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."

Comments

Re:Total Annihilation: Good Approach

[Chelloveck]

TA is definitely my all-time favorite RTS. It had great depth of gameplay; there was no one killer strategy. TA has tons of possible strategies and counter-strategies. Intelligence-gathering is key -- you need to know what your opponents are up to so you can counter them.

The game itself had a ton of balancing options, too. Prior to starting you could allow or disallow individual unit types. This could handicap a good player or just give the game a little more variation. Turn off the Advanced Aircraft plants, for example, if you want a grunt war.

The control scheme was great. You could queue orders for any unit, including buildings. You could assign buildings to control groups, so any new units produced there were automatically assigned to a group. I always assign my main production buildings to groups, and give them a perimeter patrol path that emerging units will follow. Then queue up a bunch of units and go off to focus on something else, content that the units will be built and not just stand around looking like a big target.

UberHack was a great mod for the game, too. It added a lot of new features to the game. Best. Mod. Ever. TA with Uberhack became a lunch-hour favorite for better than a year where I was working at the time.