Honestly, I think the RTS genre is too hidebound to the origins of the genre. Too focused on trees of units and factories that existed originally because of singleplayer campaigns and trickling out upgrades.
I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming.
An RTS basically expects a player to learn multiple games with completely little intersectionality between them - an early-game, a mid-game, and a late-game, wherein you use completely different units and strategies. Given the fact that the designers have to figure out how to make the "core loop" fun in several completely different gameplay modes, and players have to learn all of them, is it any wonder that RTS isn't more popular?
I love the RTS genre - the combinations of base-building and unit command and creativity and intensity scratches all the right itches for me. But every RTS game I play feels like it's bogged down in far more complexity than the game really needed. For a while I had a lot of fun playing with the Cambrian explosion of simple RTS games on mobile because they don't feel the need to bolt on so many mechanics - they figure out what their core loop is and stick to it... but the mobile gaming world has been ruined by F2P mechanics.
I've been enjoying Zero-K lately, which does reduce some of the RPGishness that I think hurts the genre - no upgrading, no teching, no tech trees... you just plop a factory and you start building units. But its mechanics are still incredibly complicated, grown organically over a decade of experimenting within the genre of Total Annihilation-style RTS play. But even then, it's still very tied to Total Annihilation, another mid-'90s RTS game.
I'd love to see more first-class attention to the "core loop" of RTS games, but I'm worried the only people who are truly experimenting with the genre are the mobile developers, and the economy of mobile gaming is an ugly place.
Slightly off-topic, but Zero-K still has some "teching", just in the form of creating a supply chain of energy to the huge cannons. However, it's messed up in that the mechanic is simply undiscoverable without a tutorial.
That's sort of ironic, as I've been missing higher tier units, as they were as close to a disruptable supply chain as it gets in TA: build factory -> make builder -> build factory 2 -> make tier 2 unit. Targeting builders or resources was a way to delay the coming of the next tier units. It also gave some predictability to the gameplay: not seeing tier 1 units meant tier 2 units were unlikely to come.
I agree with the complex mechanics, and I hate that there are so many factories, with so many units, many of them basically copies of each other. Same for defenses: do we really need 3 different anti-air towers? I much preferred the TA approach, where each unit was good at something different, and easily visually distinguishable too.
You are describing a different Zero-K than I know. In the ZK I know switching to another factory is a late game thing, not something after you get a few builders for you first factory.
Also each factory has mid-tier and high-tier units with unique capabilities. Some factories even have low tier units with specific features (e.g. Jumpbot's pyro or Cloakbots cloaking builder).
I don't understand at all how you can say that many copy each other. That's blatantly unfair.
Furthermore despite the wide choice of units and structures, every stat and an helpful description of the typical role of the unit is available in-game.
The reason for the various AA towers is because you need bigger guns against bigger beasts. Your basic cheap and fast built AA tower will wreck locusts all day, but Ravens will laugh at them and crush your factory anyway. Depending on which style of unit you face (swarm of light units, pack of medium unit, or a few heavy and high DPS units), you need a different type of weapon (e.g. low DPS area of effect or single target high burst).
You're right about mid-tier units in each factory. I guess that functions as a sort of equivalent to building tier-2 factories in TA, although there's max 1-2 of those in each factory.
What I'm trying to describe is rather the feeling of being quite lost still after 20 games or so, because I can't remember for the life of me which unit from which factory does what, even less what it works well with, and almost nothing about what mid-game units I can expect from the enemy given the observed factory they have.
Yes, the chassis, costs, and speeds give them different edges, but a more perfect game IMO would turn "Some factories even have low tier units with specific features" into "there's few enough units that each feels like it has a specific feature".
I'm not sure which way this would be best achieved: by combining some factories where units overlap most? By splitting factory groups into factions? After all, the original TA had a good faction/factory overlap: kbots+vehicles * arm+core gives 4 sets of overlaps, with some unique units in between them.
I do like the different experiments: cloaks? shields? jump? meelee? mines? disruption? All are awesome riffs on the concept, but too much all at once. Alpha Centauri dealt with it by letting the player piece units together and save as presets, instead of letting them blend in player's mind.
In all seriousness, I get the point of having 3 AA towers: one that can shoot ground, one that is somewhat powerful, and one for mid-late game. What you say about adjusting to swarms etc is not something that I expected (and my AA defenses have been historically useless for some reason), so maybe I'm just playing a game I'm not able to enjoy :P
Yes, the diversity can be overwhelming. The cloak factory is said to be a solid choice for beginners. From there, you can venture in other flavors of "bot" factories, like shield bots and jump bots. Then you can experiment with the more specialized ones, like spiders, hovers, gunships. And finally there are the very specific ones like the airplanes factory and the ships factory (good skills in those can make a difference in multiplayer games).
Of course it is better to have some knowledge about each of them, so you have a general idea of what to do when facing e.g. spiders.
Zero-K explicitly follows a rock-paper-scissors scheme (mainly raider-riot-skirmisher). Each category has a logo, which helps with selecting a counter-unit [1].
This is precisely the purpose of the campaign, which has been designed as a giant tutorial (without the annoyances of click-there-do-that past the very first mission). It restricts you to a single factory and often only a subset of the units of this factory, as you unlock the units when you complete missions. It is also RPG-y as you can unlock more modules for your commander as well. It is quite well done.
If not for the campaign, I would have never guessed how to operate the huge cannons.
The thing that drives me to Zero-K is that it's much more polished than other Spring RTS mods, the constant metal/energy factor, that it has a good diversity, and actually works without having to guess how to run it.
Meanwhile I'm still going to looking for something where the diversity has less overlaps, where I can distinguish units without having to zoom out to see icons,… and where ships come in a whole range of sizes ;)
So far I'm not willing to give up the moveable commander, and that eliminates Nota.
> I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming.
Couldn't the same be roughly said for FPS+wolf3d/doom/quake? or RPG/Zelda/Tomb Raider/whatever ?
I mean, the current monster of the genre - SC2 - can trace many of its gameplay mechanics and units back to a game that came out in 1994, which was of course primarily designed for single-player gaming.
An RTS basically expects a player to learn multiple games with completely little intersectionality between them - an early-game, a mid-game, and a late-game, wherein you use completely different units and strategies. Given the fact that the designers have to figure out how to make the "core loop" fun in several completely different gameplay modes, and players have to learn all of them, is it any wonder that RTS isn't more popular?
I love the RTS genre - the combinations of base-building and unit command and creativity and intensity scratches all the right itches for me. But every RTS game I play feels like it's bogged down in far more complexity than the game really needed. For a while I had a lot of fun playing with the Cambrian explosion of simple RTS games on mobile because they don't feel the need to bolt on so many mechanics - they figure out what their core loop is and stick to it... but the mobile gaming world has been ruined by F2P mechanics.
I've been enjoying Zero-K lately, which does reduce some of the RPGishness that I think hurts the genre - no upgrading, no teching, no tech trees... you just plop a factory and you start building units. But its mechanics are still incredibly complicated, grown organically over a decade of experimenting within the genre of Total Annihilation-style RTS play. But even then, it's still very tied to Total Annihilation, another mid-'90s RTS game.
I'd love to see more first-class attention to the "core loop" of RTS games, but I'm worried the only people who are truly experimenting with the genre are the mobile developers, and the economy of mobile gaming is an ugly place.