Where are all the good RTS games?!

I think you might have a point about devs shying away from developing new IP's for RTS but I actually think the biggest problem is a complete lack of ideas for new IP's and the skill to create them. Building an FPS is easier than an RTS because you don't have the same sort of balancing issues and need to create a challenging game. In an FPS you just turn up the hp on the enemies and make them more accurate. You can't do that in an RTS. An RTS requires and online community to be affective and that is where games like sins of a solar empire and alike failed. They also cannot be ported onto console and that makes them a poor investment for a new IP.
 
No publisher will fund them because they expect a a significant financial return on their investment. A shooter will get you that, an RTS is a big risk for them. Speaks to the modern market I guess...
 
only problem with Company of Heroes, since it is pretty much the definitive World War II strategy game is the lack of the Pacific theatre or the eastern front against the Soviet army, two theatres equally or perhaps more important than what happened post Operation Overlord.

for me that is the single biggest problem with game developers in the world today, nobody wants to be bold and take a risk, there are no enjoyable large scale strategy games in the world at the moment, in-fact post Supreme Commander there haven't been any real 'advances' in the strategy market.

couple of games in recent times have came 'close' to achieving this level, Sins of a Solar Empire jumps to mind but it is ruined, absolutely ruined by the somewhat limited game play and lack of any single player, another worth a mention is Star Wars: Empire at War, which again was so close but so far, its like they calculated what was needed to make a truly epic strategy game then just decided 'can't be bothered...' and made it 'simple'...shame for those of us who like to play games that make you think rather than just twitch shooters that dominate the market at the moment.

whilst Modern Warfare series rides wave after wave of success, and Battlefield 3 gets hyped beyond recognition (even though it was rather, dare I say average) great games like Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes and what not are just being forgotten, in-fact the whole strategy genre is being slowly but surely forgotten, with developers getting lazy, loosing creativity and just wanting to make a 'quick buck'...:(

Edit: another really fond strategy memory I have was Pax Imperia, nobody I know has ever heard of that game, which is a true tragedy because it was a fantastic game and showed what you can do if you give it some thought.
 
You mean publishers, Gashman. They hold the purse strings, make the bulk of the profits and dictate the direction of game development\marketing. Between EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard most of the PC market is tied up.

That said, you could argue that developers should seek alternate sources of funding like Kickstarter, but those are few and far between and unreliable.
 
SC2 did a massive amount to further the genre. The content of the game itself (while fantastic and amazingly balanced) is essentially similar to it's predecessor, Brood War. However the smoothness and intuitiveness of the controls in SC2 are far superior to any other RTS I've played. For example, shift-queueing etc etc. I wish more strategy games felt as nice to play, in a mechanical sense, as SC2. Also, the e-sports scene around SC2 is huge which is not only good for SC2 players, but good for the awareness of the genre as well as gaming in general.
 
Nobody has mentioned the theatre Of War series, so I will.

ToW1 and ToW2:Afrika were amazing RTS games, set during ww2.

Never tried the third instalment, set in Korea.
 
danjama said:
Nobody has mentioned the theatre Of War series, so I will.

ToW1 and ToW2:Afrika were amazing RTS games, set during ww2.

Never tried the third instalment, set in Korea.
Click to expand...

ToW 3 adds some good stuff but I still think Kursk 1943 is the best one but it is more tactical than RTS really.
 
Sins of a solar empire but be prepared to loooooong games

Even a quick 1v1can take hours I currently have a 10 way skirmish game underway that has ran for 50 hours so far but it rocks nothing better than running into an enemy fleet with a pair of level 10 kol class battleships backed up with a couple of sova carriers loaded with fighters and bombers same goes when you loose a capital ship you can spent hours levelling them up and to loose one is painful to say the least.
Some epic mods available for it too from star trek to star wars and everything in between played it to death with the startrek mod nothing better than playing as the Borg and assimilating everything you come across
 
I cannot believe nobody said LOTRO: Battle for Middle Earth. One and two. Brilliant games. Still give it a spin every few months. I love the old RTS games and still play stuff such as

Age of Mythology
Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile
A.O.E 1,2,3


The lack of new candidates coming through is depressing.
 
Wargame: European Escalation looks really good, is it worth the £30???
Also looking forward to the COH Modern Mod, played COH for days on my dire work laptop when I travelled.

Wish Red Alert 2 played nice with my Nvidia Graphics card, just stutters when theres an explosion.
 
Who remembers the old Battlefield games - Gettysburg, Ardennes, Shiloh etc?

Maybe not strictly RTS but very compelling and crying out for a remake.

Sadly both RTS and turn based games seem to be out of favour at present with the emphasis on COD clones.
 
Age of empires online on steam, £9.99 for all the playable content.

Fantastic RTS game, no where near as cartoony as the dumb trailers would have you believe, and currently the top selling game on steam.

Don't think, just buy the £9.99 offer now :)
 
bhavv said:
Age of empires online on steam, £9.99 for all the playable content.

Fantastic RTS game, no where near as cartoony as the dumb trailers would have you believe, and currently the top selling game on steam.

Don't think, just buy the £9.99 offer now :)
Click to expand...

Bhavv, quick question before I buy. Can I do single player on that? The online bit kinda insinuate that it's PVP. I play all my games vs others but my RTS I like playing alone.
 
don't get me wrong, Starcraft II is a good game, but it did nothing to move the genre forward. Supreme Commander for example changed the way we, or at least I thought about strategy games as a whole, it was a game changing moment then they went and ruined it with the 'backward' sequel.

also balancing is a odd topic, too often people balance using the traditional methods of unit, and counter unit, in Total Annihilation for example the Peewee was a basic unit, the Core had a direct counterpart in the AK, they had different weapons but at the end of the day they were direct copies of each other for the most part. Sins of a Solar Empire does the same thing, where each race has a frigate which are all essentially equal, carriers, same thing and so forth.

I am personally a big fan of using the power of ones brain so I feel 'bored' with most strategy games because they don't offer sufficient thinking challenges, people praise Starcraft II because its 'great online' but its really not, its just like Call of Duty, but a strategy version, its all about rushing.

once had an interesting discussion with a friend who also likes strategy games, but he is far less 'thought driven' than me and we had totally different opinions on it. I want a game with complex resource collection, supply lines, infrastructure and what not that can be targeted, increasing the 'strategy' of the whole experience, having a 'resource' deposit that needs to be mined, then it gets taken to be processed, then taken to be converted into a usable resource (metal ingots for example) then taken to be fabricated into something, four steps in that resource chain, four links that can be targeted and therefore must be protected. would have that any single day of the week over, build a miner, click on the resource and hey presto!
 
regulus said:
Bhavv, quick question before I buy. Can I do single player on that? The online bit kinda insinuate that it's PVP. I play all my games vs others but my RTS I like playing alone.
Click to expand...

Why not download it on Steam the F2P part try it out and then see if it is worth getting the DLC that's what I am currently doing. Although I am not convinced it is worth it to be honest at this present time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom