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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.
...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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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
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?
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?
NFL monopoly ??? You have got to be shitting me
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
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
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
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.
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
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.