True top-tier players are very flexible and love high-risk tactics like flying your commander to enemy base. They also happy to "go next" if something went wrong.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
What was your goal with this post, really?
Unless you're the highest score player in the lobby you don't get to reserve a role. And the back line roles are pretty crucial and can lose the game for the team. They're not going to have a good time in anything that isn't a very noob or a vs AI lobby with the way they currently understand and approach the game. Salty veterans and meta players notwithstanding.
If people really liked playing those roles, why am I always forced to play them? Shouldn’t everyone else be jumping to grab them? Lol
Front is the majority of the gameplay in BAR. Playing tech and getting to scale with no sweaty micro is nice, and a reasonably skilled and essential role, so it usually gets picked up by one of the top 4 on your team if doing the traditional lobby settings. Sea and air are the same popularity as front, perhaps less IMO.
Can I ask if you watched any tutorial videos or spectated many higher OS lobbies? The spectate function is excellent, and the two high OS lobbies will have spectators willing to answer questions about gameplay that made front micro against sweaties a lot less frustrating. It helped me a lot.
A lot of the conflict in BAR comes from people having different expectations about the multiplayer game experience.
I'm not going to deny BAR has salty veterans and a meta. It's a high complexity 16 player game that can go for over an hour. It doesn't really have a ranked autoqueue and there's going to be different expectations about gameplay in different lobbies. While the community and the devs can help with this, new users should be proactive in finding the right lobby or finding a way to play that's fun for the rest of the people in the lobby.
Arguing with an established lobby over role picks or meta isn't worthwhile. aetherspawn can make our find a lobby with random role pick setting, named 'friendly learning noob lobby' and they're set. I see these reasonably often. Complaining about the competative meta players in the their lobbies isn't really productive.
I’m 100% aware that most high OS players on Front are using interface mods to manage their units and send back hurt units automatically to get healed.
In fact, he’s not even that much better than me. We still do 2v2 lobbies together, and we have good and bad games and carry each other.
I know what other people are doing. I’ve been playing for over a year (200 games?), and BA on Spring for years before that (500 games, I think). I’m not naive or particularly bad at the game. It’s just not how I want to play, and when I play those positions I’m at a disadvantage because I know other players are “legal cheating”.
And don’t gaslight me lol, every single game I could see the other players falling back their individual units in big crowds 1 hit before death, and I’m telling my friend about it and he’s like “oh yeah everyone above OS 20 uses this mod, which is basically a cheat”. That’s kind of when I decided to stop playing.
Also, the community wasn’t like this in Spring BA! That community was the nicest ever despite the game being basically identical, engine and all. This is a BAR issue.
Uhhhh no? This is just micro and people do that manually. No mods are used. In tournaments etc. the widget that disallows such mods is always active. Also this widget is commonly active in the high OS lobbies so that's not possible either.
AND high OS streamers like HellsHound do this where you can clearly see them clicking the units. I'd be curious who exactly you think is doing this. I've never seen this widget used in high os play.
Step 1 - Raid and harass nonstop in the early game, never fight fair engagements, abuse range, tax your opponent's attention. Ideally harass multiple players to mess up all of them. Greed behind this, it's not expensive to raid.
Step 2 - spam pulsars (Clyret's meta)
Front line players absolutely have the economy to go t2 on their own, and I like to prove this regularly. Paying tech is simply to speed up your t2 con (and everyone else’s) by ~30 seconds.
If you’re too busy to pay for a t2 con you’re even more too busy to build t2 mexes, so you don’t need one in the first place. (I usually overpay for my t2 con to speed it up even more)
Your units should not be meat grinding. Take battles you can win or back off to safety.
Static defences are more cost effective than mobile units - that gives you the freedom to invest in your t2 transition.
Finally, there’s lots of viable diversity even in the first few minutes of the game (even up to 50os). If it doesn’t seem that way, there’s an opportunity to try new things and figure them out.
T2s are so good this is an objectively good tradeoff. It's not about compensating the eco player (though that does happen by extension) its about getting your whole team faster T2 mexes.
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
And no, the issue isn't "I like to casually play with off-the-wall builds." The issue is "video games were a lot more fun when you encountered different types of opponents."
This is, of course, why game designers put so much work into supporting variations in builds, so obviously they agree too.
I didn't criticize anyone for being less skilled or anyone for being "in the wrong." I'm observing a game dynamic that makes games less variable than their designers clearly intend.
If you don't like it that's fine - I'm actually mostly in agreement with you. But I don't think it's necessarily a flaw in the game any more than chess openers are necessarily a flaw with chess (although chess960 does exist so clearly not everyone appreciates the typical openers).
I'm not saying people who do this are evil or bad. I'm saying they make games not fun, and it's not clear at all that this is solvable by the game designers except by vastly simplifying the games (e.g. getting rid of builds).
The fact they design for variance so much but then do not achieve variance is an empirical proof that it is a flaw in the design.
Yes, this is also a flaw with chess and is why chess is an extremely boring game. You can just ask someone their Elo and know who will win. As you get into higher Elos, variation in play style becomes less relevant, i.e. more homogenous. This makes the game boring.
It's not my job to lend airtime to other people's opinions on the matter. I'm sharing my opinion. You can share yours if you want.
I’ve been playing BAR since it was called Balanced Annihilation and it peaked at 1 concurrent 8v8 daily and there was little/no youtube presence to speak of. Meta pressure was still huge, to the point that trying (now-meta) then-off-meta strategies would have you mocked, called a troll, and sometimes kicked from the room. Pretty much everyone was a meta slave, except for a few (mostly top) players who had their own quirky meta-rejecting style.
I think there’s a global desire for comfort/safety which drives meta, and this works without an industry. Copying is safe, playing the same map endlessly is comfortable, and fun for fun’s sake is neither. And ego seems to have something to do with it too. Players with less ego seem to experiment more, change things up more, break the meta more.
This is like saying "scientific progress exists even without scientists talking to each other." It sure does, but collaboration and competition among them dramatically accelerates the discovery process.
Just go read the changelogs for any major game to see them trying to balance and rebalance and adjust and constantly failing to actually achieve what you describe.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
and also it's a lot harder
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
I vaguely remember some factoid about how Magnus could tell you from memory the 20 exact opening and 20 exact closing moves of every championship game since the dawn of time or some such whatever, and I was like "oh wow great for him but what a ridiculously stupid game to continue playing."
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
I personally can feel that analogy about you winning in a way that made others feel wronged or offended or have their models about the game broken, and see it connect to the theme of the thread. Which is that people forget and mistake games for serious ventures. I don't know when exactly that happened, if it was a bigger cultural shift, a shift in incentives and behavior by game producers, and also by players I suppose, and or if its just how adults shift in their playing of games as they grow in age.
Either way I think thats fun, and cool that you made it so far with a strategy like that! One of my favorite ways of playing games is uncovering strategies like that =)
You can even see it in tabletop roleplaying. Where you're "not supposed to meta-game" or "you can't have a lawful good lich (who's ultimate goal is to live long enough to save the town from evil collegues)" or "someone's got to play healer" or whatever. I always like subverting norms to see what happens. A group of clerics on a quest for an ancient tomb might need to convince/coerce some local muscle. The lawful good lich lets everyone play with themes of racism and prejudices. A group without a healer is kind of just playing on hard mode because there's no safety net.
But lots of groups won't go for those kinds of things, or will only allow them occasionally.
I just play for fun. I win by having fun. The score is somewhat irrelevant.
I found my groups and communities in odd, niche areas like mindfulness communities and men's groups therapy - maybe you relate? Are you also selective with groups and friends, and keep a smaller circle perhaps?
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
Sorry.
Do you think or have noticed that bad behavior is less likely to occur in smaller communities, or is simply swept under the rug or ignored due to some other dynamics at play?
With counter strike, I frequented one server and got to know the players on it a bit. You'd chat a bit after you died but, mostly, I'd just see the same names most of the time. There was usually an admin online and bad behavior (mostly not game related but social behavior) would be banned eventually.
In UO, there was a lot of player interaction where I would actually make friends and aquatintes with people I interacted with a lot. You end up building a community within a community of people you like to play with.
Both of those groups had different ways of filtering bad behavior but, I think the key difference is that they both had a pretty significant social interact component. CS seem semi-accidental but the post death chatting gave it a little something I never got from other fps games.
MMOs have really gone completely away from social gaming. They've streamlined so many processes that actual relationships aren't really that important.
I agree completely but I'd also add that those changes weren't always intentional, I think. MMO changes, in particular, have greatly stifled the social aspect of their games, not intentionally, but through adding convenience.
The advent of fast travel across the world (for cost), auction houses, mailing items at no or little cost, etc. In UO, you'd walk into a town and find a blacksmith to repair your gear because they were just pasting in an advertisement over and over. Each hub would have different prices based on who was on because travel wasn't painless. I remember making a deal with someone to buy ore I mined at a specific price. It was below market value but it took away the burden of finding buyers all the time so I did it. And just like that, a casual friendship was formed.
Now, an mmo without a global (or even cross server!) auction house would be unthinkable.
Giving into the conveniences that players ask for ruins the social aspect of the game. It's cool that I can jump online and queue for an instance with a bunch of randoms in 10 minutes but it's at the expense of me actually communicating with the people and that's a shame.
You blame gaming as a scapegoat and escape from real life. I'd like to differ. The reward-effort-sense of a regular job is getting worse and worse over time. Take a job for example - you take guides and classes and interviews worth an examination only to do low level stuff. Then you find out the humans governing you are incredibly flaky on their promises. It's just not as satisfying compared to finding a guide and getting your worth out of it.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
I think this is only true about games with too few variables (not really the case for MTG), or games where too many variables can be controlled (which various MTG formats suffer from).
Historically this has not been that big a deal for the RTS genre specifically. If you look at a game like SC2, the skillfloor to actually execute the meta builds is so high that player with good fundamentals can win with a suboptimal build, versus a player with a fully meta build executed imperfectly. Plus there are almost always cheese builds that only work if the opponent doesn't expect them - not a reliable source of wins, but sometimes all it takes to clutch a tournament series
When games regularly took 10–20 turns, luck evened out pretty well even if you were a bit slow out the gate. But now when your opponent is putting out threats on every single turn that need to be countered, there’s nearly zero room for unlucky draws. Given two opponents, the odds that both of them will have sufficiently equal luck to produce an interestingly competitive game has dropped below a threshold where the game is actually fun to play.
If you don’t play the meta, you get curb stomped. If you do play the meta, most of the time the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined (and obviously so) by the luck of both of your draws or by hard counter matchups. Only a handful of games ever feel like both sides have fighting chances.
Frankly, the majority of games these days could be decided in seconds by both sides revealing their opening hard and mutually agreeing on the outcome.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.
If you want to make the community better, delete all the rules that encourage players to gang up on other players for subjective reasons. These kinds of rules punish non-verbal players, who easily fall prey to verbal players (I’ll just call them bullies) who can use the rules as a justification basically to harass someone whilst getting branded a hero.
Also, a large majority of players have fun, even when they’re losing. Asking those players to accommodate a hyper-competitive few who want the tightest loop possible to winning and restarting is anti-fun. Both from the perspective of the person winning (I get so disappointed when I win front and they just surrender before I get to blow up their base) and from the perspective of the non-front players who are pressured to quit as soon as front is lost.
Won plenty of games in more casual lobbies (kind of rare) where the front player, after dying, was happy to just receive T2/3 units to control, and due to being able to focus on just controlling a few units, won the game.
Something im trying to lean into in my games is to ask the players who are voting no what their win condition or what they think they can make a go of is.
I think what ive said above could make me sound like one of the folks who "want the tightest possible loop to winning and restarting", so to add some nuance there, I think playing a game where the conclusion is foregone lacks agency, and in a game where one team eventually loses of course there is a blurry area where the team agrees that they are in fact never going to win, and then another question on whether they lie to play regardless. Because of the variation there, i like the vote, and i am in favor of coms around why someone wants to resign or stay.
I actually think it is up to players in an open loby system to communicate their intentions and reasons, and while it is true that it means people who spam coms trying to push folks around are possible, i would echo ptaqs sentiment to use that report function! and on a softer level, i really like the mute. if someone is too much, mute them and continue to enjoy your game.
is your statement related to BAR? what was your experience there? or we can assume its a low value general assumption as it looks like?
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
It's just a bad culture fit.
> It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic.
What's toxic to A can be good advice to B. With the person saying it being person C.
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).
Some new players want to learn in multiplayer and they want to play how they play and don't want to change that. That attitude simply doesn't work in an up-to-an-hour long technical 8v8 RTS game with experienced players.
The game could do a better job communicating this to players and try to direct them to appropriate lobbies (noob friendly or vs-AI), or ditch the lobby system for queues like more modern games, but I understood this after looking around, having a few chats with communicative players, and using the excellent game spectate function.
My experience from many years playing LoL and other competitive games is that it isn't. I can't count the number of times everyone wanted to surrender and then we clawed it back and won. Worse is that these are usually THE funnest of the matches since.
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
There's no "leagues", it's just lobbies you join, and you gain or loose OS (Elo) per battle. Party up with your friends, find a lobby that says it's for noobs, has some other nonsense in the title ("rotato" is for map rotation) or just seems to have a lot of low-OS players, and have fun. You can avoid or mute/ignore people. Or start your own lobby so you can be boss and set the tone in the title.
Spectate a full match or two before you just jump in, to sort of see the pacing. Announce to the team that you are noobs... But yeah, I think it's perfectly possible for old friends to have fun in BAR PvP ranked; you just ignore / tell off the flamers, or bounce to a nicer lobby. Most people are friendly if you are friendly. Heck sometimes the spectators jump into the player chat and banter while the battle rages.
And yes, the artillery still hits just as hard as it did before.
And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.
1. have at least played some pve, the "scenerios" are good for forcing you to learn a lot of the basics. if you literally dont know how to do basic interacting with the game there is nothing that the other players in the "noob" lobby can help you with. you will struggle they will struggle no one will have fun. pvp is just an objectively bad way to learn the game. don't even try to play pvp until you are at 2 or even 3 "chev". its a complex game with lots of mechanics, its going to take time to get the basics down. 2. watching replays/specing is helpful. so are some of the yt basics guides. find someone elses build and strategy and try to copy it. you can get to a pretty high os just by doing that. if you get beat bad in a round go watch your own replay. see what the other guy did. copy it next time. 3. remember that its an apm taxed kinda game, players will spend their apm trying to help you, but they wont have time to say things nicely. its not them trying to be mad or rude usually, they just dont have time to write you a novel. use the inbetween matches chat to ask for details. assume good intent on in game chat most of the time. 4. remember that os is literally just a number, it really doesn't mean anything. but finding lobbies with similar os to you helps. like even though there are lots of lobbies with like 30+os who will allow your 10-15 os noob self in its not the right match for you. find lobbies with like 25ish os cap. or no more than 10-15 os higher than your current rank. even better ones that are "unranked" but they seem more rare. 5. the rotato suggestion i saw on another thread is good but also the glitters/supreme with the consistent roles is also kinda nice. its much easier to find lobbies and follow replays and stuff, pick the same lane and watch how a few different people play it and copy what looks like it works as best you can.
New or casual players going into the wrong lobbies (non-noob 'All that glitters' lobbies for instance) are going to have a bad time.
Pretty much the only case I've seen where a person is kicked out is either griefing (deliberately playing bad) or refuse to listen to advice.
If you don't know basics there's plenty of opportunities to learn outside of a real match (spectator, bots, special lobbies, etc.) Learning basics during 8v8 match is just extremely disrespectful: you're wasting time of 15 people. I think you missed that part.
And JFYI generally high-level lobbies (20+ is) have less drama. So it's mostly beginners having drama between themselves
I've seen lot of new or learning players being disoriented from the start, trolled and attacked during games, even kickbanned because of their sub-optimal playing after being FORCED to play front because of rating and placing/slot login in BAR.
While personally having a strong RTS background and even very specific to TA and FaF (basically BAR) I had to went through the same high toxicity problems.
The solution has been to don't give up, self learn through pain and few friends tips all the gaming micro details expected by other players and hidden in pro player knowledge.
IMHO this happened mainly and simply due to the lack of a well structured and established learning path for new players, that instead of opening a lobby list and joining the heat to get instantly rammed by toxicity should have the possibility to obtain basic game positioning, build and control knowledge in an more appropriate and structured way, in game info guidance on start -> tutorial?
Regarding the point of the poor newbie have to go as front player and holding while the pros stay in the back, is still kinda normal since the back positions, as especially the tech ones, are more fundamental later in the game, meaning that having a newbie there would be much worse game wise. and dont forget this is valid only for skill draft mode, there are othe draft modes too, even if the skill one is used "99%" of the time.
I find totally off topic and even offensive talking about needing to have had hard skin to go through this toxicity, or referencing completely different game types and generalizing on community and human interaction problems. Again, a new player should have an "onboarding" path easily available and providing necessary basic logic to be able to start decently. And based on long and wide experience this seems to be mainly a BAR problem!
While I always heavily appreciate the effort behind such types of games/communities and respect it a lot (due to having done similarly in other game cases) I keep playing, learning and evolving with BAR because I miss TA and FaF BUT I often receive stress and leave after a series of bad toxic matches with "bad back taste" and this is sad for any game and community, abd should be reduced as much as possibly.
Sadly I also need to underline that I've personally seen unprofessional and sometimes also abusive or corrupt moderation from staff members, including abusive lobbies or manipulation behind player bans. Hence asking for player reports here doesn't seem decent neither, and a more legit and rock solid moderation could also help in compensating this type of issues.
And the last sad cherry (being an OSS enthusiast) is about having heard about strange forks and attribution from past work that leads now to publishers and money being involved, sad feeling but details would be needed before confirming any judgement.
I play it, I like it (because of TA and SupremeCommander Forged Alliance) but still (with all due respect for all the members behind and their effort) I often leave with a bitter or fishy back taste leftover by a generally hostile setup and community.
The frontline & surrender thing seems a bit more reasonable though. Chances of eco players turning around a broken front are basically nil
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.
Loved that game.
Hose vs. hose sounds epic af.
TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.
As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.
But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.
Great game!
It turned into a huge battle between the highest level of units and it was so much fun, but even then the AI wasn't extremely challenging.
some of my first experiences 'hacking' were modifying .ini files for command and conquer to make a new version of the game for my friends. it was... very unbalanced
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
Even the guy that let of steam after losing will probably give you tips on the next go round.
You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.
Also if you see me(same username) online and are starting out, feel free to reach out over the FAF chat system, for some simple coaching. Game gets a lot easier after some of the meta is learned. I can't garentee I'll even respond, but I would hate for someone to bounce off due to the learning curve.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Here's a cast of 40 vs 40 players by a former Star Craft 2 pro player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1a5dkjUq3o
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
Early skill curve can be rough. Recommend playing 8v8 noob lobbies pvp or against bots to learn.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winter_(American_player)
Thank you very much.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
Our Lore Guidelines state: “No LLM-generated content, but using LLMs for editing or brainstorming is acceptable.” I think the main AI-related tool we use is a NotebookLM with all lore for checking/referencing things
Edit: I'm curious what sections read as LLM generated?
> To take the Mantle is to bear responsibility for every decision, failure, and life affected by one’s authority, without deflection to subordinates, systems, or machines. By this philosophy, every rank and position is primarily a service, not splendour.
The juxtaposition of a sentence of two lists (one of which is a reversal/contrast to another), next to another sentence that has the reversal construction "a service, not splendour" triggered some LLM hypersensitivity that I probably should fine-tune. Also from the main Cortex article, "Where Armada builds for motion, Cortex builds for order." is also throwing me off, I'm a little too biased against that phrasing structure these days.
That all said, where's the lore for the Legion?
You can see the foundations for Legion Lore from planets in the Galaxy Map, but that's coming much later and involves the campaign.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.
and also at least in lobbies with noob in the name its pretty rare for people to be actively hostile to the low os ppl who at least know the basics. but you do have to remember that in the middle of a match nobody has time to type and tell you what to do politely.(its an apm heavy game). try to assume good intent, its not ppl being rude usually.
(In theory!)
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
The post below explains it in detail.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
If the code is open source, one can always build a client that works with the Creative Commons assets or community contributed ones.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.
Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.
Beyond All Reason – open-source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42826983 - Jan 2025 (4 comments)
Beyond All Reason – An Open Source RTS Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431216 - May 2024 (2 comments)
Beyond All Reason – Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39012392 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 - Aug 2021 (101 comments)
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
Planetary Annihilation scratches the itch and reminds me that I am very bad at strategy games whenever I think I might be smart. It's probably the most fair game I've played that I am completely awful at.
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...
I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.
Of course the people who play games want to gatekeep you guys, stop talking about empathy and disruption and learn some basic self-awareness.
Which is a fork of the Spring RTS engine: https://springrts.com/
- All the code is GPLv2, MIT and other open licenses.
- Some assets are CC-BY-SA but there are also a quite a bunch proprietary ones
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
Is this game it?
[ eye rolling emoji ]
Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
You have the Divas and the workhorses, the air or sea specialists, and the goofballs and communists