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

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."

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.

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!!"

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.

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"!!