The best base building RTS's

[Nomask Alt]

I don't think there has been a thread like this here in ages.

The best base building RTS's are, IMO: Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and Forged Alliance.

End thread? Or did I miss something?

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

AI WAR : Fleet Command.

Ah, Warzone 2100, and just as I was thinking about playing some base building RTS. Used to have it on PS1, that controller sure didn't make things easier. Downloading.

 

[Roderick]

Company Of Heroes, simply beacuse gathering the resources is never boring and building is no trouble as the game concentrates on combat tactics

 

[Lunac]

I don't think there has been a thread like this here in ages.

The best base building RTS's are, IMO: Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and Forged Alliance.

End thread? Or did I miss something?

AoE series seems to have cornered a market on base building, aside of going and playing with legos again.


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[Ashery]

Replaying TA(+CC) as we speak, actually.

And I gotta say: God damnit do I mother fucking hate pathfinding in the late 90's/early 00's RTSs. Starting in on the CC campaign, too, so I'm no longer able to bypass that by relying on aircrafts for assaults (Couldn't even do that in the first few CC sea based missions, either, as there's nothing quite like the rage of having over half of your torpedo seaplanes commit suicide by flying directly over a soon-to-be-destroyed carrier).

Oh, oh, I know another major irritant: No distinction/filter on your minimap for underwater/airborne/surface based units. I want to wear down the base from max range with my cruisers' cannons, damnit, not get up close and personal with advanced torpedo launchers using only my shitty depth charges.

Ah well, rage as I might, there's nothing else that satisfies my inner arty whore quite as well

 

[Phelot]

Yeah, TA allowed you to make some gloriously large bases full of different layers of defenses.

 

[Gregz]

came here to say TA

 

[Ashery]

Heh, I tend to opt for masses of the T2 missile turrent (Defender for Arm, forget the Core name) with a sprinkling of the T2 arty battery (Guardian for Arm, Punisher for Core) along the rim.

Anything else (Of similar tech level/cost, at least) just doesn't have the range to defend without an intervention with mobile units.

 

[20 Eyes]

I don't think there has been a thread like this here in ages.

The best base building RTS's are, IMO: Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and Forged Alliance.

End thread? Or did I miss something?

AoE series seems to have cornered a market on base building, aside of going and playing with legos again.


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Yep. I played Total Annihilation when it came out, but I don't actually remember much about the base building. I do remember constructing glorious bases in Age of Empires 1 and 2. Once you built your base up, it started to look like something out of a city-building game. I've never seen an RTS do that quite so well, but I'm not a huge fan of the genre.

 

[Marsal]

Age of Empires 2! Scale of buildings and units was well done and battles felt EPIC. Also IMMERSHUN.

 

[Destroid]

I don't think there has been a thread like this here in ages.

The best base building RTS's are, IMO: Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and Forged Alliance.

End thread? Or did I miss something?

What exactly is it you are looking for? High quality games in the base building rts genre(starcraft is probably king here), or the most detailed and interesting base building?

 

[sser]

Company of Heroes is, hands down, the best base-building RTS of the past ten years.

Starcraft and Age of Empires are good classics, though. And I guess Starcraft 2 if you like your gameplay to still be circa 1998 but with better graphics.

 

[Destroid]

CoH isn't even a base building RTS.

 

[SoupNazi]

Stronghold, hands down.

 

[Angthoron]

Cossacks is a decent AoE 2 clone in terms of base-building, too.

 

[oscar]

Company of Heroes for removing it. I want to focus on the battle and tactics, not play a simplified Sim City.

 

[Ulminati]

Dang it. Saw the thread title. Immediately thought: "I'll go point out Warzone 2100 for having a base that carried over between levels". Then I open the thread and see it mentioned in the OP.

The base building itself in Total Annihilation wasn't terribly good per se. It was the autoqueue for (construction) orders and waypoints which was novel for its time.

While not really an RTS I feel UFO: Enemy unknown still deserves a honourable mention since the choices you make in base design can make defending said base far more difficult if aliens attack.

Honourable mention also goes to Dawn of War (and to a lesser extent CoH) for forcing players to expand outside of a single megafortress to hold resource points.

To add something new to the thread there is Netstorm. While the game itself was average at best the base building was pretty novel. for those who haven't played it, the map consisted of a few floating islands and a huge empty void. (well, empty air). You use semirandom tetris-like bridge pieces to extend across the expanse between islands. The bridges eventually crumble if they don't connect to something. There are no mobile units in the game except resource gatherers. So the entire game revolves around constructing and powering various turrets and walls with different arcs of fire and defense to breach the enemys defenses. Buildings that are destroyed damage nearby bridges, so it's possible to take out large sections of the enemy base if you isolate key structures that keep the bridge network anchored to islands.

It was a pretty ingenous workaround to compensate for latency in a multiplayer game during the dial-up age.

 

[sser]

CoH isn't even a base building RTS.

How did you win your games without building a base?

 

[Destroid]

Worker rush.

 

[Eyeball]

Good pick by Ulminati. Netstorm was indeed pretty unique, a kind of pseudo tower-defense game before tower defense became popular but with an offensive component too.

As for best base builder, I think Beasts&Bumpkins deserves honourable mention. Corny cartoon medieval RTS, but you had to create functional peasant village communities as well complete with housing, wells, farms, mills, bakeries, law enforcement and so on. This was done for the purpose of enticing your peasants to bump uglies (with associated tasteless sound effects, no less), thus producing children, which could later grow up into more peasants to be trained into warriors, fighters or wizards.

Game wasn't all that GOOD, but the village sim/RTS overlap was interesting, sure enough.

 

[Ulminati]

How'd this thread make it this far without someone mentioning dwarf fortress btw?

Another cool thing about netstorm by the way. It was marketed as a primarely multiplayer game with a token single player campaign. The objective of the game was to work your way past the enemys defenses and deal damage to his priest, whim you could then bring back to your altar with a resource gatherer unit. Assuming your own priest wasn't immobilized from damage, your priest would then go through a neat little ritual to sacrifice the enemy priest to the elemental furies. Upon doing so enough times you would get to choose which technology to permanently unlock for your account. Once you had unlocked everything, you could trade in all your research for a small HP boost to all buildings and start over. Buildings came in 4 different flavours. Wind buildings generally had good reach, rain buildings were resilient, thunder buildings very strong but required narrow aiming, sun buildings were generally weaker but could reach in more directions. Wind/rain/thunder also had their own power generators, while "sun" energy could be provided by any kind of generator.

What all this meant is that 2 players of roughly the same level could play against each other and they'd both have vastly different techs available to them since you usually specialized in 2 elements max.

Multiplayer level ups and perks man. Level-ups and perks.

 

[Surf Solar]

Warzone and Stronghold would be my tips.

@NetStorm - awesome, the game they took so many soundtrack titles for Fallout 2 for. ;D

 

[Roderick]

yeah it isnt annoying on Age Of Empires (especially 2), it works well for that style

Command & Conquer games, maybe?

 

[markec]

Warrior Kings was a pretty cool game, it was one of rare RTS where for destroying walls and fortifications you needed siege equipment while your other units could not even scratch them. Also terrain influenced pretty much everything from movement speed to rate of attack.

 

[Johannes]

How'd this thread make it this far without someone mentioning dwarf fortress btw?

Cause it's not really an RTS, any more than Sim City or Caesar games are.


But yeah, I'd say SC:BW, AoE2 and TA are the best RTS's, in base building and otherwise. Not into creating big nice-looking fortresses for the heck of it, but they encourage sprawling stuff all across the map to secure resources, and occasionally it makes a lot of sense too to use tons of turrets and walls, of course always in tandem with mobile units.

And I gotta say: God damnit do I mother fucking hate pathfinding in the late 90's/early 00's RTSs. Starting in on the CC campaign, too, so I'm no longer able to bypass that by relying on aircrafts for assaults (Couldn't even do that in the first few CC sea based missions, either, as there's nothing quite like the rage of having over half of your torpedo seaplanes commit suicide by flying directly over a soon-to-be-destroyed carrier).

You might then be interested in this upcoming patch for the game
http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=42656

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• Fixed Pathfinding - Perhaps the #1 wish of TA players, the pathfinding is fixed, meaning it no longer degenerates as the in-game unit count increases. Groups of thousands of units move with ease and complex maps are now playable.