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This is a game that came out in 1999! More than 20 years later there have been two remakes, there's still a huge and healthy community and a thriving pro scene. And now someone is using relatively cutting edge image AI to mod the sprites.

It's crazy to me how some of these old games have such staying power (Super Smash Bros Melee is another that comes to mind).




The crazy part is that some of the players who dominated the multiplayer scene in 2000 are still playing…and dominating.

TheViper regularly streams his matches. Surreal watching them cause I remember playing against him (and losing) 20+ years ago.


Don't remember playing against Viper but DauT had nearly made me smash my keyboard in a team game because I was sure he was cheating hehehe (and I was a teenager with a giant ego).


Wow! I looked him up and he was already a competitive player at 10 years old? That's pretty insane.


I must've been around 12 myself. This game has been a part of my life since before puberty.

I ascribe part of my deep love for history to this game.


I played the original Age of Empires when I was really young, I liked it so much I built my first website ever on geocities about that game.

I loved AoE 2 when it came out too. And yeah I loved the history immersion


Tetris on the NES still has massive tournaments. It’s pretty interesting to watch these super-young games (relative to chess, tennis, etc.) mature and develop as genuine fields of competition.


The staying power makes me feel kind of sad, because it represents a lack of vitality... they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance.


The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre more or less died in the mid 2000s with Age of Empires II, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft being the ones that left a mark.

Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene. Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.


> Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene.

SC2 still has a fairly healthy playerbase, and even War3 and BW still have some players.

> Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

You think AoE2 is alive but SC2 is dead? SC2 has very little support and will eventually be passed by AoE2 for playercount, but I don't think it's there yet. Pretty sure SC2 still has more players.


SC2 is certainly smaller than it was in its heyday, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I think going f2p is largely what's keeping it alive. It's still a hard game to learn, but I think it's got a fairly well thought out on-ramp with custom maps, co-op and 4v4s as relatively "safe" modes and a series of logical steps for eventually getting comfortable with 1v1.


There is the free and open source Beyond All Reason (BAR) inspired by Total Annihilation, which is very polished and a lot of fun. It's got features I've not seen anywhere else yet (in terms of possibilities for commands and customisation) and also has a growing competitive scene. It's worth checking out


Why do people want constantly new games otherwise they think that something is dead? This is like saying basketball is dead because basketball people only play basketball and not something else.


Because in the time between Warcraft I (not the first RTS but let's take it) and Starcraft, each new game was amazing compared to the previous. People who grew up in that loved that; but we've kind of leveled off, you can't really make things as amazingly better than current iterations graphically as the difference between WarCraft 1 and even StarCraft.


C&C is another hugely popular one. Though I was in the minority of not enjoying Westwoods RTS so much. I much preferred Warcraft and StarCraft. But my favourite was The Settlers.

This was also an era when business simulation games (you could argue as another “style” of RTS but not combat based) were popular too. Like Transport Tycoon, Theme Park, etc. From past conversations on here, it sounds like City Builders are still popular.


I feel Westwood's games were always more about the single player experience. The maps were pretty well designed as sort of puzzle boxes you needed to figure out. The amazing soundtracks and cheesy FMVs were also very good at building atmosphere. Multiplayer felt unbalanced in a not very fun way.


Agreed, StarCraft and friends got a big multiplayer scene that I was never into; I'm not a good enough player.

But C&C were fun to play through, and felt accessible to scrubs like me. (To be fair to Blizzard, StarCraft 2 is the ONLY Blizzard RTS I ever completed - or at least the episodes I bought ; they did exceptionally well on the difficulty scaling for that game.)

Competitive multiplayer was always meh for us, we loved comp stomps, and I somewhat am sad that the AI was so "bad" that you never really could get a good balance between "destroyed you instantly" and "easily overwhelmed".

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/04/the-armageddon...


I picked up a copy of C&C red alert a year ago. Sadly, it's unplayable on modern PCs. At least it was for me. Too many issues, crashes and the game speed not being changeable before game launch and by the time you can change it in game, it's too late and you're basically already way too behind to catch up. It's a shame because it was one of my favorites from the era.


Both the first C&C game and Red Alert were remastered in 2020 as a part of the "Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection".

That version should run on modern machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remaster...


They're currently on sale for a few bucks on Steam too.


There are open source engine reimplementations which use the original assets to play the c&c games on modern machines. See https://www.openra.net/


Capitalism 2 also, I played that extensively.


> The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.

Stormgate, Tempest Rising and Sanctuary are ones that RTS fans are looking forward to. A lot of people also like Beyond All Reason (a recent TA-like fan game).


Which is a damn shame because RTS games are my favorite genre, with Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 being my favorite games of all time.

It's really a shame to me that the most popular multiplayer games these days seem to be FPS games, or games where you just control a single character. Don't get me wrong those games can still be fun, but they entail a fraction of the strategy as RTS games.

I hope one day we'll see a resurgence of the RTS genre.


'Beyond All Reason' regularly ranks second place behind SC2 on Twitch.


> seeing no new games worthy of note to this day

I think Stormgate[0] will be interesting here, when it comes out.

[0] https://playstormgate.com


Northgard is pretty good and the devs are very active.


Northgard is more of a City builder that an rts.


I loved empire earth II as well


> they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance.

The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made. Company of Heroes 3 has already dropped below Company of Heroes 2 playercount despite having come out just a few months ago. AoE4 also had plenty of problems (no ranked ladder at launch? it took 6 months), though it being Relic, that's not very surprising. I'm on the r/realtimestrategy subreddit a lot, and basically every RTS that flops, well, there are very good reasons for that that you'll see people mention. It's not just "oh I'm cool with AoE/Starcraft and won't try anything else". There are some quite cool fan games, especially in the Total Annihilation-like space, but of course they don't have as much splash/marketing.

One of the core problems is probably devs streamlining away complexity, especially mechanical complexity or base building. Nearly every RTS dev for the last 15 years seems to beat on this drum of, "We're not gonna be Starcraft! We're gonna be easier for casual players!" and then they fail miserably and you look at the top 3 RTSes: Starcraft 2, Age of Empires 2, Starcraft 1. It's almost like mechanical complexity and base building can be good things!

I think Starcraft 2 had the right of it with the endless co-op mode introduced in the second expansion, that thing was very popular with more casual players (it was the most popular mode in the game at least for a while). While it retained the same core feel and mechanics of the 'regular' game, they had a lot of variety with the different commanders (basically subfactions) that could appeal to different players, including ones that were easier/had less base building. But you could still have a fairly traditional commander if you wanted one, so it was the best of both worlds.

And it's easy to see how the mode could be expanded on too: more army customizability, more variety in missions (instead of nearly every mission being 2 bases, you could vary that number up), unlockables/items/rewards from missions, varying numbers of players on a team instead of exactly 2, raid missions, mini-campaigns or storylines, etc.

Frost Giant is also planning to make 3v3 an actual competitive mode in terms of balance and design for Stormgate, which is...rare. I can't think of a competitive RTS off hand that was balanced around teams rather than 1v1, or in addition to 1v1. That might help too, team games are more social and often more popular.


> The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made.

Not only that. Playing a game today is going to a store, get a download code, wait half of hour for the game to install, make an online accout, confirm it, wait another half of hour for the game to update, start the game, shows you unskippable movies, then it starts some role playing and then finally the RTS or FPS starts. Sometimes you need a permanent connection to internet which makes the experience even worse.

With old games it is just: install the game then play.


It's hard to make a good RTS that both satisfies the competitive players and the people who want to just do various forms of comp-stomp.


I don't think it is, really.

Brood War was famous for 7v1 comp stomps being very popular in custom games, and it was obviously huge competitively, it's the super hardcore competitive RTS, even if it wasn't really planned that way.

The PvE comp stomp crowd seems to really like the co-op mode in Starcraft 2 that was introduced. To the extent that they have complaints, it's mostly that they wish there was even more stuff in it.

I think for the most part, the things that competitive players and casual players want aren't really at odds. They're usually orthogonal desires.

But what does exist, are a lot of people who say "I want to play RTS, but" and will never be satisfied. Like, there's always tons of people saying that they just want an easier to play RTS than Starcraft, and there's been tons of those, and hardly anyone plays them.


AOE4 has been an interesting journey for someone that prefers the good ol fashioned comp-stomp. It wasn't long before I was easily taking on 4 of the hardest AI and easily stomping them on certain maps, like mountain pass. But, they've progressively made the AI into a much tougher opponent. It's actually challenging now, and I'm only back up to 2 hardest, 2 hard with AI teammates on the same map. Can't speak to pvp; I've not tried at all.


Having a semi-structured form of this would also be really good imo. Starcraft 2 sorta has this -- there's a UI section similar to ladder that pits you against increasingly harder AI's, but it's just a single track and doesn't go far enough imo.

I can easily imagine a set of 'tiers' of challenges, where the bottom tier is super easy stuff for beginners and then each tier up increases the challenge until you're fighting a bunch of hard-level AI's simultaneously or whatever. Or maybe a Mario Bros-style world map that has various different challenges in different directions.


It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the symptom showing that there's little interest for competitive AoE2 play among newcomers. Like Starcraft Brood War, that still features Flash, Jaedong and Bisu.

You can compare it to Starcraft 2, whose scene remains quite attractive, and the top 4 European players (all of them being top 10 world) are just 25 23, 21 and 18 years old.


>It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the symptom showing that there's little interest for competitive AoE2 play among newcomers

This isn't true. Hera & Lierey are two of the best AoE2 players and are both young.

There's an S-Tier tournament happening this week for anyone interested: https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/King_of_the_Desert/5


The games that survived for so long are simply that good (so it's basically survivorship bias). There are plenty of new indie RTS games on PC, the vitality is definitely there. But there's no longer big publisher money behind it like in the heydays and without big marketing campaigns those games are much less visible.

But if you search a bit in the RTS section, there are definitely some gems on Steam (e.g. Northgard comes to mind, and currently I'm having a lot of fun with Timberborn, although that's a city builder, not a competitive RTS). Oh, and WARNO, even if it still has a lot of early-access roughness.


Heroes III has something similar, with major mods being developed along with entirely new "replacement" game engines.


The even crazier thing is card or board games that are still alive and modernized. Some games are timeless.


Many of the best board games are less than twenty years old. Cardboard based entertainment has made huge strides recently.

By and large, good boardgames are not so much timeless as 'fairly new' instead.

There have been a few good games earlier, but it's really instructive to have a look at the ranked list of boardgames at https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and check the publication dates.


One problem I have with the rankings here is they seem really prone to grade inflation and band-wagoning. Even more-so when the game is expensive.


The BGG rankings are a particular viewpoint into a general take on board games; the way I look at it - anything high ranked is going to be "good" even if I don't particular like the play style, theme, or execution. Many are "good but not for me".

The problem with the rankings is that some very playable games are ranked low. It's a meme on BGG but CandyLand is famously shit on: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5048/candy-land - but it's a perfectly acceptable "game" for very young children, and if you've ever dealt with said children you know that getting them to successfully complete a CandyLand session without going backwards on the track, randomly wandering off, taking multiple cards, etc is a serious feat.

It's not a great game but it's certainly still playable in the niche it occupies.


Yeah, I've heard of very few of the top ones, and they look like the super complex kind of games I don't play. I did play Pandemic Legacy and didn't like it. Then I cmd+F'd for Diplomacy, Catan, and chess on the top list, didn't see them, and said nah.


Catan isn't actually all that great (and I say that as someone who bought his set back in 1995). We have much better games these days.

Stripped of its cultural significance, chess isn't that great either for a general audience. It suffers from analysis paralysis. I would only recommend it to a niche audience.

I love Diplomacy; I played many games over email, in person and even participated in the German Diplomacy championship (face-to-face) back in the 2000s. Yet, it's also a very niche game, and I can see why some people would rate it low. I actually prefer the game over email, because it gives you more time to think, sending emails resembles the telegraphs of the early 20th century and I am less likely to burn out from a months long game with one move every few days than one very intense day of face-to-face play.

Btw, if you like Diplomacy, I recommend playing on the 1900 map variant. It's basically an improved version of the standard map.

See http://uk.diplom.org/pouch/Online/variants/1900-GG.pdf

Or for further reading https://diplomacygames.com/baron-von-powell-creator-of-1900/ or http://uk.diplom.org/pouch/Zine/F2007M/Roburn/1900.htm


Catan is merely ok from a serious gaming perspective, but for most people sitting around having fun, it's a go-to. There's value in it looking nice and being easy to understand, and I can see it staying popular 20 years from now. The top listed modern games have only ever come up in niche board game group settings for me, while even chess and Diplomacy have been much more popular. This is only my experience, but I'm probably not alone in thinking the top games are all very uncommon.

I've actually only ever played Diplomacy over Backstabbr.com with friends, so analogous to email/postal play (if you still count that as a board game). Completed several games now, and I've been wanting to do it in-person. That 1900 variant has more detailed notes than any other variant I've seen, and I'd like to give it a try!


I agree with your evaluation of the top listed games on BGG.

Catan can be fun, especially the first few dozen times you play it. But it wears thin even for a casual group. We have better casual games these days. And even back then, we did: I found that eg Bohnanza released about the same time as Catan holds up much better to repeated plays; even though it looks much less impressive at first. The big problem with Catan is that the initial settlement placement determines so much of the rest of the game, and there aren't that many meaningful decisions left in the rest of the game.

I did most of my in-person games of Diplomacy when I was working in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. I was working for a startup spun off from the local university, and noticed that the university societies were actually (mostly) open to the general public. So I just joined the Diplomacy society.


That's very lucky of you. Diplomacy is my favorite game, and some of my friends like it too, but it can be hard to get 7 people committed to something that might last 2 months (or 4 hours if in-person). I'm sure I can find some club in California for this if I try, but I'm already in too many clubs.


In a 'frictionless vacuum', Diplomacy is one of my favourite games.

After a grueling day playing Diplomacy, I usually had second thoughts. (But that wouldn't keep me from doing it again a few months later.) But I did learn that I prefer play-by-email after all. The games are higher quality, and you can actually finish them.


The people who review board games are ... a special bunch. Those games are very popular and well ranked, but they're not considered "best of the best" by people who "seriously play games".

One of the best usages of BGG is to find a game you like, and use it to find games that are like that one, and see what you want.


I know how it is. Some board games are almost like strategy video games with the amount of detail and immersion. Usually those same board game groups play D&D or something as well, like my housemates back in college. I just never liked those. If I'm gonna play a serious game, it's something simple with depth in play style, like Diplomacy.

Recommender algos are cool and useful.


Candyland might be an ok game for young children, but there are certainly better games for that niche, too.

Just like Risk can be an entertaining game, but it's far from the most entertaining game you could play during that time.


Yes. And they are also just aggregates of what people think. They aren't God given absolute quality judgements.

Yet, even with all the caveats, it's still remarkable how much better boardgames have gotten.


> They aren't God given absolute quality judgements.

This seems a bit of a high bar to make only one review site have to clear.


wow, i had no idea there were so many boardgames.. i looked to see where my old favorite Talisman was and it's ranked #1764! jeez..


That's actually pretty high.




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