RTS recommendations?

[Mastermind]

my favorite RTSs, in no particular order:

Warlords Battlecry (recommend 3, it just builds on 2 which builds on 1, albeit with a different hero system, plays about the same but with more factions/units and improved art)
Emperor: Battle for Dune (my favorite C&C style rts, was early 3d tho so graphics are pretty barebones)
Age of Empires (all of them, although I like 3 the most)
Starcraft 1&2 (1 has the superior atmosphere but hasn't aged very well gameplay wise, 2 has excellent, well polished gameplay but the story is boring, poorly written and poorly acted, they also rape the protoss so hard artanis walks around with a permanent dick shaped hole in his ass)
Command & Conquer 3 (I don't much care for the 2d ones except red alert 2, c&c3 is my favorite after Emperor)
Red Alert 2 (3 ended up growing on me but most c&c players seem to hate it, I hated it too at first but now that I've played it a bit I can appreciate it better, although it's not nearly as good as RA2, c&c3 or emperor)
Star wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (age of empires 2 clone set in Star Wars universe, better than aoe2 IMO)

 

[deama]

It's competent and somewhat fun even, but it's kinda barebones on base building. Controls are adequate and the campaign is.... good for what it is, I guess. Nice cinematics, though.

The base building isn't bare-bones, it is more important and thoughtful than in 99% of RTSs (except if you play as the goo). it's the armies that are bare bones and boring as hell.

Would you say the game is worth playing? I was thinking of playing as the goo, but I've played lots of different RTSs, so does it have interesting enough story/mechanics to keep it from going stale? Also, can you describe the base building some more?

 

[Mastermind]

It's competent and somewhat fun even, but it's kinda barebones on base building. Controls are adequate and the campaign is.... good for what it is, I guess. Nice cinematics, though.

The base building isn't bare-bones, it is more important and thoughtful than in 99% of RTSs (except if you play as the goo). it's the armies that are bare bones and boring as hell.

Would you say the game is worth playing? I was thinking of playing as the goo, but I've played lots of different RTSs, so does it have interesting enough story/mechanics to keep it from going stale? Also, can you describe the base building some more?

I hated it and only played it briefly so I'm only going off memory.

Humans had to build power lines throughout their base and attach structures to it. While those 4 armed aliens had hubs they dropped from which they could attach other buildings. I also remember them having mount points on walls on which they could place certain units to act as turrets.

The units are all boring, there's almost no infantry (the aliens have 1 infantry unit I think, humans are very high tech and don't even bother to show up on the battlefield except for their ultimate unit) and IMO units die way too fast and are relatively expensive and slow to produce so the combat feels like premature ejaculation.

The goo just spawn units from larger mother goo (which sucks up resources to grow) or have goos split up. it's an interesting idea with pretty terrible execution. Other than the mother goo "eating" enemy units it just plays like every other faction (IE: shit, not even base building).

 

[deama]

It's competent and somewhat fun even, but it's kinda barebones on base building. Controls are adequate and the campaign is.... good for what it is, I guess. Nice cinematics, though.

The base building isn't bare-bones, it is more important and thoughtful than in 99% of RTSs (except if you play as the goo). it's the armies that are bare bones and boring as hell.

Would you say the game is worth playing? I was thinking of playing as the goo, but I've played lots of different RTSs, so does it have interesting enough story/mechanics to keep it from going stale? Also, can you describe the base building some more?

I hated it and only played it briefly so I'm only going off memory.

Humans had to build power lines throughout their base and attach structures to it. While those 4 armed aliens had hubs they dropped from which they could attach other buildings. I also remember them having mount points on walls on which they could place certain units to act as turrets.

The units are all boring, there's almost no infantry (the aliens have 1 infantry unit I think, humans are very high tech and don't even bother to show up on the battlefield except for their ultimate unit) and IMO units die way too fast and are relatively expensive and slow to produce so the combat feels like premature ejaculation.

The goo just spawn units from larger mother goo (which sucks up resources to grow) or have goos split up. it's an interesting idea with pretty terrible execution. Other than the mother goo "eating" enemy units it just plays like every other faction (IE: shit, not even base building).

Damn, was hoping it'd be a good execution cause the goo faction interested me a lot.

 

[80s Stallone]

Tzar is pretty good.

 

[thesheeep]

my favorite RTSs, in no particular order:

Warlords Battlecry (recommend 3, it just builds on 2 which builds on 1, albeit with a different hero system, plays about the same but with more factions/units and improved art)

Best RTS ever. Fuck balancing, praise possibilities.
Let me give you a kiss.

Spoiler

 

[deama]

I tried Armies of Exigo and I remembered why I quit all those years ago. A squad(selection) can only have a set amount of units, so you have to use the ctrl + 1-2-3-4-5... to bind to quick select, god I hate that; I donno how I managed it in warcraft, maybe the army sizes were smaller? Or I guess the campaign was good enough for me to overlook it but damn I hate that.

EDIT: Citation? For what?

 

[Baron Dupek]

Thanks for the thread, summer is over and I started craving for some strategies.

Speaking about Armies of Exigo

There was an underworld layer of the map that I haven't seen implemented in any other RTS

Metal Fatigue got this AND upper orbital levels (mostly for solar panels), before it returned in Planetary Annihilation.

 

[deama]

I'm trying out Warlords battlecry 3 and found out about that protectors mod which apparentely expands on the game. Should I just continue to play vanilla (I'm about 3 hours in) or should I get the protectors mod and play through that one?

 

[thesheeep]

About WBC 3:

If you want to play vanilla, I strongly recommend the conquest campaign ( get it here ), since it is a far more interesting campaign and you get MUCH higher XP rewards - the vanilla campaign rewards extremely little XP so you never get to see those sweet later char levels.

 

[deama]

Time for some updates, and maybe more recommendations?

I've played through tzar burden of the crown and thought it was ok, it was close, but not quite there, I think the controls were too clunky for me, and maybe the game was too vanilla too?

Knights and merchants was actually pretty decent I thought, but unfortunately, the fan made mod that makes it work well on modern systems had a bug, in one of the missions you had to acquire a certain amount of gold, but I wasn't able to get the gold from the gold mine for whatever reason (I think it was blocked by some invisible wall or something), I tried using a cheat to give me the required amount of gold, but that didn't work, I think you needed to trigger a script by mining in the gold mine or something.

I played through warlords battlecry 3, with the protectors mod, and found it to be pretty damn good, however after a while it gets very repetitive, in the 3 years since this thread, I think I replayed through it like 3 times, but only managed to playthrough it for about 10 hours each time? The base building isn't that great either, but some races do it better than others, regardless the game just needs more variety, I remember there only being a few missions that have some nice variety to them, but that's it.

Replayed through stronghold a few more times, god I really need a good sequel to it, warlords looks like shit.

I tried plaything through dominions, I think I tried 4 and then 5, very interesting concept games, but damn I do hate 4x with a passion, I just can't stomach playing 4x.

Recently tried arthur the fantasy wargame (first one), and I mean, I don't really have a problem with the army fighting part, but there's no base building and the 4x overworld map just isn't grabbing me.

I tried playing through total war warhammer 2 and same problem, I like the concept, the races, the lore, but just the 4x of it is killing me. I would kill for a stronghold-warhammer crossover game!

I've played through warrior kings and I quite liked it actually, fully beat it too (I cheated on the very last level though cause wtf was that). I then tried the expansion pack but for some reason none of it was clicking well at all, I think they ended up balancing the game too much, also the UI felt worse as well, I guess the lack of a proper campaign didn't help either.

Played through empire earth, wasn't too bad actually, though I quit it once the midieval campaign set it, not sure why, I think the greek/cave-man campaigns had some nice charm to them, but the midieval ones were more dry; or maybe I just had enough of the game.
Was ok I guess, it had some interesting concepts, but I think there's better things out there, wish they did a proper sequel to it that flashed out the game proper, idk.

Tried playing through some battle realms before, though a few missions in I realise why it doesn't stick well to me, it seems it's due to it just being too repetitive with it's gameplay, it pretty much encourages rush strategies, build units as quickly as you can, then just rush the enemy. You can build towers, but they are hard capped, and they require units as well.
The bigger issue I had with it though was the fog of war, or the enemies abusing it. Essentially when you destroy an enemy base, sometimes the AI does this really annoying shit where it take 1 unit and starts playing hide and seek with it, literally took me 20 minutes after destroying an enemy base to find that 1 fucking unit to finally finish the mission, geeze...

I think crusader kings is the only 4x-style game I can handle as I kinda enjoy it, especially if you install some more interesting mods (like the world of warcraft mod), not sure why though, I think it's because you have a single unified ruler that you can actually use in your armies? I guess it also helps that it speeds things a long quite quickly by skipping those grand strategy battles, but idk; maybe it's because I don't like the game shifting between different playing styles in grand strategy games is what the issue is, but then again I tried hearts of iron 4 and didn't really like it (too annoyingly complicated).

Anyway, any other recommendations for base-building rts games? Anything new on the horizon that looks good?

 

[what am i doing]

If you haven't given Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance a try, I'd recommend it. It's aged quite well and has very good basebuilding and economy mechanics. Also a lot of quality of life stuff that most RTS are missing - you can drag moves in a chained move order to edit them (this includes rally instructions), same goes for points in a patrol path, you can save building templates to avoid tedious work like wall patterns for tier 1 point defence or generator adjacency patterns, the camera can zoom all the way out to show the whole map and handles really nicely, you can split the game to render two screens each with their own camera, transports can be given ferry orders and then you can just tell units to move to one of the ferry order points and they'll automatically wait there and board one of the transports working the ferry order when available and be delivered automatically, etc. Cuts down on tons of tedious busy-work micro so you can focus on strategy.

 

[deama]

If you haven't given Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance a try, I'd recommend it. It's aged quite well and has very good basebuilding and economy mechanics. Also a lot of quality of life stuff that most RTS are missing - you can drag moves in a chained move order to edit them (this includes rally instructions), same goes for points in a patrol path, you can save building templates to avoid tedious work like wall patterns for tier 1 point defence or generator adjacency patterns, the camera can zoom all the way out to show the whole map and handles really nicely, you can split the game to render two screens each with their own camera, transports can be given ferry orders and then you can just tell units to move to one of the ferry order points and they'll automatically wait there and board one of the transports working the ferry order when available and be delivered automatically, etc. Cuts down on tons of tedious busy-work micro so you can focus on strategy.

Oh I forgot to mention I played that one a few months ago, was ok, I thought zero-k was more enjoyable cause the campaign missions felt too samey, though the story wasn't too bad.

 

[Sarathiour]

If you haven't given Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance a try, I'd recommend it. It's aged quite well and has very good basebuilding and economy mechanics. Also a lot of quality of life stuff that most RTS are missing - you can drag moves in a chained move order to edit them (this includes rally instructions), same goes for points in a patrol path, you can save building templates to avoid tedious work like wall patterns for tier 1 point defence or generator adjacency patterns, the camera can zoom all the way out to show the whole map and handles really nicely, you can split the game to render two screens each with their own camera, transports can be given ferry orders and then you can just tell units to move to one of the ferry order points and they'll automatically wait there and board one of the transports working the ferry order when available and be delivered automatically, etc. Cuts down on tons of tedious busy-work micro so you can focus on strategy.

I tried to played last year, but the pathfinding seemed absolutely terrible. Did i miss something ?

 

[Lagi]

BAR

however this mouse scrool zoom function is distracting, and I think Escalation is because of that better.

 

[what am i doing]

If you haven't given Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance a try, I'd recommend it. It's aged quite well and has very good basebuilding and economy mechanics. Also a lot of quality of life stuff that most RTS are missing - you can drag moves in a chained move order to edit them (this includes rally instructions), same goes for points in a patrol path, you can save building templates to avoid tedious work like wall patterns for tier 1 point defence or generator adjacency patterns, the camera can zoom all the way out to show the whole map and handles really nicely, you can split the game to render two screens each with their own camera, transports can be given ferry orders and then you can just tell units to move to one of the ferry order points and they'll automatically wait there and board one of the transports working the ferry order when available and be delivered automatically, etc. Cuts down on tons of tedious busy-work micro so you can focus on strategy.

I tried to played last year, but the pathfinding seemed absolutely terrible. Did i miss something ?

The pathfinding is genuinely pretty bad. Miles above, say, starcraft, but still bad, and probably the game's main weakness.

 

[deama]

Oh and I forgot to mention also, I played they are billions, that one wasn't too bad at all, quite liked it, but the campaign was pretty much nonexistent, and it was moreso a tower defence with base building, I was hoping for pretty much exactly that, but set in midieval times and instead of you fighting against zombies, you'd be fighting against other lords in 1 single massive giant mega map, as well as bundle in some mechanics from CK2 and that's pretty much a perfect RTS for me I'd say, well, almost, it would need to look as nice as stronghold did and show off how the peasants worked to make your "kingdom" feel alive.

 

[Derringer]

I get the dos Stronghold and the RTS Stronghold game mixed up sometimes since people like both a lot.

 

[Sarathiour]

The pathfinding is genuinely pretty bad. Miles above, say, starcraft, but still bad, and probably the game's main weakness.

So it wasn't just me. It's a shame, because it really get in the way once you try to manage a group of 10 unit or more, and i don't think i could endure it for long, despite game's mechanic looking appealing .

 

[what am i doing]

The pathfinding is genuinely pretty bad. Miles above, say, starcraft, but still bad, and probably the game's main weakness.

So it wasn't just me. It's a shame, because it really get in the way once you try to manage a group of 10 unit or more, and i don't think i could endure it for long, despite game's mechanic looking appealing .

In all fairness in the later game you're not really meant to be microing your units (except maybe air swarms, and they don't have the pathfinding issues since they don't collide with each other) and mostly focusing on maxing out your economy and levereging that economy so that your stream of Percivals overwhelms the enemy.