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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.
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
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.
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!
[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!!"
It looks gorgious. Everything from the Battle.net interface to the in game characters is a new level of high for the Blizzard artits.
As for the RP aspects....
Your hero gains experience points from victory in battle either over your opponent, or over NPC opponents called "creeps". Exp leads to leveling, leveling leads to ability to cast different spells. All in all, the effort it takes to build your hero up to be able to cast spells is equivalent to building up the tech tree in SC to get templars that can cast spells. If I wasn't told this was a Blizzard game before I sat down to play it, I would have known as soon as the game started. It has that Blizzard RTS style. And therefore, the old SC way of thinking will bring you success in WC3. This is why I've been mostly dissapointed.
Keep in mind, this is only the third day of beta testing. Therefore, it's most likely WAY to early for me to be making such judgements. But these are my first impressions. Expect the game to change greatly from now until it's eventual release. As Blizzard will be releasing a lot of game balance patches during the beta to see what happens.
Check out my podcast: DreamStation.cc Video Game Show
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.
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!
It was posted by GameSpot back in March of 2001 so about a year old now.
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
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?