Are old-school RTSes a dying breed?

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

One editorialist on DigitalBattle.com think so.

Remember back in the day, when RTS games were about base building and resource management as much as they were about combat? Remember classics like Total Annihilation, arguably the greatest RTS game ever created? And Age Of Empires? Sadly, RTS games are moving away from the tried and tested formula to a more arcade style gameplay in hopes of gaining a wider audience.

Recent developments
Lately, RTS games have been moving away from the classic gameplay style of gathering resources, building a base and buildings units, to just “getting units” and storming into combat. Recently, in order to appeal to a wider range of audience, RTS games have moved away from their base to an almost arcade style gameplay, where the player isn’t required to posses great management or multitasking skills, only requirement is to know a bit of tactic.

The classic concept of managing resources, building bases and building armies is slowly being phased out, with games like Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes, and Command & Conquer 4. Even Supreme Commander 2 has taken the same route and moved away from its core into a more simplified style. Granted, those games aren’t bad games by any stretch, and they do tend to appeal to a wider variety of gamers.

Another reason for this is that RTS games are now being ported to consoles as well, and it’s nearly impossible to have anything but a simplified, arcade-style gameplay with the limited controls and lack of a mouse and keyboard.

What it was like before
However, by simplifying the gameplay, the developers cut off what was once some of the best part of RTS games, and what kept hard core players spending hours on a single skirmish mission, building up huge bases, massive armies and combing the map for every bit of resources. There was a certain pride hard core RTS gamers had when they hit the unit limit in Age of Empires, or lead an assault on the enemy with hundreds of units in Rise of Nations, with carefully planned companies and groups.

Naturally, not everyone has that much time to spend on a single mission, but it’s that exact challenge that made it so rewarding — multitasking between several bases on the map, deciding whether to spend your resources on research or build new units, try and anticipate where the enemy will strike and place your defenses there and so on. It required sheer gamer intelligence to pull it off. Today? Take Dawn Of War 2 for instance: you get a handful of units and go hunting across the map. Simple, to the point, but certainly not as rewarding. You might as well play a squad based FPS game instead.

What the future holds
Hopefully we’ll at least have a few games which focus on the classic RTS experience, but sadly, it doesn’t look like that. Some of the best franchises that did that are either gone or they’ve turned into arcade-style games, where they’re less about “Real Time Strategy” and more about “Read Time Tactics”.

Age Of Empires and Rise Of Nations are dead. Command & Conquer 4 and Supreme Commander 2 have moved in the arcade direction, and their successors will most likely move further in that direction. And new franchises like Tom Clancy’s EndWar and the upcoming RUSE focus on the same gameplay style as well.

One tiny hope on the horizon is StarCraft 2, and we can only hope it’ll stick to its roots more than the other franchises have over the past few years.

Although I grew up playing RTSes like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations, I must admit that I've grown a little tired of the kind of gameplay the writer pines for. The whole "build up your base, gather your resources, and train your units one by one" formula gets tedious after a while. I'd definitely like to see some kind of innovation that addresses this tedium problem.

[Sinewmire]

That's because most RTS games are aping Dawn of War's "Space Marines don't chop trees" style, rather than aping Command And Conquor, or Starcraft.

I'm sure someone will soon say something like "What happened to the days when Strategy Game forces were entirely identical except for colour? I don't know about you, but I yearn for the days when skill was determined by player ability, not by relying on inter-race balance or some flashy new team! Down with originality and innovation, say I! Bring Back Warcraft 1!"

I like the sort of "Base Building" that accompanies the Total War games, as it's not terribly intuitative to go into battle without your armoury or barracks already built.

[Samuel]

and what kept hard core players spending hours on a single skirmish mission, building up huge bases, massive armies and combing the map for every bit of resources. There was a certain pride hard core RTS gamers had when they hit the unit limit in Age of Empires, or lead an assault on the enemy with hundreds of units in Rise of Nations, with carefully planned companies and groups.

You can get massive size in the Total War series, Homeworld, or a bunch of other games. Only the need to put in large amounts of time is gone, which is generally considered a good thing as it interferes with actually playing.

multitasking between several bases on the map, deciding whether to spend your resources on research or build new units, try and anticipate where the enemy will strike and place your defenses there and so on. It required sheer gamer intelligence to pull it off. Today? Take Dawn Of War 2 for instance: you get a handful of units and go hunting across the map. Simple, to the point, but certainly not as rewarding. You might as well play a squad based FPS game instead.

He is an idiot. Dawn of war 2 has all of those features- only the campaign is like that.

[Covenant]

The author is an idiot because none of the post-C&C2 era of games had these dynamics competitively. The gameplay he's wishing for is "Sit in your base, vacuum up gold, build more units" until that first huge conflict. The idea of building a base slowly, and then massive army doesn't look like Starcraft's online play, nor C&C's for any recent memory. Basically, he's playing poorly, in a manner that would get him beat if it were against someone with a modicum of skill, and now he's mad you can't do that anymore.

Basebuilding was huge not because it was fun, but because nearly no combat ever occurred between forces outside of a base. Therefore, basebuilding made things less dull, and also let you make friendly terrain more favorable without things like morale, supply lines, support powers... etc. It's not that basebuilding is gone, it's that old-school basebuilding is more or less irrelevent with combat that occurs across an entire battlefield. But it was not Sim Outpost, the basebuilding was little more than laying down square boxes that make men and other square boxes that give you more points to make men.

Army Amassing was popular because of the above situation. Since your opponent would be building static defenses to keep you from killing him, killing him will require lots and lots of men so you can smash through his defenses. These huge armies didn't have any brains to them--there weren't formations, or command auras or even real synergy. But it was not the battle of the bulge, since nearly all of these games stressed the value of raids and little commando insertions, or engineer rushes. You only ended up with huge bases and big dumb land armies if you and your opponent agreed "No Rush 15 min, okay?"

Resource Management is probably the biggest thing that pisses me off. It's just points, does it matter if it's gotten by sending miners to a gold mine, SCVs to a mineral patch, harvested from a field by Tiberium collectors, or beamed out of the sky by solar power plants? Of course not, since this jackanape loved Total Annihilation. TA's metal miners were essentially Control Points before there were Control Points. Steady stream of resources, no harvesters or miners to raid, just a structure to claim ownership and a spot on the map. So it's clear that he doesn't care about the metagame aspect of raiding a miner. In that case, there's nothing about resource management in his favorite "best game ever" that distinguishes it from other area control games, except that his preferred model doesn't force him to defend territory outside his base's walls.

[Uraniun235]

I don't know what this guy's problem is, you can play No Rush Fortress Megaduels with your friends on Supreme Commander Forged Alliance just fine and it looks gorgeous.

[montypython]

I really despise base-building RTS's with a passion, my whole reason for playing was for the battles, which is why I still play World in Conflict occasionally (just jump straight into battle). If I want to play something that requires building up forces before battle I'd play Civilization or Hearts of Iron for that matter.

[adam_grif]

I maintain that Company of Heroes is the greatest RTS game ever made. It's like the perfect balance of everything I love. Just enough basebuilding to keep it interesting, not so much to be building sprawling sim cities. Units are tough enough to not die instantly, but weak enough so that you don't have armies pounding single units of infantry for 30 seconds and them not going down (looking at you, Dawn of War), and you have to retreat them. Resource management is interesting without being frustrating or too complex. Builder units can do some reasonable fighting, and maintain their usefulness all the way through the game. Tanks and Infantry are both useful, without stupid shit like tank guns scoring direct hits on infantry and only doing a tiny bit of damage to them (C&C). Artillery that's good for something other than sieging aforementioned ridiculous sim cities. Needing to constantly expand and capture territory while defending your own, making turtling a totally suicidal strategy. Forcing players to expand early and get into fights early on, but preventing people from Base rushing until later tiers.

If the article is asking whether RTS circa 1999 is dead, it is. But new RTS was the product of slow refinement from old RTS, and it is, generally speaking, trimming the fat while keeping the meat. If you want to play Starcraft, play Starcraft.

[Stark]

By 'old school RTS' he apparently means 'shit RTS' or 'RTS I played with my mates in highschool and I can no longer learn new ideas'. Even in the 90s this crap was old hat, and you can still play fort battles TA style like U says.

I love how so many RTS players would clearly rather play Settlers or Simcity, and they're generally the same ones who think RTS is a strategy genre.

[Darmalus]

One tiny hope on the horizon is StarCraft 2, and we can only hope it’ll stick to its roots more than the other franchises have over the past few years.

From what I have played, StarCraft 2 isn't just "sticking to it's roots", the game play was frozen in the 90s and has only been given a new coat of paint, and I don't mean that in a good way.

[defanatic]

The unit limit in Age of Empires was 40!

I feel a little bad toeing the party line here, but I also think asking the player to do book-keeping, resource micromanagement, or the same thing every single game (build the same big base every time) is bad game design.

He also mentioned "hard core RTS players". I'm not sure he means people who are good at RTSes, or people who just play them a lot and do comp-stomps. I dunno. With my design, I try to simplify economy as much as possible. :/

[Teleros]

The unit limit in Age of Empires was 40!

50 .

Anyway... whilst I agree with the broad point I think he's trying to make (ie his point about RT Strategy vs RT Tactics games), I don't think it's all bad. I definitely feel that some of the broader stategic elements are missing from more modern games (in this sense, C&C4's "pick a sub-faction" thing is a nice idea, as you can recover from a bad choice mid-battle)... but let's not pretend that zerg rushing with AoE 1 walking tanks Centurions was strategy either (much as I loved my them & and priests shouting "I owe you" or whatever it was to convert the enemy ). Of course for real strategy gaming I can always get out my copies of Alpha Centauri, Civ3, Civ4 and Master of Orion 2 .

[Stark]

Yeah, following build orders against braindead AI = strategy.

The idea that 'RT Strategy' (ie, has stupid bases) and 'RT Tactics' (ie, has no stupid bases) are some firm division is retarded. The only shame is that for all the attempts almost nobody ever did bases in an interesting way; it's fucking sad that Starcraft had a more interesting base variation than 90% of later games.

The idea that 'bases are dead oh noez' is so clearly false it's not funny; the whole ignorant screed is based on a lie. All I have to do is think of all the people explaining to me that World in Conflict can't have strategy by definition because there are no bases and laugh.

EDIT - actually, rather than piss and moan about how OH NOEZ NO BASEZZ maybe bloggers should talk about something that's actually happening - the return of hard counters. This is something that actual factual makes games more simplistic and its' quite widespread among not just games but players - the sense that hard counters are 'good design' even if they lead to stupid crap.

[PainRack]

To be honest, I would love base building..... in a turn based game. Hell, I argue that MoO, GalCiv, Civilization and such were nothing more than base building games.

Old school RTS such as C&C, Starcraft and TA had bases, but it wasn't a base building game, well, except for single player. I loved the time when I systematically built sandbags and shit up to the Temple of Nod.

Multiplayer was a "take out the ConYard" rush. Later reiterations from Starcraft, C&C 2 were just early rushes vs late game tier spam.

[Teleros]

Hell, I argue that MoO, GalCiv, Civilization and such were nothing more than base building games.

True, but there is at least real strategy involved in doing that (ignore the dumb AI for a moment ).

Multiplayer was a "take out the ConYard" rush. Later reiterations from Starcraft, C&C 2 were just early rushes vs late game tier spam.

It'd be interesting to see how even a game like Starcraft or one of the C&C titles would change if you did the following:

1. Multiplied the map size a few times.
2. Made early rushes really damned hard to pull off successfully (eg heavily defended war factories or what-have-you).
3. Line of sight with fog of war, and no means of trivialising the fog of war.
4. Less emphasis on "rock / paper / scissors" combat models (eg like in CoH, where the tanks actually have sodding machine guns in addition to their main cannons, or infantry can lob sticky bombs at vehicles).

Thoughts?

[Stark]

So you mean... make a CnC game TOTALLY DIFFERENT?

Amusingly most RTS designers have missed that hard counters are bad for units, but ok for roles, especially in team-based games. Hell, done as interestingly as Starcraft promised for the genre, even base-building is interesting team-based.

[Artemas]

Hey Stark. Speaking of shitty strategy games, have you seen some of the newer ads for Evony? Maybe it's time to update the sig man.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for a real-time stategy game that actually takes place on the strategic (or operational) level. Shit like supply lines, unit cohesion, morale (TW being the exception), and other c&c type shit. RUSE sorta had the right idea, but just ended up way too simplistic.

[Stark]

Ruse is clearly designed for competive multi, so its design is understandable.

Of course, an old 90s game did supply, morale, squad-based but was ignored... everyone has heard that story before. Seriously, the whole 'strategy genre' isn't driven by strategy AT ALL; its driven by base-building, or micro, or noob stomping or rushes. Games with actual tactical or strategic elements are often ignored; CoH is probably the only RTS that gets the attention it deserves (even though I suck at it).

[Teleros]

So you mean... make a CnC game TOTALLY DIFFERENT?

Well, yes. I picked C&C & Starcraft as two examples of very popular RTS games that don't have much in the way of real strategy to them, as much as I enjoy them. But simply the ability to have major flanking attacks on bases that you can't effectively counter just by rushing units from the front lines (ie, because the map is so big) would be a big change in a lot of these games.

[Stark]

So why didn't you say 'make a game with xyz features and brand it'?

It's pretty sad that early game rushes have been solved in RTS games for a decade, but everyone seems to thing it's insoluble. Hell, why does 'have base micro' mean 'start with nothing' anyway? There was a whole thread about prebuild, so Starcraft + prebuild = no rushes.

[adam_grif]

There was a whole thread about prebuild, so Starcraft + prebuild = no rushes.

You can do the CoH thing, and have prebuilt MG emplacements and some natural barriers, but no actual producion structures built for you.

[Stark]

You mean like people said in that thread?

But let's face it; it appears the majority of RTS players want superficially different but functionally identical factions, huge sprawling bases that aren't really very flexible but require player attention with defences that aren't really worth shit, symmetrical maps and plain old 'kill the other guy rar' victory conditions. That's why the RTS genre is so fucking boring.

Ruse might have all kinds of problems but at least it's DIFFERENT.

[weemadando]

Stark, did you ever play Warrior Kings? It was one of those RTS that dared to try something different (deeper economy, real supply lines and some early efforts at formations etc).

Lots of micro, but not the clicks per minute micro, instead it was the "carefully consider where your supply line will run so as to minimise exposure and maximise profits all while managing a battle elsewhere micro.

I've never met another person who played it, so would be intrigued to hear thoughts.

[Stark]

Remember Battle Realm? With the crop burning and the village econ and the huge UI and tiny view window?

[weemadando]

Wasn't that also the one with the ying/yang/karma system that could make it really difficult to finish off an all but done enemy?

[Stark]

Yeah, the yin-yang thing was pretty horrid. It's unplayable now because you can't zoom out, rotate the camera, the viewport is less than half the screen, etc... but the way it make villagers your most important resource (and the ability to shut down resourcing pretty easy with fire attacks on rice crops) made it fast-paced but interesting.

EDIT AHA

The guy that made it rain on your rice basically meant you won, though; but the undead guys were pretty interesting.