On February 15 2024 22:28 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I noticed Tasteless was streaming ~4:30am EST and he sometimes took a while to find games. I guess the lowest player counts are around that time. By the numbers... https://stormgateworld.com/stats
Someone used the "big SC2 tournament" excuse for declining player participation. We can now see this is not a sufficient explanation. #s have been declining long before and long after IEM Katowice.
Hopefully, the new influx of players solves this issue. They say this "season" or "wave" ends March 11. Is this the official ending of Beta Wave #1? Founders pack people spending $40+ got Beta Wave #1 as part of their package.
How much will it cost to be in Beta Wave #2?
On February 15 2024 22:52 Manit0u wrote: I must say that so far I'm not really impressed with Stormgate at all. Looks way too similar to SC2 IMO, with similar units, graphics and mechanics and doesn't really have enough distinguishing features to stand on its own.
Not really sure if it'll be a successful title (96% drop in the number of ladder players within 2 weeks doesn't really look good).
Stormgate has a long way to go, agreed. But some posts here leave me wondering... Obviously the active player count goes down after 95% (arbitrary number) lost their license to play after the 12th. I imagine quite a few of the rest, who still do have the license to play (through invites or buying a KS package) just wanted to check it out (myself included) and play a few games but don't want to be real "beta testers"
It’s also not remotely finished
Despite playing Blizz games since my first tender foray into online gaming with Diablo 1, I’ve never got invited onto a Blizzard beta
But as Artosis pointed out in his Stormgate opinions video (and wasn’t something I knew), the StarCraft beta was basically just WoL retail lacking a bit of polish and tweaking.
Units were all there, a beta of that type is obviously invaluable for technical and design feedback, but for the participants you are basically playing the actual game earlier than everyone else.
So of course you’ll keep playing it, or organise fun tournaments or whatever, provided you like the core gameplay!
My plan for Stormgate, sadly ruined by pesky life commitments was just to dip in, see how it felt in motion, muck around with versus AI, maybe play some co-op with a friend (I think that was playable?) and then just dip. I can’t imagine I’m remotely alone in this.
The game would have to have been like genuinely breathtakingly amazing for me to abandon that plan of action.
I like the early phases of strategy games and it’s fun to experiment and see what everyone else is coming up with, but if you’re missing full tech trees and a full faction I’ll just hold off until it’s fleshed out more. I’d probably keep grinding a janky but faction-complete beta way more than I’d play a smooth but content-lite one
I played the SC2 Beta. There were issues with the game (definitely with the maps) and the game was super basic but I at least had FUN in that beta. I actually looked forward to playing it. I skipped class to play it.
Stormgate's beta, I played it out of a weird sense of duty WANTING it to be good and it just wasn't.
Heh, for me playing SC2 beta for a bit meant that I've decided not to pursue it any more and I never played SC2 past beta and pretty much lost all interest in it (I didn't like the direction they took with SC2). Stormgate being so similar to SC2 in terms of design is a hard pass for me.
I only hope that Homeworld 3 and Tempest Rising won't disappoint.
Both these games are traditionally focused on PvE and not PvP right? I played every C&C PvE campaign up until Generals I think and it was nice. But PvP? They all were really bad in that regard. Sure some FFA LAN games with friends but laddering 1v1? Maybe I'm remembering wrong or was too young though
Homeworld was pretty niche game overall but it did have a PvP scene (it still has with small tournaments going on). C&C/Red Alert were played in PvP quite a bit (RA more but Kane's Wrath had its fair share of PvP).
Obviously nothing on the scale of BW/WC3/SC2 but the games were definitely playable PvP and maybe if they had bigger following and larger playerbase they might've taken off more in the e-sports space.
Edit: For me personally it is quite sad that games like Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak didn't take off on the larger e-sports scene. It's brilliantly designed, looks amazing and is pretty good from the spectator's perspective since even when spactating it has this cinematic feel with how good it looks, all the unit chatter on the comms etc.
C&C:KW looks a bit more like the old traditional RTS (and there are tournaments going on in it even this year).
Both of those games look way more interesting to me than Stormgate though
Yeah but those are finished games. And it just speak what do you like about RTS games maybe ? I look at those games and the first thing that comes to mind graphics dont look nice. I dont really see micro in the first game. All i see are dots zoomed out. The maps / terrain dont have any appeal either.
Im not saying Stormgate will improve much more than what it is now but it is a fact that there is a faction missing. So it is indeed a work in progress.
To me the most interesting about stormgate is that they doing a technology that allow players from different parts of the world to play without latency issues. Something that btw has killed Brood War and make most of the games unplayable.
That said Stormgate budget is low and i really think their game is not going to get full potential. SC2 back in 2008 budget was over 100 millions. In 2024 that is even more and Stormgate dont have a big team. Not budget. My guess is they releasing this early to see if they can get more fund. But the first impression is important and they failed to deliver in the art side. I for example was very impress with sc2 graphics back then. I was hyped etc. But then you try the game and the fights are so boring and are over in seconds that it never got me in. But atleast visual first impression was good.
So far im not impress at all with stormgate. The co-op seems fun. The hero aspects make it really fun to that mod. My only complain is that the hero size is to small . Need to be bigger and different from the rest of the units.
On February 15 2024 22:28 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I noticed Tasteless was streaming ~4:30am EST and he sometimes took a while to find games. I guess the lowest player counts are around that time. By the numbers... https://stormgateworld.com/stats
Someone used the "big SC2 tournament" excuse for declining player participation. We can now see this is not a sufficient explanation. #s have been declining long before and long after IEM Katowice.
Hopefully, the new influx of players solves this issue. They say this "season" or "wave" ends March 11. Is this the official ending of Beta Wave #1? Founders pack people spending $40+ got Beta Wave #1 as part of their package.
How much will it cost to be in Beta Wave #2?
On February 15 2024 22:52 Manit0u wrote: I must say that so far I'm not really impressed with Stormgate at all. Looks way too similar to SC2 IMO, with similar units, graphics and mechanics and doesn't really have enough distinguishing features to stand on its own.
Not really sure if it'll be a successful title (96% drop in the number of ladder players within 2 weeks doesn't really look good).
Stormgate has a long way to go, agreed. But some posts here leave me wondering... Obviously the active player count goes down after 95% (arbitrary number) lost their license to play after the 12th. I imagine quite a few of the rest, who still do have the license to play (through invites or buying a KS package) just wanted to check it out (myself included) and play a few games but don't want to be real "beta testers"
It’s also not remotely finished
Despite playing Blizz games since my first tender foray into online gaming with Diablo 1, I’ve never got invited onto a Blizzard beta
But as Artosis pointed out in his Stormgate opinions video (and wasn’t something I knew), the StarCraft beta was basically just WoL retail lacking a bit of polish and tweaking.
Units were all there, a beta of that type is obviously invaluable for technical and design feedback, but for the participants you are basically playing the actual game earlier than everyone else.
So of course you’ll keep playing it, or organise fun tournaments or whatever, provided you like the core gameplay!
My plan for Stormgate, sadly ruined by pesky life commitments was just to dip in, see how it felt in motion, muck around with versus AI, maybe play some co-op with a friend (I think that was playable?) and then just dip. I can’t imagine I’m remotely alone in this.
The game would have to have been like genuinely breathtakingly amazing for me to abandon that plan of action.
I like the early phases of strategy games and it’s fun to experiment and see what everyone else is coming up with, but if you’re missing full tech trees and a full faction I’ll just hold off until it’s fleshed out more. I’d probably keep grinding a janky but faction-complete beta way more than I’d play a smooth but content-lite one
I played the SC2 Beta. There were issues with the game (definitely with the maps) and the game was super basic but I at least had FUN in that beta. I actually looked forward to playing it. I skipped class to play it.
Stormgate's beta, I played it out of a weird sense of duty WANTING it to be good and it just wasn't.
Heh, for me playing SC2 beta for a bit meant that I've decided not to pursue it any more and I never played SC2 past beta and pretty much lost all interest in it (I didn't like the direction they took with SC2). Stormgate being so similar to SC2 in terms of design is a hard pass for me.
I only hope that Homeworld 3 and Tempest Rising won't disappoint.
Both these games are traditionally focused on PvE and not PvP right? I played every C&C PvE campaign up until Generals I think and it was nice. But PvP? They all were really bad in that regard. Sure some FFA LAN games with friends but laddering 1v1? Maybe I'm remembering wrong or was too young though
Homeworld was pretty niche game overall but it did have a PvP scene (it still has with small tournaments going on). C&C/Red Alert were played in PvP quite a bit (RA more but Kane's Wrath had its fair share of PvP).
Obviously nothing on the scale of BW/WC3/SC2 but the games were definitely playable PvP and maybe if they had bigger following and larger playerbase they might've taken off more in the e-sports space.
Edit: For me personally it is quite sad that games like Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak didn't take off on the larger e-sports scene. It's brilliantly designed, looks amazing and is pretty good from the spectator's perspective since even when spactating it has this cinematic feel with how good it looks, all the unit chatter on the comms etc.
Both of those games look way more interesting to me than Stormgate though
Yeah but those are finished games. And it just speak what do you like about RTS games maybe ? I look at those games and the first thing that comes to mind graphics dont look nice. I dont really see micro in the first game. All i see are dots zoomed out.
Well, the dots zoomed out are because it's the way they implemented the minimap basically (you can zoom out to see the entire battlefield) and you can still control units from this view. As far as micro goes I think that C&C simply didn't develop hardcore enough PvP scene and it's way more macro oriented. For DoK there won't be too much twitch-micro because the units move more naturally (they need to speed up and slow down, they have actual turn radius instead of spinning in place etc.). This makes it look better but at the same time is not conducive to command spamming on the units. There's still micro required though as the game follows the rock-paper-scissors model with unit counters so you still need to control which units engage which and stuff is happening all over the map so it still requires skill. Neither of those games require 400 APM like SC but each has its own appeal. In DoK I really like the bigger map scale with long travel times, makes it very strategic because if you leave for a push with your units and you didn't scout incoming light unit flank that might obliterate your economy you can get screwed hard because it'll take a while for your forces to get into the position to counter.
I also tested Homeworld 3 during Steam Next Fest and it's obviously way further in development and much more polished and feature-rich. It visually also appeals more to me than the blandness of Stormgate. However, I did have more fun with Stormgate and that says a lot because at this point I can't imagine myself playing it or buying campaigns. Watching my fleet in Homeworld 3 take ages to turn around for another attack on the same group of enemies again and again and again was mind-numbing. They even strayed in prolonged fights so some units ended up miles away from each other (still fighting). The 3D aspect also made it hard to judge where stuff really is. I lost track of my mining ships multiple times because the target debris was actually beneath or behind an asteroid, even though it looked like debris and asteroid were just side by side. Yes, that's my inability but I just couldn't enjoy it feeling so unintuitive to me. There was also annoying stuff with the UI, such as the chat overlapping with the action menu on the right and there was no option to fully close, move or resize it. Anyhow, I think Homeworld 3 targets a way different audience than Stormgate. The same is probably true, even though to a lesser extend I suppose, for Tempest Rising, which I haven't touched but looks very much like C&C. It just doesn't seem to feature genuine unit responsiveness you get out of Blizzard-style RTS games.
at Pax East a year ago Randy Pitchford, owner of Homeworld's publisher Gearbox, joked about the game's commercial prospects. He said , "I have no idea how we're going to make any money on this".
On February 16 2024 00:28 JimmyJRaynor wrote: big event tomorrow
On February 16 2024 00:04 WombaT wrote: The game would have to have been like genuinely breathtakingly amazing for me to abandon that plan of action.
Breathtaking? do you mean Elaine Bennis breathtaking.. or ugly baby breathtaking? LOL.
On February 16 2024 00:04 WombaT wrote: But as Artosis pointed out in his Stormgate opinions video (and wasn’t something I knew), the StarCraft beta was basically just WoL retail lacking a bit of polish and tweaking.
when you put so much of your marketing into "spiritual successor to Starcraft" and messaging that connotes "we made Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2" you end up getting compared directly with SC2. The SC2 beta was a non stop party. The internet cafe/pc bang i frequented doubled their sales in April 2010. It was all Starcraft2... all the time. I had a key from Blizzcon. The owner guy bought a bunch of SC2 Blizzcon keys off of ebay in 2009. Good Times! Most people are not going to get into a careful analysis this deep. They'll have an emotional//impressionistic memory of the March 2010 SC2 beta and then look at Stormgate and just roll their eyes. I must say though... Stormgate's graphics are quite breathtaking
OK so I watched Stormgate a bit and the game looks completely uninspired. Visually it's disappointing. The theme with demons in space is just lacking - I mean stylistically Doomtrooper/Warzone was doing it better. The game feels like forced amalgamation of Starcraft and Warcraft with nothing contributing to the genre. At this point I put a lot more hopes on Zerospace.
Also there is nothing really cool. Maybe with t3..
On February 17 2024 07:08 nimdil wrote: OK so I watched Stormgate a bit and the game looks completely uninspired. Visually it's disappointing. The theme with demons in space is just lacking - I mean stylistically Doomtrooper/Warzone was doing it better. The game feels like forced amalgamation of Starcraft and Warcraft with nothing contributing to the genre. At this point I put a lot more hopes on Zerospace.
Also there is nothing really cool. Maybe with t3..
I wish I could say Zerospace looked any better. Zerospace looks like it's still working on actual textures for the units though, or at least I hope that's what's going on.
Gameplay wise, Zerospace looks like SC2 with heroes.
So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
Strong defenders advantage but they seem to rather design games, including the maps, with little to no defenders advantage at all. At this point, the only defenders advantage Stormgate has is short productions times...
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
Nothing wrong with big armies fighting big armies. I think that's cool.
On February 17 2024 07:08 nimdil wrote: OK so I watched Stormgate a bit and the game looks completely uninspired. Visually it's disappointing. The theme with demons in space is just lacking - I mean stylistically Doomtrooper/Warzone was doing it better. The game feels like forced amalgamation of Starcraft and Warcraft with nothing contributing to the genre. At this point I put a lot more hopes on Zerospace.
Also there is nothing really cool. Maybe with t3..
I wish I could say Zerospace looked any better. Zerospace looks like it's still working on actual textures for the units though, or at least I hope that's what's going on.
Gameplay wise, Zerospace looks like SC2 with heroes.
I highly suggest Godsworn.
Better coop so far, better graphical artstyle (ok that is a subjective feeling) and it looks way more feature complete.
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
There must be a way to do it that doesn’t require a brutal level of mechanical difficulty.
I’ve just yet to see it. Or at least I haven’t seen the ‘full package’ as it were. X RTS deals with a particular issue well, or has some interesting system, but the unit control is horrible. Or the eco structure is fascinating but the units suck. Or the micro is horrible etc.
Why not experiment with terrain a bit? What about cover mechanics? What about graduating slopes? It feels Blizz RTS and this Blizz-inspired RTS have two types of ground, low and high and that’s about it.
You could have a mechanic where units can’t fire if units in front of them were on a higher incline (friendly fire would be too punishing), or cut range or something. So if you strategically design a map with areas like this being in likely high traffic areas you can have a kind of explicit anti-deathball mechanic.
Why not go a different direction to what Blizz did in Legacy in trying to spread out bases to maintain an income by having them burn out quicker?
Give each starting base an arbitrary amount of resource yield, and limit every subsequent expansion’s effective mining. Maybe even have bases be variable in this positionally depending on how risky they are (likely) to be to take
So you can get your initial eco going to keep the early game ramping up. But after that, if you want more eco well you need more bases.
In Legacy, there’s an optimal amount of bases, you just take more because you’re going to mine out. Why not make it that more bases = better income, and incentivise expanding out, which then introduces the risk/reward of more moolah versus being overstretched. Which naturally should stretch play out to be more skirmishy.
I’m spitballing some bad ideas, but hey I’m trying. I’m going off the ‘you can’t just do what BW did a quarter of a century later’ rationale.
1. Making it easier to move armies versus limited unit selection often leads to blobs. Solution - don’t try to make it harder to move an army around, make being in a blob disadvantageous somehow. Try to reverse the general idea of ‘more good units in a space = better’
2. BW’s macro was hard as fuck, but it made for good territorial jousting. Solution - Keep macro being easier on a mechanical level, just make there be more of it. Go nuts, 1 base is better than 2, well 10 bases are better than 9. This should also naturally taper off by skill level, more so than alternatives, IMO. A low-level game you might feel great engaging in some 2 base versus 2 slugfest, where a top level game you might have 10 on each side with skirmishes all over the map.
3. Defender’s advantage is tricky because I feel without making the game be too territorial in other ways it can make turtling too potent. But I’m much more in favour of a strong defender’s advantage in a game where you’re spread out everywhere, versus say where 2/3 bases is optimal.
Interested to see what people think of my ramblings and madness haha
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
There must be a way to do it that doesn’t require a brutal level of mechanical difficulty.
I’ve just yet to see it. Or at least I haven’t seen the ‘full package’ as it were. X RTS deals with a particular issue well, or has some interesting system, but the unit control is horrible. Or the eco structure is fascinating but the units suck. Or the micro is horrible etc.
Why not experiment with terrain a bit? What about cover mechanics? What about graduating slopes? It feels Blizz RTS and this Blizz-inspired RTS have two types of ground, low and high and that’s about it.
You could have a mechanic where units can’t fire if units in front of them were on a higher incline (friendly fire would be too punishing), or cut range or something. So if you strategically design a map with areas like this being in likely high traffic areas you can have a kind of explicit anti-deathball mechanic.
Why not go a different direction to what Blizz did in Legacy in trying to spread out bases to maintain an income by having them burn out quicker?
Give each starting base an arbitrary amount of resource yield, and limit every subsequent expansion’s effective mining. Maybe even have bases be variable in this positionally depending on how risky they are (likely) to be to take
So you can get your initial eco going to keep the early game ramping up. But after that, if you want more eco well you need more bases.
In Legacy, there’s an optimal amount of bases, you just take more because you’re going to mine out. Why not make it that more bases = better income, and incentivise expanding out, which then introduces the risk/reward of more moolah versus being overstretched. Which naturally should stretch play out to be more skirmishy.
I’m spitballing some bad ideas, but hey I’m trying. I’m going off the ‘you can’t just do what BW did a quarter of a century later’ rationale.
1. Making it easier to move armies versus limited unit selection often leads to blobs. Solution - don’t try to make it harder to move an army around, make being in a blob disadvantageous somehow. Try to reverse the general idea of ‘more good units in a space = better’
2. BW’s macro was hard as fuck, but it made for good territorial jousting. Solution - Keep macro being easier on a mechanical level, just make there be more of it. Go nuts, 1 base is better than 2, well 10 bases are better than 9. This should also naturally taper off by skill level, more so than alternatives, IMO. A low-level game you might feel great engaging in some 2 base versus 2 slugfest, where a top level game you might have 10 on each side with skirmishes all over the map.
3. Defender’s advantage is tricky because I feel without making the game be too territorial in other ways it can make turtling too potent. But I’m much more in favour of a strong defender’s advantage in a game where you’re spread out everywhere, versus say where 2/3 bases is optimal.
Interested to see what people think of my ramblings and madness haha
I proposed something in the same vein as your first point a few posts prior.
2 and 3 are interesting ideas on the macro side that would be cool to see for sure. Possibly with bigger maps necessary to do it, the speed of the units can be used as well, if it s slower you re more likely to spread them than run your deadball around
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
There must be a way to do it that doesn’t require a brutal level of mechanical difficulty.
I’ve just yet to see it. Or at least I haven’t seen the ‘full package’ as it were. X RTS deals with a particular issue well, or has some interesting system, but the unit control is horrible. Or the eco structure is fascinating but the units suck. Or the micro is horrible etc.
Why not experiment with terrain a bit? What about cover mechanics? What about graduating slopes? It feels Blizz RTS and this Blizz-inspired RTS have two types of ground, low and high and that’s about it.
You could have a mechanic where units can’t fire if units in front of them were on a higher incline (friendly fire would be too punishing), or cut range or something. So if you strategically design a map with areas like this being in likely high traffic areas you can have a kind of explicit anti-deathball mechanic.
Why not go a different direction to what Blizz did in Legacy in trying to spread out bases to maintain an income by having them burn out quicker?
Give each starting base an arbitrary amount of resource yield, and limit every subsequent expansion’s effective mining. Maybe even have bases be variable in this positionally depending on how risky they are (likely) to be to take
So you can get your initial eco going to keep the early game ramping up. But after that, if you want more eco well you need more bases.
In Legacy, there’s an optimal amount of bases, you just take more because you’re going to mine out. Why not make it that more bases = better income, and incentivise expanding out, which then introduces the risk/reward of more moolah versus being overstretched. Which naturally should stretch play out to be more skirmishy.
I’m spitballing some bad ideas, but hey I’m trying. I’m going off the ‘you can’t just do what BW did a quarter of a century later’ rationale.
1. Making it easier to move armies versus limited unit selection often leads to blobs. Solution - don’t try to make it harder to move an army around, make being in a blob disadvantageous somehow. Try to reverse the general idea of ‘more good units in a space = better’
2. BW’s macro was hard as fuck, but it made for good territorial jousting. Solution - Keep macro being easier on a mechanical level, just make there be more of it. Go nuts, 1 base is better than 2, well 10 bases are better than 9. This should also naturally taper off by skill level, more so than alternatives, IMO. A low-level game you might feel great engaging in some 2 base versus 2 slugfest, where a top level game you might have 10 on each side with skirmishes all over the map.
3. Defender’s advantage is tricky because I feel without making the game be too territorial in other ways it can make turtling too potent. But I’m much more in favour of a strong defender’s advantage in a game where you’re spread out everywhere, versus say where 2/3 bases is optimal.
Interested to see what people think of my ramblings and madness haha
I proposed something in the same vein as your first point a few posts prior.
2 and 3 are interesting ideas on the macro side that would be cool to see for sure. Possibly with bigger maps necessary to do it, the speed of the units can be used as well, if it s slower you re more likely to spread them than run your deadball around
Throwing my own hat into the ring, there are not enough units that are strong while not moving but are vulnerable while in transit. I'm thinking BW siege tanks and vulture mines. Defiler Dark Swarm and Lurkers. You could throw your whole blob into those and it would be a meat grinder. Turtling can be disincentivized by making map control valuable by places more and smaller expansions around the map as others suggested, or by some other method.
Bottom-line, perhaps there aren't enough units that can hold a position effectively against a bigger army.
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
There must be a way to do it that doesn’t require a brutal level of mechanical difficulty.
BAR has people commanding armies MUCH larger than those in SC2 (150 air units as just one squad for example) but they've made the controls so that issuing even complex orders to large number of units is not a problem.
I think that right now this is the most advanced RTS ever. Made by an indie team of passionate people who put gameplay first and boy do they deliver... I mean, can you imagine SC2 engine being able to handle 25v25?
Zero-K and Beyond All Reason were originally forks of a Total Annihilation mod on a fan made engine, they no longer use any asset of the original game so they count as independent RTS games.
I think Blizzard RTS fan projects like Warcraft 3 Community Edition and Warsmash given enough time could have something like that too. Warcraft and Starcraft are quite similar mechanics wise, if a fan made engine can be used for Warcraft-like games it can be used for StarCraft-like games too.
On February 17 2024 08:15 LunarC wrote: So can any of these games move beyond SC2? It's fast turning into army blob vs. army blob again. Why can't any of these games design their systems to produce multi-screen spanning battles on multiple fronts like Brood War regularly produced? I guess why do these games always revert to blob v. blob? Can the mechanisms ever be designed to revert to clashes on multiple fronts instead? Is there a solution besides a unit selection cap?
It s the main question, and the reason comes from the fact that units require some micro to reach out in close combat against long range unit. For example, against tank, you need to split your marines, against nova, you have to split, against lurker, split also, against banes u need big split.... and of course some units need a lot of apm micro like stalkers.
The counter part of the path movement SC2 algorythm compared to BW (grap shape) lead to an advantage for units with splash damage. That s way, now with a dozen year of games, we can assume that game speed has to be slower (cooldown for damage per second) because :
1) in order to be less punishing 2) avoid only back and forth fights
PLUS
3) help for balance unconsequent units in end game 4) the resistance against high damage of splash is counter by units with the armored-tag (so with a high hit points), so you also need to balance the amount of light and armored unit.
Now game is free, can we please revert to 9 workers also because for god sake, they destroyed all builds for having a game starting one minute sooner.
If you want more front lines, it also possible to decrease the number of pack minerals per base (from 8 to 6 for example) and increase the money of harvesting in exchange (to not disturb the build orders of HoTS), then you will have bigger army (because obviously 40% of workers is too much).
You can also improve little bit defense of each races to help players of being harass constantly.
Then mapmakers have to avoid (at maximum) to repeat maps the "three first bases shape position", because it doesn t help repeatability
Starcraft 1.5 would be possible only if Activision would improve SC2 in adding a rank possibility for the best multiplayer mods. Some other games have a web-online rank system, and that s why there s no new mod replacing this dead game.
Zero-K and Beyond All Reason have a "line move" UI feature that can be very useful for preventing blob-like army. It was also borrowed by the indie RTS game Istrolid (https://store.steampowered.com/app/449140/Istrolid/), you can see a demonstration in Istrolid here:
But the problem is when the target audience of your game think splitting units with a lot of clicking is a irreplaceable source of skill, it's difficult to use any UI solution like this.
EPT
