SC2 is a great RTS, imo it's tied with AoE2 for GOAT RTS.
It's this longevity that I think is a requirement for an RTS to be in the GOAT category, and I think that SC2 just does not have it. If Stormgate had not dropped the ball so hard I think it would've crippled SC2 and killed its pro scene, and I think that the first SC2-inspired RTS game that executes the concept well will do that.
Not interested in the GOAT discussion, but do you really think that the first SC2-inspired RTS game will kill SC2?
It will be difficult to compete with starcraft 2:
- sc2 is technically well made. The graphics are timeless and the performance is very good, also in terms of things like the feel of the game. It also has a good server, that makes the game extremely pleasant to play. You need a significant budget to pull this off.
- It has an extensive, well-made campaign, that once again clearly had a significant budget (also in terms of cutscenes and voice actors). Even if the story was a bit shallow, it was a very memorable experience for me.
- It executes the basic action-RTS concept well. The gameplay is not perfect, but at this point I'd argue the metagame is quite acceptable. The game is relatively balanced and there are quite a few viable playstyles in most match ups. The gameplay is polished, and tailored to be very action packed.
A new RTS game will struggle to have the budget to have the same technical performance and campaign.
It will also struggle to compete in the gameplay department. Starcraft 2 has had a lot of support and finetuning through balance patches, map updates and new gameplay expansions. An RTS game typically ages like a fine wine, as long as it continues to receive support. It will be very hard for a "copycat" game to compete in terms of gameplay, because it will never be as balanced and polished as sc2 at release. Sure, if given enough time the game might become better than sc2, but it'll be difficult to get that amount of time when for most of that time period, sc2 will be the superior game.
I didn't say kill SC2, I said "cripple SC2 and kill its pro scene", I think it would still have a community but it would no longer be possible for the best players to make a living off of the game. I don't think that any SC2 inspired RTS could do it, obviously Stormgate isn't it, I think that a high budget, polished RTS would do that. The question of whether we will ever get an RTS with enough budget and time to do SC2's concept well is a good one though, we may not ever get one. Stormgate was supposed to be that but as Frost Giant is showing the budget issue is real and budget issues aside the game arguably wasn't good enough to do that in the first place even if it had budget and time. My opinion here is mostly based on stuff like this:
There's also the fact that BW still has new strats being created by pros and meta shifts even after 20+ years of no patches, while SC2 would get stale quickly if patches stopped.
Why would SC2 get stale when BW doesn't?
Even if a meta would somehow completely settle (which i dont think it ever would), maps have always been community made and small differences in those completely change the way races are played. Metas are first and foremost defined by maps and the playstyles of current best players. Theoretical optimals come after that, unlike in many other RTS games.
There's also the fact that BW still has new strats being created by pros and meta shifts even after 20+ years of no patches, while SC2 would get stale quickly if patches stopped.
I think this argument is somewhat disingenuous, considering you're implying that the game hasn't changed when the maps have changed a lot. It's also somewhat easier to balance a game where each race has about 3 viable units, compared to 20. (These are exaggerations).
I don't really want to get into the discussion too much, especially when it's about a game I don't even play, just wanted to give my opinion, but yeah I have to admit that this in particular was a shitty argument from me. I also remembered right after posting that the SC2 patches for the last 4 years have been few and far between but the games don't feel particularly stale to me. The reason I threw that in there is because there were a lot of complaints about the lack of patches in the SC2 community, and I saw this sentiment echoed a lot that SC2 is the type of game that needs reasonably frequent patches that stir things up in order to continue feeling fresh. Also, I wasn't talking about balance at all, if Artosis' stream is any indication then BW has its fair share of balance issues. My argument was just that SC2 needs patches to not feel stale and BW doesn't, but it wasn't a good argument regardless.
The other thing you pointed out which I agree with is that I can't just say longevity is required in order for a game to be considered GOAT of its genre and then say that the shitty ladder doesn't matter, since a shitty ladder absolutely has an effect on a game's longevity. I'm hoping that the shitty onboarding is something BW can improve at in the future, if it had a decent ladder and easily accessible guides with build orders I'd probably give it a try.
steniothejonjoe wrote:I can micro better than 99% of the player base and that's 100% objective
But I often wonder if starcraft 2 is actually a great RTS. It takes such an enormous amount of effort to actually get to the strategy part, and unless you are extremely good at the game, I find the strategy part to not be very rewarding.
I wonder, what do you mean when you say "the strategy part"?
Because (I think this has been said before ITT) it might not feel like it, but strategy is by far the most common decider when it comes to who wins which games, especially on lower levels. When I'm coaching players and they show me replays of losses they'll tell me the same things friends tell me when they try sc2, or when I read about it anywhere. It tends to boil down to:
"if it weren't for these pesky slow fingers, i couldve [micro'd better, reacted faster, had more units, multitasked] and won!" And while they indeed might have won in any of those situations, the real reason they lost would be strategy related a vast majority of the time.
I'd argue that strategy naturally becomes less important the higher level you go in any RTS. But I also think that of the RTS games that I played, it decreases the least in SC2. The reason for this being the broad viability of units, in which sc2 really shines over many others.
There are two sides to this, on one end this means that there is a high diversity in strategic options to choose from at any point in the game. Making the game more strategic.
And on the other it "buffs" more mechanical focused styles. While strategy is still the more important part of the game. This does result in players feeling frustrated after losing to overall better players with suboptimal strategies compared to theirs. This frustration is understandable, but technically unwarranted.
(there is a whole sidetrack we could dive into related to this feeling: terran players tend to have the most frustrating losses because of the idea that their race is mechanically harder than P or Z in those matchups, therefore, when trying to rely more on strategy for their wins, they experience this mechanical deficit more often)
You can do a great strategy to gain somewhere between 8-16 marines for a timing attack, and then easily lose that amount and more because you looked away and banelings ran into your unsplitted marines. That doesnt feel very strategic to me.
As for this example, if you have a "great strategy" that gains marines but requires those marines to be controlled in a way that you could not, that is not a great strategy Your opponent had a better strategy, have banelings ready for the timing attack.
To me a game becomes much more fun and strategic when you're not thinking about the "theoretical optimal" but about your personal situation. In sc2, there are so many ways to gain advantages without having to rely on that Clem micro.
Anecdotally, after playing a bunch of RTS on release at the highest level. It's always fun trying to figure out the theoretical optimal strategies, but the fun starts falling off REAL fast when those are found and the balance flaws come to light. Which in turn makes the games un-strategic and boring to play. When a game is as broad and balanced as starcraft 2 (or aoe2), that's where the strategy part of the game becomes beautifully varied.
Aside from that. My favorite of all these new RTS games is Zerospace, they're looking to be real unique with it. And the race design feels fun. Currently a balancing nightmare but they patch so frequently it hasn't yet mattered.
Here's to hoping they can release with good balancing or keep that patching pace up until it is.
But that's not the only way to add uncertainty to the game and there are plenty of strategy games that do not feature another player.
You can simulate another player by adding an agent to play against that makes unpredictable choices, sure. That's a technicality. I would argue, though, that if their choices aren't influenced by yours, we enter a grey area and I don't think I would still call it a strategy game. But we digress.
Therefore, there is no point in focusing merely on "a sort of tension between the players". We should instead focus on everything in the game that gives the player the opportunity to formulate and execute "a general plan to achieve one or mvoe long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty".
I'm making the point that without players' choices interacting, you can't have a strategy game. This is in the context of saying that this interaction between the players' choices during a game of SC2 feels much more significant to me than in any other RTS I've played.
Like I said earlier, I think the biggest difference between AoE3 and SC2 is in where the strategy shows up. In SC2 it's mostly during the game, in AoE3 it's mostly outside of the game. And I'm saying a game where my strategic choices during the game are important feels like more of a strategy game to me. Because otherwise I'm missing the tension, the uncertainty, of having another player making choices that I need to adapt to. I'm trying to draw a distinction between SC2 and its peers, particularly the game you think is more strategic, and putting some focus on this tension/uncertainty is needed for that purpose.
I think strategic decision making is absolutely of primary importance in a starcraft game between 2 equally skilled players. Sure, a GM can make a hundred wrong strategy decisions and still beat me because he gets way more value out of his units, but the opposite is also true: A GM could play with one hand and still beat me because he makes better decisions.
If all things are equal except for one thing, and that one things matters even the smallest amount, then that one thing will be the deciding factor. This is a universal truth. I can use the same argument for any game. It is therefore completely irrelevant to the discussion.
I think you misunderstood? I'm not saying all things are equal except for the quality of the players' strategic choices. In that scenario one player would just be strictly better, and I clearly said "two equally skilled players". I'm saying they have equal MMR. So one is probably a better strategy gamer, the other might have better mechanics. Or maybe they're equal in every single way, it doesn't matter. I'm just saying the quality of these players' strategic choices is a primary factor in who wins. Anyway, it's already clear we disagree on that.
To me this applies strongly to sc2. I dont even think there are many strategic decisions (its more tactical imo),
"Many" is of course relative, but I think it's the game with by far the highest number of strategic choices per second, at least in the RTS genre. I guess this point is very hard to prove one way or another, which is unfortunate because it's probably our fundamental disagreement. We could start summing up ingame decisions we make in various RTS and come to some kind of judgment but this seems rather time consuming and futile.
Why did you cut up my sentence right in the middle? Why would you actively remove such a critical part of the sentence, and then proceed to completely ignore the actual argument?
You are clearly making two separate points in this sentence and all I did was separate them so I could reply to both of them. I guess I'll spell it out. The points you made were:
1) There are not many strategic decisions in SC2
2) The strategic decisions in SC2 that do exist have little impact on the result of the game
The rest of your paragraph is mostly illustrating the latter point. So I separated the former from the latter so I could respond to both. I wanted to respond to both because these are the most important points we disagree on imo.
Nobody has claimed that starcraft 2 is not a strategy game. Nobody has claimed that having more units doesn't increase your rating over the long term. This is effectively a strawman argument.
Of course, another technicality where the point gets lost. I'm just saying "starcraft doesn't feel like x, but it is x". It wasn't my intent to imply that you think it's not x, it was just for contrast and should be read with my previous sentence.
Then you somehow proceed to conclude that our fundamental disagreement is whether "starcraft 2 has the most strategic choices per second, at least in the RTS genre".
I do believe that our fundamental disagreement is in that you don't think there are many strategic choices being made in a game of SC2, and I do. That would be a tedious point to argue either way. The other disagreement is about the impact of those choices, which I responded to by saying they may not feel impactful, but (I believe) they are.
What are the most important points we disagree on, in your opinion?
But so far you aren't engaging with the actual discussion in a meaningful manner.
It's unfortunate that you feel that way. I spent most of this post repeating and explaining previous points because there seem to be some misunderstandings, so I hope it clarifed some things. But it might be good to restate my core position more clearly, especially since it's getting lost in the rubble:
The amount and the impact of strategic choices that we make during a game are a result of the amount of (relatively) viable options each player has, the accessibility of information, and the frequency of interaction between the players' choices (the amount of "adaptation points" let's say). Starcraft 2 is the RTS with the highest amount of viable options per match up, many adaptation points, and information is accessible but not so accessible that your opponent becomes an open book. This, among other things, makes it the most strategic RTS in my view.
It would be interesting to see what AoE3 would look like if you tried to emulate some of the elements of SC2/AoE2 to pull more of the strategy from "outside of the game" to "during the game." I think you'd have to eliminate a lot of the snowball mechanics.
- Increase unit speed
- Nerf snare
- Increase map size
- Nerf shipments (specifically the spike in resource value going from age 1 > 2 and 3 > 4 - it's always been weird that the resource value doubles in those ages but only increases by 50% when going from 2 > 3.)
- Nerf kill XP by 25-50%
And suddenly you've got a game that allows for more mistakes, adaptation, map positioning, etc. and less about timings based off of shipments and catching your opponent's army with a few melee units to snare them.
Those things could be done and have been done in AOE3 in various forms of modding.
Years ago, someone asked me to make a version of GP with disabled HCs and shipments, increased unit speed and occasionally I've also been asked to make huge versions of a certain standard map.
When I playtested the map without shipments, of course the game felt slower, as it took longer to age up without vills shipment or eco cards. And it seemed like you worked harder to get both eco and units out. Then you understood that XP/HCs/shipments really speed up the game and make it more labile, like it could go from one extreme to the other quickly. Which can definitely make it more spectacular for viewers.
But then, what with the semi-FF meta working on very tight timings and high level players being able to punish any small mistake and so blocking a player from recovering if a sudden advantage was lost, that could play a different role at different player levels. Players on a lower level would probably get away with recovering from a mistake a lot more.
But this is some superficial insight from a bunch of modding experiments that were a lot more drastic than some fine-grained changes to XP rates or shipments.
I did understand how great the HC feature was for making AOE3 a speedier game compared to other military RTS games, which was an innovation that was only appreciated in this niche AOE3 community.
I also remember there were some comments in the media when AOE3 came out that the game was unusual for the military RTS genre, as it mixed some Starcraft-style speed into its dynamic by adding the HC feature. Some were complaining that this went too far, as they were used to the immersive, long style of games from AOE2, in which aging up took much longer, the maps were larger and some defensive structures were stronger. But now I see some think that AOE3 does not allow for a speedy enough style of play, that the game designers could have been even bolder and made AOE3 a lot more similar to SC2. That would have broken with the Age tradition so much that it probably would not have been published as an Age of Empires game. There were already voices complaining AOE3 was too hybrid in its innovations and too unlike the previous titles. And it would have impacted sales.
It would be interesting to see what AoE3 would look like if you tried to emulate some of the elements of SC2/AoE2 to pull more of the strategy from "outside of the game" to "during the game." I think you'd have to eliminate a lot of the snowball mechanics.
I think it's mainly because there are so many civs. If all of AoE3's balance changes focused on a single match up, you could quickly reach a meta with great strategic variety in that match up. But there is no way to make a patch like that without ruining the balance in (many of) the other match ups, plus you're just spending a disproportionate amount of your time balancing only one of 100+ match ups. I think it could be a fun experiment though.
Maybe Germans, Brits and Indians would be a good selection of 3 civs. I think if you add a 4th, you have too many match ups already, but with 3 it should be doable.
But that's not the only way to add uncertainty to the game and there are plenty of strategy games that do not feature another player.
You can simulate another player by adding an agent to play against that makes unpredictable choices, sure. That's a technicality. I would argue, though, that if their choices aren't influenced by yours, we enter a grey area and I don't think I would still call it a strategy game. But we digress.
Your don't need an agent that makes unpredictable choices. You just need uncertainty. There's many ways to have uncertainty; incomplete information, an unpredictable opponent, some random factors or even a possibility space that is so large that the near future becomes uncertain.
If you're still not convinced, I'd suggest looking into the board games spirit island and paleo. These games do not have another player or agent, they just present a series of unpredictable events. Especially spirit island is a critically aclaimed, extremely deep strategy game. I don't think anyone would claim it's not a strategy game after playing it.
We're not digressing or arguing over a technicality. You simply refuse to adhere to a simple and common definition of strategy that I put forward.
The definition you are using seems to be fluid, and it seems to change such that you are always right. If you can't stick to the definition I put forward, or propose a reasonable alternative (i.e. a definition from another source, not just something you make up on the spot), then I'll have to abort this discussion, because it just feels like you're trying to gaslight me.
Therefore, there is no point in focusing merely on "a sort of tension between the players". We should instead focus on everything in the game that gives the player the opportunity to formulate and execute "a general plan to achieve one or mvoe long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty".
I'm making the point that without players' choices interacting, you can't have a strategy game. This is in the context of saying that this interaction between the players' choices during a game of SC2 feels much more significant to me than in any other RTS I've played.
And this point is clearly wrong if you stick to the definition of strategy that I supplied. Again, look at spirit island.
Come up with a source where a game like spirit island is no longer a strategy game and we can continue this discussion. But otherwise I might as well construct my own arbitrary definition of strategy that completely excludes starcraft 2 and then pridefully announce that I am right and you are wrong.
Like I said earlier, I think the biggest difference between AoE3 and SC2 is in where the strategy shows up. In SC2 it's mostly during the game, in AoE3 it's mostly outside of the game. And I'm saying a game where my strategic choices during the game are important feels like more of a strategy game to me. Because otherwise I'm missing the tension, the uncertainty, of having another player making choices that I need to adapt to. I'm trying to draw a distinction between SC2 and its peers, particularly the game you think is more strategic, and putting some focus on this tension/uncertainty is needed for that purpose.
Whether something feels a certain way to you is irrelevant. You're again using a weird, unconventional definition of strategy, that you have not disclosed with me. Provide some source that claims that strategic decisions can not be made in advance and we can continue this discussion.
Also note how you're now introducing "tension" as an important metric. This is just another case of you twisting the definition into something that favors your case.
I think strategic decision making is absolutely of primary importance in a starcraft game between 2 equally skilled players. Sure, a GM can make a hundred wrong strategy decisions and still beat me because he gets way more value out of his units, but the opposite is also true: A GM could play with one hand and still beat me because he makes better decisions.
If all things are equal except for one thing, and that one things matters even the smallest amount, then that one thing will be the deciding factor. This is a universal truth. I can use the same argument for any game. It is therefore completely irrelevant to the discussion.
I think you misunderstood? I'm not saying all things are equal except for the quality of the players' strategic choices. In that scenario one player would just be strictly better, and I clearly said "two equally skilled players". I'm saying they have equal MMR. So one is probably a better strategy gamer, the other might have better mechanics. Or maybe they're equal in every single way, it doesn't matter. I'm just saying the quality of these players' strategic choices is a primary factor in who wins. Anyway, it's already clear we disagree on that.
You have not actually provided any arguments as to why players' strategic choices are a primary factor in who wins. You've just said that if all else is equal, the one thing that is not equal can be a deciding factor. This is universally true. Let's consider a formula 1 race. If all else is equal, then strategy would indeed be the deciding factor. That doesn't make strategy a primary factor in deciding who wins the race (the primary factors are first of all the engineering of the car, secondly the skill of the driver, and only then strategy might come in).
Therefore stating that "if all else is equal, strategy is a deciding factor" doesn't tell us anything. We need to know the impact of strategy relative to the other factors, to be able to tell if strategy is an important factor in the outcome of a game. If we take away all other factors (by hypotheticaly assuming that both players are exactly equal in skill), then that doesn't tell us how impactful strategy is compared to these other factors (because we've just taken them out of the equation).
I'm not arguing any specifics of any game here. The logic behind your argument is fundamentally flawed. It's a senseless argument that literally does not say anything. The same argument can be constructed for any game. It holds equally true for any other game.
To me this applies strongly to sc2. I dont even think there are many strategic decisions (its more tactical imo),
"Many" is of course relative, but I think it's the game with by far the highest number of strategic choices per second, at least in the RTS genre. I guess this point is very hard to prove one way or another, which is unfortunate because it's probably our fundamental disagreement. We could start summing up ingame decisions we make in various RTS and come to some kind of judgment but this seems rather time consuming and futile.
Why did you cut up my sentence right in the middle? Why would you actively remove such a critical part of the sentence, and then proceed to completely ignore the actual argument?
You are clearly making two separate points in this sentence and all I did was separate them so I could reply to both of them. I guess I'll spell it out. The points you made were:
1) There are not many strategic decisions in SC2
2) The strategic decisions in SC2 that do exist have little impact on the result of the game
The rest of your paragraph is mostly illustrating the latter point. So I separated the former from the latter so I could respond to both. I wanted to respond to both because these are the most important points we disagree on imo.
Nobody has claimed that starcraft 2 is not a strategy game. Nobody has claimed that having more units doesn't increase your rating over the long term. This is effectively a strawman argument.
Of course, another technicality where the point gets lost. I'm just saying "starcraft doesn't feel like x, but it is x". It wasn't my intent to imply that you think it's not x, it was just for contrast and should be read with my previous sentence.
Then you somehow proceed to conclude that our fundamental disagreement is whether "starcraft 2 has the most strategic choices per second, at least in the RTS genre".
I do believe that our fundamental disagreement is in that you don't think there are many strategic choices being made in a game of SC2, and I do. That would be a tedious point to argue either way. The other disagreement is about the impact of those choices, which I responded to by saying they may not feel impactful, but (I believe) they are.
What are the most important points we disagree on, in your opinion?
But so far you aren't engaging with the actual discussion in a meaningful manner.
It's unfortunate that you feel that way. I spent most of this post repeating and explaining previous points because there seem to be some misunderstandings, so I hope it clarifed some things. But it might be good to restate my core position more clearly, especially since it's getting lost in the rubble:
The amount and the impact of strategic choices that we make during a game are a result of the amount of (relatively) viable options each player has, the accessibility of information, and the frequency of interaction between the players' choices (the amount of "adaptation points" let's say). Starcraft 2 is the RTS with the highest amount of viable options per match up, many adaptation points, and information is accessible but not so accessible that your opponent becomes an open book. This, among other things, makes it the most strategic RTS in my view.
I don't know what we disagree on, because you've failed to meaningfully engage with that I've written.
I am mostly addressing the missing logic in your arguments. I'm sure there could be good arguments for your case, but you're not providing arguments that are logically sound.
I am just going to repeat my initial post, because the substance of that post has not been addressed:
"But even if we ignore this, I dont see the logic. You seem to be claiming that the number of strategic decisions in a game determines how strategic it is. If one is making many strategic decisions, but the impact of each of these is very low, then I dont think its a very strategic game. To me, a strategy game is a game where strategy has a primary impact on the outcome of the game. I dont consider football to be a strategy game; while my decisions on the pitch matter, my performance is mostly determined by the fact that Im hungover, out of shape, and have poor motor skills.
To me this applies strongly to sc2. I dont even think there are many strategic decisions (its more tactical imo), but the decisions that you do make have little impact on the game. Strategic decisions tend to have an impact that, in terms of resource value, can easily be an order of magnitude less significant than your execution of micro/macro. You can do a great strategy to gain somewhere between 8-16 marines for a timing attack, and then easily lose that amount and more because you looked away and banelings ran into your unsplitted marines. That doesnt feel very strategic to me."
If you want to know how strategic a game is, you have to assess how much the strategic decisions influence the outcome of the game relative to other factors in that game. We need to consider this, and not try to use weird metrics such as "number of strategic decisions" or "tension between players", "most options in a match up" etc. It just doesn't mean anything to say these things, there is no logical substance to the arguments you are making. The only instance of you addressing the impact of strategic decisions is that you claim "you think strategic decisions have a big impact". But that's not an argument, is it?
If we were to continue a discussion, let's stick to the definition of strategy that I supplied.
Let's consider the impact of the strategic decisions in starcraft 2, rather than other arbitrary metrics.
Given the arguments so far, the conclusion would be straightforward: The impact of the strategic decisions in starcraft 2 is greatly diminished by the difficulty of micro and macro, such that inevitable slip ups in that department greatly outweigh the impact of your strategic decisions.
I will provide an interesting reddit thread on this subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comm ... o_diamond/
You can apperantly get to diamond by just having very good macro, making only marines, apperantly without even getting stim.
So apperantly you can get to the top 20% of players by straight up ignoring micro and strategy almost entirely, to the point where your army composition is worse than that of an actual bronze league player. Clearly the impact of strategy is greatly reduced by the importance and difficulty of macro.
Actually, my initial assesment of the impact of strategy in sc2 was too optimistic:
"I'd argue that below masters, you just need a solid generic gameplan, some understanding of a proper army composition, and then it once again boils down to the execution."
You don't even need understanding of a proper army composition, and you don't even need proper micro. Just macro alone can get you to diamond, apperantly.
Yeah, I played about 200 hours of that last year. If you stick to team games, it's great. 1v1s are fun but they get stale quickly because they're severely lacking in strategic depth. There's only one or two viable ways to play, and it's mostly massing one unit.
Team games are great, the game is clearly made for them. They are well-balanced, especially for a game in alpha (in general, BAR is a very polished game considering it's basically a hobby project). In an 8v8 on the most popular map, you have:
- 2 players on the front, who stay low eco and low tech for longer to hold/push the front.
- 2 players behind the front who tech up fast, and then support the front with higher tech units.
- 2 sea players who try to gain control of the water on the sides. If they do, they can attack from the water with long-range ships and the sea can be used by the rest of the team to attack from.
- A dedicated air player who supports everyone on the map, and can try to get through with bomber runs if they gain an advantage in the air.
- A dedicated "eco" player in the back who goes full boom and rushes the highest tech tier, making units only when needed. They keep booming for as long as possible because the BAR economy grows exponentially, making every second that they can focus on eco a valuable second.
It's a war of attrition, there is constant fighting at the front from the beginning. There's a lot there to explore because each role feels impactful and fun to play. BUT I found that after a while it became stale. Once you've played many games and you kind of know what to do and what's going to happen, it loses the magic. I was still enjoying smaller team games (4v4, 3v3, 2v2) and exploring more obscure maps, but the thing is it was hard to find games on maps other than the most popular ones, and hard to find smaller team games with balanced teams. The search for games became tedious.
Drongo made some content for it. Here he is doing a cheesy nuke rush from the "eco" spot, it gives you an idea of what it's like to manage the economy. And a longer video where he casts a game, following a good player carrying his team from the front. Skipping through will give you some idea of what the mid- and early late game looks like as well.
I think I might pick it up again soon. Hopefully the player base is bigger and/or not as obsessed with playing the same maps over and over.
Here's a random pic of a minimap in a typical game on the map with the roles I described earlier:
(You can actually zoom out this far in game by the way)
Blue won the battle for the south sea, red and purple are still fighting over the north sea although red seems to already have crippled dark green. Green is going full eco in the corner, as is yellow but it looks like yellow made a couple of units for defense because they felt it was necessary (this will put them behind green in eco, which could be game deciding later). Teal and orange are going air, the little triangles are fighters. The blue team seems to be doing well on the front, controlling the middle, but it looks like, with red and yellow both sending support to the front, the red team is preparing for a counter offensive.
that's pretty dope overall. I messed around with it a little bit and realized it's basically just total annihilation with a little more to it than before. TA was like my first first RTS but I only played it offline.
I like how BAR looks. I might screw around with it a little bit even though team games aren't really my cup of tea for RTS. that game with stardom was pretty cool to watch though. it does appear that you can hyper carry a game with enough skill and that's honestly awesome.
I don't have a ton of time to invest into learning a new rts but I'll give it a try.
It would be interesting to see what AoE3 would look like if you tried to emulate some of the elements of SC2/AoE2 to pull more of the strategy from "outside of the game" to "during the game." I think you'd have to eliminate a lot of the snowball mechanics.
- Increase unit speed
- Nerf snare
- Increase map size
- Nerf shipments (specifically the spike in resource value going from age 1 > 2 and 3 > 4 - it's always been weird that the resource value doubles in those ages but only increases by 50% when going from 2 > 3.)
- Nerf kill XP by 25-50%
And suddenly you've got a game that allows for more mistakes, adaptation, map positioning, etc. and less about timings based off of shipments and catching your opponent's army with a few melee units to snare them.
time for a new esoc patch.
I've been thinking for some time now that it wouldn't be too bad to introduce alternate balance modes for the community to try out. adjust balance hardcore and just make it a separate game mode/ladder and see what happens. I think aoe4 had this idea in mind when they had those tuning packs included in the games. back when i was active they had some that would nerf walls for instance
If I were a petal
And plucked, or moth, plucked
From flowers or pollen froth
To wither on a young child’s
Display. Fetch
Me a ribbon, they, all dead
Things scream.
Yeah, I played about 200 hours of that last year. If you stick to team games, it's great. 1v1s are fun but they get stale quickly because they're severely lacking in strategic depth. There's only one or two viable ways to play, and it's mostly massing one unit.
Team games are great, the game is clearly made for them. They are well-balanced, especially for a game in alpha (in general, BAR is a very polished game considering it's basically a hobby project). In an 8v8 on the most popular map, you have:
- 2 players on the front, who stay low eco and low tech for longer to hold/push the front.
- 2 players behind the front who tech up fast, and then support the front with higher tech units.
- 2 sea players who try to gain control of the water on the sides. If they do, they can attack from the water with long-range ships and the sea can be used by the rest of the team to attack from.
- A dedicated air player who supports everyone on the map, and can try to get through with bomber runs if they gain an advantage in the air.
- A dedicated "eco" player in the back who goes full boom and rushes the highest tech tier, making units only when needed. They keep booming for as long as possible because the BAR economy grows exponentially, making every second that they can focus on eco a valuable second.
It's a war of attrition, there is constant fighting at the front from the beginning. There's a lot there to explore because each role feels impactful and fun to play. BUT I found that after a while it became stale. Once you've played many games and you kind of know what to do and what's going to happen, it loses the magic. I was still enjoying smaller team games (4v4, 3v3, 2v2) and exploring more obscure maps, but the thing is it was hard to find games on maps other than the most popular ones, and hard to find smaller team games with balanced teams. The search for games became tedious.
Drongo made some content for it. Here he is doing a cheesy nuke rush from the "eco" spot, it gives you an idea of what it's like to manage the economy. And a longer video where he casts a game, following a good player carrying his team from the front. Skipping through will give you some idea of what the mid- and early late game looks like as well.
I think I might pick it up again soon. Hopefully the player base is bigger and/or not as obsessed with playing the same maps over and over.
Here's a random pic of a minimap in a typical game on the map with the roles I described earlier:
(You can actually zoom out this far in game by the way)
Blue won the battle for the south sea, red and purple are still fighting over the north sea although red seems to already have crippled dark green. Green is going full eco in the corner, as is yellow but it looks like yellow made a couple of units for defense because they felt it was necessary (this will put them behind green in eco, which could be game deciding later). Teal and orange are going air, the little triangles are fighters. The blue team seems to be doing well on the front, controlling the middle, but it looks like, with red and yellow both sending support to the front, the red team is preparing for a counter offensive.
that's pretty dope overall. I messed around with it a little bit and realized it's basically just total annihilation with a little more to it than before. TA was like my first first RTS but I only played it offline.
I like how BAR looks. I might screw around with it a little bit even though team games aren't really my cup of tea for RTS. that game with stardom was pretty cool to watch though. it does appear that you can hyper carry a game with enough skill and that's honestly awesome.
I don't have a ton of time to invest into learning a new rts but I'll give it a try.
I can recommend just playing against AI for a while. At first it's actually not that easy to beat the barbarian AI, and then you can just add more when you beat it. The nice thing is that they don't cheat, and feel kind of human.
Then you can join an all that glitters 8v8 with a healthy amount of low rated people in it, and just do the build you used against AI. You're not going to carry but won't cause your team to lose, either.
If you ever consider multiplayer lmk, maybe we can play together
It would be interesting to see what AoE3 would look like if you tried to emulate some of the elements of SC2/AoE2 to pull more of the strategy from "outside of the game" to "during the game." I think you'd have to eliminate a lot of the snowball mechanics.
- Increase unit speed
- Nerf snare
- Increase map size
- Nerf shipments (specifically the spike in resource value going from age 1 > 2 and 3 > 4 - it's always been weird that the resource value doubles in those ages but only increases by 50% when going from 2 > 3.)
- Nerf kill XP by 25-50%
And suddenly you've got a game that allows for more mistakes, adaptation, map positioning, etc. and less about timings based off of shipments and catching your opponent's army with a few melee units to snare them.
Part of the problem that aoe3 faces is that midgame strategy is a bit one-dimensional. You need to have access to the natural resources, because the investment of moving to mills/plantations is killing (not only do you need enormous amounts of resources to make the transition, the gathering rate is also significantly slower once you do make the transition). Because you basically have to control resources outside of your base, you have to go all out on army to contest these resources.
Typically, an RTS needs to provide a reason to contest the map, otherwise you get a turtlefest, where nobody has any incentive to actually attack the other player: With defender's advantage taken into consideration, attacking would always be a losing proposition. But to increase strategic depth, it needs to be possible to temporarily sacrifise map control to get ahead in other aspects (economy, technology, army composition), or in an attempt to mount a comeback. In that sense, aoe3 is too binary; you either have map control or you lose the game.
I don't know how you would fix this though.
Maybe with a significantly bigger map, you still get some significant defender's advantage for resources outside of your base/TC range. But a significantly bigger map also basically kills early game aggression.
Typically, an RTS needs to provide a reason to contest the map, otherwise you get a turtlefest, where nobody has any incentive to actually attack the other player: With defender's advantage taken into consideration, attacking would always be a losing proposition. But to increase strategic depth, it needs to be possible to temporarily sacrifise map control to get ahead in other aspects (economy, technology, army composition), or in an attempt to mount a comeback. In that sense, aoe3 is too binary; you either have map control or you lose the game.
I don't know how you would fix this though.
Maybe with a significantly bigger map, you still get some significant defender's advantage for resources outside of your base/TC range. But a significantly bigger map also basically kills early game aggression.
I think one of the main ways to address this is to keep the transition to something like mills or plantations expensive, but make it more incremental. Having to commit 10 villagers to an expensive building that gathers at less than half the speed of hunt is a lot.
You could reduce the cost but also reduce the number of workers supported, or make the building cheaper and the upgrades more expensive, etc. That smooths out the transition a lot and makes it less of an all-or-nothing type of deal.
P.S. is page 2 of this thread broken for everyone else too?
Your opponent had a better strategy, have banelings ready for the timing attack.
