Why did the RTS genre die?

Why did the RTS genre die?

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Too complicated

>refusal to invest into proper AI
>pushed multiplayer as solution instead
>but RTS multiplayer sucks
>because you're all assholes

its one of the best competitive 1v1 genres out there

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*and by proper AI I'm not even referring to NN and modern crap. Just ordinary optimization techniques, solving bunch of linear systems, such stuff. And most importantly: AI isn't supposed to be super hard and uber-human. They're supposed to have "character" such that they're fun. You need to come up with AI variants that show totally different personalities. That's the good shit. But nobody does any of this. Because multiplayer.

SC2 still has 2 million active players each month, there are hundreds of custom games lobbies, you can find ranked games at all but the very very top levels in less than 10 seconds at every time of the day. There are tons of tourneys still going on, including GSL which is still being hosted by Tasteless and Artosis.

The dumb mofoer who invented the term rtt on wiki in 2010

Doesn't matter, it's too complicated for a casual audience. Which means whoever the devs are, won't make jack shit for money. No money = no game.

I'll add that then the focus on multiplayer forces to watch balance very closely, and that half of the time goes on detriment of gameplay itself

the last RTS that really wow'd me was Z. It took the dusty click orgy base building genre, and made it fresh again. Probably not the best RTS, but at the time Z had the most impact for me. Fantastic game.

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I'm playing that new Line War game now and having a great time. It feels somewhat new.

Because nobody has made a game more interesting than what we had 20 or so years ago. The genre hasn't grown conceptually since then. Every rts since is some kind of reskin with fewer features and a smaller playerbase. Icycalm figured this out. Why can't you?

Explain how multiplayer didn't call Warcraft3.

This is important. RTS is alive, but again, it's stagnant. Starcraft 2 is a polished remix of Starcraft 1, a game that should look ancient compared to new rts games. But it doesn't. Pretty much every rts since is starcraft in another setting with more or less polish.

Gooks love MOBAs because it's all of the team sports for fat nerds aspect of strategy games with none of the aesthetic spectacle stuff that's completely lost on their bug brains which are only interested in a power trip.

Z's focus on individual soldiers without becoming bogged down is still unique.

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I was definitely using the term RTT before 2010

Elitism and gatekeeping

RTS didn't die
>AOE 2 has persisted for 20 years into a competitive and casual multiplayer powerhouse full of tons of official campaigns, co-op campaigns, custom campaigns, multiplayer game modes, and an active singleplayer and team game ladder for both random map and empire wars. Last year were the biggest AOE2 tournaments of all time including one in a real European castle. The game literally got an expansion with 4 civs 2 weeks ago
>Starcraft Brood War has persisted almost as long
>Starcraft 2 sold big and still has over a million players
>Both versions of Starcraft get insane viewership
>WC3 had a healthy RTS scene until Blizzard came in and made Warcraft 3 Refunded, the scene would be perfectly fine right now if Blizzard had never touched it
>Age of Empires 1 is massive in vietnam
>Age of Empires 4, while a terrible game in the end, proves the market desire for big budget RTS still exists as it was one of the best selling steam games of 2021 despite being a part of goypass
The reality is that you call the genre dead because you're seething that not everyone plays RTS as compstomps with their childhood friends and dad because that's what you did back in the day and so you screech and cry and try to demand that RTS devs cater their releases to retards who want to willfully never learn the games mechanics. So you go out of your way to embarrass yourselves crying about how the genre is dead, and then turn around and seething about build orders and micro when someone suggests you play Age or Starcraft.

Age of Empires 2 was designed and balanced around tournament results from Age of Empires 1. in 1999. You were never in good company in this genre, you insufferable faggots.

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AoE4 is great
Company of Heroes 3 is on the way
All there is to pray for now is a good entry to Dawn of War

Shill it to me

I saw it on steam too
they got the colors right and that's what grabs the rts boomers.

>Explain how multiplayer didn't call Warcraft3.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Wanna rephrase?

>Z's focus on individual soldiers without becoming bogged down is still unique.
Warcraft3 later also went into this direction, especially with that soloplayer bonus campaign, with it's hero characters (which I like, btw. similarly leveling up chars in c&c generals was also great). And then you got that bastard of an RTS tower defense thingy with heros. And once you're down to only a hero's tower defense multiplayer became something totally different. Probably for the better. Ordinary/classic RTS are insane/unplayable in MP.

I actually had to look up aoe4 because I thought you were being funny. I completely forgot about 4, what a shame it turned out the way it did for me to just completely memory hole it.

Yeah, it didn't catch on because it wasn't AoE2: Reloaded, and the market for a new RTS is pretty small. Still, imo solid game and for those that don't like it AoE2 is still getting regular developer love so all is right in the world.

>AoE4 is great
Literally the worst RTS I've ever played. Relic are frauds and I'm never buying from them again after what they did to AOE.
>Click delays on units
>Bad hitboxes for unit selection making it impossible to click a sheep surrounded by vils, a monk in the middle of an army, etc
>The water tech tree, the chinese, and the abbassid dynasty are blatantly unfinished and as a result will be in hotfix hell until the end of time or until they can get more than a skeleton crew back on board to do some actual redesign work
>EVERY single new balance patch and bugfix adds a new gamebreaking glitch that makes multiplayer a hellish experience
>Every single unit has basically no collision so it's just mobbing deathballs at each other
>Camera still fucked and Relic have been adversarial retards about it instead of saying they're gonna fix it
>UI permafucked
It's a fucking shame because the designs of the other 6 civs are actually fun, but eventually the filter of shit mechanics you experience the civs through just kills your enjoyment.

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>it didn't catch on because it wasn't AoE2: Reloaded
It literally is
>and the market for a new RTS is pretty small
Was the best selling game on steam for like a month, and one of their top sellers for the year
>Still, imo solid game
Nothing about AOE4 is solid. It's a complete disaster.

Very simple foundation principles, create buildings to produce soldiers and vehicles to capture territory and income and fight the other guy's stuff. No tech trees or different army types. You both have the same stuff. Resources are power and capital, which are largely but not entirely dependent upon certain key locations. Maps are randomly generated with seeds. Important to work your way up to combined arms to fight effectively. Simple and satisfying balance with land, air, and sea units. Game is very slow paced and you can't give many direct orders to units. Idea is instead that the war is fought with big general commands. The Lines in Line War.

You draw lines which serve roles like 'attack move', 'move fast', 'defend along this', and so on. The game is slow paced enough that this doesn't cause any problems once you take a little time to understand the few systems and inputs at work. It's the best attempt I've seen at making an rts that functions on an executive level. If a game gets big you can have several active fronts of fighting at once without it feeling overwhelming.

I'd recommend looking on youtube for examples of how it looks in action. Earlier I found a recording of a game that went for a decent while and showed off a few different neat elements of the game. Both players seem to have an intermediate grasp of how the game works.

youtu.be/DWCqipZBZhU

*kill Warcraft3

I really like how it looks. It reminds me of Advance Wars. And in more ways than just how it looks actually. It feels like Advance Wars in that it's very thoughtful, puzzle like, feels like it revolves around big key moves made with solid parts that interact tightly. Can't overstate how polished this game feels even though it's not feature-complete. It's probably the least frustrated I've felt playing an rts, even when I lose.

See that's the problem, iterations that aren't even bigger. Smaller even. This gets dull.

RTS need a new interface for how you play them, so they don't end up in a fucking click orgy. No more micro-management. Better high level strategy tools. Maybe with clever hierarchies you can "program", to delegate strategy/tactics to your subordinates and so on. But who is willing to take that risk of trying to come up with a new RTS variant/gameplay? Yeah...

>Is that...skillful execution in a real-time game? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"No micro" fags are huffing pure copium.

Too complicated and stressful for your casual audience, too stale and repetitive for your dedicated fans. It's basically solved genre, like rock in music.

micro shit in a real-time game is stressful and simply not fun. for me. if you like that, more power to you. I don't. I prefer round-based strategy anyways, and yes, there I wish for more, fresh ideas to show up in new games. if you don't and rather have your click orgy RTS, then that's cool. I don't give a shit. does that resolve your fucking problem, or what.

I made the post above yours, check out the game I'm shilling for free. I didn't even get a key or anything. Paid launch price.

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I just remember the AI cheating like hell. Giving me 10 minutes to build a jeep while pumping out tanks at 1 minute and always perfectly sniping drivers with the first shot.

thanks lad, will give this a shot

You don't like RTS and what's more your idea of somehow removing skillful execution from real time gameplay is fundamentally impossible. Imagine a fighting game where execution doesn't matter??? No matter what fucking barriers you try to put between the player and their units, someone will figure out how to maneuver them better than you and get things out faster than you. Next you'll say "Noooooo you aren't allowed to use a build order to get your units out in an optimal timeframe that's cheating" and come up with another stupid buzzword like "click orgy" that you've been trying to push all thread.

You are one and the same with the bottom feeding journalists and whinging retards begging FROM to add an easy mode to their games. You might actually be even worse, because their reasoning is "I don't want to get good, so I shouldn't have to" and your reasoning is "I don't want to get good, so nobody should be allowed to".

You want a turn based game, Go play Fire Emblem, you insufferable dumbass. Fuck you.

thanks, will check it out. but I currently don't even have a proper graphics card anymore, rip my 280x, so I can only play alicesoft titles on my igpu in the meantime.

you sure you aren't imagining things? The game was super hard, but I don't remember cheating AI. Then again, this was so many years ago..
>Giving me 10 minutes to build a jeep while pumping out tanks at 1 minute
isn't it just for the fact that the factory timers don't reset? so you can hold that bitch for the longest time, lose control when it's ready just for a little bit and no jeep/tank for you, but for the enemy? eh, whatever. Z was tits.

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Turn based strategy
>Bring my units into a predetermined square that they're allowed to travel to
>Watch a cutscene of the units fighting that will be determined by raw stats I knew in advance and a tiny bit of chance that can cause swings in close encounters
>Push victory through the handful of predetermined ways the devs had in mind
Real time strategy
>Get to 20 villagers and age up to feudal
>Walk 10 villagers over to my enemies base
>Delete my town center
>Build a NEW town center on enemy's home base while he tries to stop me by setting up building foundations
>Start setting up an eco and military inside of his base
>One of a metric ton of viable strategies executed in the game on a daily basis
But somehow clicking makes the game less strategic, right fuckwad?

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Not an RTS.

>isn't it just for the fact that the factory timers don't reset?
Nah it was the AI cheating. But you could win most missions by taking all your starting units straight to the enemy base and drive in.

It didn't die. RTS has always been a bit of a niche genre. The problem is devs now don't seem to know how to make them good anymore. Just look at Age of Empires. AoE4 has about half the active players on Steam as AoE2:DE because it just isn't as good. Considering a good chunk of aoe2 players are not even 90s boomers just shows you how solid that game is.

it doesn't work on console/mobile

Yes it is. And a very good one.

This invites the other extreme of criticism, do you believe that your game is more hardcore than Street Fighter? They handle more variables than you and they're coming harder and faster with more complex decision-making and inputs needed to overcome and win. If you want to say that's irrelevant because it's not strategy, think of it this way. Hands and feet are your units.

B O R I N G
O
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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>They handle more variables than you
Oh lawd.

No RTS has ever been solved. But you know what has?
>Marvel vs Capcom 2
>Marvel vs Capcom 3
>Street Fighter 2
>Street Fighter 3
>Street Fighter 4
>Melee
Just off the top of my fucking head. Fighting games are unga bunga tier in the face of something like Age of Empires 2 sheer variables. More pro games than not end up going massively off meta because of how much each individual match becomes it's own things.

You're an honest to god mentally disabled person user.

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Casuals refuse to adapt into metaslaves and minmaxing micro/macro like some autistic gook

>You want a turn based game
no, I just said I tend to prefer them, because RTS gameloop, multiplayer in particular, is mostly bastardized ass. Real-time games need better gameplay mechanics than found in your ordinary RTS, if you ask me. No need to sperg out. I don't have any influence on the matter and what they come up with next anyways.
>no u are the problem
dsss

>Turn based strategy
yeah, I don't like it either if they turn out to be mere puzzles you can optimally solve. Not too happy with most of those games either. E.g. advance wars, formerly battle isle, is such a game that turns into an abstract puzzler. That's when these games tend to lose me, I space out, and go play something else, more fun.
The best games here are still CIV and the likes. Colonization was nice too. The important thing here is likely to overwhelm the player with a huge world and infinite possibilites/room for fun activities, that it never degrades into a brainlet puzzler, and remains fun anything can happen.
>But somehow clicking makes the game less strategic
no, it's mostly a problem of interface and how I can't issue better, more effective commands, more adequate for a real-time gameplay. Baby sitting every single little shit unit is not my cup of tea.

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The majority of people that found rts fun refer to the casual aspects of it involving facing off against AI in scenarios/campaigns or doing fun matches with your friends. New devs and returning devs get it wrong trying to copy what Blizzard tried to do with esports. Having multiplayer is great but when a game is centered around it (especially with ranked systems) it starts to develop metas for the players rather than there just being whacky crazy shit everywhere.
RTS as a genre in the current day lends itself better to be used in other genres and I'm surprised more people haven't taken advantage of things like RTS base builder but you can command units in giant armies like you're on the field with them, or an RPG with similar mechanics. The scale of RTS needs to go up, the variety of things to do in the genre needs to go up, and we need to stop making ones surrounded around this dogshit 3D planet mapping trend.

Who's making more decisions per second? AoE2 player or SF5 player? AOE2 has lots of decisions but half of this is on the level of mindfulness exercise. If you cut out the plate-spinning of "got to keep my logging camps efficient and delegate my villagers to stone as soon as I have 3 on gold" they key points end up sparse. I know you can make minute adjustments to these small parts of the picture that can make vital differences, I play a bit of AoE2, but when I play decently and win I don't really feel like my mind is running hard and fast. It feels more like mental work than thought, if that makes sense.

i remember this game
it had bullshit difficulty

The same thing that kills any game
>devs releasing unfinished products and turning people off their game at launch
>shitty DLC practices, unit packs, etc (this was honestly more of a 2010s problem, but certain companies still get off on releasing tiny paid expansions for their games)
>balancing games around a tiny "competitive scene" rather than responding to easily accessible fan feedback
>generally just putting more effort into generating hype and making wacky social media posts than actually developing a great game
I can't understate the first point, because I've seen it happen so many times with games that should have been new classics.

Total War is what RTS games should be

>and I'm surprised more people haven't taken advantage of things like RTS base builder
oh man, I loved me some arma 2 warefare/rts. multiplayer. in fucking real time. then the much superior arma 3 came, but forgot to deliver warefare buildings and many other things. bummer. king of the hill just isn't the same.

No Warcraft 4

most fun RTS, maybe ever, was pic related. and came for free with my gforce3. SACRIFICE! So fucking good. And it almost plays like arma 2 warefare: you get to control your own little squad, limited by souls. Very similar in a way. Of course sacrifice was a crazy magics and monsters games with spells and all kinds of whacky shit. the last spells you learn (volcano and what not) was absolutely brutal stuff. Fantastic game. Go play some sacrifice if you missed it. That's how an RTS works, without all the boring shit. Also notice: basically no micro-management. Instead you set up your squad mates in certain patterns/formations (again similar to arma), and off you go. So fucking good.

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Competitive balance changes impacted casual/lower level player enjoyability