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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.
... 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
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.)
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I think this was the guy who modded me down for quoting Einstein..
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.
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.
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
I'm pretty sure there were several free, real-time strategy games for UNIX workstations before 1989, some of them even multiuser.