a new(?) tidbit about the rts campaign, posted yesterday on the GD discord
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Oh no, I never liked the concept of heroes in RTS games. But some units having a build limit of 1 are fine.
Heroes is part of what made Age of Mythology and Warcraft great imo, loved those
*ofc also depends very much how they are handled by the devs
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That’s usually the case for hero units in the RTS games I played, so I’m not sure what you don’t like about the concept.
I like hero units if they aren’t the “main character”, ie everything in a mission revolves around them and if you lose them, you lose the mission. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
I think ideally a hero is a stronger but not too powerful unit with at least one unique ability that has a few promotion levels and can only be built once.
Each GD faction has a plethora of heroes, so I can imagine some kind of extensive hero pool that you can draw from and each time you build a hero unit of a specific archetype a name is randomly assigned. That way you still can have uniquely named heroes but nothing is lost when they die, you just draw another one from the pool.
Have you ever played Battle for Middle Earth? That is an excellent hero system in my opinion, they gain new mini skills (either passive or damage skills) while levelling. It’s like a taste of ARPG while playing an RTS.
Agreed, personally I feel it really detracted from Warcraft 3. Don’t get me wrong, it was cool to have a customisable hero leading your troops into battle. The issue was the game ended up revolving around the heroes so damn much, to the point where if you had a juiced hero they could equal a good portion of your opponent’s army on their own, and battles were decided by who managed to keep their hero alive. I mean watch a Grubby stream and see how much of the gameplay revolves just around picking the right hero as your starter, using them to farm some camps, get some gear on them and get them to their ultimate ASAP. I guess I’m grateful that the success of Warcraft’s heroes led to DotA, but I’m not sure it was that great for the RTS part of Warcraft.
It was very different in Age of Mythology, heroes were important in the campaign but in the normal game they were just counter units like any other. The Greek ones were pretty much the only memorable ones, cause in Mythical Age they all had special abilities to make them notable. For Egyptians they weren’t that big of a deal cause outside of their myth unit counter role, they were all supports (healers, scouts, economy boosters). For Norse they were just a generic mass producable unit with no special characteristics unless you were playing as Loki. Atlanteans just converted normal units to heroes.
Warcraft IMO went overboard on the hero front, AoM incorporated them as more or less normal units but by doing so they barely made them feel “heroic”. I’m not sure there’s a middle ground to be found where the match doesn’t entirely revolve around them while at the same time they don’t feel generic. I’d rather heroes are kept out except for the campaign.
Me thinks a good role for heroes in RTS is as aura support, tank, infiltrator, or decoy like distraction carnifex. They should not be the main damage dealer that can wipe armies in instant.
Tiberium Wars Commando is a good example of hero/infiltrator, they are still counterable by most basic infantry until reach max rank, and vehicle are resilient against them, but left alone they wipe your base of the map. Things like Marv is another good example of distraction Carnifex, it deals good damage and pretty tanky(no pun), but the main killer is the missile squad and predator that player create to support it.
Part of Warcraft over reliant on heroes is due to the unit cost much supplies, like 5 Grunt + Blademaster already takes a fifth of max population space. Although people can still play without heroes, then again hero like Blademaster can also tank, infiltrate, deal high damage, and as worker harassers.
In the end I think the basic things people would like to see in RTS is big army vs big army battle
Commando and other units from C&C are not heroes, but simply units with a build limit. That’s why I made a distinction in my previous post. These are fine. By heroes I meant those from WC3, who could equip items or learn new skills as if they entered a wrong game by mistake.
Which was hype and one of their best mechanics. An army of Hero Fanatics and Hero Destroyers was hilarious because Fanatic are great against basically everything outside of buildings and Destroyers are great against buildings.
It will be a classic RTS with resource collection and base-building. To give you an idea, my favorites are Age of Empires (the first two) and Starcraft I / II, so you can expect something along those lines. I did really enjoy WC3 when it came out but I also felt like it was too hero focused. The campaign will feature heroes but they will not be part of the pvp.
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I was massively into SC for the longest time, up until WoW came out. Sf_Hope was the name and zerg was my main game!!
I thought heroes were fine in WC3 until they started adding more and more and more…and convoluting the whole thing to where it just wasn’t much fun anymore because they couldn’t balance them properly. I loved playing NE because they were the HARDEST to start with but if you were allowed to build a bit after initial rush they could be unstoppable.
They tried mixing the hero building of WotA with WC3’s RTS. Initially it was fine until they started adding a lot more heroes. I think there were only 3 or 4 to begin with?
I was an incredibly casual RTS player, TBS is more my jam. I’m usually 2slow to do great in ARPGs but Grim Dawn has been just right for me. 
I’ve played many RTS games over the years, PvP is completely out of the question for me. C&C Generals, SC, W3 and Dawn of War 1 were the only ones I played Multiplayer because there were ways to play coop - custom maps in w3 and sc, and me and my friends would play our own little “survival mode” in Generals and Dawn of War, where we would play together on spawn points close to each other vs an entire team (or 2 teams) of enemies which would horde upon us until we were ded.
Anyway, by far the most important thing for me personally was the campaign, having a good story, having good music (so important for me) and good voice acting. I usually enjoyed all of this more than the gameplay itself.
Oh yeah a good RTS game needs good unit speech lines, like this
or this
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Got a little bit more info from the dev stream of the 29th August looking at the upcoming v1.2 patch and announcing the 3rd expanison for Grim Dawn.
With the 3rd expansion we’ll be meeting the Kurn and learning about their background/history which features in the upcoming RTS game.
RTS will feature the Kurn, Eurlan and Arkovia.
Mammoths might feature prominently in the RTS.
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Grobles or riot
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A bit more about the new game engine here in a Crate FB post.
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i like where Malcolm is coming from, clearly thinking ahead 
Based on his name I’m not sure we should be applauding that sort of forward thinking. I know where he’ll lead us.
Malcolm Betruger is the bad guy from Doom 3 and his surname kinda tells everything you need to know about his trustworthiness if you speak German