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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.
Europa Universalis had some new ideas, and you'll notice that people get really upset after a war lasts too long and its very difficult to annex large areas of a country (3 province max or everything). Only problem was this game is that it tends to take days on end at teh highest speed to finish a game, even if you're the first person to go out. Many games are working on that problem and its something people are trying to get away from. The truth is that in reality the bigger army usully wins. So whats the solution? Make the costs of bulding an army increase as it gets larger. For example, if you have 90% of your population off fighting wars you'll have lower food production and your armies will starve, all together leaving you with less fighting ready units. Or create demoralizing effects of full scale war and increasing desertion and rebellion. Don't create ways around the demoralizing effects (woman's suffrage in civilization) because though it supplies a goal, it can undermine the realistic aspects of a game. I'm sure there's other ways aroudn these problems, if just someone would put me in charge of creating an RTS:)
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.
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What about "Wargames" ? It's RTS game for Atari XL/XE and it was released long before Dune II.
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.
Yes, I agree completely. I have long thought TA the best RTS game, and I have played a *lot* of games.
Bias in my thoughts: I have certainly played the games I like much more than the others, but the ones I profess to have experience in, I really have played and evaluated long enough that I consider my judgement valid. I love to play games, but I don't really enjoy single player games. If all my friends want to play StarCraft, then that's what I play, even if I consider it vastly inferior to TA. I have played War2, SC, AOE, AOE2, C&C, and several others. Each of these I have played for at least 50-100 hours... (TA I have played 1000s of hours worth).
In the TA community, I played on Kali and was known as 'Blade.java'.
Anyway, Total Annihilation:
To corroborate King_TJ, the worst part of the game was its network code. Strangely, it seemed to work better in the early days than the later ones (and later patch versions).
TA had lots of elements that were incredible, and some that still haven't been surpassed. The only good concept I can think of that another game had which TA lacked was random map generation.
The resource model was better than any other. I have read AOE2 fan sites that lambaste TA for its 'terrible resource management'. This is ludicrous, they must not have spent very long evaluating it. More resources doesn't equate to a better resource model. TA had only 2 resources, energy and metal. The most interesting aspect of TA's resource model was that your resource store was "continuum based": All of your resource income and expenditure was like "+2.3 metal/sec -1.5 energy/sec" from an individual mine, and maybe you have a vehicle construction unit building a laser tower for "-5.3 metal/sec -30.2 energy/sec" or something... The different construction units built at different speeds. The most important part was that you could start building anything you wanted regardless of resource cost. For example, it might cost 2000metal and a lot of energy (metal was far more important than energy) to build an advanced construction yard. Even if you only had 100 metal on you, you could start the construction immediately... Your construction unit might use up 10 metal/sec, so your metal will be used up quick, but you can still build. If you run out of metal, some building projects don't get built during that second (if you bring in 20 metal and try spend 30, some things don't get done)...
Also interesting about the resource model was "corpses"... If you attack me and fail to do much damage, there is a good chance you are in a lot worse position than you were, since your units die and leave behind "corpses" or "husks" which have lots of metal on them, and I can send out construction units to reclaim the metal (and then build my own army faster).
Also interesting is the concept of the Commander. Other games have this concept in varying degrees now, and perhaps TA wasn't the first, but it was the first to do it well. The commander, (your starting unit), is very powerful fighting and a very quick construction unit. Also interesting, is that the commander becomes a liability in lategame. He is not powerful enough on his own to be useful (his build speed is still useful), but if he is destroyed, depending on the game settings you either lose the game immediately, or, he explodes with the force of a nuclear missile (which basically destroys everything within a rather large radius).
One of the better aspects of TA is that just mindlessly churning out units and trying to overwhelm your enemy is not nearly so useful as in other games. (People who have played other games and then evaluate TA often say TA is bad *because* this is what happens, but that is typically due to their inexperience).
Some people attack TA because it has "too many units", and "they all look alike": I suppose this is just a matter of taste, and I agree it can be daunting to new users. However, I can say without exaggerating that except for a small handful (less than 5) of the 300+ units, every single unit has its uses, and they all get used by experienced players. Contrast this with other games, where they have maybe 50 units, and perhaps 5 or 10 see regular use.
My specific bitches about other RT"S" games typically come from the micromanagement factor. SC is by far the worst in this area, IMO, but the others commit the crime much more than TA. Examples from SC: the terran tanks, going out of siege mode, sneaking forward a tile, then going into siege mode. Also, how important the spellcasters are: A single spell can really spell(har har) the difference in the game, for example by taking out several 1000s worth of resource by killing a group of marines or zerglings... And every spell must be handled and cast manually! Another example: Look at the descriptions of "championship matches" involving SC or AOE and the like. Invariably they revolve around distracting your opponent and then surprise attacking another area. This is a high level tactic almost verging on actual strategy, which is commendable, but the fact remains that the units fight so terribly they must be handheld. TA has its own failures in this area, but they are not nearly so grevious as other ones.
A million factors make TA a much deeper game than most Realtime "Strategy" games. I put "Strategy" in quotes because I hold that there is very little strategy that goes into them, but rather tactics. This is not to say they aren't fun, I rather enjoy some of them, but I do maintain that they are named incorrectly. TA has both strategic and tactical levels.
OK, I suppose I have ranted enough. I don't even suppose people will care very much about an older game anyway.
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.
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"!!
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.
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.
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