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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

It's so great to see the RTS genre getting love from the free software community. It's really been abandoned by commercial game development studios, much like point-and-click adventurers.

I can't wait to have some cross-platform Command and Conquer style games with my friends.

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One more good example is NetStorm 2 [0] that is a Unity3D-based remake of little-known, but still good classic RTS game NetStorm [1].

[0] http://netstorm2hq.com/page.php?7

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetStorm:_Islands_At_War

Wow! I used to love the original.. Nice balance of strategy, puzzle and sweaty palmed action

> It's really been abandoned by commercial game development studios

Not really. Starcraft 2 comes to mind. And not too long ago Supreme Commander. Wargame: European Escalation... and so on.

Not to mention the Total War series, though they are significantly different in some respects. I think the problem with traditional RTSes is that they are just too damn hard to play effectively for most people. As a former follower of StarCraft II, I remember vividly the discussions about ladder anxiety and even experienced it myself when playing. It's such an incredibly high-pressure game, I'm really not surprised people avoid playing it.

Total war is real time tactical plus turn based strategy,not really RTS.

Yeah, I'm aware of the difference. Personally, I think it's splitting hairs in an already extremely small genre (by number of titles, not players).

Just because the RTS genre is small doesn't mean that it makes sense to consider things that are very different part of the genre -- having construction/replenishment, strategic movement, etc., outside of the realtime game and part of the turn-based game makes Total War very different structurally from an RTS, and very different in its appeal.

Who gets to decide which structural features are allowed and which aren't allowed in the genre? I'm sorry but I've had this sort of argument with tons of other people regarding other genres. Personally, I don't think you can define strict rules for what should/shouldn't be in a game for it to be classified into a genre. Otherwise a genre would be nothing more than a list of games that never changes.

There are plenty of browser based RTS games in they don't have turns. However, total war is much closer to starcraft etc than any of these: http://www.mmobomb.com/browsergames/strategy

Planetary Annihilation did some amazing numbers on Kickstarter.

...thankfully, not totally abandoned: http://www.uberent.com/pa/

I am a backer but it is pretty much just a multiplayer game and what I loved about RTS games was the single player campaign experience

And it's an indie game.

I miss Tiberian Sun. That and Goldeneye were what got me stoked about gaming in the first place.

Interesting- for me, Tiberian Sun was a huge disappointment. Maybe I was alone in this.

My favourite C&C game was Tiberian Sun, so I'm really interested in seeing an official mod from OpenRA. However, It's not clear to me if it uses the proprietary Freeware game content (terrain, units, structures) of the original game. Can anyone please explain if that's covered by the GPLv3 as well? Thanks.

No, the original assets are definitely not covered by any open content or free software license. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/FAQ#is-that-legal

Probably not, I didn't like it too much. At least compared to Red Alert 1, which is my all time favourite.

And on that topic maybe I should plug redalert1.com, a still active community for the game, and others too.

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