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Stardock Developing MMORTS Game

Posted by Zonk on from the massively-multiplayer-online-real-time-strategy dept.

John Callaham writes "Computer Games Magazine has learned that Stardock, developer of Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine, is now working on an unnamed massively multiplayer real time strategy title that will be free to play." From the article: "...the development team is trying to solve the problems that have kept other similar games from being as popular as other MMO titles. When asked to describe the gameplay Wardell said, 'I like to call it The Sims meets Total Annihilation.'"

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Total Annihilation... by pudding7 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...being the best RTS game ever, of course. Never understood this fascination people have with Starcraft and C&C. To me, those games were like junior high. Dumbed down interfaces, limited units and command options, etc. TA was grad school. Insane unites, complex commands and unit construction...

    1. Re:Total Annihilation... by Pxtl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wrong. TA was not more complex - it was simpler. That was why it was good. No spells to limit how much you can control at a time. No weapon energy to distract you from handling large groups. No worrying about whether units are moving or attacking (they do both). No need to "attack to position" - they do that automatically. No relocating your base to handlde depleting resources. Harvesting resources was just building a building. No artificial unit caps.

      The improved commands were just consolidating things - unlimited queues for units, starting orders, construction buildigns, construction workers. Simple things like the "guard" command made the gameplay so much easier to manage.

      Many games increase complexity by adding more spells, more complex units, things like formations, bizarre terrain, etc. TA did the opposite - everything in the game is simple, and the emerging gameplay is so much more mindblowing than StarCraft.

      Just spread your army like the plague, and try not to panic when shit happens.

      Again, careful simplicity brings emerging complexity - compare Lisp to C++, Go to Chess,etc. Where in "complex" systems like C++, you learn a long list of specific rules, strategies, combinations, etc. simple but well-designed systems allow you do do just as much in a more elegant fashion.

      TA is such a simple system. Yes, the list of units is nauseatingly long compared to StarCraft - but each unit is simple and pure in function, and generally knows how to do its job whether or not you babysit it.

  2. Re:FREE!?! As in beer??? by zoomba · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you actually played any of their games in the past few years?

    -GalCiv beat the pants off of MoO3... one of the best 4x games out in quite a while
    -Political Machine was a fun budget title that got a TON of press coverage during the election
    -GalCiv 2 just entered beta and it looks EXTREMELY promising.

    I heard Brad hint at how they could possibly pass this off for free. It went something like this title, because it's free and being offered by a stable company (one that isn't dependent on the one title) that the media and general attention it will create will draw more and more people to their sites. Those new eyes will see the other products (Object Desktop, TotalGaming.Net, GalCiv 2 etc...) and then if they like the free game, pick up other products.

    The large amount of press generated by The Political Machine last summer did exactly this. People came to Stardock that had never heard of them before. Since then sales of other products have increased and stayed higher than projections.

    Stardock is one of the companies to keep an eye on in the next few years. They've got some cool stuff up their sleeves.