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Top Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time?
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "GameSpy is running a feature looking at the editors' picks for the top real-time strategy games of all time. Included on the list are such classics as StarCraft, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and Age of Empires. The article looks at each game's significance to the genre as a whole, as well as offering some reader feedback on the editors' choices. Why not grunt rush their server, have a look at their picks, and share some of your own RTS favorites here?"
I was always a big fan of the original Command and Conquer. The units had a nice variety without bogging you down with too many options and the whole concept of RTS was new and exciting to me. I don't think any C&C quite lived up to the original except Red Alert.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
There is nothing like building an impenetrable fortress and a huge assault force and then unleashing your army on a neighbour.
I love love love that game. I love it. Love love love. Am I gushing? Sorry. :)
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
should work quite well on dosbox.
:)
:)
It was just great when it came
too bad I never liked the rts games that came after it as much, imho most of them were lacking in atmosphere.
though, I'd count populous 1 as rts anyways
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Up until #4 warcraft 3 every game on the list was crap. They should have inserted warcraft 2 at #4 warcraft 3 at #5 and warcraft 1 at #6. The original C&C should have come in at #7. The rest can stay the way it is.
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I had several issues with Total Annihilation that apparently the gamespy editors overlook or praise.
Although gamespy liked the graphics, I had a big problem with them. Yes, it was 3D, which made for some beautiful maps. However, the units, IMO, were plainer than plain. They were all boxey and ultimately had very little character (as contrasted to Starcraft, where eveything was quite distinct and enjoyable to look at, and listen to).
Then you've got this comment "You don't just order an attack -- you send in a WAVE of hundreds of units, a wall of steel death that will fill the screen with awesome-looking explosions for minutes on end. You can build a nuclear missile capable of destroying a screen full of units, but it's worthless to build just one: Typically, you send them over in batches of a dozen or more. Obscene? YES. That's Total Annihilation! Every game was non-stop action, carnage, and brutality at a level never seen before or since. ". While I am sure there was lots of strategy involved in competitive TA play, this statement belies that fact. Mass and attack has very little strategy to it. Weapons that destroy an entire screen full of units, that can be mass produced, is not much in the way of strategy. Its like asking a 12 year-old and a 40 year-old their favorite movie. One is going to say "Super death explosion 12" while the other is going to say "Mystic River".
Perhaps, I'll dust off TA and give it another try. Being a Blizzard fan, I never really got into it all that much.
However, I was a little disappointed not to see mention of one of the best RTS pre-cursors, Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. That game had many of the elements that are in current games and did it back in the mid 80s.
Also, another game not mentioned was 7 Kingdoms or its sequel. While I could never really get into it, it did have a number of really interesting features that I would love to see in future games, such as spies that took on the enemies color and could be integrated into their force.
Strategy games & adventure games are the only games I ever play.
My current favorite is Rise of the Nations.
Before that Stronghold used to take a big chunk of my time.
I picked up Kohan: Ahriman's Gift on a whim and can honestly say it is one of the most interesting of all the RTS's I own. It has depth of play that other RTS's really don't even approach and allows you to actually use strategy and tactics, a concept that is slowly becoming foreign to the so called RTS genre. This is a rant for another day though. If you are interested in trying out this little known wonder, I believe there is a demo out for it. I think you can find it at Timegate Studios. Its an Oldie but a Goodie.
Warcraft II. It's still a fantastic game today, and it's going on what, 9 years now?
I can't say I developed much of a taste for Warcraft III, though. Adding that whole 'hero' aspect just wasn't my style.
RoN is a truly amazing game once you get the basics down. It takes a while to get to a point where you feel "in control" of what is going on--for example, there are five different resources to juggle, and your military strategy needs to change significantly as you progress through the ages. What makes it stand apart from the other games in this list is that there is so much to juggle that you've got a lot more control over how to play out the game than you do in other games. There simply isn't a recipe for "how to win a game"; once you've gone beyond a few basic opening strategies, it's wide open. What's more, there's far less unit micromanagement than in other games in the genre: you send your armies into battle and control formations, but you rarely need to do the "now you attack this here" bit. Some people like this; to me, it goes against the nature of the RTS, changing it from being a game of strategy to being a game of who can click which units the fastest and most accurately.
Warcraft III was pretty and engaging, but it eventually boiled down to the classic Rock-Paper-Scissors style combat that dominates the genre. It's more of an action game than a strategy game, IMHO--gameplay relies on developing and guiding your heroes to determine the outcome of the battle, making it more of a dungeon crawl than a strategic title.
TA deserves that first place award. It's one of the few old-school RTS games I can still play and thoroughly enjoy. I'd love to see the engine updated to take advantage of modern hardware and UI enhancements...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Warcraft 1 lacked ease of use compared to Warcraft 2. Most notable point : No ability to right click movement. Thats right, everytime you wanted a group, which was limited to FOUR, you had to click 'M', and left click. Not only that you couldn't group units using the now standard Ctrl-# method, so juggling troops in the middle of a battle was a near impossibility. There was no "attack movement" either so strategies generally degraded into throwing armies at your opponent and then spending time telling each unit to engage the enemy over and over. Warcraft 1 was the equal of Warcraft 2 in an Alpha stage, a shoddy piece of crap which kept people playing because of the art and graphics. It didn't help that the only differences were their spells either, or the fact that all your building had to be connected to your town hall by ROADS... which had to be built (read : waste of money) INDIVIDUALLY (read : the computer will unfairly bum rush you).
To say every game before Warcraft 3 on the list is crap is ignorant. Dune 2 crap? Yeah, ignorant.
I know the game was always sort of a "sleeper" that never broke it big like heavy hitters such as Starcraft did, but Myth was still incredibly well done, and I've never come across a person who flat out didn't like it.
;)
It's strongest quality was mostly the fact that it cut out all the annoying resource gathering and just let you work on the strategy part of killing your enemies.
I was hoping the ideas it brought to the genre would catch on (I think maybe Sacrifice is the only game I've played since that comes close) but it never caught on.
Doesn't change that it was an awesome game though.. I would have replaced that stinker 'Age of Empires' with Myth on that list any day.
Honestly, just play it - superb atmosphere, superb gameplay but never really took off - seems people weren't so hot on first person perspective for these things. Personally, I think it just makes it wonderfully immersive.
Also, I tend to get annoyed with the number of RTS games where you're winning wherever you go, mopping up every last unit of resistance and levelling the battlefield. Battlezone isn't like that - you're constantly battling to get out of the level alive and achieve the objectives before you get overpowered. That crucial difference leads to a very different mindset that I find more enjoyable in the long-term because you don't tend to end up with levels where you're hanging around for ages desperately trying to build up the army for the last final push, knowing you'll make it eventually just by storming the base and killing them all. You have to get it right just to live, and that's a victory in itself.
Superb game - if you can track it down, do.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I don't know if I would have ra,ked it 1str, because the others listed in there are serious competition. but it's cool to see my best game ever as #1 ! For once things go my way, heh :) Some of you must know the feeling..
TA and extension packs (TA:CC, TA:BT) are the last games that I bought, and I still have them installed on my current computer, 2 generations later. I'm still playing it occasionnally, although not quite as much as I was in '97/98 !
Perhaps it wasn't included because it's not an RTS?
While I am sure there was lots of strategy involved in competitive TA play, this statement belies that fact. Mass and attack has very little strategy to it.
...). In my experience low level harassment from the start, multiple bases and territory control were much surer paths to victory.
I used to play TA tournaments: a LOT of strategy was involved (especially before Cavedog started monkeying around with the balance with the units they released weekly, after Chris Taylor left IMHO things went downhill pretty fast).
Yes, when you see newbies play it's going to be pretty boring, but expert play is a completely different kettle of fish. It =can= happen even among experts that you'll have a pretty sizeable battle where you throw everything at your opponent, but obviously before you do that you have to be pretty sure you're going to win (recon, selective bombing, multiple fronts,
TA's greatest strenght is its UI in my opinion, being able to queue things so easily, creating groups, pathing, guarding and so on gives a lot of flexibility to the experienced player.
Install TA, grab TA:M (TA mutation) and some of the latest AIs (that are MUCH better than the one shipped with the game) and you'll have a lot of fun, believe me.
-- the cake is a lie
1. Total Annihilation
2. StarCraft w/ Brood War
3. C&C Red Alert
4. WarCraft 3
5. Age of Empires
6. Homeworld
7. Close Combat 2
8. Rise of Nations
9. Medieval: Total War
10. Empire Earth
Honorable Mention: Dune 2
The missions were pointless. That's what Battle.net was for. That's where the strategy was.
Starcraft balanced recourse gathering, unit and building production, expansion, technological progression, and battle tactics in a clear and elegant way.
In my opinion the only problem with Starcraft was people's tendency to play games with lots of resources (think Big Game Hunters) and sit behind defenses and build carriers. It made it hard to find a game with decent players :)
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The only game to have 3 completely different types of armies, buildings are done completely different, and everything is balanced across the boards? I think you are quite mistaken.
Rushes kinda killed the game, cause its a way for a decent player to discourage those that learn. Experts playing never even rush, cause if your opponent knows how to defend it, you are toast.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Dune II only getting a honorable mention?? Without Dune II where would the RTS genre be? I remember playing this game and being in complete awe over its originality. It only left me wanting more. This game belongs in the top ten with its fellow RTS games. Screw honorable mentions give it the respect it deserves as one of the top ten RTS of all time.
How could they make it first pick? Because it rocked.
:
They're right. It was WAY ahead of it's time. Games today STILL don't give you the level of control that TA did.
Controls TA pioneered:
Order queuing: Hold down shift and you can give a unit a giant stack of orders. No limit (save memory I'd imagine). Warcraft 3 had it, 2 didn't. Starcraft didn't either.
Factory orders: You give an order queue to a factory, and every unit it produced would get those orders. This feature has yet to be duplicated (to my knowledge).
Factory groups: If you assigned a control group to a factory, every unit it produced was also in that group. I haven't seen this duplicated either.
Seperate move & shoot behavior controls: Some games give you the option of having a unit be agressive or passive or whatever, but TA seperated movement and firing options. For movement you had "hold still, tether (follow enemy a short distance and then return), and free roam". For attacking, they had "hold fire, return fire, and fire at will". In warcraft three you can order a unit to hold still, but you can't order it to hold it's fire.
Select all of *: TA had LOTS of keyboard shortcuts to let you select all of a particular group of units. Some of those groups included "all units that can attack", "air units" "ships", "construction units", "all the units on the current screen", "all units of the same type as the ones currently selected", stuff like that. Oh, and "all units".
Production Queues: You could order a factory to keep producing a given unit forever. You could order 5 fighers, then 10 bombers, then 5 more fighters, then 3 scouts, THEN keep building fighters forever.
Foritifications: You were allowed to build little barracades called "dragons teeth". They could be shot over with indirect-fire weapons, but direct fire hit them, and it took quite a bit of damage to destroy them. You could build your own walls.
Pay as you go production: Producing units drained resources over time, rather than paying for everything up front.
Unlimited resources: There was no limit on how much of a given resource was present. A "metal patch" with a miner on it would continue producing X-metal-per-second until it was destroyed. More of a gameplay descision than a control feature, but still noteworthy.
If you didn't like TA, you either
* Need to take another look
* Don't have the same tastes as right-thinking people (me).
And it was REALLY mod-able. Quite a few total conversions floating around out there. Sadly, many were based on someone else's IP and shut down (star wars, various other RTS's duplicated in TA, stuff like that).
Incidentally, Chris Taylor did quite a bit of "new spin on old ideas" in Dungeon Siege too. Sadly, he seems to have removed some "fun" stuff, along with many of the hassles. And I pray that he goes back and does that sci-fi RTS he's threatened to do on occasion.
Fooz Meister
I actually didn't finish the single player campaign in Homeworld (I had borrowed the game and had to give it back) but I can say I was dazzled by the 3-D dimension. I mean, the did it perfectly. Once used to the system, you could send small sories on intercept routes varying at angles, and catch the enemy from three different directions, all the while maintaining an escape route.
The one thing that bothered me was the lack of sufficient variety in units. More units, different spaceships, maybe a history to the units...that would have made it much cooler when you actually saw them in action.
Its really unfortunate that none of the big names in RTS picked up on this idea, because I think it has amazing potential.
Imagine rendering hundreds of ships in a raging 3-D battle in an asteroid field just outside a binary system. Wow.
Did you ever play against a human opponent? Preferably one who liked the game and knew what s/he was doing?
I ask because I'm a viciously good TA player and I don't think I've EVER seen a successful "mass rush" without thought behind it--as in scouting, diversionary attacks, and multiple fronts.
Sure the AI sucked. But for pure strategy/tactics, it's much better.
And as for Starcraft/Warcraft, I have yet to see a successful player who doesn't use a pre-memorized (And usually researched online) build order for the first five-ten minutes of the game at least. There is no strategy there, just speed.
Personally, I like TA and AoEII for the same reason--the early rush is hard but doable, there's no "build order" that's going to get you units fast enough to make a difference, and you actually have to think about your attacks.
I like TA better because it rewards truly long-term planning. In Warcraft/Starcraft, you knew you had to keep your units at the unit limit, or you were going to get just plain outnumbered--but if you hit the limit, you couldn't (by definition!) be outnumbered.
In addition, you had to balance your resource collection units against your combat units, which is really artificially limiting with the small unit counts you were allowed.
AoEII has this problem to a lesser extent, since a 200-unit (max) barrier is harder to hit than a 75-90 unit max.
But TA has a 500-unit max. And if you're playing a skilled opponent, you never had time to reach it, and you never knew exactly how your numbers compared to the enemies without scouting, feinting, and being very careful. THAT'S the depth I like.
Your mileage may vary, but TA was a great game in terms of raw strategy and helping take the mundane details off the hands of the player (allowing for actual sweeping strategies instead of incessant tactical clickfests).
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
Dear god.
They put out a half finished game and made you wait 6 months before it was playable.
The AI was laughable. It was so poor at resource management it cheated on every difficulty level, evey easy. It was totaly incapable of building an army, it would simply spam buildings and vills with the occasional military unit thrown it.
Nealry every age was hopelessly unbalanced, for a game that stressed how important counter units were, Persian cavarly would dominte everything on the battle field for 3 or 4 ages only to finaly be replaced by another unstoppable army.
Maybe they fixed it in 2.0 patch/Expansion pack but i never stuck around to find out. There were far better games out there, like ones that a person could stand to play.
To put EE on there and snub good games like Warcraft II or Stronghold Crusader or even Cossaks, is inexplicable.
Rise of Nations and Homeworld.
Any other RTS I've ever played I've been able to consistently use overwhelming numbers to beat the other players, be it online or off. Problem is that, yes, there is some strategy involved, and in an evenly matched battle the one who can effectively micromanage special abilities or troops will win. But in all the games I've played (sans the two mentioned, and I've played just about every game called an RTS out there, and some that weren't but still qualified) if you have at least 1.5 times more troops than your enemy, nothing will save you. (I'm talking equally skilled players here, an idiot will lose no matter how many troops he gathers)
Rise of Nations really took the idea of borders to the next level, which made it incredibly hard to effectively attack enemy territory because you could never affect the economy directly (before an assault) of any player with decent skill.
Homeworld because the concept of specific units being effective against other specific units actually mattered. Yes in other games it's been done, and using that to your advantage could mean a win, but it wasn't a critical factor. In Homeworld even basic fighters never really lost their effectiveness against more advanced ships (Fighters ate Ion Frigates for lunch), and combine that with future releases like the Beast infection beam or the cannon you could add to the mining ship, you really had to stop and consider how to make an attack.
I'll throw in two honorable mentions:
#1: Total Annihlation. Although not revolutionary in terms of the engine, the modability and the diverse units (Land, Sea, and Air in a Sci-fi setting) really made this game shine.
#2: Dune 2 and Warcraft 2. These I only mention because they were the games that sparked the RTS industry. Yes others came before them, but these two became so popular that they made the difference. (Just like Half-Life/Couter Strike for FPS, Diablo for dungeon crawls, Falcon series for Flight Combat Sims, etc...)
Just a note: All RTS are tactical games. There are few strategic elements to them.
TA had build orders too. It just wasn't popular enough for them to become common. any game like this, when faced with high levels of competition eventually optimize their strategies. TA does have less variety fo units. The only varibales for th euntis are range, damage, speed, and hitpoints. If it had the 20,000 players daily that Starcraft or Warcraft has it too would start having commonly used strategies. Pre-canned build orders still won't help much if you can;t get the timing down or have the manual dexserity to manage you units. TA made it very hard to micro manage because of the latency and the slow response from units.
Even at it's height, TA didn't have many "skilled" player because it didn't have that many players. Notice: cave dog went out of business. The sales were poor. It's well though of becaus eit has that "blow shit up" Quality a lot of us nerds enjoy.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You mentioned that one of the things you didn't like was a lack of "immersion". I say "how could you NOT be drawn in with that awsome music"? And I thought that the voice acting of the single-player campaign was quite good.
There wasn't much of an in-game personality, I admit. *craft has always had a more detailed 'unit personality'... particularly when you start clicking on the same unit over and over again (FUNNY stuff in there).
But I was immediately hooked on it... the sheer scope of TA was great. And the control it gave you allowed you to manage that scope without too many headaches.
One of the great things TA allowed you to do: Order all the units of a factory out on a particular patrol route along the front line. When you've stocked up a sufficient supply of bodies, select them all (they can all be in the same control group, so this is trivial) and fling them at your enemy. Great fun. Lots of pretty explosions.
I think I'm going to have to re-install it Real Soon now. If only I could come by copies of CC and BT again.
Fooz Meister
The designers at Big Huge Games obviously played a lot of TA, as many of its innovations can be found in Rise of Nations. The inexhaustible resources, along with a pretty intelligent infinite queuing system, and lots of useful shortcut keys (not as many as TA, but to be honest, the game is also a little more elegantly designed, so it doesn't need them). A really fun game - it also features some great innovations that would be appreciated in a TA-style game (you fight over cities, for example, but can't destroy them).
The one problem I always had with TA was (besides the too many unit types... really, half would have been more than enough - it just makes the game too hard to get into) is that it really should have given a higher macro level of control with building. Most RTSs would benefit from this, really. I would have loved to have saved standard defense configs based around walls and turrets, and then just tell a worked to build one of those configs there and there and here, etc. The base building micromanagement just got a little too heavy at times, largely because of the destructiveness of certain weapons (though TA did make micro easier than most).
Great game, though. I need to give it another spin one of these days.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon