Build, accumulate, attack, repeat: the history of real-time strategy
While we are waiting for the release of this new Age of Empires this fall, let's remember the ups and downs of the RTS genre.
The heyday and decline of real-time strategy was very strange. They arose gradually from experiments in which developers tried to combine the speed and interestingness of action games with deliberation and depth of strategies. Suddenly, the genre gained explosive popularity in the second half of the 90s, and then just as quickly lost it (with the exception of StarCraft ) in the mid-2000s, amid stagnation and changes in the gaming market. However, one of the most popular competitive games in the world is RTS, and three of the four remaining became an offshoot of the real-time strategy genre.
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At 25 years of age, real-time strategy remains committed to its core ideas and legacy. Today, at the moment of a deep calm of the genre, it's time to historically explore it, as we did with graphic adventure games , Sim-games , first-person shooters , racing on maps , open-world games ( translation to GT) and city-planning simulators .
Before I begin, I will explain: as in all studies of the history of genres, I want to highlight innovations and new ideas, that is, I can get around some popular games and not even mention [here-the name of your favorite game] . In this article, real-time strategy refers to the one in which the base is being built and / or managed, resource collection, unit production and semi-autonomous battles, and all this happens in real time (and not step by step). The goal of the game is to capture / hold strategic points of the map (for example, resources and command centers).
I also want to emphasize that tactics and strategy are not the same thing, and therefore, in this article, real-time tactical games, such as Total War and Close Combat, will almost not be considered. If you do not know: strategy is high-level planning, and tactics are focused on smaller tasks. Explained in terms of video games, strategy is building with the help of the resources extracted / collected by armies created in buildings and their management; The tactic applies only to the battle itself and the deep combat mechanics focused on the alignment and deployment of troops, the use of relief features. The RTS usually has an element of tactics, but strategic mechanics are rarely present in tactical games.
So, with all this in mind, let's begin the journey 36 years ago to the past.
If you recognize this game, then you have caught the birth of a genre ( Utopia ).
Cytron Masters for Atari.
Perhaps the graphics are not impressive, but the mechanics of the game were advanced for that time.
The separation of strategies into “real-time strategies” and “step-by-step” was introduced relatively recently. Until the mid-90s, strategy games were step-by-step, and action games were played in real time, and they never (well, almost never) combined. Game designs were based on incompatible ideals: strategies inherited the rich traditions of complex and intricate desktop wargames; Action games were a simple and mindless test of reflexes and coordination, based on arcade machines. The strategy was methodical and unhurried, devoted to the careful planning and weighing of each decision. The idea of ​​adding real-time elements to force players to make instant, impulsive decisions was unheard of. Moreover, it seemed to be a completely opposite strategy.
But it was precisely at this time that Dong Douglow created Intellivision’s Utopia game of 1981, which was one of the earliest predecessors of the real-time strategy genre. Utopia talked about the war of the two island nations, in which it was necessary not only to penetrate the territory and / or destroy the enemy, but also to create their own reliable and safe base. It was necessary to think about the infrastructure, production, troops, weather, spies, pirates and the results of player decisions. As if it was not difficult enough, life on the islands and between them continued to boil even in moments of inactivity - raids of pirates, hurricanes, crop failure, riots and much more.
Soon, other “action-strategic” games appeared, each of which implemented its own view on how the two types of games should be combined. The next notable game was Cytron Masters (1982) from recognized designer Dan Bunthen (later known as Daniel Butenten Berry). Later, Bunten said that the game "fell into the crevice" between the players in action and strategy. (Note: in 1992, Bunten changed his gender and began to call himself Bunten Berry.)
Cytron Masters for the gameplay resembled an early prototype of the concept RTS, but despite this, it commercially failed. The game had five semi-autonomous unit classes involved in defense, attack and communications on the battlefield, several power sources that gave more energy (the only game resource) and allowed to build more units. The whole process took place on one screen. The players started the game on one of the edges of the area, similar to a football field, but instead of the gates there were command centers. Players could see how the commands given by the opponent are executed in real time, along with their own.
Nether earth
In the genre of RTS appear robots \ m /.
Modem Wars .
Stonkers .
WarGame for ZX Spectrum Stonkers (1983) and Chris Crawford's Legionnaire (1982) sought a more action-tactical style of play. The curtailed, quick adaptation of the real-game combat phase of the traditional real-time game with beautiful graphics by the Stonkers was greeted with great enthusiasm, but a lot of bugs that hindered the game had a negative impact on sales. Legionnaire , a simple semi-historical simulation of the battles of the Romans and barbarians, received a more controversial reception. This game became the progenitor of the real-time tactics genre (RTT), but it had to wait for popularity until next year. Then The Ancient Art of War appeared , a hit and powerful computer wargame (RTT, like its closest relative RTS, took many years to finally become a recognized separate genre).
Meanwhile, Nether Earth (1987) further consolidated the basic concepts of what would later become RTS. In it, the player creates robots that can capture or destroy the six types of factories needed to make the components used to produce even more robots. The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy the enemy’s base / bases, erasing them from the ground with nuclear weapons on board a kamikaze robot. The player can control the robots himself, choosing them one at a time, but usually it is better to simply give them an order to destroy, capture, kill or defend, and most concentrate on making new robots to surpass the enemy.
Another Dan Bunthen game, Modem Wars (1988), placed greater emphasis on tactics, but had many of the elements that eventually became crucial in real-time strategy. Including fog of war, which does not allow seeing enemy troops outside the scope of a unit / building, espionage, changing unit formations, the effect of relief on movement and combat. Powerful pace of the game allowed to cope with a variety of tasks without overloading the player (this lesson could not be learned by many of the later RTS).
Herzog zwei
The player controls one of the battling furs, each of which can take air and ground forms, as well as carry different types of units. Units can be bought at the command center and give them orders.
Get it, player 1.
Powermonger for Amiga.
Click on objects and read descriptions.
Command HQ .
This game is similar to the RT-adaptation of the classic board game Risk . It allows you to zoom in and explore the cities of the country.
In the same year, when Modem Wars came out, the tactical mech-shooter Herzog of the Japanese studio Technosoft laid the foundations of what many consider the first strategic game in real time. After it, in 1989, Sezab Genesis released a resemblance to the prototype MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena, genre-branch RTS) Herzog Zwei . In it, you control one of the fighting mechs that can transform between air and ground forms, as well as transfer different types of units that can be bought in the command center. You can order units to patrol, hold a position, attack / seize a satellite base, supply other units with supplies, or attack the enemy’s main base. Units try to perform these tasks with or without the player’s help.
There are nine satellite bases scattered around the map, each of which can be captured with the help of four infantry units. Bases generate money, that is, allow you to quickly release new units. In addition, the base can carry out orders for the purchase of new units.
It was a tough game, even despite the boring AI. Already at a low level of difficulty, when playing against a computer, it instantly moves, captures empty satellite bases, and then falls on your main base with an endless crowd of units. Herzog Zwei remained muddled, even when the player was adjusting to her pace. When your units gained an advantage, the enemy could interfere with their fur and quickly destroy them if you do not support them with your own fur. But every second of participation in combat is the time when you cannot buy new units, so the game turns into tedious quick micromanagement exercises. Probably, the game predicted the almost inevitable after StarCraft future multiplayer RTS - the world in which minor errors can have devastating consequences, and the delay and degree of meaning mean loss.
But at the time when the genre was just getting on its feet, the main task was to outline the basic mechanics, which varied greatly in different games. Next was Powermonger (1990) from the developer Populous Bullfrog, which almost redeemed its monotonous gameplay and stupid interface with interesting ideas. The game had a polygonal 3D map with the ability to zoom and rotate, but limited to a small field of view. It contained interrelated elements of simulation, such as wild animals, seasons, and city residents with their own activities that influenced the world (for example, there was less food in winter). There were interesting touches in the game - in the cold time people warmed near the fire, and after death they turned into angels.
Also in the game there are three "building" armies that affect the execution of orders. Under suitable conditions, it is possible to force all people from the conquered city to join your army, taking any available weapon, although it is often better to leave part of the residents in place so that they can work (thus providing you with the necessary supply of resources for recruits).
The game Powermonger stepped on the heels of Command HQ Dan Bunthen (1991), which looked like an adaptation of the classic Risk board game in real time. She forced the player to rush through the menu, driving the economy, helping foreign countries, studying intelligence reports, buying and placing units, setting targets for attacks, exploiting oil fields, launching space satellites and other ways in the first to fifth world war simulations.
Absolutely different in style and presentation, but equally ambitious on the scale of Mega Lo Mania (1991) of Sensible Software, stretched throughout human history, divided into 10 eras. Like the Powermonger , she lacked the tactical component of the battles, but she compensated otherwise. In Mega Lo Mania, the player must assign people to the tasks: researching new technologies, collecting / mining / processing the resources needed to obtain better weapons, the birth of new people or the expansion of the army. It was not only a technological, but also a territorial game in which the player had to send his troops to destroy enemy bases and / or build new fortresses in other areas. (There were different resources in each area, so sometimes it was necessary to reinvent / explore the same technology.)
The uniqueness of the world and the little computer people allowed to close their eyes to the shortcomings of the Powermonger . Playing with small strokes improved various aspects of the gameplay, except perhaps for an uninteresting and monotonous final phase. It is worth especially to note the wonderful voice samples transmitted with excellent intonation - “We've nuked them!” And the stereotypical “Do you want to be in my gang?”. In addition, after reaching a new era, buildings and people changed their appearance.
Dune II .
This game came out shortly after the original Dune , and both were very loosely associated with the film.
Of course, who controls the spice, he owns the universe Dune .
The North caused problems long before the Game of Thrones era.
It was only in 1992 that real-time strategy gained its name thanks to the producer of Dune II, Brett Sperry, who coined the term in an attempt to describe his game. From a design point of view, Dune II was a bit more than just an improvement on previous work, but their legacy and influence were traced throughout. Dune II is the first RTS game that people usually recall. This is a game that has determined everything that has arisen after, both the good and, alas, the bad.
The developer of Westwood Studios, formerly known for the RPG Eye of the Beholder RPG, was highly inspired by Herzog Zwei , Populous , a simulator of the god, and a Macintosh graphical user interface with mouse controls, when developing the surface-related books and movie Dune . Dune II , strangely released just a few months after the adventure of Dune Cryo Interactive, tells the simple story of House Atreides, House Harkonnen and invented by the developers of House Ordos, fighting for control and use of the spice on the planet Dune, because, as everyone knows, at least superficially familiar with the world of "Dune", the one who controls the spice, controls the universe.
There is something undeniably exciting in the basic gameplay Dune II cycle - you send a harvester to collect a spice, turn it into credits for which you can buy upgrades, repairs, new units and new buildings. A more user-friendly interface allowed less messing with micromanagement when attacking enemies. This meant that the player had more time to study the map, create additional bases and think through the strategy of destroying the enemy. During the game, you realize that with every passing minute, computer-controlled enemies also gather resources to improve the base and strengthen their army. This promised a long, exhausting battle for the capture of the card (it further worsened its need for constant “clicking” to give orders to each unit separately, because there were no grouping options or the choice of several units). An early attack on the key buildings of the enemy could take him by surprise and give the player a great advantage that saved him from monotony, but could also make him vulnerable to a crushing counterattack.
Westwood took the feedback loop from the genre, which in the 1993 Master of Orion preliminary review of Computer Gaming World magazine will be called 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), and discovered the winning formula, changing the scale of strategy from macro to micro level. In essence, each level was a small-scale 4X real-time combat.
The player always starts with a building base, a few hundred credits and a pair of units. Then, having restored his base after the attack (it was most convenient to do this, protecting at least one spice processing plant and mobile construction vehicles hidden in a safe place), he continued to develop - he created a second spice plant, ideally located near the far field of the spice, watched on the mini-map the movements of the enemy, lined up a reliable (directed towards the enemy) perimeter defense away from the center of the base, sent out trikes to search for weak points in the defense of the enemy, at the last levels he built as soon as possible sky port (because it is a cheaper and faster way to get the necessary tanks and rocket launchers than a heavy machine factory). Another element of tension was the natural time limit - the amount of spice remaining. If you run out of spice before you win, then this is a sure sign of defeat. This is how the modern RTS was born.
Maybe Dune II gave the name to the genre, but WarCraft stole it.
Not every game of the DOS era RTS genre could inspire film adaptation.
V means Victory.
Good orc like everyone.
Then (then) the little-known studio Blizzard Entertainment cemented the Dune II format as a new genre. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) changed Dune's sci-fi entourage to old-fashioned fantasy. Now the player did not collect the spice to get money, he mined gold and poured trees. Buildings were not built out of sight and were not exhibited instantly; in front of the player’s eyes, unarmed peasants / peons were built, who also needed to be created (or, rather, “trained”).
In addition, the two warring Warcraft races had their own personality. If Dune II House Harkonnen showed his villainous nature only with the destructive power of the Death Hand rocket, the Warcraft orcs were charismatic and strangely attractive in the game itself, where they responded to the player’s orders with phrases and in the cutscenes between missions (the text with a comic voice acting, even when an orc girl was ordered to kill another orc (to “teach” her to obey her father).
In Warcraft, there was also a two-player battle mode over a local or Internet connection on maps used in a campaign or created procedurally. As the popularity of defatchee Doom changed first-person shooters, so the multiplayer mode RTS led to a gradual shift in development priorities. The multiplayer Warcraft mode was popular and fascinated players even when they fully mastered campaigns for orcs and humans. For Blizzard, this was an important lesson.
Command and Conquer .
Cursed Brotherhood Nod.
These unforgettable videos.
Red Alert .
Node and delightfully simulated video scores are back.
What is the background story of Red Alert? The plot begins with the fact that Albert Einstein returns to the past to kill Hitler ...
Warcraft II .
The game added the mechanics of the fog of war, which made a great contribution to the genre of RTS.
Westwood received her own lessons from the spiritual follower of Dune II - Command & Conquer (1995), an exaggerated, frivolous look at the war for an alien substance between the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod, a decentralized paramilitary secret community with deep corporate connections and almost cultist zeal.
At its core, Command & Conquer has become a faster version of Dune IItransferred to an alternative time line of our world. It was complemented by notable innovations - the choice of several units, support for the multiplayer mode and a logical interface. But it is impossible to dwell on this description, otherwise we will neglect the brilliance of other elements of the game. Intentionally pompous melodramatic cutscenes with the participation of live actors against the background of green screens brought fancy fun to the gloomy theme of the game. It seemed that the forces of GDI always act according to circumstances, the Brotherhood of Nod became so stereotypical manic evil that it was impossible to stop laughing while watching their plans, betrayals and unreasonable violence.
Nod's troops readily kill defenseless residents and destroy their homes, both during missions, if you do not protect the village, and in the cutscenes. In one remarkable mission for Nod, you are ordered to partake of the immoral philosophy of the Brotherhood: to steal a GDI helicopter, and then destroy the nearby village. But all the fun does not come only to the soldiers of Nod: in the campaign for GDI there is a tremendous mission, in which you use a commando to single-handedly wipe the enemy base off the face of the earth by secretly setting up explosive around it. The commandos have become one of the coolest units in the RTS, in particular, due to the fact that they accompanied their destructive and bloody actions with gloomy phrases like “I have a gift for you!” And “One left!” Command & Conquer
seriestook her place in pop culture thanks to the 1996 spin-off on the theme of World War II Red Alert . He brought wonderful videos, fast paced and spirit of the 90s of the original game in the alternative history of the mid-20th century, which somehow coincided even better in style. In some ways, it can be considered a prequel of a frivolous first game. The story begins with the fact that Albert Einstein is transferred back into the past and kills Hitler, and this leads to the most absurd consequences - the Soviet Union has its own views on the expansion of territories, so an alternative World War II begins, in which you can participate on the side of the Allies or Soviets .
Of course, the Nod was not without its brotherhood either - its mysterious leader Kane participates in backstage intrigues in the corridors of Soviet power. In the game, the Soviets are not as sinister as the Nod forces in C & C , but they can still please sadists thanks to such weapons as Tesla's coil, able to instantly fry any unit that was not lucky to be in its field of action. Red alertIt is also notable that the differences between the warring parties intensified - Soviet and allied units differ more in skills and capabilities than the forces of Nod and GDI, despite the fact that at that time the trends in game development were going in a different direction. However, the developers did not implement this correctly, so instead of using variability and diversity, ambitious players quickly found the dominant strategy: play for the Soviets, build a lot of heavy tanks, and then arrange a rush to the enemy base.
At the same time, Blizzard reinforced the success of Warcraft with the sequel to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) with improved graphics and control. Now the player could select several units in the same frame as in Command & Conquer, and the performance and capabilities of the selected unit were visible at a glance. Additional convenience was that the player could choose whether units should hold positions, pursue attackers, or patrol territory. Also in Warcraft II there was a deeper storyline; besides, for the first time in the genre, the game added a system of two-level fog of war: not only unexplored areas were closed by a black fog that hides everything, but also areas beyond the visibility of player’s units (or his allies) were shaded gray. The player could still see the relief, but not the enemy actions hidden by this fog.
The mechanics of improved fog of war changed the face of the genre. It meant that you could never have complete information about your enemies, which added many new levels of strategy. Now you could suddenly make covert attacks, fast and farsighted units could be used as scouts after the initial exploration of the map. And if the enemy is negligent in intelligence, then you can accumulate large reserves of units hidden from his gaze, and then lure him into a trap. RTS-games were still competitions in speed of clicks, but this innovation has shown that they are beginning to justify the word "strategy" in its name.
After two hit games of Warcraftand the resounding success of the three RTS Westwood gateways opened - real-time strategy hit the trends. And there were hordes of clones.
After the emergence of excellent RTS, attracted the attention of players, the creation of mediocre games was only a matter of time ...
Such as Dark Colony ...
... or Earth 2140 .
Conquest Earth .
The best example from this stream of the second half of the 90s was Z (pronounced “Zed”).
The game had the only tempo option - swift. It was a continuous insane succession of quick ups and downs in the battles for dominance.
In this emerging abundance of mediocre popular science RTS Conquest Earth(1997) was distinguished by the fact that it allowed the race of Jupiterians attacking Earth to disguise themselves as map objects, human transport, and also to combine several weak units into one powerful one. Released in the same year, Dark Colony had a heroic unit commander and mystical artifacts that could be captured to gain an advantage in battle. For example, it was possible to turn the surrounding trees into weapons or suck up enemies into a tiny black hole. In Earth 2140 , also released in 1997, there were generals who had special skills in managing and organizing groups of units, but they were so stupid that they turned out to be more of a burden than an advantage.
The legendary British studio The Bitmap Brothers, which Amiga fans idolized for the games of the late 80s and early 90s, managed to stand out against the background of their competitors thanks to the 1996 game Z (it will be zed). Instead of cultists with megalomania or rival races, the game told the story of armies traveling in space, robots programmed to fight to the last for control of five planets. The game added to the British eccentricity genre, combining the humor of such projects as Mega Lo Mania and Powermonger with the irony that emerged in the previous few years of RTS development.
Zbecame one of the first RTS-games in which there was nothing superfluous. There is no slow construction, no temporary lull in the middle of the game, no tedious end-level battles - only a constant insane series of quick ups and downs in the fight for domination. It was a territory control game with simplified resource collection and database management systems. Their place was taken by the control zones: the map is divided into cells, and the game itself resembles the RTS version of the flag capture. It was a modernized and improved Nether Earth , and interesting ideas were present in it, for example, knocking out enemy units from vehicles so that its own soldiers could occupy it. The game was proof that the RTS games could take a different path, but even Z could not change the trajectory set by the genre.Dune II .
See the treasure - the original Age of Empires .
AoE borrowed some of its basic concepts from Civilization .
In general, the game became the evolution of Red Alert and Warcraft II .
Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries lost amid the popularity of AoE .
However, this game provided a much deeper strategy than usual in the RTS.
The RTS fans finally managed to take a break from fantasy and science fiction in 1997, when, with an interval of just one month, two very different implementations of the same basic idea appeared.
Under the leadership of Civilization co-author Bruce Shelley, Ensemble Studios in October 1997 returned the real-time strategy to the Stone Age (as well as to the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age) in its most popular hit, Age of Empires . The player, who led one of the 12 unique real historical civilizations, had to lead his empire through four centuries, fighting with seven rival empires for domination in the region. As in Civilization , you can build monuments that give advantages (automatic victory in standard modes if it lasts more than 2000 years, or just a bonus to points in other modes). As in Civilization , the player must stimulate research to move to new technological discoveries before competitors.
In all other aspects, the game became the evolution of Red Alert and Warcraft II . The player has four resources, and not two or three - stone, gold, wood, and food (which could be grown, harvested from plants, or mined by hunting). The game implemented a more complex system of dependencies between upgrades and buildings. It also has diplomacy through receiving / donating gifts. A player could use navigation points to make unit movement more strategic. But under the surface of Age of Empires, there were already familiar cycles of gathering resources, micromanagement of units and expanding the base.
Therefore, it is a pity that the Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries , released just a month after Age of Empires , had such a small impact. Seven Kingdoms , developed by Enlight Software, a tiny company under the management of designer and programmer Trevor Chan, creator of the highly acclaimed business simulator Capitalism , was much better than you can decide on a modest schedule and mediocre sales. Her diplomacy, trade, and technology systems, of course, were not comparable to Civilization or a complex strategy game, such as turn-based Imperialism . But in the Seven Kingdoms present strategic depth, inaccessible to ordinary RTS.
Instead of mindless "clicking" the player had to carefully (but quickly) think about maintaining balance in the economy. Each unit and building had an annual maintenance fee, charged after the creation costs, which had to be paid, taxing the peasants and trading in raw materials and processed resources in the markets. Each resident of any city owned by a player automatically paid a small tax, but it was possible to earn additional income by collecting taxes again, although at the cost of reducing loyalty. Less loyal people fell more easily under the influence of another civilization and were more likely to accept a bribe from a rogue spy.
Resources came from mines set on resource pools, transferred to markets for sale, and to factories for processing into goods that could also be sold on the markets, if only the player assigned people to work in the respective buildings. Markets were more complicated than in Age of Empires . The player needed to find the most efficient and profitable supply routes for caravans. It was necessary to ensure the availability of markets in his kingdom, and on the territory of competitors, that is, it was necessary to enter into trade unions. If you make a mistake in this or stretch the force expansion of territories too much, then it remains to rely only on taxes, which you probably will not be able to hold out for a long time. This meant that life was never easy. As soon as the money ran out, the loyalty of the troops fell, the buildings collapsed, the siege weapons fell apart, and the villages turned to competitors. That's right - a healthy leadership could lead to defeat in just 10 minutes.
To balance the detailed economic side of the game, Seven Kingdoms almost completely abandoned the tactics of fighting. Victory in the battle ceased to depend on the flank maneuvers and heaps of teams to units, rolls of bones took their place based on the size of the squadron, combat skills of the unit (number from 10 to 100), general leadership skills and loyalty of each unit to the player. It was necessary to take into account nationality - joining a neutral or enemy city could be much easier if most of the soldiers in the barracks on the edge of the city had the same nationality as the inhabitants.
Dark reign
Total annihilation
Homeworld
Battle scenes in 3D!
Having lived for several years exclusively in 2D, the real-time strategy game again began to flirt with three-dimensional relief: in September 1997, Dark Reign: The Future of War was released. Graphically, Dark Reign resembled existing games, but it used an internal elevation map that affected the scope of the units. When the unit climbed the hill, he could see further. Moreover, planning an ambush and going on reconnaissance, the player could use trees and stones as shelters.
The game introduced another handy feature - the ability to disable buildings on the base, which helped control energy consumption. Units could be given orders for automatic research, attacks, patrols, searching and destroying, and even returning to the base for repairs when a given level of damage was reached.
Total Annihilation , released just four weeks later, explored similar ideas. Her pre-rendered fixed-point 3D maps affected animations and the scope of units. The maps were tied to a physics engine that counted the effects of explosions, artillery fire, and debris flying. But its triumph game was not obliged to flirt with 3D. Rather, Total Annihilation has become a real master class in creating balance.
Energy was needed for everything: for construction, building units, metal mining (a scarce resource), and even for combat (unit weapons consumed energy). You start expanding too fast, and production will be idle; build too large an army - it can remain without energy, defenseless even against a small handful of attacking enemies. It was necessary to always keep track of the numbers, carefully controlling the balance of arrival and energy and metal consumption (which, it is worth noting, could be collected from destroyed units). The oversupply meant inefficiency, for which the player was punished, but a prolonged shortage could be even more threatening.
This need to think in terms of balance extended to the units themselves - each of them had a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by the other. The only unit able to cope with all the others, Commander, was also the only one whose loss was unacceptable - its destruction meant loss.
A little later, in 1997, Bungie’s Myth , a stunning real-time 3D tactic, showed how fully a three-dimensional engine can improve the combat side of the RTS. Full control over the camera made it easier to view the battlefield, and the weapon could become less effective and predictable (for example, grenades could roll and bounce) depending on the terrain.
But in order to catch up with the progress, the RTS games took another two years. The first 3D game was Homeworld (1999), and it was the first to be in outer space. Its structure was very similar to the traditional RTS - commanding the fleet, building ships, exploring new technologies, collecting resources - but the very nature of the subject of deep space strongly highlighted the game against the background of the standard entourage of the genre. The need to think in three dimensions was sometimes confusing, especially with such a minimalist interface, but it was worked out enough not to distract the player from stunning, large-scale views.
You probably already heard about it ...
StarCraft was much more than just a futuristic version of Warcraft .
While the first three-dimensional RTS came to grief in half, the traditional two-dimensional isometric perspective was able to secure a long life thanks to the most popular game of the genre. Having accumulated power on the first two Warcraft and dungeon crawler-e Diablo , Blizzard turned its attention to science fiction. Instead of orcs, humans, elves and the like, fighting for wood, gold and oil, there appeared terrans (humans), zerg and protoss fighting for minerals and gas vespen in a distant world. StarCraft (1998) was much more than just a futuristic version of Warcraft . The most notable difference was the completely different three races. Their units, buildings and methods of resource extraction were unique, albeit approximately comparable. The balance of the races was perfect for their confrontation.
On the other hand, after the release of the game, there was one unbeatable strategy for the multiplayer mode: to quickly create a large number of simplest units of the race, and then flood (“insure”) the enemy base before the enemy had time to build a defense. (In this strategy, the zerg were the most effective due to the quickest creation of units, which is why the Zerg-rush meme appeared.) Designers limited players to a maximum of 12 simultaneously allocated units, but they needed much less for successful early rush. Blizzard did a good job correcting such balance problems, frequent patches changed the numbers inside the game, but with proper implementation, the rash still remained quite a viable strategy. As is usually the case in online gaming circles, when one strategy becomes dominant, they were disapproved in the early stages of the game, and rejection of it was often considered a condition of a gentlemen's agreement.
It would be remiss on my part not to mention the huge popularity of StarCraft in South Korea, where the game has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. It led to the organization of television broadcasts and the creation of special channels, and this at a time when any mention of games on television was very rare. This wide professional scene got its millionaire stars and gained a full arena of viewers even a decade after the release of the game.
AoE II .
Honestly, it was more like AoE 1.5 .
Empire Earth .
In 1999, Ensemble Studios offered a big-budget alternative to the science-fiction theme StarCraft in the face of the new historic RTS Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings . Although the game is better perceived as Age of Empires 1.5, rather than a full-blown sequel, despite poor marketing and a decent sequel to the high price, it refined the original in the right aspects. In addition, she added some great innovations.
The player could ring the town hall bell to summon all the inhabitants to the village to protect the headquarters and meet the attackers with a hail of arrows. Unit groups actually maintained their ranks while moving, the fastest units were suspended to wait for laggards. In practice, this was important in many respects, but the most important was the effective protection of siege weapons and ranged units from attackers from close range, it allowed to counteract the excellent tactics and strategies of enemies.
Such innovations brought AoE II to the bestseller list, and yet there was also a perfectly tuned generator of random cards and a qualitative balance of various winning strategies. Users continued to participate in multiplayer battles for many more years after the release of the game. (And some continue to this day: the recent expansion of the HD re-release of the game has been developed by modders from the fan community. They have implemented an improvement in the balance, “dug-in” strategies that became dominant already at the beginning of this decade.)
Later Empire Earth (2001) attempted to dislodge AoE II from the throne of the main historical RTS: it had 3D graphics, a system of heroes, improved AI, 14 historical epochs covering all of human history, and not just 4 epochs stretching for 1000 years. But neither the impressive scale and complexity, nor the leadership of the lead designer of Age of Empires, Rick Goodman, could bring her sales and reviews to her spiritual predecessor.
Meanwhile, Westwood continued to go its own way, despite the fact that the studio was bought by EA and most of the key employees quit. A remake of Dune II called Dune 2000 was released in 1998, right before buying EA, and went unnoticed (because the new graphics did not reach the desired level, the gameplay balance was absent, and the game itself was trying to fix something that did not need to be corrected). The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun , which followed in 1999, retained the original funny videotapes and added all the expected improvements. In addition, it appeared the engine with dynamic lighting, used for the excellent effect of searchlight towers (especially at night), and high-quality system of waypoints, which could set the patrol and movement routes.
Prior to closure in early 2003, Westwood managed to release two more full-scale RTS games - Red Alert 2 (2000), which was again made intentionally silly and fun, and Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001) - a quality and beautiful sequel to Dune II / Dune 2000 , whose gameplay was very similar to the style of previous games.
Settlers III .
Cultures .
Kohan .
On the periphery of the genre everything was a little different. The Settlers III (1998) marked the new course for the enchanting Blue Byte strategy series on urban planning and supply chain management. Having got rid of the roads and expanded the possibilities of the battle, the game became much more reminiscent of real-time strategy. But it still preserved several dozen different types of occupations for workers and almost as many basic and auxiliary resources that needed to be managed for the smooth development of your empire, protection from enemy attacks and the gradual conquest of the entire map.
Cultures (2000) had approximately the same spirit, and in this, without doubt, the merit of its creators (Funatics Software), who studied the history of Settlers games and made the main goal of the game not conquest, but the happiness of a small tribe, which should be sought for research, construction and economy. A similar approach was used by Anno 1602 (released in 1998 in Europe), it is also 1602 AD (released in 2000 in the USA), which became the founder of another large series of games. The first part of Anno , as well as all subsequent games, considered the fight as a necessary hindrance to the main gameplay, which was sea trade and research, as well as the construction of colonies in the style of Settlers . She was leisurely and less time-bound than most previous RTS games, and the war in her most often consisted in blockades and maneuvering than in actual battles. Nevertheless, the rather complicated economic model Anno 1602 made the gameplay fascinating.
Later released Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns (2001) demonstrated that the economy of demand and consumption can actually be very viable in the RTS genre, which has traditionally focused on defeating enemies with weapons. The orders of the player influenced the regiments consisting of companies of a whole heap of units of three different types under the command of the captain. It was possible to order the companies to protect the key points of the map, which, if they were held for a long time, would have defensive bonuses. When it came to combat, the player could only observe, call in reinforcement companies, or give orders to retreat (meaning a decrease in morale) and regrouping.
Kohan also simplified the collection of resources: everything except gold was obtained from resources located on the player’s territory. A surplus of resources could be directed to new units and population growth (which increased the city’s territory) or sold to produce gold, which was spent on maintenance (everything has operating costs), upgrades and coverage of the resource deficit for new companies or buildings. As in the Seven Kingdoms , gold is always needed, otherwise you will see your kingdom crumble to dust.
Even against the background of the decline of the RTS genre, remarkable games appeared ...
... like Majesty .
Cossacks .
WarCraft III came out just at the moment when MOBA began to gain massive popularity.
By the early 2000s, the love of the RTS began to decline. Publishers rejected fast and low-quality clones of Command & Conquer , because the audience of real-time strategies shrank to the core group of well-informed players who love online competition and learned the game from top to bottom. On the periphery, there were groups that preferred single-player campaigns or niche RTS hybrids like Anno , Settlers and a series of serious strategies for Europa Universalis .
The developers and publishers who tried to reach these people changed tactics: they aimed at a contiguous audience - RTS fans interested in any other genre with which it can mix, plus fans of other genres who are tolerant of RTS mechanics.
For example, Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (2000) was, in effect, a modernized version of Stronghold (1993 version), but with completely autonomous units (which could be influenced by exposing flags "awards" for tasks to which heroes). Firefly’s 2001 Stronghold RTS / lock-up simulator partially added to the Age of Empires the rigors of the simulator and the sadistic pleasure of boiling oil poured through the wall on the infantry besieging the castle or from the comedy-farce in which the peasants carelessly entered the flaming building just to so in a second burning to run out of it.
It is also worth remembering Kazakov (2000), in which whole armies were placed on the screen, grouped into different formations, each of which could contain up to 196 soldiers. Warrior Kings (2002) offered more creative and diverse missions campaigns than almost all the games before it, as well as with large-scale (for that time) three-dimensional tactical battles. Celtic Kings (also 2002) became a hybrid RPG / RTS with separate adventure modes and strategies, each of which was intertwined with the other.
Big companies also experimented with new ideas. In Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos(2002) Blizzard added RPG elements and special hero units. And with their help, I made feedback loops much more intense. A clean "turtle" strategy (building a base and accumulating a large army before the first attack on the enemy) became risky, because in this case the level of heroes remained low. The game wanted the player to organize attacks and create patrol detachments, and also stimulated him with the fact that the cards were inhabited by monsters who were not very pleased with the presence of the player and enemies in their territory.
If this seems to be similar to MOBA such as Dota 2 and League of Legends , then do not worry - that’s it. MOBA genre originated in 2003 as a Warcraft III mod calledDefense of the Ancients , which itself was based on a StarCraft Aeon of Strife fan card . (Note to the uninitiated: in essence, MOBA are RTS games without building / managing bases and direct control of hero units only.)
But the spinoffs were created not only by modders. Ensemble Studios took a breather from its popular historical series RTS, releasing in 2002 a more storyline and creative Age of Mythology . They cut down the number of playable factions from thirteen ( AoE II ) (18 with the expansion of Conquerers) to only three. Each of the races could choose one of the three patron gods, giving certain bonuses. The process of obtaining the patronage of gods who were able to destroy enemies or send divine support was different for each of the civilizations, as was the use of resources for building. Different skills with the habits of different classes of units.
Perhaps Rise of Nations was the beginning of the end of the loud popularity of RTS.
Warhammer proved that the genre is still alive.
Company of Heroes .
Flamethrower.
The first attempt to combine the traditional real-time strategy with a step-by-step strategy in the style of Civilization was undertaken only in 2003 - macro and micro strategies , combined in one ambitious game under the leadership of lead designer Civ II and Alpha Centauri, Brian Reynolds. Rise of Nations at the same time became a breakthrough, an excellent step forward, and a dead end, a short-lived rebel of a strategic genre, highly valued and selling well, and then gone into oblivion.
Its authors took the idea of ​​territories and expanded it to full-scale cities within the constantly shifting national borders. Expansion of territories on the one hand is limited by progress in research in civil law - each level increases the development limit of the city by units, and on the other hand by the complexity of conquests: being behind enemy lines, and therefore without direct reinforcements (if you don’t bother with supply wagons) player units start suffer battle losses.
As in Age of Empires with Empire Earth , in Rise of Nationsa large chunk of human history is involved, but here transitions between eras work a little better - they are more compressed, resources are collected automatically and there are “trading thresholds” to speed up the pace of the game. This game was supposed to lead the player through the entire history of mankind in one hour, giving him an amazing sense of scale - you passed from hoplites and catapults to archers, spearmen, guns, then to submarines, tanks and stealth bomber - units upgraded right in your eyes heading into battle with the enemy. The player also had the option of a threat of nuclear weapons that could refresh the later stages of the game: the explosion of each nuclear bomb brought the clock of Armageddon closer to the cataclysm.
This may have been an indication of the increasing fatigue of the RTS, which gradually arose after the gold rush of the genre at the end of 90, but despite all the improvements and innovations, as well as impressive sales, Rise of Nations did not have a strong influence on the genre. Real-time strategies were better than ever, and it seemed like they had a great future. However, this was the beginning of the end.
At the time, this was not obvious. Against the background of a successful (albeit too complicated) sequel to Homeworld Relic Entertainment, it gained fame with the RTS version of the popular board game universe Warhammer 40k. In Dawn of War(2004) skillfully transferred the battle of space marines, orcs, eldar and demonic former paratroopers. DoW turned out to be a great game with excellent aesthetic and thematic elements. Most noteworthy is that it consolidated the idea that a real-time strategy can be focused on capturing and holding several strategic points on the way to an enemy fortress, and not on attacks from hostile bases.
Despite the abundance of tactical options that require constant attention, Dawn of Warallowed to maintain control over the game (more), reducing the number of game units and focusing on the management of units, rather than individual units. But too often, the gameplay was too fast, the systems of cover and morale seemed ill-conceived, and all this proved that the RTS-games lost their accessibility - you had to memorize too many hotkeys, and you had to train too much before multiplayer mode - the most interesting part of the game.
The next game of Relic in the theme of the Second World War - Company of Heroes (2006), took the new design pattern Dawn of Warand turned it into real innovation. In essence, it was a real-time tactical game, on top of which a strategic layer was imposed. As in Dawn of War , the maps contained strategic points that, after capturing, generated the resources necessary for special skills, upgrades, and training new units. But Company of Heroes has developed this concept. Units could occupy any buildings and use them as shelters, and although the player could build military buildings to train new units, it was more important to retain existing structures.
Company of Heroesconveyed the feeling of military action better than any other RTS before it. It was difficult not to become attached to their soldiers, because their cries penetrated the battlefield when powerful tanks rolled through the streets, destroying the player’s attack plans, and buildings and other map elements, such as telephone lines, caught fire, collapsed and fell apart, presenting new dangers to still living units. The infantry could be suppressed by enemy fire, and after a while it was so intimidated that it ceased to obey orders (except for the order to retreat). And despite all these tactical nuances every minute it was a very strategic game. It was necessary to preserve supply lines, to capture and hold not only strategic resource points, but also areas that give victory points,because war is a sequence of capturing small areas of territory and difficult victories, and not a task of destroying the enemy base. It was exactly thisCompany of Heroes .
Sales of AoE 3 were massive.
There is a reason why the studio retained an appetite for release this fall by AoE IV
Supreme Commander .
The success of Age of Empires III (2005), the eighth bestseller on the North American PC market in 2005, suggested that real-time strategy still had a long life, despite the fact that it had hardly changed over the decade. But for PC gaming it's hard times. Revenues from PC games have fallen throughout the industry annually since 2001, and now publishers have been wary of investing heavily. The console market looked more attractive, where sales grew rapidly . This has become a problem for real-time strategies: they have always been poorly combined with console controllers. And no one wanted to risk to correct the situation.
Meanwhile, in the PC market, when Blizzard continued to stamp patches for StarCraft, and Ensemble released two AoE III extensions , Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor tried to destroy the impression of the stagnation of the genre. He sought to reinvent the RTS, reinforcing the strategic component and discarding the tactical complexity of the genre. Taylor released Supreme Commander (2007), the scale of the hostilities which would not allow to fall into the trap of a one-dimensional strategy and too simplified tactics. The game maps were up to 6,500 square kilometers (2,500 square miles) and had a “strategic zoom,” which allowed them to see the entire battlefield from space or from behind the unit.
The player could create queues from a variety of teams and experiment with different approaches to the strategy of defeating the enemy - take it with numbers, diversions or maneuvers on the flanks (the cards were so big that it turned out to be more interesting than usual) or something more inventive. The game represented more space for strategic thinking: is it worth trying to undermine the economy of the enemy? Aim at his rocket systems and units / bots / long-range buildings? To “bury” in your own defense, preparing for a duel at the end of the mission?
Such reflections became even more interesting if you consider the unpredictability of the physical system (downed flying units could fall on your base, destroying its part, or cause forest fires) and experimental units, for example, walking tanks or destroyers.
butSupreme Commander fell into the same trap as all the real-time strategy games of that era: it was too difficult to learn how to play. This, perhaps even more than the stagnation of the RTS template itself, led to the decline of the genre, while others characteristic of the PC began to gradually recover. Real-time strategy crossed the threshold of difficulty, which was tolerable for beginners.
Although in most multiplayer battles of RTS games, the focus was still focused on short battles, the participants of which figured out who could build more and faster — all according to the roots of the genre — they required the player to learn so many hotkeys, processes, rules and standard strategies (you had to do all this quickly), then there was simply no point in buying RTS if you were not ready to master all these skills or did not want to simply go through the campaign mode (most likely, not completely polished).
Like urban simulators stuck for several years after SimCity 4, and flight simulators (except those developed by fans), frozen after the appearance of hardware acceleration of 3D graphics, having fallen into obsession with realism, the RTS genre collapsed. He pushed himself into a corner, striving for more elements that can be “clicked”, a larger set of memorized keyboard macros, more actions per minute (about 150 apm, that is, 2.5 actions per second - that's how much you need to succeed in StarCraft II ), in other words, there was too much action in the action strategy. Despite having found its success branches of the genre - MOBA and similar to the RTS tower defense, the RTS genre itself stood still.
Only the sequels are left - Supreme Commander 2(2010), coped with the problem of complexity too late, Red Alert 3 (2008), Dawn of War II (2009), Company of Heroes 2 (2013), StarCraft II (2015) and the new Anno games , and also the market share for the ever-popular oldies ( StarCraft , AoE II ), along with the latest Ensemble game of complex fate - Halo Wars (2009), which defeated console control problems, but did not win success.
To be successful in StarCraft II, you need at least 150 apm, that is, 2.5 actions per second. O_o
The future of the real-time strategy genre looks vague. It is still of great interest, but it is difficult to assess how popular a high-quality game can be. Now the most famous RTS games are StarCraft II and Age of Empires II : the first is an improved version of the 19-year game, the second is the 18-year-old game itself (with a recent HD remake and expansion). Relic's Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series still maintains a large base of amateurs among RTS players who prefer a large share of tactics in strategy. Are these players ready for something new and better?
Time will tell, although I can not say when we see the next great RTS. At the time of this writing, only a few new games were announced , and none of them belong to a large studio. Tooth & Tail looks like a promising return to the roots of RTS-deathmatch with a touch of modernity. Empires Apart openly admits that it is a new look at Age of Empires . Driftland: The Magic Revival hopes to win over players with a combination of RTS and God simulator. The historic open source RTS 0 AD looks promising, but has been in the alpha state for more than a decade. Chris Taylor is back with World of Tanks developerWargaming and working on ... something .
However, I would not dismiss the genre so quickly. The PC gaming market is stronger than ever, so a real-time strategy game can experience the same sudden renaissance as adventure games after Telltale flourish, or town-planning simulators after SimCity (2015), which paved the way to the top of Cities: Skylines .
The heyday and decline of real-time strategy was very strange. They arose gradually from experiments in which developers tried to combine the speed and interestingness of action games with deliberation and depth of strategies. Suddenly, the genre gained explosive popularity in the second half of the 90s, and then just as quickly lost it (with the exception of StarCraft ) in the mid-2000s, amid stagnation and changes in the gaming market. However, one of the most popular competitive games in the world is RTS, and three of the four remaining became an offshoot of the real-time strategy genre.
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At 25 years of age, real-time strategy remains committed to its core ideas and legacy. Today, at the moment of a deep calm of the genre, it's time to historically explore it, as we did with graphic adventure games , Sim-games , first-person shooters , racing on maps , open-world games ( translation to GT) and city-planning simulators .
Before I begin, I will explain: as in all studies of the history of genres, I want to highlight innovations and new ideas, that is, I can get around some popular games and not even mention [here-the name of your favorite game] . In this article, real-time strategy refers to the one in which the base is being built and / or managed, resource collection, unit production and semi-autonomous battles, and all this happens in real time (and not step by step). The goal of the game is to capture / hold strategic points of the map (for example, resources and command centers).
I also want to emphasize that tactics and strategy are not the same thing, and therefore, in this article, real-time tactical games, such as Total War and Close Combat, will almost not be considered. If you do not know: strategy is high-level planning, and tactics are focused on smaller tasks. Explained in terms of video games, strategy is building with the help of the resources extracted / collected by armies created in buildings and their management; The tactic applies only to the battle itself and the deep combat mechanics focused on the alignment and deployment of troops, the use of relief features. The RTS usually has an element of tactics, but strategic mechanics are rarely present in tactical games.
So, with all this in mind, let's begin the journey 36 years ago to the past.
If you recognize this game, then you have caught the birth of a genre ( Utopia ).
Cytron Masters for Atari.
Perhaps the graphics are not impressive, but the mechanics of the game were advanced for that time.
Action connects with strategy
The separation of strategies into “real-time strategies” and “step-by-step” was introduced relatively recently. Until the mid-90s, strategy games were step-by-step, and action games were played in real time, and they never (well, almost never) combined. Game designs were based on incompatible ideals: strategies inherited the rich traditions of complex and intricate desktop wargames; Action games were a simple and mindless test of reflexes and coordination, based on arcade machines. The strategy was methodical and unhurried, devoted to the careful planning and weighing of each decision. The idea of ​​adding real-time elements to force players to make instant, impulsive decisions was unheard of. Moreover, it seemed to be a completely opposite strategy.
But it was precisely at this time that Dong Douglow created Intellivision’s Utopia game of 1981, which was one of the earliest predecessors of the real-time strategy genre. Utopia talked about the war of the two island nations, in which it was necessary not only to penetrate the territory and / or destroy the enemy, but also to create their own reliable and safe base. It was necessary to think about the infrastructure, production, troops, weather, spies, pirates and the results of player decisions. As if it was not difficult enough, life on the islands and between them continued to boil even in moments of inactivity - raids of pirates, hurricanes, crop failure, riots and much more.
Soon, other “action-strategic” games appeared, each of which implemented its own view on how the two types of games should be combined. The next notable game was Cytron Masters (1982) from recognized designer Dan Bunthen (later known as Daniel Butenten Berry). Later, Bunten said that the game "fell into the crevice" between the players in action and strategy. (Note: in 1992, Bunten changed his gender and began to call himself Bunten Berry.)
Cytron Masters for the gameplay resembled an early prototype of the concept RTS, but despite this, it commercially failed. The game had five semi-autonomous unit classes involved in defense, attack and communications on the battlefield, several power sources that gave more energy (the only game resource) and allowed to build more units. The whole process took place on one screen. The players started the game on one of the edges of the area, similar to a football field, but instead of the gates there were command centers. Players could see how the commands given by the opponent are executed in real time, along with their own.
Nether earth
In the genre of RTS appear robots \ m /.
Modem Wars .
Stonkers .
WarGame for ZX Spectrum Stonkers (1983) and Chris Crawford's Legionnaire (1982) sought a more action-tactical style of play. The curtailed, quick adaptation of the real-game combat phase of the traditional real-time game with beautiful graphics by the Stonkers was greeted with great enthusiasm, but a lot of bugs that hindered the game had a negative impact on sales. Legionnaire , a simple semi-historical simulation of the battles of the Romans and barbarians, received a more controversial reception. This game became the progenitor of the real-time tactics genre (RTT), but it had to wait for popularity until next year. Then The Ancient Art of War appeared , a hit and powerful computer wargame (RTT, like its closest relative RTS, took many years to finally become a recognized separate genre).
Meanwhile, Nether Earth (1987) further consolidated the basic concepts of what would later become RTS. In it, the player creates robots that can capture or destroy the six types of factories needed to make the components used to produce even more robots. The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy the enemy’s base / bases, erasing them from the ground with nuclear weapons on board a kamikaze robot. The player can control the robots himself, choosing them one at a time, but usually it is better to simply give them an order to destroy, capture, kill or defend, and most concentrate on making new robots to surpass the enemy.
Another Dan Bunthen game, Modem Wars (1988), placed greater emphasis on tactics, but had many of the elements that eventually became crucial in real-time strategy. Including fog of war, which does not allow seeing enemy troops outside the scope of a unit / building, espionage, changing unit formations, the effect of relief on movement and combat. Powerful pace of the game allowed to cope with a variety of tasks without overloading the player (this lesson could not be learned by many of the later RTS).
Herzog zwei
The player controls one of the battling furs, each of which can take air and ground forms, as well as carry different types of units. Units can be bought at the command center and give them orders.
Get it, player 1.
Powermonger for Amiga.
Click on objects and read descriptions.
Command HQ .
This game is similar to the RT-adaptation of the classic board game Risk . It allows you to zoom in and explore the cities of the country.
RTS in everything except the name
In the same year, when Modem Wars came out, the tactical mech-shooter Herzog of the Japanese studio Technosoft laid the foundations of what many consider the first strategic game in real time. After it, in 1989, Sezab Genesis released a resemblance to the prototype MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena, genre-branch RTS) Herzog Zwei . In it, you control one of the fighting mechs that can transform between air and ground forms, as well as transfer different types of units that can be bought in the command center. You can order units to patrol, hold a position, attack / seize a satellite base, supply other units with supplies, or attack the enemy’s main base. Units try to perform these tasks with or without the player’s help.
There are nine satellite bases scattered around the map, each of which can be captured with the help of four infantry units. Bases generate money, that is, allow you to quickly release new units. In addition, the base can carry out orders for the purchase of new units.
It was a tough game, even despite the boring AI. Already at a low level of difficulty, when playing against a computer, it instantly moves, captures empty satellite bases, and then falls on your main base with an endless crowd of units. Herzog Zwei remained muddled, even when the player was adjusting to her pace. When your units gained an advantage, the enemy could interfere with their fur and quickly destroy them if you do not support them with your own fur. But every second of participation in combat is the time when you cannot buy new units, so the game turns into tedious quick micromanagement exercises. Probably, the game predicted the almost inevitable after StarCraft future multiplayer RTS - the world in which minor errors can have devastating consequences, and the delay and degree of meaning mean loss.
But at the time when the genre was just getting on its feet, the main task was to outline the basic mechanics, which varied greatly in different games. Next was Powermonger (1990) from the developer Populous Bullfrog, which almost redeemed its monotonous gameplay and stupid interface with interesting ideas. The game had a polygonal 3D map with the ability to zoom and rotate, but limited to a small field of view. It contained interrelated elements of simulation, such as wild animals, seasons, and city residents with their own activities that influenced the world (for example, there was less food in winter). There were interesting touches in the game - in the cold time people warmed near the fire, and after death they turned into angels.
Also in the game there are three "building" armies that affect the execution of orders. Under suitable conditions, it is possible to force all people from the conquered city to join your army, taking any available weapon, although it is often better to leave part of the residents in place so that they can work (thus providing you with the necessary supply of resources for recruits).
The game Powermonger stepped on the heels of Command HQ Dan Bunthen (1991), which looked like an adaptation of the classic Risk board game in real time. She forced the player to rush through the menu, driving the economy, helping foreign countries, studying intelligence reports, buying and placing units, setting targets for attacks, exploiting oil fields, launching space satellites and other ways in the first to fifth world war simulations.
Absolutely different in style and presentation, but equally ambitious on the scale of Mega Lo Mania (1991) of Sensible Software, stretched throughout human history, divided into 10 eras. Like the Powermonger , she lacked the tactical component of the battles, but she compensated otherwise. In Mega Lo Mania, the player must assign people to the tasks: researching new technologies, collecting / mining / processing the resources needed to obtain better weapons, the birth of new people or the expansion of the army. It was not only a technological, but also a territorial game in which the player had to send his troops to destroy enemy bases and / or build new fortresses in other areas. (There were different resources in each area, so sometimes it was necessary to reinvent / explore the same technology.)
The uniqueness of the world and the little computer people allowed to close their eyes to the shortcomings of the Powermonger . Playing with small strokes improved various aspects of the gameplay, except perhaps for an uninteresting and monotonous final phase. It is worth especially to note the wonderful voice samples transmitted with excellent intonation - “We've nuked them!” And the stereotypical “Do you want to be in my gang?”. In addition, after reaching a new era, buildings and people changed their appearance.
Dune II .
This game came out shortly after the original Dune , and both were very loosely associated with the film.
Of course, who controls the spice, he owns the universe Dune .
The North caused problems long before the Game of Thrones era.
What is in the name?
It was only in 1992 that real-time strategy gained its name thanks to the producer of Dune II, Brett Sperry, who coined the term in an attempt to describe his game. From a design point of view, Dune II was a bit more than just an improvement on previous work, but their legacy and influence were traced throughout. Dune II is the first RTS game that people usually recall. This is a game that has determined everything that has arisen after, both the good and, alas, the bad.
The developer of Westwood Studios, formerly known for the RPG Eye of the Beholder RPG, was highly inspired by Herzog Zwei , Populous , a simulator of the god, and a Macintosh graphical user interface with mouse controls, when developing the surface-related books and movie Dune . Dune II , strangely released just a few months after the adventure of Dune Cryo Interactive, tells the simple story of House Atreides, House Harkonnen and invented by the developers of House Ordos, fighting for control and use of the spice on the planet Dune, because, as everyone knows, at least superficially familiar with the world of "Dune", the one who controls the spice, controls the universe.
There is something undeniably exciting in the basic gameplay Dune II cycle - you send a harvester to collect a spice, turn it into credits for which you can buy upgrades, repairs, new units and new buildings. A more user-friendly interface allowed less messing with micromanagement when attacking enemies. This meant that the player had more time to study the map, create additional bases and think through the strategy of destroying the enemy. During the game, you realize that with every passing minute, computer-controlled enemies also gather resources to improve the base and strengthen their army. This promised a long, exhausting battle for the capture of the card (it further worsened its need for constant “clicking” to give orders to each unit separately, because there were no grouping options or the choice of several units). An early attack on the key buildings of the enemy could take him by surprise and give the player a great advantage that saved him from monotony, but could also make him vulnerable to a crushing counterattack.
Westwood took the feedback loop from the genre, which in the 1993 Master of Orion preliminary review of Computer Gaming World magazine will be called 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate), and discovered the winning formula, changing the scale of strategy from macro to micro level. In essence, each level was a small-scale 4X real-time combat.
The player always starts with a building base, a few hundred credits and a pair of units. Then, having restored his base after the attack (it was most convenient to do this, protecting at least one spice processing plant and mobile construction vehicles hidden in a safe place), he continued to develop - he created a second spice plant, ideally located near the far field of the spice, watched on the mini-map the movements of the enemy, lined up a reliable (directed towards the enemy) perimeter defense away from the center of the base, sent out trikes to search for weak points in the defense of the enemy, at the last levels he built as soon as possible sky port (because it is a cheaper and faster way to get the necessary tanks and rocket launchers than a heavy machine factory). Another element of tension was the natural time limit - the amount of spice remaining. If you run out of spice before you win, then this is a sure sign of defeat. This is how the modern RTS was born.
Maybe Dune II gave the name to the genre, but WarCraft stole it.
Not every game of the DOS era RTS genre could inspire film adaptation.
V means Victory.
Good orc like everyone.
Then (then) the little-known studio Blizzard Entertainment cemented the Dune II format as a new genre. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) changed Dune's sci-fi entourage to old-fashioned fantasy. Now the player did not collect the spice to get money, he mined gold and poured trees. Buildings were not built out of sight and were not exhibited instantly; in front of the player’s eyes, unarmed peasants / peons were built, who also needed to be created (or, rather, “trained”).
In addition, the two warring Warcraft races had their own personality. If Dune II House Harkonnen showed his villainous nature only with the destructive power of the Death Hand rocket, the Warcraft orcs were charismatic and strangely attractive in the game itself, where they responded to the player’s orders with phrases and in the cutscenes between missions (the text with a comic voice acting, even when an orc girl was ordered to kill another orc (to “teach” her to obey her father).
In Warcraft, there was also a two-player battle mode over a local or Internet connection on maps used in a campaign or created procedurally. As the popularity of defatchee Doom changed first-person shooters, so the multiplayer mode RTS led to a gradual shift in development priorities. The multiplayer Warcraft mode was popular and fascinated players even when they fully mastered campaigns for orcs and humans. For Blizzard, this was an important lesson.
Command and Conquer .
Cursed Brotherhood Nod.
These unforgettable videos.
Red Alert .
Node and delightfully simulated video scores are back.
What is the background story of Red Alert? The plot begins with the fact that Albert Einstein returns to the past to kill Hitler ...
Warcraft II .
The game added the mechanics of the fog of war, which made a great contribution to the genre of RTS.
Reinforcements arrived
Westwood received her own lessons from the spiritual follower of Dune II - Command & Conquer (1995), an exaggerated, frivolous look at the war for an alien substance between the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod, a decentralized paramilitary secret community with deep corporate connections and almost cultist zeal.
At its core, Command & Conquer has become a faster version of Dune IItransferred to an alternative time line of our world. It was complemented by notable innovations - the choice of several units, support for the multiplayer mode and a logical interface. But it is impossible to dwell on this description, otherwise we will neglect the brilliance of other elements of the game. Intentionally pompous melodramatic cutscenes with the participation of live actors against the background of green screens brought fancy fun to the gloomy theme of the game. It seemed that the forces of GDI always act according to circumstances, the Brotherhood of Nod became so stereotypical manic evil that it was impossible to stop laughing while watching their plans, betrayals and unreasonable violence.
Nod's troops readily kill defenseless residents and destroy their homes, both during missions, if you do not protect the village, and in the cutscenes. In one remarkable mission for Nod, you are ordered to partake of the immoral philosophy of the Brotherhood: to steal a GDI helicopter, and then destroy the nearby village. But all the fun does not come only to the soldiers of Nod: in the campaign for GDI there is a tremendous mission, in which you use a commando to single-handedly wipe the enemy base off the face of the earth by secretly setting up explosive around it. The commandos have become one of the coolest units in the RTS, in particular, due to the fact that they accompanied their destructive and bloody actions with gloomy phrases like “I have a gift for you!” And “One left!” Command & Conquer
seriestook her place in pop culture thanks to the 1996 spin-off on the theme of World War II Red Alert . He brought wonderful videos, fast paced and spirit of the 90s of the original game in the alternative history of the mid-20th century, which somehow coincided even better in style. In some ways, it can be considered a prequel of a frivolous first game. The story begins with the fact that Albert Einstein is transferred back into the past and kills Hitler, and this leads to the most absurd consequences - the Soviet Union has its own views on the expansion of territories, so an alternative World War II begins, in which you can participate on the side of the Allies or Soviets .
Of course, the Nod was not without its brotherhood either - its mysterious leader Kane participates in backstage intrigues in the corridors of Soviet power. In the game, the Soviets are not as sinister as the Nod forces in C & C , but they can still please sadists thanks to such weapons as Tesla's coil, able to instantly fry any unit that was not lucky to be in its field of action. Red alertIt is also notable that the differences between the warring parties intensified - Soviet and allied units differ more in skills and capabilities than the forces of Nod and GDI, despite the fact that at that time the trends in game development were going in a different direction. However, the developers did not implement this correctly, so instead of using variability and diversity, ambitious players quickly found the dominant strategy: play for the Soviets, build a lot of heavy tanks, and then arrange a rush to the enemy base.
At the same time, Blizzard reinforced the success of Warcraft with the sequel to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) with improved graphics and control. Now the player could select several units in the same frame as in Command & Conquer, and the performance and capabilities of the selected unit were visible at a glance. Additional convenience was that the player could choose whether units should hold positions, pursue attackers, or patrol territory. Also in Warcraft II there was a deeper storyline; besides, for the first time in the genre, the game added a system of two-level fog of war: not only unexplored areas were closed by a black fog that hides everything, but also areas beyond the visibility of player’s units (or his allies) were shaded gray. The player could still see the relief, but not the enemy actions hidden by this fog.
The mechanics of improved fog of war changed the face of the genre. It meant that you could never have complete information about your enemies, which added many new levels of strategy. Now you could suddenly make covert attacks, fast and farsighted units could be used as scouts after the initial exploration of the map. And if the enemy is negligent in intelligence, then you can accumulate large reserves of units hidden from his gaze, and then lure him into a trap. RTS-games were still competitions in speed of clicks, but this innovation has shown that they are beginning to justify the word "strategy" in its name.
After two hit games of Warcraftand the resounding success of the three RTS Westwood gateways opened - real-time strategy hit the trends. And there were hordes of clones.
After the emergence of excellent RTS, attracted the attention of players, the creation of mediocre games was only a matter of time ...
Such as Dark Colony ...
... or Earth 2140 .
Conquest Earth .
The best example from this stream of the second half of the 90s was Z (pronounced “Zed”).
The game had the only tempo option - swift. It was a continuous insane succession of quick ups and downs in the battles for dominance.
In this emerging abundance of mediocre popular science RTS Conquest Earth(1997) was distinguished by the fact that it allowed the race of Jupiterians attacking Earth to disguise themselves as map objects, human transport, and also to combine several weak units into one powerful one. Released in the same year, Dark Colony had a heroic unit commander and mystical artifacts that could be captured to gain an advantage in battle. For example, it was possible to turn the surrounding trees into weapons or suck up enemies into a tiny black hole. In Earth 2140 , also released in 1997, there were generals who had special skills in managing and organizing groups of units, but they were so stupid that they turned out to be more of a burden than an advantage.
The legendary British studio The Bitmap Brothers, which Amiga fans idolized for the games of the late 80s and early 90s, managed to stand out against the background of their competitors thanks to the 1996 game Z (it will be zed). Instead of cultists with megalomania or rival races, the game told the story of armies traveling in space, robots programmed to fight to the last for control of five planets. The game added to the British eccentricity genre, combining the humor of such projects as Mega Lo Mania and Powermonger with the irony that emerged in the previous few years of RTS development.
Zbecame one of the first RTS-games in which there was nothing superfluous. There is no slow construction, no temporary lull in the middle of the game, no tedious end-level battles - only a constant insane series of quick ups and downs in the fight for domination. It was a territory control game with simplified resource collection and database management systems. Their place was taken by the control zones: the map is divided into cells, and the game itself resembles the RTS version of the flag capture. It was a modernized and improved Nether Earth , and interesting ideas were present in it, for example, knocking out enemy units from vehicles so that its own soldiers could occupy it. The game was proof that the RTS games could take a different path, but even Z could not change the trajectory set by the genre.Dune II .
See the treasure - the original Age of Empires .
AoE borrowed some of its basic concepts from Civilization .
In general, the game became the evolution of Red Alert and Warcraft II .
Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries lost amid the popularity of AoE .
However, this game provided a much deeper strategy than usual in the RTS.
I need a stone
The RTS fans finally managed to take a break from fantasy and science fiction in 1997, when, with an interval of just one month, two very different implementations of the same basic idea appeared.
Under the leadership of Civilization co-author Bruce Shelley, Ensemble Studios in October 1997 returned the real-time strategy to the Stone Age (as well as to the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age) in its most popular hit, Age of Empires . The player, who led one of the 12 unique real historical civilizations, had to lead his empire through four centuries, fighting with seven rival empires for domination in the region. As in Civilization , you can build monuments that give advantages (automatic victory in standard modes if it lasts more than 2000 years, or just a bonus to points in other modes). As in Civilization , the player must stimulate research to move to new technological discoveries before competitors.
In all other aspects, the game became the evolution of Red Alert and Warcraft II . The player has four resources, and not two or three - stone, gold, wood, and food (which could be grown, harvested from plants, or mined by hunting). The game implemented a more complex system of dependencies between upgrades and buildings. It also has diplomacy through receiving / donating gifts. A player could use navigation points to make unit movement more strategic. But under the surface of Age of Empires, there were already familiar cycles of gathering resources, micromanagement of units and expanding the base.
Therefore, it is a pity that the Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries , released just a month after Age of Empires , had such a small impact. Seven Kingdoms , developed by Enlight Software, a tiny company under the management of designer and programmer Trevor Chan, creator of the highly acclaimed business simulator Capitalism , was much better than you can decide on a modest schedule and mediocre sales. Her diplomacy, trade, and technology systems, of course, were not comparable to Civilization or a complex strategy game, such as turn-based Imperialism . But in the Seven Kingdoms present strategic depth, inaccessible to ordinary RTS.
Instead of mindless "clicking" the player had to carefully (but quickly) think about maintaining balance in the economy. Each unit and building had an annual maintenance fee, charged after the creation costs, which had to be paid, taxing the peasants and trading in raw materials and processed resources in the markets. Each resident of any city owned by a player automatically paid a small tax, but it was possible to earn additional income by collecting taxes again, although at the cost of reducing loyalty. Less loyal people fell more easily under the influence of another civilization and were more likely to accept a bribe from a rogue spy.
Resources came from mines set on resource pools, transferred to markets for sale, and to factories for processing into goods that could also be sold on the markets, if only the player assigned people to work in the respective buildings. Markets were more complicated than in Age of Empires . The player needed to find the most efficient and profitable supply routes for caravans. It was necessary to ensure the availability of markets in his kingdom, and on the territory of competitors, that is, it was necessary to enter into trade unions. If you make a mistake in this or stretch the force expansion of territories too much, then it remains to rely only on taxes, which you probably will not be able to hold out for a long time. This meant that life was never easy. As soon as the money ran out, the loyalty of the troops fell, the buildings collapsed, the siege weapons fell apart, and the villages turned to competitors. That's right - a healthy leadership could lead to defeat in just 10 minutes.
To balance the detailed economic side of the game, Seven Kingdoms almost completely abandoned the tactics of fighting. Victory in the battle ceased to depend on the flank maneuvers and heaps of teams to units, rolls of bones took their place based on the size of the squadron, combat skills of the unit (number from 10 to 100), general leadership skills and loyalty of each unit to the player. It was necessary to take into account nationality - joining a neutral or enemy city could be much easier if most of the soldiers in the barracks on the edge of the city had the same nationality as the inhabitants.
Dark reign
Total annihilation
Homeworld
Battle scenes in 3D!
Third dimension
Having lived for several years exclusively in 2D, the real-time strategy game again began to flirt with three-dimensional relief: in September 1997, Dark Reign: The Future of War was released. Graphically, Dark Reign resembled existing games, but it used an internal elevation map that affected the scope of the units. When the unit climbed the hill, he could see further. Moreover, planning an ambush and going on reconnaissance, the player could use trees and stones as shelters.
The game introduced another handy feature - the ability to disable buildings on the base, which helped control energy consumption. Units could be given orders for automatic research, attacks, patrols, searching and destroying, and even returning to the base for repairs when a given level of damage was reached.
Total Annihilation , released just four weeks later, explored similar ideas. Her pre-rendered fixed-point 3D maps affected animations and the scope of units. The maps were tied to a physics engine that counted the effects of explosions, artillery fire, and debris flying. But its triumph game was not obliged to flirt with 3D. Rather, Total Annihilation has become a real master class in creating balance.
Energy was needed for everything: for construction, building units, metal mining (a scarce resource), and even for combat (unit weapons consumed energy). You start expanding too fast, and production will be idle; build too large an army - it can remain without energy, defenseless even against a small handful of attacking enemies. It was necessary to always keep track of the numbers, carefully controlling the balance of arrival and energy and metal consumption (which, it is worth noting, could be collected from destroyed units). The oversupply meant inefficiency, for which the player was punished, but a prolonged shortage could be even more threatening.
This need to think in terms of balance extended to the units themselves - each of them had a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by the other. The only unit able to cope with all the others, Commander, was also the only one whose loss was unacceptable - its destruction meant loss.
A little later, in 1997, Bungie’s Myth , a stunning real-time 3D tactic, showed how fully a three-dimensional engine can improve the combat side of the RTS. Full control over the camera made it easier to view the battlefield, and the weapon could become less effective and predictable (for example, grenades could roll and bounce) depending on the terrain.
But in order to catch up with the progress, the RTS games took another two years. The first 3D game was Homeworld (1999), and it was the first to be in outer space. Its structure was very similar to the traditional RTS - commanding the fleet, building ships, exploring new technologies, collecting resources - but the very nature of the subject of deep space strongly highlighted the game against the background of the standard entourage of the genre. The need to think in three dimensions was sometimes confusing, especially with such a minimalist interface, but it was worked out enough not to distract the player from stunning, large-scale views.
You probably already heard about it ...
StarCraft was much more than just a futuristic version of Warcraft .
Zerg rush
While the first three-dimensional RTS came to grief in half, the traditional two-dimensional isometric perspective was able to secure a long life thanks to the most popular game of the genre. Having accumulated power on the first two Warcraft and dungeon crawler-e Diablo , Blizzard turned its attention to science fiction. Instead of orcs, humans, elves and the like, fighting for wood, gold and oil, there appeared terrans (humans), zerg and protoss fighting for minerals and gas vespen in a distant world. StarCraft (1998) was much more than just a futuristic version of Warcraft . The most notable difference was the completely different three races. Their units, buildings and methods of resource extraction were unique, albeit approximately comparable. The balance of the races was perfect for their confrontation.
On the other hand, after the release of the game, there was one unbeatable strategy for the multiplayer mode: to quickly create a large number of simplest units of the race, and then flood (“insure”) the enemy base before the enemy had time to build a defense. (In this strategy, the zerg were the most effective due to the quickest creation of units, which is why the Zerg-rush meme appeared.) Designers limited players to a maximum of 12 simultaneously allocated units, but they needed much less for successful early rush. Blizzard did a good job correcting such balance problems, frequent patches changed the numbers inside the game, but with proper implementation, the rash still remained quite a viable strategy. As is usually the case in online gaming circles, when one strategy becomes dominant, they were disapproved in the early stages of the game, and rejection of it was often considered a condition of a gentlemen's agreement.
It would be remiss on my part not to mention the huge popularity of StarCraft in South Korea, where the game has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. It led to the organization of television broadcasts and the creation of special channels, and this at a time when any mention of games on television was very rare. This wide professional scene got its millionaire stars and gained a full arena of viewers even a decade after the release of the game.
AoE II .
Honestly, it was more like AoE 1.5 .
Empire Earth .
Consolidation
In 1999, Ensemble Studios offered a big-budget alternative to the science-fiction theme StarCraft in the face of the new historic RTS Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings . Although the game is better perceived as Age of Empires 1.5, rather than a full-blown sequel, despite poor marketing and a decent sequel to the high price, it refined the original in the right aspects. In addition, she added some great innovations.
The player could ring the town hall bell to summon all the inhabitants to the village to protect the headquarters and meet the attackers with a hail of arrows. Unit groups actually maintained their ranks while moving, the fastest units were suspended to wait for laggards. In practice, this was important in many respects, but the most important was the effective protection of siege weapons and ranged units from attackers from close range, it allowed to counteract the excellent tactics and strategies of enemies.
Such innovations brought AoE II to the bestseller list, and yet there was also a perfectly tuned generator of random cards and a qualitative balance of various winning strategies. Users continued to participate in multiplayer battles for many more years after the release of the game. (And some continue to this day: the recent expansion of the HD re-release of the game has been developed by modders from the fan community. They have implemented an improvement in the balance, “dug-in” strategies that became dominant already at the beginning of this decade.)
Later Empire Earth (2001) attempted to dislodge AoE II from the throne of the main historical RTS: it had 3D graphics, a system of heroes, improved AI, 14 historical epochs covering all of human history, and not just 4 epochs stretching for 1000 years. But neither the impressive scale and complexity, nor the leadership of the lead designer of Age of Empires, Rick Goodman, could bring her sales and reviews to her spiritual predecessor.
Meanwhile, Westwood continued to go its own way, despite the fact that the studio was bought by EA and most of the key employees quit. A remake of Dune II called Dune 2000 was released in 1998, right before buying EA, and went unnoticed (because the new graphics did not reach the desired level, the gameplay balance was absent, and the game itself was trying to fix something that did not need to be corrected). The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun , which followed in 1999, retained the original funny videotapes and added all the expected improvements. In addition, it appeared the engine with dynamic lighting, used for the excellent effect of searchlight towers (especially at night), and high-quality system of waypoints, which could set the patrol and movement routes.
Prior to closure in early 2003, Westwood managed to release two more full-scale RTS games - Red Alert 2 (2000), which was again made intentionally silly and fun, and Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001) - a quality and beautiful sequel to Dune II / Dune 2000 , whose gameplay was very similar to the style of previous games.
Settlers III .
Cultures .
Kohan .
In the rear
On the periphery of the genre everything was a little different. The Settlers III (1998) marked the new course for the enchanting Blue Byte strategy series on urban planning and supply chain management. Having got rid of the roads and expanded the possibilities of the battle, the game became much more reminiscent of real-time strategy. But it still preserved several dozen different types of occupations for workers and almost as many basic and auxiliary resources that needed to be managed for the smooth development of your empire, protection from enemy attacks and the gradual conquest of the entire map.
Cultures (2000) had approximately the same spirit, and in this, without doubt, the merit of its creators (Funatics Software), who studied the history of Settlers games and made the main goal of the game not conquest, but the happiness of a small tribe, which should be sought for research, construction and economy. A similar approach was used by Anno 1602 (released in 1998 in Europe), it is also 1602 AD (released in 2000 in the USA), which became the founder of another large series of games. The first part of Anno , as well as all subsequent games, considered the fight as a necessary hindrance to the main gameplay, which was sea trade and research, as well as the construction of colonies in the style of Settlers . She was leisurely and less time-bound than most previous RTS games, and the war in her most often consisted in blockades and maneuvering than in actual battles. Nevertheless, the rather complicated economic model Anno 1602 made the gameplay fascinating.
Later released Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns (2001) demonstrated that the economy of demand and consumption can actually be very viable in the RTS genre, which has traditionally focused on defeating enemies with weapons. The orders of the player influenced the regiments consisting of companies of a whole heap of units of three different types under the command of the captain. It was possible to order the companies to protect the key points of the map, which, if they were held for a long time, would have defensive bonuses. When it came to combat, the player could only observe, call in reinforcement companies, or give orders to retreat (meaning a decrease in morale) and regrouping.
Kohan also simplified the collection of resources: everything except gold was obtained from resources located on the player’s territory. A surplus of resources could be directed to new units and population growth (which increased the city’s territory) or sold to produce gold, which was spent on maintenance (everything has operating costs), upgrades and coverage of the resource deficit for new companies or buildings. As in the Seven Kingdoms , gold is always needed, otherwise you will see your kingdom crumble to dust.
Even against the background of the decline of the RTS genre, remarkable games appeared ...
... like Majesty .
Cossacks .
WarCraft III came out just at the moment when MOBA began to gain massive popularity.
Hybridization
By the early 2000s, the love of the RTS began to decline. Publishers rejected fast and low-quality clones of Command & Conquer , because the audience of real-time strategies shrank to the core group of well-informed players who love online competition and learned the game from top to bottom. On the periphery, there were groups that preferred single-player campaigns or niche RTS hybrids like Anno , Settlers and a series of serious strategies for Europa Universalis .
The developers and publishers who tried to reach these people changed tactics: they aimed at a contiguous audience - RTS fans interested in any other genre with which it can mix, plus fans of other genres who are tolerant of RTS mechanics.
For example, Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (2000) was, in effect, a modernized version of Stronghold (1993 version), but with completely autonomous units (which could be influenced by exposing flags "awards" for tasks to which heroes). Firefly’s 2001 Stronghold RTS / lock-up simulator partially added to the Age of Empires the rigors of the simulator and the sadistic pleasure of boiling oil poured through the wall on the infantry besieging the castle or from the comedy-farce in which the peasants carelessly entered the flaming building just to so in a second burning to run out of it.
It is also worth remembering Kazakov (2000), in which whole armies were placed on the screen, grouped into different formations, each of which could contain up to 196 soldiers. Warrior Kings (2002) offered more creative and diverse missions campaigns than almost all the games before it, as well as with large-scale (for that time) three-dimensional tactical battles. Celtic Kings (also 2002) became a hybrid RPG / RTS with separate adventure modes and strategies, each of which was intertwined with the other.
Big companies also experimented with new ideas. In Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos(2002) Blizzard added RPG elements and special hero units. And with their help, I made feedback loops much more intense. A clean "turtle" strategy (building a base and accumulating a large army before the first attack on the enemy) became risky, because in this case the level of heroes remained low. The game wanted the player to organize attacks and create patrol detachments, and also stimulated him with the fact that the cards were inhabited by monsters who were not very pleased with the presence of the player and enemies in their territory.
If this seems to be similar to MOBA such as Dota 2 and League of Legends , then do not worry - that’s it. MOBA genre originated in 2003 as a Warcraft III mod calledDefense of the Ancients , which itself was based on a StarCraft Aeon of Strife fan card . (Note to the uninitiated: in essence, MOBA are RTS games without building / managing bases and direct control of hero units only.)
But the spinoffs were created not only by modders. Ensemble Studios took a breather from its popular historical series RTS, releasing in 2002 a more storyline and creative Age of Mythology . They cut down the number of playable factions from thirteen ( AoE II ) (18 with the expansion of Conquerers) to only three. Each of the races could choose one of the three patron gods, giving certain bonuses. The process of obtaining the patronage of gods who were able to destroy enemies or send divine support was different for each of the civilizations, as was the use of resources for building. Different skills with the habits of different classes of units.
Perhaps Rise of Nations was the beginning of the end of the loud popularity of RTS.
Warhammer proved that the genre is still alive.
Company of Heroes .
Flamethrower.
Last hit
The first attempt to combine the traditional real-time strategy with a step-by-step strategy in the style of Civilization was undertaken only in 2003 - macro and micro strategies , combined in one ambitious game under the leadership of lead designer Civ II and Alpha Centauri, Brian Reynolds. Rise of Nations at the same time became a breakthrough, an excellent step forward, and a dead end, a short-lived rebel of a strategic genre, highly valued and selling well, and then gone into oblivion.
Its authors took the idea of ​​territories and expanded it to full-scale cities within the constantly shifting national borders. Expansion of territories on the one hand is limited by progress in research in civil law - each level increases the development limit of the city by units, and on the other hand by the complexity of conquests: being behind enemy lines, and therefore without direct reinforcements (if you don’t bother with supply wagons) player units start suffer battle losses.
As in Age of Empires with Empire Earth , in Rise of Nationsa large chunk of human history is involved, but here transitions between eras work a little better - they are more compressed, resources are collected automatically and there are “trading thresholds” to speed up the pace of the game. This game was supposed to lead the player through the entire history of mankind in one hour, giving him an amazing sense of scale - you passed from hoplites and catapults to archers, spearmen, guns, then to submarines, tanks and stealth bomber - units upgraded right in your eyes heading into battle with the enemy. The player also had the option of a threat of nuclear weapons that could refresh the later stages of the game: the explosion of each nuclear bomb brought the clock of Armageddon closer to the cataclysm.
This may have been an indication of the increasing fatigue of the RTS, which gradually arose after the gold rush of the genre at the end of 90, but despite all the improvements and innovations, as well as impressive sales, Rise of Nations did not have a strong influence on the genre. Real-time strategies were better than ever, and it seemed like they had a great future. However, this was the beginning of the end.
At the time, this was not obvious. Against the background of a successful (albeit too complicated) sequel to Homeworld Relic Entertainment, it gained fame with the RTS version of the popular board game universe Warhammer 40k. In Dawn of War(2004) skillfully transferred the battle of space marines, orcs, eldar and demonic former paratroopers. DoW turned out to be a great game with excellent aesthetic and thematic elements. Most noteworthy is that it consolidated the idea that a real-time strategy can be focused on capturing and holding several strategic points on the way to an enemy fortress, and not on attacks from hostile bases.
Despite the abundance of tactical options that require constant attention, Dawn of Warallowed to maintain control over the game (more), reducing the number of game units and focusing on the management of units, rather than individual units. But too often, the gameplay was too fast, the systems of cover and morale seemed ill-conceived, and all this proved that the RTS-games lost their accessibility - you had to memorize too many hotkeys, and you had to train too much before multiplayer mode - the most interesting part of the game.
The next game of Relic in the theme of the Second World War - Company of Heroes (2006), took the new design pattern Dawn of Warand turned it into real innovation. In essence, it was a real-time tactical game, on top of which a strategic layer was imposed. As in Dawn of War , the maps contained strategic points that, after capturing, generated the resources necessary for special skills, upgrades, and training new units. But Company of Heroes has developed this concept. Units could occupy any buildings and use them as shelters, and although the player could build military buildings to train new units, it was more important to retain existing structures.
Company of Heroesconveyed the feeling of military action better than any other RTS before it. It was difficult not to become attached to their soldiers, because their cries penetrated the battlefield when powerful tanks rolled through the streets, destroying the player’s attack plans, and buildings and other map elements, such as telephone lines, caught fire, collapsed and fell apart, presenting new dangers to still living units. The infantry could be suppressed by enemy fire, and after a while it was so intimidated that it ceased to obey orders (except for the order to retreat). And despite all these tactical nuances every minute it was a very strategic game. It was necessary to preserve supply lines, to capture and hold not only strategic resource points, but also areas that give victory points,because war is a sequence of capturing small areas of territory and difficult victories, and not a task of destroying the enemy base. It was exactly thisCompany of Heroes .
Sales of AoE 3 were massive.
There is a reason why the studio retained an appetite for release this fall by AoE IV
Supreme Commander .
Decay
The success of Age of Empires III (2005), the eighth bestseller on the North American PC market in 2005, suggested that real-time strategy still had a long life, despite the fact that it had hardly changed over the decade. But for PC gaming it's hard times. Revenues from PC games have fallen throughout the industry annually since 2001, and now publishers have been wary of investing heavily. The console market looked more attractive, where sales grew rapidly . This has become a problem for real-time strategies: they have always been poorly combined with console controllers. And no one wanted to risk to correct the situation.
Meanwhile, in the PC market, when Blizzard continued to stamp patches for StarCraft, and Ensemble released two AoE III extensions , Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor tried to destroy the impression of the stagnation of the genre. He sought to reinvent the RTS, reinforcing the strategic component and discarding the tactical complexity of the genre. Taylor released Supreme Commander (2007), the scale of the hostilities which would not allow to fall into the trap of a one-dimensional strategy and too simplified tactics. The game maps were up to 6,500 square kilometers (2,500 square miles) and had a “strategic zoom,” which allowed them to see the entire battlefield from space or from behind the unit.
The player could create queues from a variety of teams and experiment with different approaches to the strategy of defeating the enemy - take it with numbers, diversions or maneuvers on the flanks (the cards were so big that it turned out to be more interesting than usual) or something more inventive. The game represented more space for strategic thinking: is it worth trying to undermine the economy of the enemy? Aim at his rocket systems and units / bots / long-range buildings? To “bury” in your own defense, preparing for a duel at the end of the mission?
Such reflections became even more interesting if you consider the unpredictability of the physical system (downed flying units could fall on your base, destroying its part, or cause forest fires) and experimental units, for example, walking tanks or destroyers.
butSupreme Commander fell into the same trap as all the real-time strategy games of that era: it was too difficult to learn how to play. This, perhaps even more than the stagnation of the RTS template itself, led to the decline of the genre, while others characteristic of the PC began to gradually recover. Real-time strategy crossed the threshold of difficulty, which was tolerable for beginners.
Although in most multiplayer battles of RTS games, the focus was still focused on short battles, the participants of which figured out who could build more and faster — all according to the roots of the genre — they required the player to learn so many hotkeys, processes, rules and standard strategies (you had to do all this quickly), then there was simply no point in buying RTS if you were not ready to master all these skills or did not want to simply go through the campaign mode (most likely, not completely polished).
Like urban simulators stuck for several years after SimCity 4, and flight simulators (except those developed by fans), frozen after the appearance of hardware acceleration of 3D graphics, having fallen into obsession with realism, the RTS genre collapsed. He pushed himself into a corner, striving for more elements that can be “clicked”, a larger set of memorized keyboard macros, more actions per minute (about 150 apm, that is, 2.5 actions per second - that's how much you need to succeed in StarCraft II ), in other words, there was too much action in the action strategy. Despite having found its success branches of the genre - MOBA and similar to the RTS tower defense, the RTS genre itself stood still.
Only the sequels are left - Supreme Commander 2(2010), coped with the problem of complexity too late, Red Alert 3 (2008), Dawn of War II (2009), Company of Heroes 2 (2013), StarCraft II (2015) and the new Anno games , and also the market share for the ever-popular oldies ( StarCraft , AoE II ), along with the latest Ensemble game of complex fate - Halo Wars (2009), which defeated console control problems, but did not win success.
To be successful in StarCraft II, you need at least 150 apm, that is, 2.5 actions per second. O_o
Moving on!
The future of the real-time strategy genre looks vague. It is still of great interest, but it is difficult to assess how popular a high-quality game can be. Now the most famous RTS games are StarCraft II and Age of Empires II : the first is an improved version of the 19-year game, the second is the 18-year-old game itself (with a recent HD remake and expansion). Relic's Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series still maintains a large base of amateurs among RTS players who prefer a large share of tactics in strategy. Are these players ready for something new and better?
Time will tell, although I can not say when we see the next great RTS. At the time of this writing, only a few new games were announced , and none of them belong to a large studio. Tooth & Tail looks like a promising return to the roots of RTS-deathmatch with a touch of modernity. Empires Apart openly admits that it is a new look at Age of Empires . Driftland: The Magic Revival hopes to win over players with a combination of RTS and God simulator. The historic open source RTS 0 AD looks promising, but has been in the alpha state for more than a decade. Chris Taylor is back with World of Tanks developerWargaming and working on ... something .
However, I would not dismiss the genre so quickly. The PC gaming market is stronger than ever, so a real-time strategy game can experience the same sudden renaissance as adventure games after Telltale flourish, or town-planning simulators after SimCity (2015), which paved the way to the top of Cities: Skylines .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/373815/
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