Supreme Commander's gameplay is nothing but hard counters[1], especially with the reclaim system (you can harvest a dead unit to reclaim 80% of the mass used in creating it).
The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF.
[1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades.
Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs.
They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards.
I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!
SupCom has remained interesting to RTS players long past its expiration date. The official servers have been down for years! Games are played on unofficial servers now.[0]
Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic.
Not an expert, but urban warfare is more complicated and doesn't have as much 'hard counters'; they had to fight tooth and nail, door to door to (re)take cities in the middle-east.
Of course, if you take the gulf war you can see it in action, with most of Iraq's tanks and airplanes being taken out via airstrikes.
It's interesting that you pick Cybran SACUs as your example; I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units. Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses? Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
Also FAF is amazing, if anyone reading this is interested I suggest you check out some replays on GyleCast:
>I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units.
It was less of a statement against how OP they are and more of a statement about how they seem to exist outside of the rock/paper/scissors mechanic that almost all other units are subject to. Seraphim SACUs can of course telesnipe and wreak havok, but would struggle against a swarm of gunships or bombers as they lack AA.
>Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses?
There's not a whole lot they can do against naval units (apart from set up shields and TMLs), but then again there's not a whole lot that naval units can do against them if they just walk away from the shore.
>Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
You're looking at 50DPS with the torps and 80DPS with the AA. Not exactly comparable to the 400DPS long-range bolters and 4000 DPS face laser!
In terms of hard counters:
- It would lose to two T3 heavy gunships (3k mass total).
- Naval-wise, a pair of Salems (4.5k mass total) could complete nullify its torps with anti-torps (4 torps/4s for the ML vs 2 anti-torps/3.8s per salem) and fire back at a combined 200DPS.
(For people unfamiliar with SupCom, a Monkeylord is a giant, late game unit that costs 20k mass.)
I should get back on that one, I loved playing it at the time (against CPU, never a fan of online play), just building layers of defenses and have a constant stream of CPU forces get destroyed against it.
The one I'm thinking of had early support for multi-core and multi-screen, with the minimap / overview on the other screen. But it was still constrained; would have loved to test that defense of mine against all 7 other CPU players on a big map. Might try it again on my newer system.
Yeah, loved doing that exact same thing too :-) Turtling was incredibly fascinating in SC for some reason. Especially once you built the Tier 4 infinite power generator from one of the races.
And yes, I tried it couple years ago and unfortunately I don't think it's that well optimized for multi-core CPUs, the game was massively slowing down for me, but my i7 was at like 50% usage at most.
If you're playing against AI in SupCom, try the LOUD mod. I've been playing it for a year or two, and found it's much improved (CPU usage and tactics) over the stock AI.
This is the tldr of hard counter play in most RTS games. It’s fun for experienced players who understand the rules/decision tree and enjoy learning the tricks and edge cases - terrible for new players who just get crushed by rules they don’t know and can’t know without going online for 10 hours.
In many cases, the joy of RTS for new players is map control. Hard counters tend to break this gameplay loop for them as they don’t understand how they can lose when they had 80% of the map. Conversely pure map control games get boring for pros who get tired of “take more territory, get bigger units” play styles.
Iron harvest was a recent curious entrant to the RTS genre where the game depends heavily on positioning but doesn’t grant you large bonuses from controlling territory. They allocate just enough bonus to ensure the game ends eventually with a clear winner.
Also new players might still lose with 80% of the map because they might not know how to scale their economy properly, or, in RTSes, just lack the speed to execute that.
I don't think you're right. Really good players will sometimes stop taking the game seriously after building a colossal economy, then they do stuff like build 1000 t1 bombers and try and win with that. It's usually horribly inefficient, but it's definitely possible to win with the wrong unit, if your economy is much larger than the other player's.
Not someone who played the game much, but a quick glance at the stats suggest that the size of a SACU death ball would be limited by a nuke? I also concede it'd be hard to build a nuke without other players noticing.
The missiles are expensive and take a long time to build (I blieve around 8k vs 3.6k for an anti-nuke), and move across the map so slowly with such a huge warning (pulsating hazmat icon as a radar signature, plus a "strategic launch detected" blaring out the speakers of every player is a bit of a giveaway!) that they can't really hit anything except a stationary target.
Most successful strategies I've seen with them involve rushing T3 and firing a missile from a stationary launcher before the enemy can build antinukes, sabotaging the enemy's antinuke installations with a wave of strategic bombers, or using nuclear subs/Yolona Oss to surprise/overwhelm an enemy with antinukes very late game.
I think its cool seeing what factors are considered in RTS balancing. I guess an equivalent for fighting games would be invincible vs non-invincible DPs or weird things like movement options.
In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the character/move properties or if its because one player is way better.
Well, fighting games do offer high crush/low crush options, where hurtboxes (the vulnerable portion of your character) are shifted higher or lower, to make a move suited to cleanly beat either approaches from the air or sweeps. Beneficial properties like this can be balanced by a number of things -- speed, recovery time, damage, range, for a few examples!
I realise you may already be familiar, but I figured it'd be worth expanding a little for other readers.
High / Low options are rarely the option people think about at the high level. That's just a simple mixup (worst case scenario, you're forced to guess in case you can't react in time).
What he was talking about is the DP, the "Dragon Punch", also known as Shoryuken, that Ryu / Ken are famous for in Street Fighter.
The mindgame is that Shoryuken is 100% invincible: no matter what your opponent is doing, the Shoryuken / Dragon Punch will have infinite "priority" so to speak, it punches through all of your opponent's options because your hurtbox completely disappears during the move. That's right, your hurtbox is not merely "shifted", its gone. You're fully invincible.
Of course, for balancing purposes, the Shoryuken has high-cooldown and high-periods of counter-hit status. Which means that although the Shoryuken "beats" all other attacks in the game, it also loses to a simple block into counter-hit.
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So the mind game becomes one of timing. You approach the opponent, making them _THINK_ you're about to throw out an attack. They dragon-punch in response to your movement. But instead of attacking, you just block, and bam. You beat a player who spams dragon punch.
Because of this extremely heavy "Dragon Punch wins vs all attacks" mindgame, there's a rich strategy / dance involved called footsies where the two players try to get each other to push the attack button first (especially if in a mirror match, Ryu vs Ryu or Ken vs Ken). The 2nd one to attack wins, because of the strange property of invincibility.
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As far as Fighting Games go, the "Shoryuken" / Dragon punch is most similar to this "hard counter" found in RTS games. Shoryuken "hard counters" all other attacks in the game.
While "simply holding the blocking button" consistently beats Shoryuken. Its a hard counter, always going to win if and only if you know exactly what the opponent will do.
Because these options require understanding your opponent's mindset (when / timing of their use of Dragon Punches and/or blocking), they lead to incredibly fun mindgames.
I know Apex Legends balancing is pretty aggregate stat based and with each release they monitor aggregate stats like what % of X character is on the winning team over all games or what % of X character killed Y character as well as different team compositions, along with similar stats for individual weapons, to try to balance the overall engagement statistics as much as possible.
Dota has an interesting approach. They collect tons of statistics, but ultimately the game design comes down to one person, and they complement the stats with a lot of interviews with top ranked players to get their subjective perspective.
The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast.
One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start.
Zynga was infamous for a stats driven approach, but there it was all about tricking people into maxing out the micro transactions :(
Maybe there's some underground scene for hardcore RTS players, but as a (formerly) casual follower of the Starcraft 2 pro scene, it seems like MOBAs ate their lunch.
It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
MOBAs ate them because they have a lower skill floor.
If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time.
If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping.
I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
I'll disagree with the other poster. MOBA games, particularly Dota, have a pretty high threshold of entry compared to RTS. You've got 100 something heros, each with 4+ abilities. Then you've got basically as many items, half of which have an active of some sort.
That's a big initial bite to get down.
I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through.
But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go.
I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
MOBAs are almost impossible to get into if you're not starting with friend(s). Half the skill is in communication and coordination, and if you're playing solo with random people you'll almost never experience good teamplay. Toxicity is over the roof compared to 1v1 games like starcraft.
I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
With a MOBA you’re relying on other players. If you lose at Starcraft, you only have yourself to blame, you can watch the replay and see exactly where you went wrong, and steadily improve.
I watch both, and they definitely have different things going for them. I think something that is missed in appreciation of pro play is just how smoothly coordinated the players are. They make it look effortless, the same way high APM Starcraft2 players make things like fighting on multiple fronts while managing their macro look effortless. It can be really noticeable when a player gets swapped in the middle of a tournament run and the team doesn't quite gel back together right away.
I think the entropy curve of RTS games tend to be poor. The most addictive games have a random start with different elements and a fair bit of luck (think battle royale and roguelikes).
RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop.
If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
>
It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks.
I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/
Planetary Annihilation spherical maps are an interesting concept, but graphically kind of uninteresting to watch (and my necessity very small in actual build area).
It was certainly interesting though with the experience of not having anyway to "put your back against the wall" though.
Planetary Annihilation was okay but didn’t really speak to me compared to SupCom/TA. I don’t know why, but I do feel like the planets are hard/annoying to navigate and don’t add anything. I really liked the TA/SupCom maps where there’s natural cover (water/walls) to navigate through, but with PA it’s just whatever since you can just launch some stuff from another planet.
Not releases, but there have been some other significant developments:
* Ex blizzard RTS devs have gone to a few different studios. Frost Giant has the most hype, but there's also one of the Dream Haven studios IIRC, and Uncapped Games.
* A bunch of SC2 modders made a new studio, SunSpear, and their new RTS called Immortal: Gates of Pyre had a successful Kickstarter and has been getting a fair amount of hype from the StarCraft community.
I'd love to see a competent PvE-oriented RTS with the MMO-lite treatment: co-op missions, entire campaigns, customizable armies, unlockable units, mission rewards, purchasable (with in-game currency) items, bigass raids, the whole shebang.
SC2 co-op mode took a big step in that direction, and it was well received and has become fairly popular...but a game built around that as its primary locus could be so much more.
I know many more traditional core gamers would practically vomit at this idea, but I think there's room for plenty of different styles under the RTS umbrella. And bringing in tons of money with one style might well benefit the others.
The CoH games are great small army RTS games, even if I think of them as Real Time Tactics games. But that really is the point for me. It seems that with the aging and seeming non-interest in RTS games like Starcraft, the market and those making products to serve that market have splintered a relatively homogeneous genre into a group of loosely similar niche genres where the differences between themselves and other games is seen as a dividing line instead of focusing on the commonalities involved to grow interest and increase player base amongst the larger game segment.
I see Warhammer 40k and Starcraft having much more in common with each other than either has with Halo, despite the very obvious surface level trappings. And I think X-com has more in common with CoH than either have in common with modern warfare or call of duty. I really despair for a broader grouping of strategy and tactics games, that may or may not exclude 4x games, in hopes that it could build a bridge between the various niche styles and cross promote the bigger genre.
AOE2 gets balance and content patches about once a month.
It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
I am so disappointed this article didn't even touch on AoE2 - it has a pretty amazingly well tuned approach to this problem with extremely finely targeted (except back when camels were technically boats cough) bonus damage system. To compare it to SC2 is hilarious - SC2 has more hard counter systems than most games (both visibility and flight are common uncounterable attributes) and yet for all that countering tends just to be a question of how much and how wide the splash damage is when attacking tightly packed formations. High level SC2 eschews huge portions of the roster since they're essentially irrelevant - AOE2 definitely has strong preferences but most of those units get to see action pretty regularly... except the siege tower.
The community staying very active has been the biggest factor here IMO. The predecessor to the current Definitive Edition, the rather disastrous (engine-wise, not content-wise) HD Edition, was created in part by co-opting community made mod content and hiring on some of the creators. This has continued for both the Definitive Edition and AOE 4.
Likewise, most of the biggest pros and casters started their careers 5-10+ years ago working on community tournaments and other grassroots events. Even though there's a lot more money now with investment from Microsoft, Red Bull and others, that grassroots core has stuck around and feels (at least to me) more fresh than the very corporate machinery around Blizzard RTSes. It's funny to think that the most anticipated LAN tournament is literally held in someone's apartment (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/)!
If you are not familiar with it, OAD[0] is a fully open source RTS with an active community of developers that keep making it more and more polished at every release.
To my knowledge, Supreme Commanders Forged Alliance Forever (FAF) community has been updating the game and has a fairly active community. It seems to be in a fairly good state, wish I was in the position in life to be able to relax and dump some hours into playing it. Was always a fun game.
FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.
I think there is a much going on as ever, but because RTS games tend to be on the more heavier side to get in to and get good enough at to really enjoy it, it isn't featured as much as any of the generic FPS/BR/DOTA style games.
While there might be less of an SC2 eSports bonanza going on right now, there is Age of Empires that is pretty active (as was posted here as well).
I think one of the major impacts to the 'visibility' is the fact that 'generic' or 'casual' games have social buy-in that is orders of magnitude bigger than what we used to think of when talking about 'big games' or 'big communities' or 'active genres'. 10000 players or even 100000 players used to be top-tier. Now that's less than 1% of any of the 'big' games out there right now.
Not a new release, but I've been enjoying Supreme Commander 2 on a modern gaming PC! The game is pretty cheap on Steam ($13)[1] but it scales very well with modern hardware, and the gameplay is far improved (IMHO) over SC1. (Another RTS series I'd like to replay on modern hardware is Homeworld[2]).
SupCom2 felt very tailored to consoles. It felt like a dumbed down version of SupCom1. Good fun and had some interesting research mechanics though.
My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.
Gray Goo was really really good but pretty much fizzled. Nobody has brought that kind of budget in since. Westwood[esc]cwPetroglyph subsequently made some very fun "8bit" styled RTSs with a more CnC flavor. We also just got a CnC/RA remaster, StarCraft Remaster, and WC3 remaster. So RTS almost feels more like a historical than a vital genre at this point. Which is a shame because it's imo more accessable than a MOBA (in which every match you must strap in, prepare to endure abuse if you suck, not surrender, and click really fast.)
Sins of a Solar Empire is such an underrated RTS in my opinion. Do you play the base game, or do you try out some the mods (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) as well?
Concentrated, rather than dead. SC2 and AoE2 are the only games still running strong. SC2 seems quite alive. I play AoE2 competitively, and it's stronger than ever.
In terms of new games, yeah it's pretty dead. AoE4 looks cool, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if its near as fun to play competitively as AoE2. Wacky civ specific strategies make games more predictable, and 2d is more ergonomic than 3d.
Blizzard recently ended development on Starcraft 2. This prompted a lot of hand-wringing.
There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).
These include:
- Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene.
- FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni
- A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent.
Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.
> competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).
I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years."
IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.
The Total War franchise is still going strong, especially nowadays with Warhammer releases. Mind you, it seems to be mostly PvE and includes a big Civilization-like aspect, and you have to be into the particular style of combat that Total War does.
There's a real world version of this, the DePuy Quantified Judgement Method.[1] It's fairly simple - weapons have a weight value (sword=1.0), you add that up for the forces committed,
there's a quality of troops multiplier for each side,
some adjustments for defensive preparations, and you get a measure of combat strength.
DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His observation is that the side with a 2x advantage almost always wins. If nobody has a 2x advantage, either side can win.
Asymmetric warfare ( or guerilla warfare) has been successful time and again since the Napoleonic wars, regardless of how overwhelming the enemy was. And Napoleon himself won multiple times against the odds ( so much so the Coalition made a deal to only attack when he isn't in command).
And there's the usual incompetence, bad luck, or tactical/strategic brilliance.
Just in the last century we have the Russians ( in Russo-Japanese war, WWI, Winter war, WWII), Austro-Hungarians, Italians, Ottomans, Americans ( multiple times), Arabs ( against Israel) fail miserably against a theoretically inferior in terms of size and weaponry enemy.
Except real-world doesn't have any counters at all but instead anything can happen at any time almost. The outcome of encounters in war is controlled by endless amount of parameters, just because someone has more swords than another doesn't mean they will almost always win. See Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper who killed ~500 Red Army soldiers during the Second World War as an example of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
In RTS terms this seems more like 'supply' or 'pop' count: a measure (often ingame) of the relative power (and cost) of each unit, such that equal supply counts of different units are in theory on the same footing (often with a hard cap to avoid game-breakingly large armies), absent any specific advantages or counters. Even small differences in supply can be extremely significant in most RTS: a 2x supply advantage is almost always overwhelming. Hard counters are exactly what would be a counterexample to that.
A hard counter in RTS parlance is a unit or tactic that will win a fight even even if they are grossly outnumbered. A classic example would be a ground unit that cannot hit air units. Any number of those ground units will die to a single air unit.
First half of the title got my hopes up as a Magic: the Gathering player, but alas, it was not an argument in defence of hard counters costing only two mana.
> The ground unit cannot hurt the air unit in any way, and the air unit can hurt the ground unit. This relationship is based on innate and immutable differences between the two unit types.
There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart.
So, in a way - there are no hard counters either :)
Generally a unit would only be considered a hard counter if it could destroy the other unit in a reasonable amount of time. If a swarm of zerglings can take continuous fire from some air units and still manage to destroy an entire base before being destroyed themselves, then the air units aren't much of a counter...
One of the games I used to play that wasn't reviewed very well was Tom Clancy's End War (the online multiplayer died pretty quick). It was the one with the gimmick / sometimes really useful attribute of being purely controllable via speech recognition.
It was certainly more forgiving of casual players - you could only have 12 "addressable" units in the game at a given time. A unit was 4 vehicles or 4 groups of 5 infantry. Rather than having to produce one soldier or vehicle at a time, they'd deploy in their groups. "Healing" them could be achieved by evacuating the unit off the map, which would return half the unit's deployment cost. They could then be redeployed later at full health. Infantry units could be evacuated by air, vehicles had to drive off the map's boundary.
There was a fairly simple circle of vehicle hard counters - Helicopters were highly effective against Tanks, which were highly effective against IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles), which where highly effective against Helicopters, etc.
There were two types of infantry units - rifleman and combat engineers, and were vulnerable to everything, but could be placed in cover to drastically increase their defense stat. Rifleman (in cover) were highly effective against other infantry units and combat engineers (in cover) were highly effective against all vehicles. Rifleman could capture control points / forward deployment points faster than combat engineers.
IFVs could be used to move infantry units quickly around the map, and rifleman could be redeployed by air at the cost of some deployment points.
Artillery was effective against everything but helicopters (which were highly effective against them), whether units where in cover or not. Downside was that it was vulnerable to everything, but this rarely mattered because they could engage from half the map away.
There was also a command vehicle which could manufacture robots. You had a UAV for spotting and guard robots which would be tasked to guard a control point or a unit.
Match start had you select 3 units to deploy first. A common strategy was to start with a command vehicle, an artillery unit, and a rifleman unit. You'd immediately send the rifleman unit to capture the nearest control point, and by the time they finished you'd have had enough time to get an IFV unit in to pick them up.
You'd deploy your UAV to the enemy's side of the map to see what they were up to, and have the command unit build defense robots for the artillery to cover for their extreme vulnerability to air units.
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The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF.
[1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades.
Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs.
They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards.
I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!
Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic.
[a] Technically tactics at the scale of SupCom
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBQEPV_6qg
Of course, if you take the gulf war you can see it in action, with most of Iraq's tanks and airplanes being taken out via airstrikes.
Also FAF is amazing, if anyone reading this is interested I suggest you check out some replays on GyleCast:
https://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta
It was less of a statement against how OP they are and more of a statement about how they seem to exist outside of the rock/paper/scissors mechanic that almost all other units are subject to. Seraphim SACUs can of course telesnipe and wreak havok, but would struggle against a swarm of gunships or bombers as they lack AA.
>Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses?
There's not a whole lot they can do against naval units (apart from set up shields and TMLs), but then again there's not a whole lot that naval units can do against them if they just walk away from the shore.
>Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
You're looking at 50DPS with the torps and 80DPS with the AA. Not exactly comparable to the 400DPS long-range bolters and 4000 DPS face laser!
In terms of hard counters:
- It would lose to two T3 heavy gunships (3k mass total).
- Naval-wise, a pair of Salems (4.5k mass total) could complete nullify its torps with anti-torps (4 torps/4s for the ML vs 2 anti-torps/3.8s per salem) and fire back at a combined 200DPS.
(For people unfamiliar with SupCom, a Monkeylord is a giant, late game unit that costs 20k mass.)
The one I'm thinking of had early support for multi-core and multi-screen, with the minimap / overview on the other screen. But it was still constrained; would have loved to test that defense of mine against all 7 other CPU players on a big map. Might try it again on my newer system.
And yes, I tried it couple years ago and unfortunately I don't think it's that well optimized for multi-core CPUs, the game was massively slowing down for me, but my i7 was at like 50% usage at most.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
In many cases, the joy of RTS for new players is map control. Hard counters tend to break this gameplay loop for them as they don’t understand how they can lose when they had 80% of the map. Conversely pure map control games get boring for pros who get tired of “take more territory, get bigger units” play styles.
Iron harvest was a recent curious entrant to the RTS genre where the game depends heavily on positioning but doesn’t grant you large bonuses from controlling territory. They allocate just enough bonus to ensure the game ends eventually with a clear winner.
Also new players might still lose with 80% of the map because they might not know how to scale their economy properly, or, in RTSes, just lack the speed to execute that.
The missiles are expensive and take a long time to build (I blieve around 8k vs 3.6k for an anti-nuke), and move across the map so slowly with such a huge warning (pulsating hazmat icon as a radar signature, plus a "strategic launch detected" blaring out the speakers of every player is a bit of a giveaway!) that they can't really hit anything except a stationary target.
Most successful strategies I've seen with them involve rushing T3 and firing a missile from a stationary launcher before the enemy can build antinukes, sabotaging the enemy's antinuke installations with a wave of strategic bombers, or using nuclear subs/Yolona Oss to surprise/overwhelm an enemy with antinukes very late game.
In RTS games balancing seems a bit more quantifiable. In fighting games there is a lot of guessing at what actually counters what unless its extremely obvious. Its hard to tell if a matchup or strat is good/bad due to the character/move properties or if its because one player is way better.
I realise you may already be familiar, but I figured it'd be worth expanding a little for other readers.
What he was talking about is the DP, the "Dragon Punch", also known as Shoryuken, that Ryu / Ken are famous for in Street Fighter.
The mindgame is that Shoryuken is 100% invincible: no matter what your opponent is doing, the Shoryuken / Dragon Punch will have infinite "priority" so to speak, it punches through all of your opponent's options because your hurtbox completely disappears during the move. That's right, your hurtbox is not merely "shifted", its gone. You're fully invincible.
Of course, for balancing purposes, the Shoryuken has high-cooldown and high-periods of counter-hit status. Which means that although the Shoryuken "beats" all other attacks in the game, it also loses to a simple block into counter-hit.
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So the mind game becomes one of timing. You approach the opponent, making them _THINK_ you're about to throw out an attack. They dragon-punch in response to your movement. But instead of attacking, you just block, and bam. You beat a player who spams dragon punch.
Because of this extremely heavy "Dragon Punch wins vs all attacks" mindgame, there's a rich strategy / dance involved called footsies where the two players try to get each other to push the attack button first (especially if in a mirror match, Ryu vs Ryu or Ken vs Ken). The 2nd one to attack wins, because of the strange property of invincibility.
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As far as Fighting Games go, the "Shoryuken" / Dragon punch is most similar to this "hard counter" found in RTS games. Shoryuken "hard counters" all other attacks in the game.
While "simply holding the blocking button" consistently beats Shoryuken. Its a hard counter, always going to win if and only if you know exactly what the opponent will do.
Because these options require understanding your opponent's mindset (when / timing of their use of Dragon Punches and/or blocking), they lead to incredibly fun mindgames.
The end result is the game has gotten better balanced continuously with time. There were a handful of patches that were a regression, but usually are on top of it pretty fast.
One of the more pernicious problems they've faced is the team that holds the base on the bottom half of the map has consistently had an advantage, as much as 5%. This appears to be related to the perspective being 3d in the shape of top down, vs a literal 2d top down view. They've tried a few different ways to balance this, but what's ended up working best is trading it off vs first pick in the lineup drafting phase of the game start.
Zynga was infamous for a stats driven approach, but there it was all about tricking people into maxing out the micro transactions :(
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/278908415756206080/86...
(I assume this is for ranked 1vs1 rather than casual lobsterpot though ?)
It's really a shame, since there was nothing quite like the intensity of a 1v1 match between two players controlling an army with a nearly unlimited skill cap...
As much as I've tried, I simply cannot make any sense of the on-screen visual overload of MOBAs like DOTA or League of Legends. Why is it so much harder to find myself engaged by MOBA battles than RTS (mostly Starcraft) battles? I don't really know.
If I understand 50% of how to play a MOBA, I can play the game and have fun. I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana, and my ultimate ability, get mad. They have cooldowns, but it doesn't matter, I just spam all my moves when I see a bad guy. If I don't see a bad guy, I can kill the enemy turrets and little cpu creatures. If I'm having trouble, I can follow one of my allies and often get into 2v1s which are easier to win. And oh look, he is playing Sword Guy, he's doing pretty well, maybe I should try Sword Guy next time.
If I only understand 50% of how to play an RTS, I'm screwed because I didn't realize that I needed to build a t2 bot factory with my t1 bots, which can then build tier 2 constructor bots which are required to build flak cannons which are the only viable defense against this specific type of gunship-based commander sniping.
I like RTS games better too, but I can see how it can be hard to get into an RTS without a really expensive-to-create campaign tutorial (e.g. Starcraft) and/or a huge time commitment. I bet I could download a MOBA I've never played before and have fun in my first match knowing nothing about how to play it (even the controls).
That's a big initial bite to get down.
I played Dota for at least a year until I finally felt like I even understood the baseline. The skill cap on say SC2 is indeed as high as you can take it, but learning the tech tree and counters is comparatively trivial. It's not that Dota is chess or such, there's just a huge volume of material to get through.
But that's also what makes it so rewarding. Dota is the only video game where I feel the same sense of accomplishment when winning as a game of go.
I think the world is wide open to a new awesome RTS game. Just, no one has thought up something good enough.
You can just play single-player Starcraft 1 or Age of Empires or Red Alert against the AI or the campaigns, and it's a fun little experience.
I stopped playing Starcraft 2 (or any Blizzard games) because of the Hong Kong controversy but I do miss some good multiplayer RTS. Preferably a little less APM-intensive than starcraft.
RTS games tend to have a standard opening minutes setup where you just do your own thing and then follow a flow chart of how to progress based on how things develop.
If you're playing someone decent, and are not a top tier player, you don't actually get to experiment and do interesting things so much as try to execute better on your original book of plays.
This is precisely why RTS is dead. Every victory or defeat is solely in your hands. In the MOBA format, you can always get carried by your team/cuss out your team for being failures.
Ashes of the Singluarity: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/
I haven't played them, but they are in my Steam backlog. I've heard jokingly that Ashes is mostly played by people doing benchmarks.
I have played Planetary Annihilation. It's like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander (same people, different studio): https://planetaryannihilation.com/
It was certainly interesting though with the experience of not having anyway to "put your back against the wall" though.
* Ex blizzard RTS devs have gone to a few different studios. Frost Giant has the most hype, but there's also one of the Dream Haven studios IIRC, and Uncapped Games.
* A bunch of SC2 modders made a new studio, SunSpear, and their new RTS called Immortal: Gates of Pyre had a successful Kickstarter and has been getting a fair amount of hype from the StarCraft community.
Then there is Age of Empires 4 that is nearing completion which might be an Age of Empires 2 DE contender or might be an AoE 3 dud.
SC2 co-op mode took a big step in that direction, and it was well received and has become fairly popular...but a game built around that as its primary locus could be so much more.
I know many more traditional core gamers would practically vomit at this idea, but I think there's room for plenty of different styles under the RTS umbrella. And bringing in tons of money with one style might well benefit the others.
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Company of Heroes 3 was recently announced, and its launch will probably get a lot of old players back into the multiplayer lobbies.
I see Warhammer 40k and Starcraft having much more in common with each other than either has with Halo, despite the very obvious surface level trappings. And I think X-com has more in common with CoH than either have in common with modern warfare or call of duty. I really despair for a broader grouping of strategy and tactics games, that may or may not exclude 4x games, in hopes that it could build a bridge between the various niche styles and cross promote the bigger genre.
It's remarkable on its own that a 20 year old game is still getting balance patches. I suspect this is a due to a mix of evolving strategies, a changing skill-level distribution, and feedback loops from subtle changes, catalyzed by added units and civs.
Likewise, most of the biggest pros and casters started their careers 5-10+ years ago working on community tournaments and other grassroots events. Even though there's a lot more money now with investment from Microsoft, Red Bull and others, that grassroots core has stuck around and feels (at least to me) more fresh than the very corporate machinery around Blizzard RTSes. It's funny to think that the most anticipated LAN tournament is literally held in someone's apartment (https://www.ageofempires.com/news/nac3-tournament/)!
[0]: https://play0ad.com/
While there might be less of an SC2 eSports bonanza going on right now, there is Age of Empires that is pretty active (as was posted here as well).
I think one of the major impacts to the 'visibility' is the fact that 'generic' or 'casual' games have social buy-in that is orders of magnitude bigger than what we used to think of when talking about 'big games' or 'big communities' or 'active genres'. 10000 players or even 100000 players used to be top-tier. Now that's less than 1% of any of the 'big' games out there right now.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2...
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
My friendgroup did SupCom1+FA. Then SupCom2. Then botbashed SupCom1+FA+FAF for aaaaages. FAF is a community donation-ware client that adds mods/units/maps/multiplayer-options galore. Fantastic if you want to configure what you want exactly.
Wargame Red Dragon announced a South Africa themed DLC.
* Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation
* Sins of a Solar Empire
* Zero-K
In terms of new games, yeah it's pretty dead. AoE4 looks cool, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if its near as fun to play competitively as AoE2. Wacky civ specific strategies make games more predictable, and 2d is more ergonomic than 3d.
It's an Open Source RTS heavily inspired in Total Annihilation, with nice graphics and great balance.
There’s also a few new studios cropped up that have announced intention to produce new, competitive RTS games in the Blizzard tradition (in contrast to models like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War, SupCom, or C&C).
These include: - Sunspear Games, which is making a game called Immortal: Gates or Pyre based in an SC2 mod called Vanguard that was well received by the pro scene.
- FrostGiant games, a new studio just set up by a bunch of SC2 team alumni
- A new studio by David Kim, head honcho of design and balance on SC2, being bankrolled by TenCent.
Over the next 2 to 3 years there’s going to be the biggest wave of new, competitive RTS releases since SC2 first launched.
I don't know how to interpret this other than "it'll be a destroy-your-mouse high APM obsessed click-fest that will ignore all lessons and modern inventions in the RTS genre over the last 20 years."
IMO the worst thing that could happen for the industry is 5 more Starcraft remakes.
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DePuy was a US. Army colonel, and the weights come from analysis of real-world battles. His observation is that the side with a 2x advantage almost always wins. If nobody has a 2x advantage, either side can win.
So, real-world war has a "hard counter".
Asymmetric warfare ( or guerilla warfare) has been successful time and again since the Napoleonic wars, regardless of how overwhelming the enemy was. And Napoleon himself won multiple times against the odds ( so much so the Coalition made a deal to only attack when he isn't in command).
And there's the usual incompetence, bad luck, or tactical/strategic brilliance.
Just in the last century we have the Russians ( in Russo-Japanese war, WWI, Winter war, WWII), Austro-Hungarians, Italians, Ottomans, Americans ( multiple times), Arabs ( against Israel) fail miserably against a theoretically inferior in terms of size and weaponry enemy.
A submarine is a hard counter to an aircraft carrier -- that's why we put sub-hunters on carriers and surround them with anti-sub ships.
A fusion-warhead ICBM is a hard counter to most things.
There are some ways in which ground unit can still win the game in this scenario. For example if you can flood the enemy with zerglings and kill his buildings just ignoring the air units slowly picking the zerglins apart.
So, in a way - there are no hard counters either :)
Game is really fun, and requires a lot of thinking but it's absolutely ruthless.
Every single unit has multiple hard counters. When it comes to combinations everything gets more messy and fun.
It was certainly more forgiving of casual players - you could only have 12 "addressable" units in the game at a given time. A unit was 4 vehicles or 4 groups of 5 infantry. Rather than having to produce one soldier or vehicle at a time, they'd deploy in their groups. "Healing" them could be achieved by evacuating the unit off the map, which would return half the unit's deployment cost. They could then be redeployed later at full health. Infantry units could be evacuated by air, vehicles had to drive off the map's boundary.
There was a fairly simple circle of vehicle hard counters - Helicopters were highly effective against Tanks, which were highly effective against IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles), which where highly effective against Helicopters, etc.
There were two types of infantry units - rifleman and combat engineers, and were vulnerable to everything, but could be placed in cover to drastically increase their defense stat. Rifleman (in cover) were highly effective against other infantry units and combat engineers (in cover) were highly effective against all vehicles. Rifleman could capture control points / forward deployment points faster than combat engineers.
IFVs could be used to move infantry units quickly around the map, and rifleman could be redeployed by air at the cost of some deployment points.
Artillery was effective against everything but helicopters (which were highly effective against them), whether units where in cover or not. Downside was that it was vulnerable to everything, but this rarely mattered because they could engage from half the map away.
There was also a command vehicle which could manufacture robots. You had a UAV for spotting and guard robots which would be tasked to guard a control point or a unit.
Match start had you select 3 units to deploy first. A common strategy was to start with a command vehicle, an artillery unit, and a rifleman unit. You'd immediately send the rifleman unit to capture the nearest control point, and by the time they finished you'd have had enough time to get an IFV unit in to pick them up.
You'd deploy your UAV to the enemy's side of the map to see what they were up to, and have the command unit build defense robots for the artillery to cover for their extreme vulnerability to air units.
I had fun with it anyways.