Many complaints about actions per minute and economic plate spinning vanish when you limit or remove building entirely.The minutiae of combat become more significant too, with troops needing cover and flanking conferring a natural advantage thanks to the sightline simulation made possible by 3D engines. So do I want more focus on tactics? Well, there's already Company Of Heroes, Men Of War, or last year’s Iron Harvest. Though villagers are excellent at making themselves useful instead of waiting for orders, soldiers are prone to running off on their own, and battles still tend to come down to amassing a large enough blob while hoping you've hit the right numbers to unlock guns first. I've lost more than one game I should have won handily because a war entered an attritional period and I got bored of pumping out and directing an endless line of troops. And let's not even talk about games that reach the nuclear age, in which overly proud players can outright destroy themselves, and the game itself actually shows more respect to a "loser" who surrenders rather than wreck the planet.Īnd yet, it runs into the same problems. My favourites, the Iroquois, automatically become invisible and get free healing any time they stop moving and fighting. Territory is visible on the map and drastically changes the free-for-all expansion of almost any other RTS, but even these rules are defied by some factions, which are themselves diverse and unpredictable. You must build multiple cities instead of just one, or you could build tall and capture the enemy's instead. It could almost fill this whole article, frankly. "Global Socialist Iroquois Confederacy" tells itself, honestly. I wish I'd played Rise Of Nations in its day. It feels more natural and refined than AoE ever has, and so neatly connected that I was playing confidently within an hour. Banking on science gives you better research potential in the long run for all the technologies those other fields will unlock, and of course military research is how you turn those archers into musketeers, then modern infantry. Improve commerce for fewer limits on your resource income. Improve civics and you get better governments and more cities. Progress through eras depends on researching enough breakthroughs in four scientific/cultural fields, the balance of which depends on what strategy you're going for this round. Instead of a series of scripted missions, campaigns are more like Total War, with a Risk-esque world map you move armies around, triggering 30-90 minute bouts of base building and ctrl+2ing gangs of spearmen. While clearly based on Age Of Empires, playing it today I'm struck by how much more innovative it is than Relic's recent release. I might say it had become stagnant, with too many attempts to blindly copy Starcraft (or worse, Warcraft 3, which was the same but fiddly, generic, and self-serious), just as older efforts blindly copied Command & Conquer.īut is that even true? I look back today and see too many interesting games to easily list, but most of all I see that many developers were already trying to move the genre on, years before I started complaining that they weren't. I've long accused publishers of abandoning the RTS in the 2000s, but I kind of abandoned it too. Games where you need to mine more crystals and build more turrets, and, if I'm feeling sour, games that make me complain they're really about clicking on a hundred things just to stay level. Games where you peer down from your sky-throne and yell at little guys until they build a base that will produce more and better guys, who'll go out and kill your rivals and blow up their base. Today we're considering the descendants of Dune 2, Starcraft, and Total Annihilation. Game taxonomy is irrational and esoteric, let's not get into it. Let's start with clarification: yes, "Real-Time Strategy" technically includes all manner of games, from Europa Universalis to RimWorld. Why do I think it could have pushed the trireme out further? Is it possible to make a modern RTS that captures the best of the classics without simply rehashing them? Has it even been done already and gone unrecognised? We've needed an RTS revival for ages, right? And this one is good, if a bit safe.įor the last few weeks I've been puzzling over the lingering feeling that it could have been more ambitious. Lukewarm praise, perhaps, but it seems to be doing well, and that makes me glad. It's been a few weeks since I came down on the side of basically liking Age Of Empires 4. This is The Rally Point, a regular column where the inimitable Sin Vega delves deep into strategy gaming.
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