I played D1 when it came out and really enjoyed it but I didn’t play that much. I think I beat it once or twice.
I skipped D2 release. At the time I was engrossed in MMOs and the idea of playing a 640x480 game was looool… I eventually started playing it after I joined Iron Lore for research purposes but by then, LoD was out, which made it a lot more playable and I ended up really getting into it. I played hundreds of hours and beat the game on hardcore hell with a couple chars. Playing so long gave me insight into how some of what appeared to be design flaws on the surface actually added to longevity and long-term enjoyment of the game. I don’t know if they were intentional or not but I tried to emulate some of that in GD. I’d found some similar things to be true with AoE, although, in talking to the creators, it was apparent the “flaws” that actually made the game better, were not intentional there haha…
RTS has really been my favorite genre though, since the days of Dune 2. I played a lot of RPGs also and I’ve played a few other ARPGs but I have never really gotten into any as much as D2 (or GD of course). I think for me, ARPG is a tricky formula to get just right.
I guess I haven’t liked that many RTS games either. In more recent years, it’s basically just AoE / AoE II, WC3 and SC / SC2. I actually didn’t really even play that much AoE II - I figured out to break the mp game balance with mass persian TCs right after release and then sort of moved on. Now AoE feels really slow and clunky to me, trying to go back to it.
I have no idea what this RTS project is, (like everyone else) but I do ask for one thing. If there is a single player part to the game, please have tactical pause. I just can’t play RTS games without pause. Be a shame not to be able to buy and play the game.
Multiplayer I understand no pause. Single player, me pausing shouldn’t effect anyone else’s game. Heck even put it in as an option. So many RTS games I wanted to buy and didn’t because it didn’t have this feature in single player.
i think one of the issues with RTSs and why ther isnt a huge following is the full game can be pretty complex. It would be interesting for low ranks in multiplayer to be very accessible with features unlocking as your rank up. more upgrade paths/more units ect
Most RTS have a pause in single and multi-player but while paused, you can’t issue any commands or really do anything.
This “tactical pause” thing some people are hyped on, I assume is the ability to issue orders while paused.
I am sort of philosophically against it as an RTS purist but, its not for me… so part of me says, its fine for SP, let people do what they want… but a potential issue with this sort of thing is, you introduce a mechanic that provides an obvious player advantage, it can make even more experienced players feel like they have to use it, otherwise they’re not playing their best.
Maybe we could add it just for lower difficulties or something, I dunno… we’ll have to figure it out when we get further along.
Oh right, that is very much true. Then the only RTS that I can think of that has a tactical pause is supreme commander (I believe). It’s been a long time since I played a good RTS besides AoE2/SC2, so I don’t remember too well. The RTS market is pretty empty after all…
RTS does have a decently large following, it’s just not large enough that big publishers are very interested. They want to fund something that could sell 30m copies. The next Call of Duty, GTA, Skyrim, Overwatch, etc… Based on historical data, a top selling RTS is probably going to land in the 5-10m copies range (now sure if any aside from the Age and Craft series have hit there) and many others end up with 1-3m sales or less. For us, >1m sales is great. For EA or Actiblizzard that’s suck. So that’s a big part of the reason you don’t see a lot of RTS.
Also a lot of what has come out in the last 10-15 years has been… not good. When a crappy RTS comes out and has shit sales, publishers go “oh see, RTS is a bad investment.” When you pitch to publishers you can’t say the reason your RTS is going to succeed where other’s failed is just better execution - which is our entire strategy lol. They want to hear about some special marketing gimmick that will set it apart - but that’s exactly what makes some RTS’s suck.
Low ranks in mp tend to self-regulate difficulty because you’re playing against other people who don’t really know what they’re doing (baring smurfing… but maybe we can find a way to limit that with more intelligent match-making.
The other thing though is most people really don’t play mp in RTS. I think a bigger issue with RTS is people don’t like to invest a bunch of time building up a base, econ, army, then get smashed. Not only does the loss for your time investment feel bad but in RTS, people can feel bad about being out-skilled.
I think back to playing games in the office and prior game companies and people tended to gravitate toward shooters because even the worst player could occasionally get lucky, take out the best player, and feel like a hero (even though they were like 1 for 9000). Getting crushed over and over in an RTS is less fun for lower skill players.
Not sure what we can really do about that but I guess it’s worth thinking about it. At the end of the day though, I think if we just ship a really solid RTS with an appealing, fun campaign, we’ll do well enough. Anything beyond that is icing.
Stellaris has this feature, and we are using this in SP as well as in MP. Even the base game has so many features, that there are times when you get snowed under in messages, and you need some time to plough through them while also issuing other commands. And it only gets worse with the DLCs.
I’d prefer to slow down the game in these moments, but in SP it’s just more convenient to hit space and pause the game than to click a tiny button a few times.
Add it as accessibility option. In MP this could be selected if you want a more chill atmosphere.
I don’t mind getting smashed and try again, but my defeat needs to be satisfactory. I’d also like to have enough information to understand why I lost, so that I can develop better strategies myself. As opposed to watch / read up strategy guides and end up with the feeling others impose their playstyle onto me.
Instead of being removed from the game when you are defeated, the game could put you into a guerilla mode, so that you have a chance to recover, while the powerful parties have to use different strategies to defeat you for good.
I guess you have to handle two audiences: story mode and competitive players. I assume the challenge is to build up the former group through the campaign, so that they can hold their ground long enough in MP to stay invested. Provided they have any interest in MP gaming.
I can’t emphasise how important this is. RTSs in general live and die by their clarity IMO. Though I wasn’t there to witness the downfall of Grey Goo firsthand (I got into the game when it was already dead) the lack of clarity there was pretty glaring.
When you play SC2, every unit has a role. When an opponent is rolling you with heavy armor, you know you need Marauders/Immortals to counter them. The game is pretty clear about what works and doesn’t work against what. AoE2 does a considerably worse job of that because it’s so old. There are so many hidden bonuses that units get, it’s kinda baffling. Still, the rock-paper-scissors system is there if you have the patience to learn it, and a lot of it makes sense retroactively if you play other games from the series (Age of Mythology in particular).
Even after comparing the stats of units side by side, I couldn’t tell you why you should build Commandos over Stalkers or Tridents over Revolvers in Grey Goo. The unit variety was pretty low and even in an environment with such a limited number of options the game did a poor job explaining which option is good for what. Except for AA, where you had essentially one or two units that can even shoot up and if you built those you hard-countered enemy air out of the game.
Of course it didn’t help that the game promised revolutionary AI, yet the AI seemed completely inept at playing the Goo faction and hardly posed a challenge until you cranked the difficulty to the point where the AI massively cheats with build times and unit hp. So the compstomp crowd really had nothing to work with there, whereas SC2 offered Co-op, Archon mode and solid AI opponents for competitive and non-competitive folk.
Not providing the tools to learn and improve through unit role clarity and hampering practice through incompetent AI is a death sentence.
That smells dangerously like dragging out the game for no real benefit. If you’re defeated, you lost your army, your production, your resource collection. If there’s a built-in way to come back from that, it devalues the macro the winning player was doing because apparently that’s not what matters. You shouldn’t be able to win with no base and resource collection in a resource-oriented base-building RTS. Hence, extending the game after your defeat might as well be equivalent to floating your buildings into the corner, scattering your villagers all over the map to build houses or parking your Mother Goo on a mountaintop.
This is just a spontaneous idea I had - as an example for a negative feedback loop, which provides weaker parties with an advantage, so that they do not totally fall behind. What you obviously need to avoid is that a session becomes an infinite loop of a party being defeated and recovering again. Things would have to escalate at a certain stage. Then again such a game might be more about luck and less about skill, which is something competitive players probably frown upon.
But I am not a competitive player. In board games I prefer those, where everybody is entertained until the end, even if you play against each other. Those games have usually a fixed end, whereas you expect that an RTS game ends through military victory. Maybe my ideas are not feasible, but right now I just in the mood to toy with them.
Here is another one: Instead of having just that one event late in the game, there could be events throughout the game, which evaluate how players are doing and apply different effects, so that weaker players can catch up. These effects should not just be modifiers for their economy, but different traits or units, so that the players have different things to work with.
My hope is that you can play with a wider range of players this way. Also the game can have more varied, random starting conditions, which are balanced out throughout the session.
Stellaris is a 4X strategy game though, those have so much going on, once you conquer multiple territories, they are practically designed to require a tactical pause.
I suppose there is somewhat of a spectrum from more streamlined RTS to 4X and it sounds like maybe this new Company of Heroes game that includes tactical pause, is a bit further toward the 4X end of the spectrum. I could see that being the case because even in the original CoH, I sometimes felt out of control because I had so many units in different places, doing different things, that all needed to be specially controlled. Part of that stems from the game being based on control points and units all having various abilities, being able to take cover, even having the direction of attack matter in some cases as with tanks.
In a more traditional, streamlined RTS like SC2, you typically don’t have your army split into more than 2-3 groups and really, at lower levels in mp, people just kind of make one big army go try to smash their opponent with it. It’s only at higher level that people typically start to employ 2-pronged attacks.
I think this may actually be counter to what most people want in competitive mp. Really, if someone is a weaker player, you want to win earlier and be able to move on to a better match-up. Nothing is more frustrating than the games in SC2 where a person has basically lost in the first 8m due to being crippled by a rush that didn’t quite finish them or being contained and unable to expand but, because they may have certain types of base defenses, it is too risky for you to charge in and try to finish it, so you have to play it out for another 10m, even though they have basically no hope of winning. (looking at you terrans)…
There are often opportunities though, to make stunning come-backs in SC2, if you are crippled early on but then proceed to out-play your opponent / capitalize on a couple of their bad decisions to get back in the game. I do enjoy that.
I honestly lost interest in Grey Goo as soon as I read the title. I dunno, may be superficial but it just sounds goofy and I feel like it makes marketing an up-hill battle, when people can’t even glean from the title that it’s a strategy game of any kind. Unless you’re Blizzard, probably helps to throw in a “war, empires, armies” etc to the title haha.
Then the visuals just don’t look that compelling or relatable. I think a lot of people were turned off before they even got to the mechanics.
I honestly had a tough time initially figuring out what all the unit relationships were in SC2. Sometimes they were counter to what I expected, although once you learn the system and read the unit stats, it is all consistent and makes sense. What I really like to see is the type of unit relationships that are visually intuitive, based on function. Like colossi counter marines - totally makes sense, since colossi do area-damage and marines are small low-hp units that can bunch up.
