Cool. I'm impressed by your pathing on the bugs and the fact that stuff isn't locked into a grid of preset spots. Moreover, this just looks fun.
I've always had sort of a soft spot for the RTS genre and to a lesser extent its simplified offshoot the tower defense game. I recall playing the Age of Empires, and Starcraft games a lot growing up, and Rise of Nations too. Not sure what happened to the genre, exactly, but I think it suffers from many of the same structural issues that led to the decline of 'Ameritrash' board games like Risk and Monopoly, in favor of Eurogames, namely the presence of player elimination and runaway advantages for the player who is winning, plus the games just tend to drag on a bit too long and often lack a real spread of alternate strategies in favor of 'dominant' strategic paths that are always the same within each civ or faction. When a game cuts out the weakest players halfway through and has them just kind of sit there doing nothing except wait for the next game to start, and it is obvious who will win for the last 30-40 minutes of a game, that's a design problem. If somebody can find a way to solve these recurring design issues in the genre while retaining the essence of the genre's appeal, and take advantage of modern graphics, they might be able to revive the category and breathe new life into it [maybe].
Starcraft, AoE and Conmmand & Conquer for me... yes, I love RTSs and want to get more RTS elements into this Tower defense. Your points on long, boring board games are well-taken. Re video games. What do you think of Starcraft2? Did they do everything right? And why didn't RTSs exactly rise again after that...
Yeah, I played C&C a bit too back in the day though that series just got more and more ridiculous as it went, and then it just sort of deteriorated to the point where nothing of quality was showing up, which I suspect was largely EA's fault as a meddling publisher. [RIP Westwood] I'm not sure why Starcraft 2 didn't do better - it was certainly well-designed in most respects but not popular enough to avert Blizzard's wholesale shift into the MMORPG category and away from doing anything more with the RTSs with (Starcraft/Warcraft). Basically the genre's been dormant or dead for 13 years now, following the release of SC2, aside from the occasional throwbacks embracing nostalgia like mobile port of C&C or the HD remaster of the original Starcraft and the first two Homeworld titles. (If you don't recall Homeworld, well, it was pretty noteworthy being an RTS circa 2000 with a true 3d map where combat and navigation were in sectors of fully 3-dimensional space, not just built off of a 2d terrain. Better executed and more genuinely 3d UI than, say, Star Trek: Armada 2 which was essentially still a 2d game in mechanics sense but running in a 3d engine and given a sense of depth)
And I'm really sort of unsure why this genre is gone but the 4x category, or at least the Civ series in particular, continues to hold out, even thrive.
There've been actual occasional attempts - not especially high-budget, but legit attempts - to revive it since SC2. Look at Cossacks 3, or Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Neither got much attention from the gaming public. But the genre isn't entirely gone. It's just niche.
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Cool. I'm impressed by your pathing on the bugs and the fact that stuff isn't locked into a grid of preset spots. Moreover, this just looks fun.
I've always had sort of a soft spot for the RTS genre and to a lesser extent its simplified offshoot the tower defense game. I recall playing the Age of Empires, and Starcraft games a lot growing up, and Rise of Nations too. Not sure what happened to the genre, exactly, but I think it suffers from many of the same structural issues that led to the decline of 'Ameritrash' board games like Risk and Monopoly, in favor of Eurogames, namely the presence of player elimination and runaway advantages for the player who is winning, plus the games just tend to drag on a bit too long and often lack a real spread of alternate strategies in favor of 'dominant' strategic paths that are always the same within each civ or faction. When a game cuts out the weakest players halfway through and has them just kind of sit there doing nothing except wait for the next game to start, and it is obvious who will win for the last 30-40 minutes of a game, that's a design problem. If somebody can find a way to solve these recurring design issues in the genre while retaining the essence of the genre's appeal, and take advantage of modern graphics, they might be able to revive the category and breathe new life into it [maybe].
Starcraft, AoE and Conmmand & Conquer for me... yes, I love RTSs and want to get more RTS elements into this Tower defense. Your points on long, boring board games are well-taken. Re video games. What do you think of Starcraft2? Did they do everything right? And why didn't RTSs exactly rise again after that...
Yeah, I played C&C a bit too back in the day though that series just got more and more ridiculous as it went, and then it just sort of deteriorated to the point where nothing of quality was showing up, which I suspect was largely EA's fault as a meddling publisher. [RIP Westwood] I'm not sure why Starcraft 2 didn't do better - it was certainly well-designed in most respects but not popular enough to avert Blizzard's wholesale shift into the MMORPG category and away from doing anything more with the RTSs with (Starcraft/Warcraft). Basically the genre's been dormant or dead for 13 years now, following the release of SC2, aside from the occasional throwbacks embracing nostalgia like mobile port of C&C or the HD remaster of the original Starcraft and the first two Homeworld titles. (If you don't recall Homeworld, well, it was pretty noteworthy being an RTS circa 2000 with a true 3d map where combat and navigation were in sectors of fully 3-dimensional space, not just built off of a 2d terrain. Better executed and more genuinely 3d UI than, say, Star Trek: Armada 2 which was essentially still a 2d game in mechanics sense but running in a 3d engine and given a sense of depth)
And I'm really sort of unsure why this genre is gone but the 4x category, or at least the Civ series in particular, continues to hold out, even thrive.
There've been actual occasional attempts - not especially high-budget, but legit attempts - to revive it since SC2. Look at Cossacks 3, or Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. Neither got much attention from the gaming public. But the genre isn't entirely gone. It's just niche.