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On The Ascent And Descent Of The RTS
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the perceived decline of the real-time strategy genre. The author argues: "While there have been unusual bright spots on the RTS gaming scene, the overall look of it is pretty grim. Most games offer very little when it comes to revitalizing the genre, and eventually they even fail in rekindling old interests that faded away when we let go of Command & Conquer and Warcraft." He finishes with a call to arms, citing Command & Conquer: Generals ("[a] dearth of interesting strategies") and Age Of Mythology ("[offering a] rote formula") as examples of this lack of innovation, and urging: "Only you can stop the market from regurgitating the same old titles, and maybe even encourage it to make a few nudges in the right direction."
The RTS world needs a big hitter to put it back in the charts.
But no innovation?
Bullfrog has looked after us well.
How about Dungeon Keeper & Black and White.
Both are as RTS as they come but did an admirable job of putting the raw mechanics of '5x = 1y' behind the theme.
It was a sad day to learn that Dungeon Keeper 3 put on hold indefinately
I don't think that the Total War series really fits into the RTS genre considering the time spent in the turn based portion of the game.
I've been hankering after some RTS action recently but don't feel like revisiting.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You could do that in Starcraft using the "Team" multiplayer modes that were rarely used. They let two (or more) people control the same team, effectively letting one person worry about resources and another handle combat.
Or you could have two handling combat during big fights, and so on. I played that way a few times with a friend who was a great base builder, and he left the exploration and conquest to me (although he built most of the army, I'm the one who used it). It worked out really well.
Actually there is already a game which melds FPS gaming with RTS gaming and its mainstream (doesn't seem to be TOO successful though). Its called Savage : Battle for Newerth. There are two sides each with different weapons and abilities and both sides gets a human player as the commander. Quite better than Natural Selection since its run by a full fledged company rather than a small group of unpaid modders.
RTS gamers just have to realize that Real Time Strategy doesn't have to only be the same old same old build-base kill-base rinse lather repeat paradigm we've had to deal with since Command and Conquer. There is room for complexity and brilliance in games that are real time, but bear no resemblance to those.
Have you heard of Paradox Entertainment? How about Europa Universalis 2, Hearts of Iron (second thought: forget about that one), or Victoria? They're, technically, real time strategy games, albeit with control over the game speed. No turns in sight. And they're some of the most brilliantly involving strategy games I've seen in a long, long time. (Disclaimer: I beta test some of their games, but I got the volunteer position because I was such a dedicated fan.)
There is an open-source effort to create a game similar to TotalA. It's a bit stalled, looks like the developers took a little vacation, but it's not dead at all .. just resting ;)
Liquid War its fun and it is a ...its not exactly eye candy though...Screen shost...
--meh--
Depending on how you choose to define RTS, you could go as far back as Sea Battle (1980) or Utopia (1981) on the Intellivision. Sea Battle had ship building, real-time deployment, and real-time combat, though it also had all of the battles play out in sequence instead of simultaneously. Utopia was fully real-time, but its military component was limited to building and deploying a PT boat and funding rebellions on the other island. Its focus was mostly on competitive society building, similar to Civilization.
If you want to talk about the progenitor of what we currently define as RTS, look no further than Herzog Zwei on the Sega Genesis, which I believe was released in 1989. Fully real-time with multiple unit types, production, base capturing, per-unit posture control, and great AI for the time.
This Daniel Moore guy clearly doesn't know his history.
Actually, it IS his decision to make, and *drumroll please*, [b]hes made that decision.[/b]
Expect the "spiritual succesor to TA in 2005-2006, after DS2 (Dungeon Siege 2) is released.
Apparently its already started, although its really low-key till DS2 is released.. they're mainly making it almost as a hobby for now.. adding bits here and there at their leisure.
how can you be assured i know what im talking about?
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Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
what about multiplayer? IPX i assume works, if the kernel is set up to use it, or does it do TCP/IP?
I have to admit that I never tried that. Sorry. :-(
There was a bug with running under Wine, where just occasionally the mouse pointer would disappear. Didn't happen often though; you could still click on things, but when you can't see your pointer it's a little difficult.
While I'm here, some other tips:
When I ran it, I had it run in its own X instance, which was set to 640x480; no window manager or anything else needed - X exits when you exit from RA. You'll need a second XF86Config, and a small shell script to help you start everything. I seem to have lost mine (IBM DeskStar died).
You can make actually get the English version of RA working on 2K/XP: make a shortcut on your desktop to the setup.exe on the CD. In the shortcut properties, change the mode to emulate Win98, and then start the setup via the shortcut. You also need to install the updates (on the Counterstrike and Aftermath CDs). After that, it worked fine for me! You may have problems if you have another language - I couldn't get the German version to work using this method.
-- Steve