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HIstory of RTS Games
Spuggy writes "Gamespot has got an excellent article (in Two Parts) depicting the history of Real Time Strategy Games (From Dune II to the forthcoming Warcraft III and Emperor: Battle for Dune). They cover nearly every RTS release and categorize them by generation. The article even has a mention of the old Sega game Herzog Zwei, which was the first game to incorporate RTS elements." It's all about WC2 for me. What
a game.
Oh my god! I could not remember the name of that game! I have it stashed away somewhere in storage. My friend gave it to me because he couldn't figure out how to play it. (Well he wasn't actually a friend, just someone I knew.) I had no instruction manual and no idea what it was. I figured out how to play it all on my own and loved it! Man, I haven't thought about that game for a long long time.
Herzog Zwei? That's a new one.
:)
Doesn't anyone remember NATO Commander? Published in 1984, for Commodore 64. It was an RTS. No mouse driven interface, but it was real-time. Brilliant game (of the era) about the good ol' red storm rising and NATO and Warsaw pact fighting it out in the central Europe.
Try it out on your C-64 emulator
Pax Digitalia
These games are some of the best I have seen. They so completely non-linear in their gameplay that they should be commended in some way beyond other games. The only trouble with these games is the fact that four hours never fails to seems to seem like one, and that can be a very, very big problem...
... was Total Annihilation.
3D graphics, order queues for your units, well thought out balance between the two factions and good (for the time) network support, allowing for a decent game against your friends.
Too bad the company (Cavedog) went to hell and never released a decent successor.
If you want to read what I'm blathering about, here is the link to the summary from the main article.
The problem with RTS games is that the S is always the same: build a really large army of something and send it over to overwhelm the opponent. It's impossible to control your army other than mass-select-and-move, so a lot of the finer points of strategy are lost.
Advice: on VPS providers
How is it nearly when you leave out...
1) Command and Conquer - Tiberium Sun
2) Red Alert 2
3) Star Wars Galatic Battlegrounds
4) Star Wars Force Commander
huh?
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
...including the upcoming Black & White.
Er, exactly how recent is this article?
I read the internet for the articles.
shouldn't sim ant count as a realtime strategy game?
Oh man! My roommate and I would play that game for hours and hours. The stress of it eventually got to the point were we wouldn't come anywhere near it. The kicker was you could always send a single motorcycle guy towards the enemy base. He'd get through the defenses almost every time and then make your opponent freak out because his base was under attack...
This article was quite good, had all the basics, the classics and what was good about the RTS genre.
What bothers me is, where is the section where they give you all the "dont do this when you make a RTS" games (eg, Star Wars: Force Commander). I know there were quite a few RTS games that I wouldnt touch with a 40 foot pole. I cant remember any of them offhand (it being 1:42am and all), but I do remember many a university lecture being skipped and me wondering "why the hell did I skip a perfectly good lecture for THIS crap?".
...is trying to load a site linked on /. as soon as the story has appeared and before the target has been slashdotted to death. This time it seems that I'm unlucky, my proxy is reporting "Connection timed out". Game over.
Mod the parent down. If any of you bothered to read the article you would know that this is just a copy and paste of the article. I can't believe you people modded it up that high.
What?
That's interesting, and certainly a good background, but I've always thought that the word strategy was misapplied here. Strategy implies planning - and on a grander scale than is necessary in RTS games. I think a more accurate word would be tactics; that is, the application of strategy. After all, these games are scenario-based in that you are told what the situation is, what objectives you must accomplish, and what resources you will have. A pure strategy game lets you develop the resources, decide the objectives, and get yourself into that combat situation.
Just my $0.02
You know, I do play Galactic Battlegrounds, and it's fun - but it's also a blatant ripoff of Age of Empires II. Almost everything in the game is just an AOE2 unit converted to Star Wars graphics and sounds.
If I had to list all of the memorable RTS games in an article I wrote, I'd probably leave this one out on purpose - just because it's such a copycat of a true classic.
This quote, from Gamespot's own site:
(More info here on the work of Danielle Bunten, including M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, etc.)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Herzog Zwei was good, but I could never get it to play in an emulator without really annoying flashes that make you dizzy after a while. Picture dune 2 though with a split screen and you each play a transformer that can be a man or a plane and you go around and pick up units and drop them off and try to take over a bunch of bases. Then you run out of gas and have to go back to your base to refuel while your enemy is going around killing all your guys. You have to make missile tanks to keep the enemy transformer from flying too close to your bases too.
Of course the best strategy game ever made for Sega is definitely Third World War for sega CD, which you will not find a ROM for because last time I checked there were no working emulators because they could never hack the sega stuff.
I think this was the guy who modded me down for quoting Einstein..
gamespot politely forgot to date the article, so I guess we'll never know.
What?
> For the purposes of this history, our focus will be on the games that are
> generally understood to be in the "harvest, build, destroy" mode
> that we've come to know and love.
Or more commonly known as in the RTS world:
eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate
Master Of Orion 3 (MOO3) is supposedly adding eXperience, but how well they will pull it off, remains to be seen. (I loved MOO2 and am very interested to see what is "new".)
You can read more by following these links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moo3+4x
Cheers
~~
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." -- Thomas Jefferson
The best RTS I remember I have played is Super Dune 2 <http://www.theunderdogs.org/game.php?name=Supe r+Dune+2>. It has everything I wanted, including diffuculty, it is somewhat of a challenge where as Dune 2 was children's play.
My favorite RTS game is the lean and mean intergalactics, a Risk-like web-based game that seems simple, but is amazingly complex. It doesn't have that aspect of "getting good at building up resources", like most RTSes do. Instead, you are thrown right in to pure human vs. human strategic situations. The amount of tactics and strategies that arise from this are astounding!
I'm currently a War Craft 3 beta tester. I've come to realize over that past two days of WC3 open play on Blizzard's Battle.net game network, that RTS as a genera seems to be in a rut. Thinking back on my RTS experience from C&C to RedAlert2 to TA to StarCraft to now WarCraft3, the dominate RTS paradigm is managing economic efficiency. This leads to mass production of basic units and the eventual overwhelming of your opponent. In other words, RTS hasn't evolved much past zergling/tank rushing. The mindless action of highlighting a large group of cheap single functionality units and pointing them in the direction to roll over anything they come across. Once you establish the most efficent process of building economoy, you end up repeating the same damn steps each and every game you play. The RTS game now becomes nothing more than repition which equal mind numbingly boring games. Although Blizzard has obviously taken steps in WC3 to try and change the focus from economic centered game to a tatically centered one, IMHO they've fallen short (as for why, you'll just have to wait to see for yourself in about three months). The closest I've seen anybody change RTS was a Korean company that made Shattered Galaxy. That game had it's own meta repetative process that territory was never really gained or lost, but they changed the focus of the game to the battle (and added an interesting team and political aspect). All in all, WC3 is a step in the right direction in pushing RTS from it's simple roots toward the future, but we got a long way to go to make RTS's that rise above the complexity of Rock-Paper-Scissors toward something as copmlex as chess.
Check out my podcast: DreamStation.cc Video Game Show
What about "Wargames" ? It's RTS game for Atari XL/XE and it was released long before Dune II.
[Repost from some of my Replies to other Comments]
Part 2 located here.
My fault for not posting it in the first place (hopefully they'll update it when they get a chance).
It will clear up a lot of the posts I am seeing about "They missed xxx!!"
True. There's something profoundly silly about having a bunch of R2 droids picking berries, catching fish, and slaughtering animals for meat.
When I got Windows 95 on my 486/4MB RAM, and I installed Sim City 2000, it became a realtime stratagy game. As a matter of fact, if I maximized it, it would take a full month for a month of game time to elapse! Ahh, but I have to thank M$ and Maxis for that experiance. Being discusted with the performance, I went back to Dos/Win3.1. All the stuff I learned about partitioning helped me immensly when I got in to linux. (No that wasn't a powerful enough Machine, and yes I learned linux on a different Machine)
Sweet, I'm off topic AND lame in this post.
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Check here for another excellent synopsis of Turn Based Strategy Games from Gamespot (and to think I hated this site when Gamecenter closed and began redirecting to it)
Any review purporting to cover "the earliest days of RTS" - as the referenced article purports to do - is incomplete without a mention of this game.
I'm not even sure if this is exactly the right name - perhaps it was "Ancient Art of War" - but this was the first RTS game I had ever played, and it must have come out around 1987 or earlier. It ran on the PC, and if I recall ran in black and white, and certainly did not feature the huge armies or innumerable unit types that are available today, but games like WC and AOE play - in broad strokes - VERY VERY similar to "Art of War". It was, for its time, a great game.
Sacrifice is a good example of an rts that broke out of the niche mold of traditional c&c/starcraft type rts's. It still maintains a unique rts feel though, along with an rpg and open ending element thrown in. It was somewhat overlooked when it came out but I think it was a pretty groundbreaking game. Resource mangement was downplayed but still there the focus was more on action and the unit behavior reminds me of shogun: total war. The cinematics and graphics were much advanced as well compared to other rts's.
What about the Settlers / Serf city games? Best real-time action games I've ever played. Ok, they're slow and it's kind of boring, having to wait for the trees and grain to grow, but very addictive anyway. (and you can always press F12 or so to speed things up)
Another nice one I had on my XT was "The Ancient Art of War", by brøderbund. Unfortunately it won't run on my new(er) machine, it finishes the game in about 0.1 seconds.
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
The earliest RTS I'm aware of is Stonkers on the ZX Spectrum, published by Imagine in 1983.
... :)
Fun game, tho' it had a tendancy to occasionaly reset the machine half-way through.
It's out there for the many Speccy emulators, of course
Gamespot writes that the first real-time strategy ever was Herzog Zwei for Sega Genesis (1989), and first computer RTS was Dune 2 (1992). This is both wrong. There was a game called STONKERS for Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer (called Timex Sinclair in the U.S.) by Imagine Software, which was released in 1983 (!!!). It clearly falls under the definition of "Real-time strategy" (it features different units, map with various terrain, reinforcements, even zoomable map)! It was less than 40 KB long. You can play Stonkers online using Java Spectrum emulator here.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
It (and it's sequels) fulfill the "harvest, build, destroy" definition.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Is the first RTS i played.
It was published by Infocom and developed by Westwood Associates (at least it says so in the little credits flyby).
oh..it has BulletTime(tm) too.
Looks like GameSpot has to fill pages with stuff, too bad gaming and writing articles do not go hand in hand.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All C&C screenshots are pre-release doctored for increasing the hype (back then).
It pissed me of when i bought the game, it pisses me off now.
I WANT MY "TROOPERS WALKING THROUGH WATER FROM HOVERCRAFT" !!
How is it that Ozark Softwares Command HQ is not the first real time strategy game for the PC? It came before the others, release date of about 1990, it's a strategy game, it's real time. Without a doubt I spent more hours playing HQ than any other single game, with the possible exception of DOOM. Yeah I know I'm a geezer, but I still can't see how this one slipped by.
Granted it has its shortcomings, but I'm pretty sure I've never played a game (this is including every one of the Final Fantasy and Madden games) more than I played Starcraft (and the Brood Wars expansion). For a good year and a half of my life I pretty much played nothing else.
The games greatness didn't necessarily lie in its features, (TA was much better looking; still had the build-gather-amass troops-rush problem in a lot of cases) but in its storyline and multiplayer modes. It was really the first RTS game to have Internet play planned for the start. Sure there were problems with kidiez running out on games on you and other issues, but for the most part, the Blizzard Ladder system provided a great way to compete for both fun and competition. (Still remember reading writeups of every match in the tournaments on starcraft.org--too bad the damned site is unviewable now in Mozilla).
As far as the storyline goes, who doesn't remember Kerrigan's infestation or the Protoss Hero's (can't remember his name now--kinda killing my argument here) sacrifice. The Brood War expansion was a masterpiece as well--bringing back Kerrigan as the Zerg Hero, showing the uneasy alliance between the Dark Brethren of the Protoss, and of course the UED, who you just grew to hate. The storyline of the games were so great, that at several points I didn't care about the gameplay, I just wanted to see the Cinematics and the Mission Briefings.
I'll admit that I haven't been as active in the genre as I once was, and could have had as much fun with another game, but it was Starcraft that really won me over.
Looking foward to Warcraft III to provide the same level of greatness in 'net play and in the storyline.
You can't forget games such as: The Myth Series, or any of the ogreBattle games. Which don't emphasize building forces, but rather managing what you have. Wars without the draft as it were.
-Edie
IMHO, Kohan is the most deserving of mention in the "Future Evolution" category. It's an RTS that finally lets you actually build a real strategy and maintain an economy (you have to pay for your unit's upkeep) while making your armies. Destroy an opponents economy and his armies will soon fall into disrepair and eventually disband. Formations factor heavily into gameplay as different formations affect the strength of your attacks and the rate at which you can move (if you choose a strong defensive stance, you will only be able to plod across the battlefield, if you choose a superfast pressed move your troops will make it to their destination fast, but be completely exausted and useless for battle.) Kohan also prevents you from micromanaging much of the game. Your control happens at the company level, and the computer controlls the individual units in battle, even the spellcasters. The AI's are programmable (well tweakable) to allow you to build up stronger opponents for single or multiplayer.
Additionally, Kohan is available for Linux if you look around, and there's a dedicated online community of Linux gamers that are great to play with. I can't reccomend this game enough, I havn't played a game this much since Starcraft. It is well worth the $50 sticker price.
I read the internet for the articles.
The first pc RTS was Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned rat, not Dune II.
- WeaselGod
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet turbines
I wonder why nobody mentions this game anymore. It was released in 1983(??) and still is great fun. Just download vice (a C64 emulator) and use your old floppy with the original MULE game (right...).
Might well be the ancestor of all RTS games, IMHO.
Moritz
I remember playing that. It was PC based, had a useable, but ugly 4-color interface. That was out in 1987 or so.
chess (with a clock).
Hm, wouldn't Intellivision's Utopia be a RTS as well? I mean it was still turn-based but that was really only for scoring purposes. But you goy to build your structures, and control the boats.
Utopia started the Sim-genre IMHO.
http://www.intellivisionlives.com/ used to have a PC version of Utopia, but it seems the site is down.
POKE 53281,1 POKE 53280,0
I can't believe they left out Populous, published by Electronic Arts 3 years before Dune II, in 1989. See some screenshots, with bad translation. Gamespot considers it one of the 15 most influential games of all time.
The concept was that you were a God, and you were battling another Diety for control of worlds. Both you and your opponent started out with a few followers, and they would multiply rapidly through making settlements. You could make the settlements produce faster by improving the land around them.
You slowly built up Mana points that you could spend on disasters to inflict on your opponent's settlements and followers. Volcanos, quicksand, earthquakes, just to name a few. The more followers you had, the faster your Mana would accumulate.
It was the first game that I had ever seen that had multiple units to control at once. Instead of having direct control over each unit, you could direct them towards a "Papal Magnet" that you could place anywhere in the game world.
It even had a multiplayer option that you could play over a modem.
It was much closer to today's RTS games than Herzog Zwei!
Hello jandrese:
e _pt2/index.html.
The part II of the article is here: http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/realtim
It covers RTS from 1999 to the present.
Someone correct me if I'm way off, but didn't It Came From the Desert (1990?) have some RTS elements to it? Been a long time since I've played it ...
This game (for the Amiga, though I believe there is a PC version as well) fulfills the basic criteria: harvest, build, destroy -- and in real time versus a computer opponent.
What about Bullfrog's Dungeon Keeper? Wasn't this one of the best Real-Time Strategy games? Mine for gold, attract creatures, show your opponents the meaning of "hell"!!
I remember the first time that I played Warcraft II and blew up a building. The fire that resulted (despite being 30 sprites of some stock flame) was so incredible looking. It was absolutely amazing.
Also, I remember WarII as being the first game I played online. I went by 'PeonMe.' Oh boy, my 6th grade years.
-Vic
I played net-trek on PDP-10s, 11s and Vaxes in the late-70s. These had the features of RTS mentioned just with text based graphics. Multi-player realtime action with texty goodness. I played non-multiplayer trek in the mid-70s. Empire and multiplayer Empire (I particularly like XEmpire with its cool graphics and would love to find an old source drop of it!, particularly the networked varient with multi-player support). Not to mention some other single player RTS like Rogue and DND (not to be confused with Dungeon, the text script game). All of these had a running clock, items or status to recover, entity interactions, and many were multi-player networked games. And of course the trade based games.
:-) losing all that was in them at the time. I would love to find a copy of Galaxy!
Pre-Internet (with the capitalized I) on the Merit network was a game (that was banned _often_ by the system administrators) that created an adaptive universe to travel through (local copies of the universe were "patched" to have dimensional rifts when the local universe synced to a remote universe and the on-the-fly universe creation overlaped between the two universe, sometimes entire rifts winked out of existance (when sys admins quashed them
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
is Shiny's Sacrifice! It almost requires a GeForce or later to run, but has a style of gameplay I haven't seen before. You play from a third person view as the general of your army on a huge island. It's worth looking at if you haven't seen it. Wine even emulates it.
It was posted by GameSpot back in March of 2001 so about a year old now.
This is one case where I feel the game community's creativity really hurt the game - a lot of the people I play with will only play if you have such-and-blah third-party level packs, and many of these (I think) unbalance the game. That said, at a LAN party where you can prepare patches and unit packs in advance, it's an awesome game. A lot of people downplay the AI (and rightly so, it really isn't all that good) but sometimes it does put up a mean fight - I've spent days locked in epic battle with the AI, with the entire map filled with units, missiles flying everywhere - TA has a truly epic scale. And, you can get it for about five bucks from EB - with or without COre Contingency expansion pack, depending on the alignment of the stars. Best five bucks I ever spent.
I'm the stranger...posting to
yep wing commander 2 was a GREAT game! :P
I'm actually a bit confused about why Dune II has the destinction of being the grandfather of RTS. Wasn't Sid Meier's Civilization released a year prior to Dune II?
Repeatedly Timed Sex
there's nothing wrong with Galactic Battle Grounds, in fact I enjoy the game...i was never into AOE2, but since i'm a star wars fan, GBG appeals to me...
i wouldn't excatly call it exactly a rip-off...in fact it actually uses the AOE2 game engine...it's like when they take Monopoly, and then give it a NFL theme to make it appeal to a different market...that's what GBG is....
in any case, i personally find it more interesting to control units and such in GBG because they are units in a universe that we've seen and grown up with (through movies, books, etc...) our whole lives.... well, just my opinion...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Sure total annihalation had some nicer graphics and better interface but starcraft is the so much better in style and gameplay. They have three fundementally different races and still the game is balanced. TA had two balanced races but they had no character no style. You just had walking tank A or walking tank B. Besides Starcraft is still one of the better selling games 3 years after it's release as well as having a least 10,000 games going on at any time while TA had about 16 on gamespy the last time I checked.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'm pretty sure there were several free, real-time strategy games for UNIX workstations before 1989, some of them even multiuser.
Two nominees for groundbreaking RTS games:
- Homeworld (and the half-sequel, Homeworld: Cataclysm).
Strategy in Space, with full 3d navigation. Huge battleships to form the core of your army (includes Carriers, which can be deployed remotely, and can be used to create strike craft and frigates), and smaller crafts like bombers and fighters to move quickly for recon and attack.
The capital ships need to be defended, yet they are also your biggest weapons. The 3D factor is more important than it might seem, since it's quite hard to avoid attacking in a flat plane.
Remember, the enemy's gate is down!
- Shogun: Total War
Cavalry, archers, pikemen (either peasants, who are cheap, and professional pikemen, who are hardier). Not in a one-on-one capacity, as done by Warcraft. Units have a maximum of 120 individual soldiers, and each army has a maximum of 16 units, including the unit which carries the army's general.
Having 1920 soldiers on the field in medieval-oid configurations and formations is fun enough by itself. Each unit has morale. If this is too low, they give up and run for the hills.
Morale of a unit is determined by the units around it. If you have a wavering line of pikemen, and allied cavalry is fleeing through their ranks, the pikemen are more likely to panic. Taking losses to the unit hurts morale. Having the general of an army killed hurts morale.
Units also have stamina. Quickmarching soldiers and horses up hills exhausts them, and they really do fight worse if they are exhausted. Also, they become slower. It also affects morale. Horses don't go well through trees. That sort of thing.
Okay, that turned in a (poor) mini-review. Anyway, Shogun takes the cake when it comes to scale and detail. It's on a level no other RTS has done, IMHO.
These two had better be in the second part of that review. Anyone else have recommendations?
Only bad point about Command HQ is that sometimes, when an unit defeated an other in extremis, both players might see a different outcome on their screens... like on my computer my unit wins, and on the other computer it lost. When this happens towards the end of a critical battle, the games quickly became completely desynched and we had to stop. Too bad Dan bunten's games always had those little annoying bugs!
Still, he/she was a brilliant designer and undoubtedly influenced many of the people who made the genre become as big as it became a few years after.
I could not for the life of me find that frigging thing!
It's a little hard to believe they made this oversight, considering that Populous is one of the true classics of PC gaming.
I'm glad Warlords Battlecry was mentioned. That is my favorite RTS by far. The sequel will be out soon, don't miss it you guys! I'm sure it will be good. Steve Faulkner is a gaming mastermind!
Old, but still oft-replayed in spare hours. Although I've played several newer titles, I haven't yet seen a RTS game that I thought beat TA for pure gaming addiction. And I can still play TA on my P2/350. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In 1989, maybe even a couple years earlier, there was a real-time version of Risk that you could play on Macs over an Appletalk network. All the rules were the same as Risk, except -- no turns! Move & attack as fast as you could click, reinforcements would appear gradually as a function of your territory.
It was great fun, and definitely fits as a "RTS" game.
Going back even further, to about 1982, Intellivision's Sea Battle had two players simultaneously deploying and giving directional orders to fleets on a worldwide map, with "zooms" into fleet-to-fleet battles (like Ancient Art of War). Sea Battle could definitely be considered proto-RTS.
If your really good at these games do you think you could add that to your resume?
I've just finished playing XCom: Apocalypse, and it's the most gripping strategy game I've played. Possibly because it's not totally real-time: the economics of equipping your troops and researching aliens are done seperately from the close combat. And you can pause the game at any time to issue a new bunch of orders.
:)
Also, this game is HARD. Any mission can turn into a disaster if you let your people get seperated, out in the open, or forgetting to watch their backs. The aliens have devastating weapons which they know how to use.
Much better than a tank rush any day
Yep, this WAS definately a RTS. The difference here is that you controlled all the units in 3D 1st person perspective! Back then this was INSANELY cool. You had your mothership that built the units, you flew them to isles and set them to do various tasks when you werent controlling them.. While the CPU mothership went on its way .. Definately the most innovative RTS ever created, and it outdated almost 99.9% of the RTS genre. (That Spectrum Sinclair one from 1983 definately wins "first prize" tho!) The only games that have tried to mimic the Carrier Command game was the BATTLEZONE series.
It sucked so bad. You didnt use tactics in this lame RTS. TA was way ahead because you head literally 300 *different* units in the entire game that all brought in their own unique stats to defeat. Dont even compare Starcraft in the same sentence with TA please. Starcraft is the RTS for 5 seaseme street kids. Please come back and play TA when you want to do some real strategy.
where are the sim games? they dont involve warfare but its about strategy in those too (well, at least in good old SimCity it was)
Perhaps the best RTS made to this date is Starcraft. I don't know why it hasn't been mentioned before. Of course I didn't read all of the posts, but I read enough to be convinced some of you haven't the right to talk about RTS's until you've played Starcraft online... Blizzard = RTS masters. Hopefully, Warcraft 3 will do their previous works justice. I fully expect it to as well, since it has been roughly 45 years since the first predicted release date...
They specifically stated that Populous is a "God Game" genre. Not RTS that the article was covering. Games like C&C and Dune2 - That whole RTS genre. You have to mine resources and use tech trees to build different units, etc .. Populous you played god and spent most of the time shaping land and watching what happened. it didn't count. Two totally different genres.
NFL monopoly ??? You have got to be shitting me
Sheesh!
RTS = Real Time Strategy
XCOM was TURN BASED.
It's doesnt get any more simple than that, folks.
To continue your excellent rant, I've played RTS games since Warcraft, but I always go back to TA. Why? Because of all othe RTS games, it has the most Strategy. SC, WCII, CC all involve way (way way) too much micromanagement. (I haven't played AoE or AoEII yet). Everytime I play SC, I long for TA's movement and attach profile. Also, the small unit grouping limit is a huge pain in the ass. With TA, setting the profiles for Movement (Hold Position/Manuever/Roam) and Attack (Hold Fire/Return Fire/Fire At Will) can make a huge difference in how unit behave. This is exactly what you want when you send units out to patrol vs. guard vs. attack vs. sneak attack vs. targetted attack etc. Another big plus is the ability to have construction units patrol areas to repair structures and units.
Over all strategy is incredibly important in TA (when played well) mind you. With a good defensive structure/web up (laser cannons and plasma cannons and missile turrets, Oh My! Oh and dragon's teeth, lots of dragon's teeth) I can guarantee that any rush without huge air support will get annihilated (haha).
TA is still one of the few games where a mostly defensive posture is possible. SC, WC, CC and WCII all favor very aggressive postures. In TA, against someone who knows how to scout and scan their radar screen often, extreme agressiveness will get you wiped out quickly. Especially on metal deprived maps, attacking early can give your apponent a huge advantage in metal.
On small maps, the race is usually who will get a (protected) Fusion Generator + Bertha/Intimidator up first. Note that if it isn't well protected, a full flight of bombers supported by distracting fighters/scout planes will reduce it to a pile of twisted metal in a blink of an eye.
On large maps, air power/mobility is (IMHO) the way to go (with sufficient ground protection for your bases of course). The one thing I wish CD would have released before they went under is a heavy air transport (4-6 units). Radar cloaking can also make a huge difference against opponents who aren't thorough. I think of navies as primarily air support platforms and spy sub intelligence gathering.
Check out planet Annihilation's Strategy Page if you want to see some of the depth of TA. I think it's still the RTS game with the most "S" out there.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I'm dissapointed about the articles failure to mention the Warwind series. I found both titles quite enjoyable, almost more than those that give Blizzard it's fame.
I dunno, I liked Wing Commander four better... much more cinematic, and the plot twists were fun. Pity it didn't run too well on my 486/66.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
if you use such a strategy in mechcommander you will die almost immediately.
anyway you cannot build as large army as you want because you can only take limited tonnage into the dropship. this is a game where you have to start thinking.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I played Castles way back in the day in which its 320x200x256 graphics were quite amazing and there did not seem to be a game quite like it. I realize that Castles was not an RTS game as they are cut with the cookie cutters these days, but that game was one of the first that combined SimCity-like construction along with militaristic planning.
And the computer always had more units than you, too.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
Don't forget Mega-Lo-Mania on the pc!!!
I've been a huge RTS game fan since my first, WC2. Since then, I've played almost any RTS I can get my hands on, and I have to say bar none, Sacrifice is the best RTS game ever, and for me, best GAME I've ever played. I've been playing it almost a year now, and it continues to get more and more entertaining. Even the newer generation RTS games don't compare (Empire Earth, Battle Realms).
:)
:)
Sac is the first RTS I've played where tactics are just as important as strategy. Those mostly unused RTS features like formations have a big impact on the outcome of battles. Micromanagement is often worthwhile. Mass units are far from a guaranteed win like some RTS games, and because the resource management is light, Sac is just pure in-your-face action. Not to mention you're right on the battlefield along with your troops
Another benefit to the light resource management is that it's very possible to lose your whole army, run off to a corner of the map, summon a whole new army, and be back in the game. Depending on the game length, this usually happens many, many times over on both sides. With traditional RTS games, once you're overpowered, you're done for.
If you're an RTS fan and you haven't played Sacrifice, you should, or else you're doing yourself a disservice. Even the single player campaign is well done (imagine, a game with great voice acting and a cool story!). There's 5 different gods, each with a set of 11 unique units, many with special abilities. Each god grants ~8 unique spells to your wizard as well. The depth is just amazing, and yet, it's still very well balanced.
Best of all, single player runs under Linux using Transgaming's WineX
www.sacrifice.net
Does anyone remember Bolo, an old Mac-based tank RTS? You could play with up to 16 people, but most Internet games had 2 teams of 2. (LAN games were something else entirely. . . .) It feels a bit different from the RTSes of today, but it actually had all the usual elements: you harvested trees, managed pillboxes (which served as structures & "troops" at the same time), and struggled for control of territory. I've never seen an RTS do a better job mingling tactics and strategy. There was quite a 'net community around this game, and it had that magical quality of always letting you get better. If the RTS world is looking for fresh ideas, here is a game that did it right.
--Paul
The true RTS pioneer was Dan Bunten. I was absoultly astounded after reading the article on gamespot that Dan Bunten's games Modem Wars (1986), Command HQ (1988), and Global Conquest (1990) were not even mentioned. Dan Bunten was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Internation Game Developers Association in 1998.
Tragically Dan Bunten abandoned the field and changed his pronoun to her (and his name from Dan to Danielle) in 1991. Dani Bunten passed away in 1998 of metastatic lung cancer at the young age of 49.
A good history of Dani Bunten's accomplishments is available from The Underdogs. Also here in Google cache
Rescue Raiders, an Apple II game put out by Sirtech in the early eighties ('83 or '84) beat them all to the punch. It was a 2d side scroller, but it had most all the elements of present day RTSes. (it most resembled Herzog Zwei)
You piloted a helicopter (a la Choplifter), but this chopper had a main gun, anti-air missiles, and bombs. You had to progress from the left side of the battle field to the right and kill your enemy's base. To help you do this, you could "summon" tanks, infantry, missile launchers, and demolition trucks. The goal essentially was to attack, and protect a demolition truck long enough for it to get to the other side and blow up your enemy's base.
See the link for more details.
Oxryly
This article is very very old. I remember reading it waaay back in the day.
Wait! Other people have already pointed this out, AND my name isn't CmdrTaco, which means I'll get marked "redundant".
mlylecarlin
Why does Gamespot always ignore the Amiga and the Atari ST. Some of the greatest RTS games ever camer out first for for the ST and Amiga. Utopia and Powermonger,Cannon Fodder, Mega-lo-mania, Realms
This game came out in the mid 80's and featured realtime play, 2-D top down scrolling map, units you ordered to move or fire (though they'd move and fire on their own if confronted with the enemy) and you had to manage supply trucks that'd keep your troops equiped with ammo and some fresh recruits.
I'm sure there are some VM/VMS/Unix V6 games that predate any of the games mentioned in any of these comments.
Some buyout from ZDNet or Vice Versa (or partnership or whatever. Gamespot was picked to close down because 90% of the pages were hard-coded HTML where as GameSpot used FrontPage or whatever WYSIWYG Editor. Factor in better marketing support for GameSpot at the time, and it wasn't too tough of a decision for ZDNet/C-Net to make. Shame too, 'cause Gamecenter was the premier site out there for Gaming News. (They had articles like this constantly and had a great hardware feature as well--something Gamespot is lacking).
If anyone doesn't believe me, check out some of their pages here. The newest ones (from Late Feb 2001/Early March 2001 will probably redirect you to GameSpot, so don't bother.)
If you want the very last page they made, then you want to check here here (Gotta love Archive.org)
I used to play a game on my Apple //gs called "Reach for the Stars." This was released in 1988.
f or_the_stars.html
Players were given planets, and could build space ships to meet certain objectives. A *very* basic Starcraft, I suppose.
A quick review and download at http://www.inwards.com/~fairway/game_pages/reach_
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
The other great thing is the ability to easily create levels. Triggers are nice, and can make the game more interesting, but have you ever gotten the chance in any other game to drive a tank around your campus and blow stuff up? your home town? Shellbyville? There are some great maps of Harvey Mudd out there... wish I could find a link.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Sorry, just curious about the user name... Don't mind my meaningless ranting.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Ne1 played that game? the first part (harvesting) was kinda boring but as soon as you would get into a fight with aliens it was freaking cool...
Thing is the game was so lame for starting, it probably killed itself, but once you were set, god.. addictive...
To ring a bell: You had to collect minerals from other blanets, build better vessels with R&D, there was always one metal you'd need and trying to add more cargo to your transport ships.. you would start with a mining machine on one ship and harvest the meteor I think... oh here's better:
Deuteros, a sequel to millenium
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
... isn't "Emperor: Battle For Dune" out? i.e. not upcoming? And hasn't it been for a while?
Sig: Where I'd put something witty if I could think of it.
The first realtime strategy game I'm aware of is "Modem Wars" for the Commodore 64 circa 1985-1986. It encorporated all of the elements you'de see in any RTS game.. Movement of forces, variable terrain, variable damage, differing strengths/weaknesses of each piece, execution of feild strategy, even grouping of forces. Quite a breakthrough game considering it could be done within 64K of RAM, and played head to head over a modem.
Bowie J. Poag
Dune 2 rocked. It was seriously good. So I snapped up C&C, which too rocked... but in the same way that Dune 2 rocked. It dawned on me very quickly it was Dune 2 but a bit glossier. Then out came Red Alert. Yay, I thought... they'll have... no, wait. It was almost identical gameplay wise to C&C, which was almost identical to Dune 2. Red Alert 2? Hah, by now I was only testing out pirate copies. Yeah, it was identical in gameplay to Red Alert, which was identical to C&C, which was identical to Dune 2. Then, the ultimate piss-take, Dune 3. How excited I was that the next installment was out, remember how ground breaking and fun Dune 2 was.
Dune 3 was like Dune 2 but in 3d and with movies. The gameplay was identical. What a fucking joke. That's 5 games over 8 years that were essentially the same except for the way they looked. Westwood should be hung, drawn and quartered for their complete lack of originality and the way they milk the game market for every penny they can get. Just because you're a company, you don't have an excuse to be so cheap. I'm never going to buy another Westwood game as long as I live.
Starcraft... now that rocks. Different races, in every way. Not too sides with different names and a different special unit. Completely different, different tactics, strengths and weaknesses. Any budding RTS game designer should look to starcraft as to how a game should be made.
And did anybody notice how old that article was? "...the upcoming Black and White." Um, Black and White was released how long ago?
Why did it get posted anonymously? I'm logged in... "Post Anonymously" was unchecked. :|
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
I read everybody praising StarCraft. Duh. Have you people played TA? Better yet, TA:CC? The gameplay is unchallenged. TA took the RTS genre to new heights by combining a powerful interface (oh the multiple orders for units and factories, guard and patrol options) with a huge number of different units. Morever the ability to combine units or give unexpected orders made this game an ever-evolving RTS, not to mention all the new units. ;-)
I played them all, and TA is still the best as of now.
If you haven't tried it, you can have it at a bargain price now. Get TA, TA:CC, install the latest patch, and play a few hours. You'll love it. Then have a network game, with 8 friends. Watch the amazing variety of different strategies that evolve from game to game. Welcome to RTS as it was meant to be.
Like with movies, new does not always mean better
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
Kohan is definitely the best RTS I have played to date, and I have played many of them. It combines concepts like flanking, moral, unique heros, and company control to give meaning to the strategy part of RTS. If you like RTS's then you dont want to miss this one.
The home of the 3D Socialization and Interaction Engine
Although games such as Populous and SimCity are certainly played in real time, these give rise to the "god game" genre
since when are those games real time?
So not exactly _news_ for nerds then? Ah well, I guess a couple hundred /.ers posted it when it came round and all the bosses rejected it, then a year later J Random Coward stumbles over it and gets it posted. Not that I'm bitter or anything.... ;-)
Grab.
I don't have that game (or any Sega CD games), but according to this page it is playable in at least 2 SegaCD emulators.
l
http://www.eidolons-inn.de/sega/segacd_comp.htm
A lot of you guys are complaining about RTS with few tactics. What about Sudden Strike? http://www.suddenstrike.com It's a realistic WW2 RTS. The editor is pretty powerful, and when you play the game online it is some of the most mind grueling and tactic filled games ever. You choose one of three nations: USSR, GB/US, or Germany. Each has their own strengths, and each are very different. Some people only use one nation because they are so familar with them. In multiplayer, you start with your team members on on side, with the other team on the other side (or if there is three teams, or four(max) it just gets more crazy). With the units you start with, which are defined by the map maker, you scramble to get to the flags on the map. Each flag, or group of flags (2+) will give you extra units after you hold them for 1 minute. There is ussually a delay of 1-5 minutes for each set of reinforcements after capture. Think about this: once people settle on lines of defense, you can have huge walls of AT guns, artillery, infantry, tanks. Pretty much everything except naval battles are in this game. Since you don't build your units, you treat them as resources. No, this isn't ground control. Since the way to get more units is to capture flags, you have to work with your team to exploit weak points in enemy defenses. I have wasted hundreds of infantry in a single assault just to break through their line, only to have their counter attack stagger my defenders and force me to pull back. Some maps even have bombers, spy planes, and paratroopers to go behind enemy lines. A lot of the strategy is not just killing the enemy, but using each of your units and the ground you have. I know I have started to become pretty good at taking out enemy artillery groups. Believe me, nothing is quite as satisfactory as using your 3 cannons to take out 5 of their that were harrasing and destroying your AT guns along the line of defense. The scale of the game is epic, with dozens of tanks, and thousands of infantry on screen not being uncommon in the larger maps. I remember one particular game on a river map where we sent in like 20 bombers in a joint air strike to clear out a rail way station just across the river. We were having trouble securing bridges, so after we cleared it out (losing half our planes in the process) we just sent in another 20-25 paratrooper planes and landed, securing that area, and mocing steadily south until we overwhelmed their defenders on one bridge. Seeing more then 800 infantry moving along with tank support, it really is some of the best strategy playing I have seen. Real world tactics apply. I mean, take for instance tanks. You can't expect them to beat all this infantry down. I have had 4 AT guns with 40 infantry in a very good defensive location (ridge) hold off a group of 10 or so tanks, plus about 250 infantry. The graphics are similar to those on RA, and although the infantry looks pretty pathetic, when you consider that there are hundreds, thousands even, on screen at a time, it's not hard to see why. If you want to pick it up, there are some on sale used and new in most game stores. They don't make it anymore, and it's primarily a European game, so there are some less then legal ways to get it. Some people are forced to use those since they can't find it anywhere in a local store. If you still can't find it, SS2 is coming out within 6 months. I suggest you at least check out the link. If you like strategy, this game is the best I have played.
I like to kill your couch. HE DIED HARD! MOO.
They overlooked Cytron Masters for the Apple II, which is likely the very first RTS game.
You sent different types of units marching across the screen at the opponent, who did the same to you. Could be played against the computer or a human opponent.
Pre-dates Herzog Zwei by about eight years...
I always thought football was the first strategy game. Stop and go play, brainless players going across a board commanded by one guy with sense. The ability to choose and execute different attacks. Football is the real first.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.