Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it

[mhloppy@fedia.io]

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[fizz@lemmy.nz]

Rts is great but many people nowadays don't touch the genre and the people that play it are spread out across every rts game that ever existed. TA still has a community and it came out in 1997.

I've always played rts games extremely casually never playing single player but never playing 1v1 ranked. When you're bad the games take so much longer and start slower. So it's litterally a more boring game until you get good.

Playing beyond all reason and playing 1v1s for the first time has forced me to drop my noob habits and actually play rts properly. Its intense having to manage your raiding units while expanding while protecting that expansion while scouting while keeping your base safe and growing. But it's so rewarding when you win.

Now I see newer players and what they have to go through I understand why so many quit. They join a lobby called "all welcome" then get kicked because no one wants the noob on their team. They get flamed. People run circles around them in game and attack before they have a single unit out. Rts is hard to learn but so fun once you have the basics down and can actually start developing strategies and reacting to your opponents in real time. Idk even know what I'm trying to say here I just woke up.

[anewdaydawns@lemmy.world]

I loved the old Blizzard RTSs as a kid. I think it was SC2: Heart of the Swarm when I got a bunch of coworkers to get the game and we played together quite a bit over a month. But it reached a point where I could take them all 4v1 (we only did that once though, I didn't want to scare them off or be a gloating asshole) and win without really breaking a sweat. I learned my build orders and my keyboard shortcuts.

I could not for the life of me break out of bronze in multiplayer.

A couple years later one of my best friends was talking shit about whooping me in SC1, and I destroyed him. But that game gave me some ideas.

I think people really enjoy the base building aspect, like all of my friends treated building bases on some level as being like Sim City.

And back in the SC1 days, battle.net was rife with "No Rush" games where you build yourself up for whatever agreed upon time limit and then go at it. Games would often be labeled as NR15 or NR20, for example.

I think one possible resolution for increasing the popularity of RTS is to take a hybrid real time approach. You can build and do things in real time, but under the hood battles and the economy operate in discrete chunks of at least several seconds. You can do something similar to Sim City where every minute or two or whatever, you get all your resources to spend, and can then spend the rest of the time focusing elsewhere.

You can make a Base Building RTS where No Rush rules are baked into the game.

There is room for RTS games to be chill and more relaxed, as opposed to the game long manic feeling that you can never do anything fast enough, and that I think is the avenue to giving RTSs some mainstream limelight.

[regrettable_incident@lemmy.world]

I love RTS but I rarely play it these days because I don't have a lot of screen time. When I have half an hour to pick up my device I'm probably going to play an FPS. I did start a play through of the original homeworld campaigns a while back but I've not had time to progress far.

[zagorath@aussie.zone]

fwiw in my experience, most Age of Mythology: Retold games last about 10–15 minutes. So you could usually get 2 games in if you've got half an hour free.

[regrettable_incident@lemmy.world]

I'll check it out, cheers!

[ryathal@sh.itjust.works]

AOE 3 had a treaty mode that blocked attacking or building too close to an enemy before a certain time. It was a moderately popular mode.

[zagorath@aussie.zone]

I should say, this is when I play ranked games at a slightly-above-average Elo. RTS games have a reputation for trending to go much longer at very low Elos because players aren't good at doing aggressive strategies. I dunno how much this would apply in AoM though, compared to AoE2 (which is my main source for this point) because defensive buildings are much stronger in AoE2 than AoM.