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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?
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.
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!
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
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
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...)