Rts is great but many people nowadays don’t touch the genre and the people that play it are spread out across every rts game that ever existed. TA still has a community and it came out in 1997.
I’ve always played rts games extremely casually never playing single player but never playing 1v1 ranked. When you’re bad the games take so much longer and start slower. So it’s litterally a more boring game until you get good.
Playing beyond all reason and playing 1v1s for the first time has forced me to drop my noob habits and actually play rts properly. Its intense having to manage your raiding units while expanding while protecting that expansion while scouting while keeping your base safe and growing. But it’s so rewarding when you win.
Now I see newer players and what they have to go through I understand why so many quit. They join a lobby called “all welcome” then get kicked because no one wants the noob on their team. They get flamed. People run circles around them in game and attack before they have a single unit out. Rts is hard to learn but so fun once you have the basics down and can actually start developing strategies and reacting to your opponents in real time. Idk even know what I’m trying to say here I just woke up.
I love RTS but I rarely play it these days because I don’t have a lot of screen time. When I have half an hour to pick up my device I’m probably going to play an FPS. I did start a play through of the original homeworld campaigns a while back but I’ve not had time to progress far.
Personally, I consider “retro graphics” to specifically mean the graphics evoke the look of an old game system, as opposed to just having “lo-fi” art. So I’d say that Celeste has great pixel art, but it’s not retro graphics, since it doesn’t remind me of any old console’s look. In addition to the games others have mentioned, I’ll point out these ones.
Indie games using retro graphics is nothing new. The ratio of effort vs looks is pretty good. The solo dev of Cave Story (released 2004) said that was why he went for that aesthetic.
<span style="color:#323232;">Fixed Scene 2 ( almost )
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Fixed Entering cars
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added back the Hatchback
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Made cars more explosive
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added animations to Jack
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added Jump Animation to Dani
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Fixed swimming
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added a settings system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added a settings UI ( GTK )
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Added a savings system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Made so it saves cars in garage.
</span>
Find yourself a Radio Control, a Smart Lamp, a Noisemaker, and a few radio activation mods. Mod the noisemaker to look for Green signals and use it to draw zombies away (or towards caltrops/nailboard traps you placed). Throw the smart lamp and activate it with Blue to act as a renewable flare you can turn off. You can mod ONE bomb/grenade at a time with red and explode dangerous enemies around corners with precision timing. Careful not to press red by accident though, it’s the default button when you activate the radio controls.
Speaking of nailboards/caltrops, those are my favorite weapon against unarmored zombies; they do not have any sense of self preservation, so they’ll just stomp the caltrops until they bleed out if they’re in a good spot or have an active noisemaker on them.
You can use permanent markers and pocket settings to make your inventory cleaner. I have an IFAK pouch attached to my backpack that I put a first aid kit in, which I can Open and Close to reduce menu clutter. Inside the first aid kit are ziploc baggies that whitelist one item each, all with maximum priority so that I can easily top off supplies between runs.
Molle storage is the best, be sure to remove all pockets from any zombo soldiers you defeat to grab specialized pockets for your gear.
Make or find yourself a cart to drag around (g or G to drag it). It it doesn’t have wheels it’ll be quite loud. Sound = attraction = death in most cases.
Don’t bother with cars for a long while, even one that actually runs. They take a lot to maintain and cause a lot of noise (see above). You’re better off starting with a bike for midrange transportation (or if using mods a foldable bike).
When you start building or find a nice base area, make a crafting nook and drop all your items nearby to it. When crafting you can pull ingredients from 1-2 tiles adjacent.
Drive it like you stole it. You’re gonna do poorly for a long time until you get your head wrapped around it, so just be curious and see if that thing DOES kill you. Then you know to avoid it. There are some good tutorials on YT that can help. Might be a bit dated, but should get you a decent start. Good luck!
That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.
And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.
Starcraft 2 has the best control scheme out of all the RTS games that I have played. I wish Age of Empires 2 could put the map on the left, then I would be way better at using it.
Fog of war
Just play Terran and scan, hurr durrrrrrr. Interestingly, AoE2 has a game option of letting everyone see each other by default.
And dogs, rats, greasels, karkians, and fish if you’re standing (the game doesn’t have a use animation while swimming), and grays too but you’ll take damage when you do it
What I want out of romance in games is to have it take you by surprise, which often means it’s not a “romance option”. Some of the best character scenes I’ve seen wrapped some other major plot point into the fact that one person cares a bit too deeply about another, and processes it all very suddenly.
So I’m fine with this removal. All those romance choices in RPGs like Fallout and Skyrim felt ultra shallow to me. Even BG3 just seems like raw wish fulfillment from a horny cast.
As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.
Still some of the best party shooters out there. A plethora of game modes, and a co-op story mode as well. The original and FP are great games. 2 took itself a little too seriously in my opinion (and didn’t have character select lines) for it to match up to quite the same level.
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