RTS Starcraft

[Brickfrog]

Sc isn't about the plot, or the narrative, or the characters.
It's about watching Korean 15 year olds hit 450 actions per minute.

 

[luj1]

It's about watching Korean 15 year olds hit 450 actions per minute.

its about being a well designed and well balanced RTS

Probably the best ever made

 

[Multidirectional]

It's about watching Korean 15 year olds hit 450 actions per minute.

Nobody hits 450 actions per minute, APM is a useless statistic that is there to impress idiots who know nothing about the game.

 

[Brickfrog]

Nobody hits 450 actions per minute

I mean Flash was considered slow at 350. Jaedong would peak over 450.

Obviously I was joking about the game being about apm but if you followed brood war you should know 450 was not uncommon to see in tournament play.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I think RTS could be a great avenue for more serious political and military storytelling. At present I feel its potential is untapped.

 

[Multidirectional]

Nobody hits 450 actions per minute

I mean Flash was considered slow at 350. Jaedong would peak over 450.

Obviously I was joking about the game being about apm but if you followed brood war you should know 450 was not uncommon to see in tournament play.

Here's me in SC2 Gold league few years ago. I specifically played this game so I could take this screenshot to shut up one dude who wouldn't stop pissing in my ear about how APM is an important measure of skill.

Spoiler

Guess it means I'm twice as fast as pros.

 

[Jaedar]

Today SC2 is as old as SC1 was when SC2 came out.

I remember when SC2 came out, RTS felt kinda struggling, not a great time for the genre. And today:

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

People play Starcraft for the story? I thought that was a joke. MP all the way.

80% of RTS players don’t play MP. It’s an untapped market.

Yup, it's ripe for an indie dev to make millions. AAA won't touch it cause they're not interested in single player stuff (especially not sp without microtransaction potential). Sadly all the rts indies also seem mostly interested in the mp aspect.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Today SC2 is as old as SC1 was when SC2 came out.

I remember when SC2 came out, RTS felt kinda struggling, not a great time for the genre. And today:

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

People play Starcraft for the story? I thought that was a joke. MP all the way.

80% of RTS players don’t play MP. It’s an untapped market.

Yup, it's ripe for an indie dev to make millions. AAA won't touch it cause they're not interested in single player stuff (especially not sp without microtransaction potential). Sadly all the rts indies also seem mostly interested in the mp aspect.

Yup. The golden age of RTS is long over, and the worst part is that the genre never developed as well as it could have.

Part of the issue is how the market has changed. Microtransactions, MOBAs… RTS can’t compete because of its niche appeal. Companies chasing esports didn’t help either.

Another problem is that RTS is just inordinately difficult to develop because it requires special coding that Unity and Unreal don’t come with out of the box like they do other genres. The *craft games fostered huge modding communities only because the RTS infrastructure was already in place.

I feel that the popularity of the *craft games has strangled creativity in the RTS design space too. Other formulas like C&C, AoE, SupCom or others yet to be codified have been crowded out and forced into obscurity. (Even so, there’s a number of *craft clones that put genuinely interesting spins on the mechanics, like Armies of Exigo or Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis.) Many old RTSes aren’t preserved by GOG, when they could offer useful lessons.

 

[luj1]

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

MOBAs killed them

 

[Jaedar]

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

MOBAs killed them

I think there's truth to this, but not the entire truth. I think it's more that the audience for RTS were in it for different aspects, and when mobas, tds, cookie clicker, etc became their own genres it sort of ate away at the customer base bit by bit. And of course it never helped that RTS doesn't work on console and isn't a good platform for microtransactions.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

One of the most innovative RTS games I played recently was this obscure indie gem It Stares Back. It simplifies a lot of RTS mechanics.

It has base building and a degree of tower defense, but it doesn't have worker units. The way it's designed has created full-blown supply lines that needed to be defended, which isn't a feature of any other RTS I'm aware us. I mean supply lines: resources are harvested from deposits as they are needed by nearby buildings, and you need an unbroken line of towers between the point where you're building and the resource deposits. In other RTS games resources are simply harvested and stored in the ether and wirelessly transmitted wherever they're needed, so there isn't much in the way of supply lines. (This makes me think. A realistic war game with things like supply lines, maneuvers, espionage, etc just wouldn't lend itself to competitive play.)

Another mechanic it doesn't have is pathfinding. It doesn't need it. Units move in straight lines without anything getting in the way. There are terrain hazards that can slow, speed, or kill units that walk over it, but that's it. I think this would really help a dev out because writing pathfinding code is the worst and one of the key reasons preventing indie RTS from blooming.

It's a double-edged sword. While the simplicity loses a lot of what made classic RTS games fun and challenging, it probably makes the game a whole lot easier to produce if you don't have to worry about all that RTS-specific code that isn't supported out-of-the-box by Unreal or Unity.

The game also adds other mechanics to make up for this simplification. It's also a metroidvania and has a points-based persistent upgrade mechanic. Missions are arranged on a branching overworld map, you can play missions repeatedly, and some missions need to be played multiple times with different upgrades before you can clear them. It's definitely new and original in terms of mechanics.

 

[Brickfrog]

Rts' are too demanding for general consumption. The attention-splitting, mechanical, and micro skills that are required render them inaccessible. People don't like looking away for 10 seconds to find a dozen medevacs dropping on their worker line.

Mobas picked up steam because you only have one character to look at instead of hundreds.

I don't think wer ever going back to the good ol days of ballbustingly hard RTS' being particularly popular.

Fun fact for old brood war heads: Team Liquid is now valued at over 400 million USD largely on the strength of it's Moba and shooter teams

 

[Marat]

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Survival RTS has been surprisingly popular. No clue why.

 

[hello friend]

I remember when SC2 came out, RTS felt kinda struggling, not a great time for the genre. And today:

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

Weirdly, despite the shrinking playerbase the SC2 pro scene is at the highest level it's ever been.

 

[Multidirectional]

Weirdly, despite the shrinking playerbase the SC2 pro scene is at the highest level it's ever been.

Yeah since I started playing 5 years ago pro games have only been getting better. And it's impressive how long Serral continues to dominate after breaking the koreans in 2018, even after him and Reynor got zerg, my main race, nerfed to shit. It's pretty common for him to reach grand finals of tournaments without dropping a single map to anyone. Current Dreamhack tournament too, he's yet to lose a single map and he's close to finals now. I can't really be arsed to watch every game in these things but I do make sure to catch up on Serral's games, kid is amazing.

 

[hello friend]

Have you seen when Reynor off-races Terran? Very interesting to watch, his playstyle is very different. Here are a few cool non-standard games:

 

[Multidirectional]

^ Cannot be arsed to watch entire thing, it seems like he's just playing bio terran there. I am bored as fuck of marine marrauder medivac, seen enough of that shit for a lifetime.

True meme builds is what I play when I go Terran, like Cyclone Widow Mine based compositions. Or mass Raven turtling. I love how creative you can get with mech. Yet most people are idiots who just blindly copy whatever the "standard" in pro play is and torture themselves trying to play bio at low levels. Their loss.

I've seen Reynor's protoss though and he just plays it like zerg, which is perfectly normal for zerg main player. I also play protoss very similarly where I add a ton of gateways, which enables me to remax very fast. It's just natural to want to do that when you main zerg.

 

[hello friend]

Yeah it's bio, but unlike any bio I've ever seen before. It's off race, so it's not the cleanest in terms of builds and decisionmaking, but he takes his many years of experience coordinating lings and banes and applies it to bio. If you could somehow graft that kind of speed and control onto a Terran player who better knew what he was doing, well, that would be a sight to see.

 

[hello friend]

Vindicta is the only Terran I can think of that plays remotely like that, he's not a top player but he's good and damn is he fast.

 

[hello friend]

I love this video series:

 

[Multidirectional]

^ Yes, Is It Imba is his best content. Both entertaining and informative. I've actually made some good adjustments to my play as a result of listening to him roast these people.





Broodwar champion of butthurt. Maybe deciding to tryhard with Terran in Broodwar after being SC2 Protoss player isn't the best course of action.

 

[Lucumo]

Nobody hits 450 actions per minute

I mean Flash was considered slow at 350. Jaedong would peak over 450.

Obviously I was joking about the game being about apm but if you followed brood war you should know 450 was not uncommon to see in tournament play.

Well, averaging in the 400s. Peak was obviously higher. In general, Zerg players had higher average apm because it's more required of their race.

I am actually a bit upset RTS is stone dead.

MOBAs killed them

I think there's truth to this, but not the entire truth. I think it's more that the audience for RTS were in it for different aspects, and when mobas, tds, cookie clicker, etc became their own genres it sort of ate away at the customer base bit by bit. And of course it never helped that RTS doesn't work on console and isn't a good platform for microtransactions.

It was mainly about three things: 1. Surging popularity of MOBAs, especially DotA, 2. Rise of the MMORPG genre which cut into all other genres but especially RTS because they weren't really a thing on consoles, 3. Decline of the quality of RTS games (I played lots of RTS, on LAN with friends too but eventually nothing interesting came out anymore. Last good year was 2003 IIRC.)

Weirdly, despite the shrinking playerbase the SC2 pro scene is at the highest level it's ever been.

Yeah since I started playing 5 years ago pro games have only been getting better. And it's impressive how long Serral continues to dominate after breaking the koreans in 2018, even after him and Reynor got zerg, my main race, nerfed to shit. It's pretty common for him to reach grand finals of tournaments without dropping a single map to anyone. Current Dreamhack tournament too, he's yet to lose a single map and he's close to finals now. I can't really be arsed to watch every game in these things but I do make sure to catch up on Serral's games, kid is amazing.

No clue about the current scene but it was barely ever relevant when, after Blizzard sued the shit out of South Korea to force them to switch to SC2, players either switched to LoL if possible or continued their contracts until they could retire and switch back to BW and start streaming to make money that way.

 

[hello friend]

Noob Artosis doesn't realise he can just 1a 2a 3a 4a

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Cool Saudi BW invitational: