So there are lots of games (Real Time Tactical or RTT) that took the unit movement micro and expanded it because people had fun moving armies around, but your standard RTS was too weak at giving the nuance. That’s why there are the COH and Wargame series’ which IMO are very much just the extrapolation of the micro in an RTS into a complete game.
Like if Command and Conquer (and its like) is in the middle, on one side we have Tower Defense games and City Builders, and on the other side we have Tactical Games, and maybe ABOVE there is the 4x games and grand strategy games and so on, which pull back quite a bit.
Then if you dig down further from RTS it’s very much a case for the squad based FPS/TPS games with perhaps base building elements, from Tribes up to NS and beyond. And then pf course X-com and others.
So RTS is its own thing but its definitely combining a lot of gameplay joys from those different genres (or indeed proved the origin for them) into a middle-scale strategy realm. So there’s a bit of jack of all trades mid-level depth where you have to handle disparate aspects.
I enjoy that you get to interact with all those levels simultaneously. From moving one Tanya around the map to building a giant defensive wall, from starting a new outpost to staging a naval invasion force. But yes usually the depth of the base building is shallow. The depth of how to implement my beach landing is lacking, there is only so much depth each element can offer when combined and under one player’s control.
A co-op environment that splits the labor up could be awesome. Players will naturally gravitate to their preferences.
Starcraft is intense. When Starcraft II came out I was able to push to diamond on pure fresh game gusto, but I quickly hit the wall of people who could actually play the game. I would have to practice and like “train” to overcome that wall. I’m sure if I picked it up now in the world with an established metagame I would be bronze. I always excel at that early phase of games before people sift through a lot of it. I find my biggest problem is I can’t solve the UI the way I want to. I’ll know I want to trigger this and this and this and move this and this and this and I just don’t have the muscle memory or apm to execute it.
I think that’s why I found dawn of war 2 much more enjoyable (once again early). There’s way less macro, and a bit less micro, but a lot of it is less apm intensive and more predictive. At least that was my gut instinct. I only once got into a fight with someone where I really felt like they had my number, they were playing orcs with a full knockdown based build and I just could not seem to play around them in any way. The “wall” never hard materialized while I was playing that one.
I’ve been playing Team Fight Tactics for the first time (maybe 5 games so far) and that’s my first battle chess game. I’m liking it, but I do not know how a lot of it works (first game I literally didn’t upgrade a single unit). It’s sort of fun because you can still do decent in a draft without even knowing the game. I have yet to upgrade a unit to tier 3 though.
I played the original DOTA Auto-Chess, the “official” auto-chess, and then Underlords. I didn’t make the jump to TFT.
Despite being built on top of RTS/MOBA-ish engines, these games have nothing to do with RTS whatsoever. They have more in common with board games like 7-Wonders. The strongest real-time aspect is a turn timer. I think TFT has a little real-time game where you have to move quickly to grab some heros or items maybe. I haven’t looked at it in a long time. They were fun for awhile, but then it got played out.
This is a video I mentally prepared for over the course of multiple days so that I can watch it in one sitting. Tim Rodgers has a style that no one else can reproduce and can bring tears to my eyes.
Final Fantasy XVI was announced, I’m hyped, no surprise. I’ve waited for the announcement for a while now, as I knew XVI would be coming eventually, I just wanted Square to get it over with, just throw something out instead of having another too long project that ends up falling flat.
But now I’m hyped, not just because I call myself Final Fantasy fan, but because the director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV is the producer of XVI. Also I’ve not seen sources that confirm this, but apparently some of the staff, including writers who did the first expansion to XIV are working on XVI. So there is a team that has delivered good stuff before.
Probably approaching 1/3 since there’s X-2 with it’s terrible story but great job system (dress sphere hype!), and XIII had 3 parts? plus the 7 remake now…
All the interesting RPGs are indie now. Small, short, evocative stories with decent mechanics.