[HN Gopher] In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
___________________________________________________________________
In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games
Author : aw1621107
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-07-27 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waywardstrategy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waywardstrategy.com)
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
|
| So, real-world war has a "hard counter".
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| A phalanx armed with shields, swords and spears can't damage
| an A-10; the A-10 can shoot or bomb them into
| ineffectiveness. Hard counter.
|
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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 Hayha, 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
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Your example of the most outlier sniper of all time doesn't
| really conflict with "advantaged side almost always wins".
| afrodc_ wrote:
| They also lost the war
| sofixa wrote:
| That smells like bullshit.
|
| 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.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| I feel like there's been little going on in RTS land. Did I miss
| any significant releases?
| danielecook wrote:
| Check out They are Billions. It has an RTS-like feel, but the
| strategy is largely defensive.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Since nobody has figured out how to integrate loot boxes or
| gambling into RTS yet, other genres are currently much more
| profitable.
| [deleted]
| chaps wrote:
| Check out Zero-K if you haven't already. Open source RTS and
| arguably the best, but definitely has that lingering ol' open
| source taste to it.
| nestorD wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://play0ad.com/
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Keep your eye on Frost Giant.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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.)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Grey Goo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/290790/Grey_Goo/
|
| 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/
| EamonnMR wrote:
| GG is a good SC-alike and Annihilation is Annihilation. Both
| bring a lot to the table. Ashes just never ran properly so I
| gave up on it.
| Causality1 wrote:
| You are the first person I've seen mentioning Ashes of the
| Singularity who wasn't doing a hardware review.
| opportune wrote:
| Starcraft 2 is still the leader after like 10 years at this
| point
| Vadoff wrote:
| Nope, feel like the last major release the masses played was
| Starcraft 2, and that's over 10 years old now.
| thrwawy12345 wrote:
| Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has a thriving pro level
| tournament scene and online multiplayer culture.
| oneplane wrote:
| And Age of Empires 2 on Voobly is still active as well, with
| userpatch updates being released.
|
| 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.
| ddek wrote:
| Unlikely. AoE4 looks more like a Civ competitor than AoE2,
| in that it'll look beautiful, have wildly divergent civs,
| and almost entirely be played SP long run.
|
| AoE2 does so many things wrong by 'modern game' standards.
| The graphics are 2D. Pick any two civs, they're 80%
| identical. New, goofier mechanics (Flemish Revolution) are
| disliked by the players (although still used). It's still
| an incredible game.
| dimitar wrote:
| I like the Eugen games, especially the wargame series
| the__alchemist wrote:
| 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.
| BadInformatics wrote:
| 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/)!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| 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.
| thrower123 wrote:
| RTSs went off the deep end catering to competitive
| multiplayer, and that's where I stopped caring.
|
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| SC2's co-op significantly extended the games popularity. It
| lacks much strategic depth, but it's still surprisingly fun
| if repetitive.
| bluescrn wrote:
| 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.
| rollcat wrote:
| I love team ladder in SC2. Somehow we tend to avoid blaming
| each other, rather we analyse our team games and see which
| plays worked well and which didn't. In 1v1 the road to
| improvement is usually macro, macro, scouting, and macro -
| in teams it's communication, communication, teamwork, and
| communication. 60% winrate last season :)
|
| Also arranged teams have a very strong advantage over
| random teams, you can really punch above your weight if
| your teammates understand how to support you.
| Majromax wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's not really true. A typical player can watch the
| replay of their losing match and see the _proximate cause_
| of the failure ( "my army got blown up"), but looking at
| the game analytically to find the _ultimate cause_ is /was
| much more difficult. The art of doing so was a regular
| feature of the Day[9] daily videos.
|
| That complexity is part of what makes strategy games (real
| time or otherwise) compelling: seemingly simple choices or
| optimizations compound into a much larger advantage later
| on. However, those small-scale advantages are rarely
| highlighted by the game itself as important, and
| optimization usually asks a lot of the players.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| The funnest starcraft games I ever played were 2v2 or 3v3
| games with friends. 1 on 1 always seemed overly stressful
| and annoying.
| ajuc wrote:
| 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.
| jdmichal wrote:
| 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.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| 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).
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I am gorilla. I have 4 moves: punch, slam, eat banana,
| and my ultimate ability, get mad."_
|
| One day maybe there'll be games with just one move... just
| to dumb games down to the lowest common denominator and not
| leave anyone out.
| MathYouF wrote:
| As much as I loved it, Assassins Creed had a combat
| system like this.
| rikthevik wrote:
| Check out Divekick. It's a 1v1 fighting game with two
| moves: Dive and Kick. And it's got a very high skill
| ceiling. :)
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| This is just hungry hungry hippos.
| Miraste wrote:
| > specific type of gunship-based commander sniping
|
| I see someone's played Supreme Commander. I love the game
| but it's the archetypal example of what you're talking
| about: winning depends on detailed knowledge of dozens of
| different units across four factions and simultaneous
| maximally-efficient economy building. Building a tutorial
| for it is impossible. It's only playable by the sort of
| people who will read wikis and watch videos and lose and
| lose and lose until they have some idea what's going on.
|
| This causes the other problem with RTSes: the (small,
| dedicated) community has been running for fifteen years and
| is _incredibly_ unfriendly to new players. Having less than
| ~150 hours playtime is often grounds for being kicked from
| games, which doesn 't help expand the playerbase.
|
| Unfortunately, RTSes simplified enough to avoid these
| problems aren't nearly as fun. The genre just works better
| as a community passion project than a commercial
| enterprise.
| Jiokl wrote:
| Also, MOBAs give you that team play experience, which
| reduces the amount of weight/pressure on you as an
| individual. 1v1 ladder anxiety is a _huge_ under-
| appreciated issue and one of the things RTS 's can do to
| avoid it is a bigger focus on team PvP.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I really don't think the MOBA comment works for Dota 2. Its
| not really about the characters, its about the map,
| position, and timing (itemization + push timing). The
| characters are important, but frequently people pick meta
| characters and get bopped. This wouldn't be an issue if
| dota had new people playing the game, but I want to say
| that dota is at this point filled with people who have been
| playing for a long time. So, you'll see people who at low
| levels just destroy people with characters that are
| supposed to be bad because they just know where to stand
| and abuse the map or creep aggro. Its wild.
|
| Just as a specific example. If you take two teams of equal
| MMR and one had all the character counters so they "should"
| win. If the team with the better characters doesn't know
| how to pull the safelane, they will just straight up lose.
| Full stop. They will get gold starved and unless the other
| team throws (which is very common lol) they should lose.
|
| Also, losing like this in dota is anti-fun. Its really not
| a good time for like anybody, the winner of the loser. Its
| just one team dumpstering another and it happens at all
| levels.
| opportune wrote:
| I don't think it's just skill. They're also primarily team
| based.
|
| If you win, you can feel really good because you had a 17/2
| K/D. If you lose, you can blame your teammates. You can
| also play with your friends. With starcaft even though team
| matches are supported, they are unpopular, and there's no
| easy way to look at the stats for the game and feel like a
| badass if you win.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > 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).
|
| Used to play DotA (as in, the custom WC3 map) and LoL. I
| downloaded Pokemon Unite last week. Instantly understood
| pretty much everything except the individual feel and
| tactics of each character.
| maverwa wrote:
| I think one big reasons why RTS are having trouble is, that
| loosing in an RTS, as a new player, can be one of the worst
| experiences in gaming (not counting player toxicity): you
| just spend several minutes, maybe a lot of them, playing
| this game, you finally got your T2 fab, and then the enemy
| nukes you with his experimental artillery and you are just
| gone. No way to understand what exactly went wrong. To
| slow? Wrong build order? No clue! Might you just mismanaged
| the harvester and you economy suffered early. Compare that
| to a shooter, an (a)rpg or a racing game. They might be as
| hard to win, but at least you have a clear understanding of
| what happens. He saw you, he shot you. She just had the
| correct breaking point figured out and you hit the wall.
|
| Ofc it's not always that clear cut and there is a lot in
| between these examples. But in my experience, RTS and maybe
| strategy in general, can be really hard to understand what
| went wrong, even on a basic level.
|
| MOBAs are, imho somewhere on between. High skillcap both in
| regards or game knowledge and strategy, but also in
| agility, but also somewhat readable. Sure, you might wonder
| why your gorillas punch did way less damage than their
| gorilla, but a look at the KDA or their gear might already
| give you a hint.
|
| So I guess with the overall growth of the gaming market and
| games becoming more and more expensive, the small community
| that actually enjoys RTS isn't really ,,worth" that money.
| jgon wrote:
| I think another thing is that MOBA's have downtime. You
| need to walk to places, you need to back, buy items, etc,
| etc. It's been a while since I played Starcraft, but my
| memories of it were basically that if you weren't _doing
| things_ at literally every moment, you were probably going
| to get beat. You could try and use better macro, and
| tactical understanding but you 'd eventually run up against
| someone who was equivalent and had better micro/apm and
| just lose. Which meant that every match basically felt like
| a sprint from start to finish, which was exhausting.
| Eventually it got to a point where it was hard to jump into
| a match because I just wanted to game and not go all out. I
| had pre-emptive anxiety/exhaustion about the intensity of a
| match. A moba can still feed that competitive desire and
| has moments of intensity, but it feels much more balanced
| than RTS' ever did to me.
| ajuc wrote:
| Yup this is more important - in starcraft you will lose a
| game you almost completely won if you stop context
| switching for a few minutes.
|
| On the other hand you can abandon starcraft game at any
| moment with no consequences and it doesn't last for 50
| minutes. If you got toxic teammates in DOTA you are
| pretty much stuck with them for almost an hour.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think this also plays into the human reward pathways.
| More variation in intensity means more spikes of
| adrenaline and dopamine.
| Regic wrote:
| These were my exact thoughts about CS vs Quake back in
| the days. Quake had no downtime, all action while CS had
| time between rounds or just tense moments without
| anything actually happening. I think this dynamic was an
| important point behind the success of battle royal games
| too. An all action game is like an action movie without a
| moment's pause - it just doesn't work for most people.
| ajuc wrote:
| You ignored itemization and counterpicking in MOBAs, which
| is like ignoring build orders, army composition and macro
| efficiency in starcraft and just focusing on microing your
| army :)
|
| I was in the same camp when I only played RTS games, but
| after my friend got me into dota I have to admit there's a
| lot of depth there that I wasn't aware of.
|
| Also the win conditions are much more obvious in RTS games,
| just after I switched I had no idea that pulling, stacking,
| wave cutting, denying was important. Also the vision battle
| is more involved in MOBAs.
| RussianCow wrote:
| > after my friend got me into dota I have to admit
| there's a lot of depth there that I wasn't aware of.
|
| But that's kind of the point: you don't _have_ to be
| aware of it to have a good time. Sure, all of that stuff
| matters in competitive play, but it can still be fun to
| just run around killing things if you don 't know what
| you're doing. On the other hand, seeing artillery
| blasting your base from afar and having no idea what to
| do about it is really demoralizing.
|
| FWIW, I think this applies more to Dota 2 than it does to
| LoL. I haven't played the latter in many years, but I
| remember it being much more rigid and cookie-cutter
| strategy-wise than Dota, and the micro decisions mattered
| a lot more, which meant that sub-optimal play was more
| obvious. In Dota 2, your poor item build can still win
| the game with a single good team fight or just generally
| better awareness.
| jessewmc wrote:
| I think the big problem here was with Starcraft 2's lack of
| UMS and chat room focus compared to Brood War. I played
| competitive 1v1 in both, and anecdotally I spent alot more
| time in Brood War, and much of that time was socializing,
| playing casual games, and UMS--largely with friends who
| didn't play competitively.
|
| This community was completely destroyed by SC2, multiplayer
| really only appealed to serious competitive players. It
| sucked unless you only wanted to grind ladder. That
| community kept the game as a whole alive and acted as a
| gateway.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| Jiokl wrote:
| But you don't have to know any of that straight off the
| bat, because you have other players on a team to rely on.
| You can play with a friend who'll carry you if need be.
| SC2's relentless focus on 1v1 is a huge detriment, and it
| seems like the entire RTS genre has decided "well, that's
| what we do".
| chrishynes wrote:
| Yes, but the abilities and item actives are all quite
| similar in broad categories -- dash, stun, slow, etc. Same
| with items -- broad categories of damage, magic, health,
| armor, etc.
|
| To OP's point, you don't have to know the entire 100 hero
| roster and all of their abilities to have fun, just the
| general things they can do "Oh I just got stunned by that
| ability, might want to dodge next time"...
|
| Obviously to be good you need to know them all, but not to
| get started and have fun at lower levels of play.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yeah, there's some sparseness to it all that simplifies,
| but that's also offset by most abilities having a
| geometric component to how they're targeted or have area
| of effect.
|
| Respectfully, OP doesn't know the game. You can indeed
| have fun playing casually like that, but your win rate
| will reflect the lack of what you don't know. You can't
| even _see_ the game until you get some months under your
| belt, imo. Sound is another underrated aspect: you need
| to know exactly what spells are going off, how your
| allies or enemies will position them, based on nothing
| but hearing it and knowledge of the game.
|
| There's no way I would have learned Dota without a friend
| to pull me along. It's a big problem with the genre as a
| whole. LoL is a bit more forgiving and ability spammy,
| but has all the same issues. And I say this as someone
| that got near the top of the 2v2 ladder in LoL beta (RIP
| original twitch malphite combo).
| Jiokl wrote:
| > There's no way I would have learned Dota without a
| friend to pull me along
|
| But that's something that MOBAs can do that RTS games
| can't. Which is another reason why MOBAs ate RTSs lunch.
| I'm not sure why you're focusing on win rate when there
| are plenty of people who play MOBAs who are quite frankly
| garbage at the game(s).
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| If you're interested, the age of empires 2 community has been
| growing over the past year with the release of the definitive
| edition
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Sure feels like the genre is mostly dead. Kind of sad
| ddek wrote:
| 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.
| oneplane wrote:
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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]).
|
| [1]
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/40100/Supreme_Commander_2...
|
| [2]
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/244160/Homeworld_Remaster...
| s5300 wrote:
| 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.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| There's also the LOUD mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-
| ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| 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.
| askesisdev wrote:
| I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original
| Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the
| changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The
| performance of the original was even worse, you had to
| apply a patch to get multithreading.
|
| Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license
| for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way
| worse than the original, too simplified but I guess it was
| the logical path as people complained about SupCom's
| difficulty/complexity.
| javajosh wrote:
| I found the SupCom 1 controls uncomfortable in the first
| 20 minutes of the tutorial, and chose not to continue.
| Life is too short to finish bad books or punishing games;
| however for me SupCom 2 was a huge ergonomic improvement
| and if not for that game I wouldn't be playing the series
| at all.
| stu2010 wrote:
| Company of Heroes was an outstanding release, and its sequel is
| a good game with a still living, active community.
|
| Company of Heroes 3 was recently announced, and its launch will
| probably get a lot of old players back into the multiplayer
| lobbies.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| CoH is great, i've seen the CoH3 announcement! I'll
| definitely give that one a try
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| 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.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I'm still playing relatively old ones with my friends:
|
| * Supreme Commander & Planetary Annihilation
|
| * Sins of a Solar Empire
|
| * Zero-K
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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 :)
| ironman1478 wrote:
| 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.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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 :(
| blt wrote:
| Did they try rotating the camera 180 degrees?
|
| I can understand how this might be confusing. Like a mirror
| track in Mario Kart, it would make the map feel totally
| different.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| So, I suspect why they haven't gone with an approach like
| that is they want to preserve the layout for spectators.
| Dota is the biggest purse in all of esports, and they
| take the spectatorship quite seriously as a result.
| sigstoat wrote:
| as i recall, spectators receive game data, not a video
| stream. you can spectate in VR.
|
| so during real tournaments they could just broadcast from
| a spectator in the "standard" view.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| Its really difficult. The exact placement of individual
| trees in the game matters a lot and it affects line of
| sight, which is a key component to Dota. If you flipped
| the view, not only would it just be weird, but what is
| visible can change I think based on the camera position.
| A tree that blocks a path in one camera position doesn't
| block it in another. A single tree's position sounds
| trivial, but navigating them is crucial at mid and high
| levels of play.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| This is really perceptive and on point. I think something
| a lot of casual observers miss about Dota is it's a game
| of momentum with very small edges that accumulate.
| Compared to the other MOBAs it's the game that punishes
| you for a single error far more harshly.
| ufo wrote:
| It certainly is confusing. I remember that someone once
| made a video with the flipped map and most of the
| comments were about how weird it appeared:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/5rmbd3/
|
| However, I wonder this is something that people would get
| used to, if they played it for a while. As far as I know,
| it was never seriously tried anywhere.
| post-it wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The opposite to "the enemy's gate is down"
| pete5x5 wrote:
| Exactly this - the ability to re-orient your view in a
| game (or in your mind in the case of the "enemy gate")
| can be a huge advantage. I personally play much better on
| bottom side in MOBA games and I have never understood why
| it can't be flipped. Even if the map is not 'symmetrical'
| the players could adapt to that change, rather than
| having to adapt to the change in side each game.
| wincy wrote:
| League of Legends: Wild Rift on iOS does this. You're
| always the team on the "bottom half" of the map.
| emasirik wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If you want to see really brutal hard counters try Clash Royale.
|
| 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.
| thom wrote:
| 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.
| pete5x5 wrote:
| "In defense of Mana Drain: how to lose friends in cube draft"
| thom wrote:
| If you're tired of Mana Drain in cube, you're tired of life.
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(page generated 2021-07-27 23:00 UTC)