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.

Comments

Herzog Zwei!

[CMiYC]

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.

NATO Commander was one of the early ones.

[Zarhan]

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 :)

Warcraft II

[Digitalia]

Nothing taught me the meaning of strategy better than spending 10 minutes straight typing "glittering prizes." To this day, I can still type those two words in under a second. Being such an excellent student of strategy, I realized I could save time in typing papers for class if I started working Warcraft I and II cheats into them. Consider the following:

• "In Shakespeare's
• Othello, Iago covets the glittering prizes of Othello, in the form of his wife, and uses every little thing she does to evoke jealousy in the iron forge of Othello's heart."

Best RTS ever in my not so humble opinion...

[Cynical_Dude]

... 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.

Re:Best RTS ever in my not so humble opinion...

[dustman]

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.

The Problem with RTS Games

[afabbro]

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.

Re:The Problem with RTS Games

[Peyna]

AOE II addressed some of this, allowing you to control you armies movements, stance, behavior, etc. Also, if you've ever played against anyone good, just sending mass armies doesn't work, you do have to work with timing and what order to send in what units in order to be more effective. It also depends what you're up against.

Actually, Bunten's "Modem Wars" was the first RTS

[Hobart]

This quote, from Gamespot's own site:

Some consider Dune 2 to be the most influential real-time strategy game. Others claim it was the 1970s mainframe version of Empire that laid the groundwork for RTS games as we know them today. That debate will never be satisfactorily settled, but we can honestly say that the RTS game that deserved the title of "being ahead of its time" is Electronic Arts' Modem Wars.

(More info here on the work of Danielle Bunten, including M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, etc.)

When will the real evolution of RTS arive?

[ThomasMis]

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.

Read the Second Part of the Article

[Spuggy]

[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!!"

RTS Thanks to Configuration

[Kirkoff]

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

They forgot Art of War

[tmark]

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.

What about Sacrifice?

[iomud]

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.

Starcraft -- My RTS Fav

[Spuggy]

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.

Where's Kohan?

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Recycled? Or an old lost article

[__aasfhc1949]

Hello jandrese:

The part II of the article is here: http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/realtime _pt2/index.html.
It covers RTS from 1999 to the present.

Dungeon Keeper

[InsaneCreator]

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"!!

Wow, what about even older RTSes

[Tjp($)pjT]

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.

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 :-) losing all that was in them at the time. I would love to find a copy of Galaxy!

Pokemon factor was a problem, though

[ColGraff]

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.

very commercial slant

[markj02]

I'm pretty sure there were several free, real-time strategy games for UNIX workstations before 1989, some of them even multiuser.

Rescue Raiders beat them all...

[Oxryly]

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