Have not played that. Must look into it.
Have not played that. Must look into it.
There were aspects of this in Warzone 2100. It was possible to build one unit as a "Commander". Each unit slaved to the commander would fire at the whatever enemy unit the commander was firing at.
In addition there was automatic artillery counter barrage sensors which could be linked to strike aircraft or artillery.
A very neat and often overlook RTS, available for free now.
That reminds me that Achron actually had a commander system somewhat too, but it was mostly used to decrease chronoenergy costs. If only the game had not failed so hard at standard rts mechanics. Least my brother got the free extra copy they gave me when I bought it.
Clicks being a resource adds some rather interesting gameplay dynamics to RTS games, actually.
Automation isn't all good, either. AI goes counter to "control": if you make a decision, should the AI correct you if it thinks you're "wrong"? Furthermore, if you take automation to its logical conclusion, you would be writing AI scripts, then just seeing how things play out.
That's all well and good, of course, but you've traded one set of problems for another.
You should watch some of the Day[9] Daily videos. You'll find that the vast majority of the strategic advice there is, in fact, NOT "you should click faster". The game does have an execution component, sure. but that does not diminish the amount of strategy. All it could possibly do is lessen its relative importance. In case of SC2, at least, "strategy" is still a rather large chunk of the pie, though.Originally Posted by b0rsuk
The issue of too many games with micro focus does seem to be an unfortunate side effect of Starcraft & Warcraft's success. For quite awhile, most RTSs would try to copy the same formula.
Luckily, we're starting to really get some diversity in RTSs again.
How does Kohan do with this? Not that Kohan is new. The idea of pre-grouped units appeal to me. It seems like it's more than the usual homogenous squads that end up acting the same as if it was one guy. It seems like that would take away some of the need to micro, too.
You still have control of things. The AI only performs simple tasks that you tell it to perform in my theory. Plus special units, especially the most powerful ones function under your direct control. You can even leave in the standard commands as an option for people who are into it, though you would still only be able to directly micro a small number of the total game units.
Besides we already have a glut of Starcraft style games.
Kohan was great.
Dawn of War style groups of units were kinda fun, but the difference between the guns you could buy was almost impossible to notice and they really did act like a single unit. And it didn't even give the impression of larger armies, you still only had a couple hundred tops.
Starcraft 1 had a map mode Shared Ally.
Did it a few times. My friend would base build, I would micro the army. Good fun.
Never checked to see if SC2 had it.
Is it SINS or some other RTS, that the game speed in multiplayer could be adjusted when every player selected the same game speed, then it would change to that.
I thought Kohan was interesting, but I didn't really get why they didn't make it turn-based. It was waaaaaaaaay too slow.
In theory, yeah. In practice, even simple stuff like CoH's movement didn't work well enough to not be frustrating when some of your squaddies tried to take cover by running through gunfire, and there was nothing you could do to stop that.
Aside from SC2, there aren't many (any?) recent SC-style games, actually. Not that this'd would be a reason to make more of them, but "glut" is not my experience at all.
Taking cover is pretty unique to CoH really. And that's not really related to excessive automation which is what the sentence you quoted was in response to. A non micro game should be more decided by troop comps and deployment decisions as opposed to low level micro stuff anyways.
DEFCON allows time-limited pause / speed options in multiplayer. It handles that pretty well.
Too bad more games don't have that. Most RTS games don't have any reconnect either.
So I got me some Kohan and went through the campaign and such and it wasn't nearly as AIii and organizii as I was expecting.
You had a couple formations with super simple bonuses and you could stick some healers in your group thingy. I mean I appreciated certain aspects of the game, but I feel like people made it out to be more than it was.
Kohan doesn't have a huge amount of depth, but it was and is quite innovative.
Have you tried Dungeon Siege? The first one. I think it does a lot of things that are very much in line with what you describe, but on a smaller scale. You have a party of six characters, and you can set up a formation, equip them with different weapons or spells, and have some rudimentary AI control. Expand the scale to multiple parties and you'd have a crazy awesome RTS.
Well I would say innovative, but not quite innovative. It had a few unique features. I do think it was fun as a whole, but just not as out of the box as people seemed to think. Maybe I just play way too many RTS games and also its been a bit since it came out.
To some degree any party based RPG in real time would be nice when expanded to RTS size. I have heard a lot of people talk about dungeon siege. If only I had more money to buy all these games :) I already have to buy some rts wargames and demo some others from suggestions I got at another forum. Maybe I should look into fulltime work and a better pay scale job :)
High level SupCom play was in fact very micro dependent, to an annoying degree IMHO.
Zero-K has some smart built-in unit behavior options and interface bits, but you do have to pick and deploy units carefully, and there's a learning curve. I'd recommend TA/SC fans give it a try. ZK is well designed, and some of the unit balance is based on those automatic behaviors. The interface is impressive (even if unpolished), but you have to dig around to configure it and find out how the addons and optional bits work.
Tales of, Star Ocean, Grandia. JRPG, real time battles with AI controlled party members.
Xenoblade came out recently where you only control 1 of 3 party members, who react depending on what is going on and help set up combos between characters.
Gratuitious Space Battles is something where you set your units out and the AI takes over.
Units do have some basic AI on what to engage by default (air/ground) but other than that it is rather basic.
Haven't seen the Homeworld franchise mentioned yet. Homeworld 2, especially, has a lot of the features you desire:
- Units automatically attack their optimal target (Bombers will prefer frigates and bigger, fighters will go after other fighters, corvette's chew out anything smaller than themselves, etc) - that way, you could select your entire armada, attack-select the enemy fleet and watch each unit go after their preferred targets. GLORIOUS.
- Resources come in the form of space rocks - Resourcer (herpderp) units will, once set loose on a group of rocks, go after the nearest rock and fly back and forth toward the nearest depository (Foreman/carrier/mothership). That way, you could have cute little mining ops going all over the place by placing foremen-units/carriers at all the fields, while your mothership moved into a more favourable position away from the stones
- Actually, fuck all this, Im reinstalling ALL the Homeworlds. Including Cataclysm, fuck the haters.
I actually just downloaded and played Zero-K a couple days ago, can't remember why. It doesn't really have much macro imo. A lot of times people think I am wrong about games not having macro but its mostly because I am weird and a lot of macro to me means something way different. Way more in line with TBS sensibilities I think. To be fair a lot of TBS games have insane unnecessary micro also, but its balanced with far more strategic options.
For instance in a game of dominions you have several options. You can choose a bless pretender to rush with sacred troops, and you have to pick what to get your bless 9s in. You could get a rainbow pretender because your race has limited options to develop magic in some areas.
For research you could go for construction and focus on gearing up super combatants or you could push evocation for mages with AOE in teamfights or you could push for magic schools that give access to good gem boosts or you could go for a magic school which gives good combat buffs across your army.
You deploy an army to an area to defend one of your borders and you need to make the right call on size and composition because you cannot get major support to an area fast.
It might be better to say I prefer grand strategy since macro is a word where lots of people perceive its meaning differently.
Zero-K does get you into a large amount of units on the map, which I like a lot, but the tech tree is pretty much non existent, you can build whatever you can afford.
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