Top Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time? 175
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "GameSpy is running a feature looking at the editors' picks for the top real-time strategy games of all time. Included on the list are such classics as StarCraft, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and Age of Empires. The article looks at each game's significance to the genre as a whole, as well as offering some reader feedback on the editors' choices. Why not grunt rush their server, have a look at their picks, and share some of your own RTS favorites here?"
C&C (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:C&C (Score:2)
The only problem we see is that the sides don't seem all that well balanced compared to something such as Yuri's Revenge (an add on for Red Alert 2). We fired up Yuri's over this past weekend and had a blast (ipx only though....) I don't know; the two games share a lineage, but since EA has the new C&C, it just doesn't feel the same.
Re:C&C (original -- Tiberian Dawn) (Score:2)
Whatever happened to C&C:Twilight or something like that?
Re:C&C (original -- Tiberian Dawn) (Score:2)
Thanks for replying.
Age of Empires II (Score:3, Interesting)
There is nothing like building an impenetrable fortress and a huge assault force and then unleashing your army on a neighbour.
I love love love that game. I love it. Love love love. Am I gushing? Sorry. :)
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:3, Funny)
I used to have fun setting up traps for my neighbour. Once I set up a Burger King-esuqe maze for him to walk back and forth through while towers picked away at his army. Heh. I had fun listening to him swear from the next cube.
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:2)
What is a Burger King-esque maze?
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:3, Funny)
At Burger King , they have this maze in front of the counter that you have to walk back and forth through before getting to the counter to order your meal. The place is never busy, but you still go in back and forth and back and forth. It's like "When I complete this, can I have a piece of cheese?"
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:2)
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:2)
Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
After doing the AoE expansion pack and some other stuff, he did Empire Earth. Similar idea, but this time "done right".
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
But then again, AOE2 introduced the "f
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
EE has an attack-move command. It has find-idle-worker and find-idle-fighter commands. The only command it lacks which I find myself missing occasionally is a "unit B, escort this other unit A" command. As it is, I can tell unit A to unconditionally move to point X, and unit B to attack-move to point X, but B will not match A's pace, and if they get separated, A becomes open to ambush.
In practice, it just means I need to split A in half and send a vanguard and a rear guard, with B between them.
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
Oh. I didn't know that. Clearly there was some cross-pollination of ideas, then, since some of the expansion pack ideas made their way into EE. (Or vice versa? Dunno.)
Re:Followup game by the AoE guy (Score:2)
At that point, most RTS developers were thinking along the same lines and heading in the same direction in terms of featues and GUI.
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Age of Empires II (Score:2)
I had a 'killing zone' of 15 to 20 cannon towers mixed in with 3 or 4 castles that got destroyed by 4 or 5 waves of maxed out Samumari. :)
Sometimes I hear that 'attack' noise in my head, as well as the 'trebuchet' (sp?) 'launch' noise. The sound of buildings being l
M.U.L.E. (Score:2)
Re:M.U.L.E. (Score:2)
playing dune 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
It was just great when it came
too bad I never liked the rts games that came after it as much, imho most of them were lacking in atmosphere.
though, I'd count populous 1 as rts anyways
Re:playing dune 2 (Score:2)
I also bought Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune. They were not great as the original game. Emperor was a better game than Dune 2000. Maybe EA Pacific (formerly Westwood Studios) should stop making Dune RTS games.
Up until 4 (Score:2, Insightful)
Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:5, Insightful)
Warcraft 1 lacked ease of use compared to Warcraft 2. Most notable point : No ability to right click movement. Thats right, everytime you wanted a group, which was limited to FOUR, you had to click 'M', and left click. Not only that you couldn't group units using the now standard Ctrl-# method, so juggling troops in the middle of a battle was a near impossibility. There was no "attack movement" either so strategies generally degraded into throwing armies at your opponent and then spending time telling each unit to engage the enemy over and over. Warcraft 1 was the equal of Warcraft 2 in an Alpha stage, a shoddy piece of crap which kept people playing because of the art and graphics. It didn't help that the only differences were their spells either, or the fact that all your building had to be connected to your town hall by ROADS... which had to be built (read : waste of money) INDIVIDUALLY (read : the computer will unfairly bum rush you).
To say every game before Warcraft 3 on the list is crap is ignorant. Dune 2 crap? Yeah, ignorant.
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:2)
It was paced much slower than its successors, and I think that you could see elements from a more turn-based conception peeking out beneath the real-time gameplay. For example, you could effectively move only one unit or small groups of units at a time, and none of the interface improvements which allowed for quicker gameplay as in Warcraft II were there. Also, the idea of roads are akin to Dune II's concrete
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:2)
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, not really. The only reason I picked up Warcraft I was because a friend gave me his copy. Warcraft I was a step BACKWARD compared to Dune 2 (which was developed by Westwood, Blizzard's rival during Warcraft II) all things considered.
At the time Dune 2 was FRIKIN AMAZING. THREE (relatively) distinctive sides, a constant threat which could f*** up your entire game (sandworm attacks were NOT alerted to the player, so you could lose an entire fleet of
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:2)
I agree with what you wrote otherwise (Warcraft I was a huge step backwards from Dune2, overall), but I thought Emperor was a fun game. Some really nice, interesting unit design in that game. The atmosphere was perfect, too.
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Up until 4 (Score:1)
yay! (Score:2)
Yay.
Re:yay! (Score:4, Interesting)
The one thing that bothered me was the lack of sufficient variety in units. More units, different spaceships, maybe a history to the units...that would have made it much cooler when you actually saw them in action.
Its really unfortunate that none of the big names in RTS picked up on this idea, because I think it has amazing potential.
Imagine rendering hundreds of ships in a raging 3-D battle in an asteroid field just outside a binary system. Wow.
Rise of the Nations (Score:2, Interesting)
My current favorite is Rise of the Nations [microsoft.com].
Before that Stronghold [stronghold-game.com] used to take a big chunk of my time.
Re:Rise of the Nations (Score:2)
The poor coordination in the beta program left me with a feeling of loss. The first version they shipped out to us was horribly, horribly bugged - in terms of artwork and game playability, as well as video card driver support (I had to downgrade my drivers until I figured out how to edit the game files to make it work with higher level drivers...I don't know if the game developers fixed the problem till much later).
Still, when I finally got to playing the game I
Seven Kindoms II (Score:1)
The great thing about Seven Kingdoms II was the espionage aspect of the game. Truely unique and made for interesting diplomocy. (Which was always broken in AOE and others).
Also, the concept of character leadership and changing hitpoints was a great feature. If your General had high leadership points, his troops would get extra damage bonus.
It's only failing was lack of single player replayability, IMHO
Dominion: Storm over Gift 3 (Score:1)
Re:Dominion: Storm over Gift 3 (Score:2)
Kohan (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Kohan (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kohan (Score:2)
Re:Kohan (Score:2)
But I don't work there or anything.
The choice is obvious: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't say I developed much of a taste for Warcraft III, though. Adding that whole 'hero' aspect just wasn't my style.
Not a bad list... (Score:4, Informative)
RoN is a truly amazing game once you get the basics down. It takes a while to get to a point where you feel "in control" of what is going on--for example, there are five different resources to juggle, and your military strategy needs to change significantly as you progress through the ages. What makes it stand apart from the other games in this list is that there is so much to juggle that you've got a lot more control over how to play out the game than you do in other games. There simply isn't a recipe for "how to win a game"; once you've gone beyond a few basic opening strategies, it's wide open. What's more, there's far less unit micromanagement than in other games in the genre: you send your armies into battle and control formations, but you rarely need to do the "now you attack this here" bit. Some people like this; to me, it goes against the nature of the RTS, changing it from being a game of strategy to being a game of who can click which units the fastest and most accurately.
Warcraft III was pretty and engaging, but it eventually boiled down to the classic Rock-Paper-Scissors style combat that dominates the genre. It's more of an action game than a strategy game, IMHO--gameplay relies on developing and guiding your heroes to determine the outcome of the battle, making it more of a dungeon crawl than a strategic title.
TA deserves that first place award. It's one of the few old-school RTS games I can still play and thoroughly enjoy. I'd love to see the engine updated to take advantage of modern hardware and UI enhancements...
Thermonuclear war? (Score:1)
Total Annihilation... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if I would have ra,ked it 1str, because the others listed in there are serious competition. but it's cool to see my best game ever as #1 ! For once things go my way, heh :) Some of you must know the feeling..
TA and extension packs (TA:CC, TA:BT) are the last games that I bought, and I still have them installed on my current computer, 2 generations later. I'm still playing it occasionnally, although not quite as much as I was in '97/98 !
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2)
I'd call it a tie with Myth.
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:5, Informative)
They're right. It was WAY ahead of it's time. Games today STILL don't give you the level of control that TA did.
Controls TA pioneered:
Order queuing: Hold down shift and you can give a unit a giant stack of orders. No limit (save memory I'd imagine). Warcraft 3 had it, 2 didn't. Starcraft didn't either.
Factory orders: You give an order queue to a factory, and every unit it produced would get those orders. This feature has yet to be duplicated (to my knowledge).
Factory groups: If you assigned a control group to a factory, every unit it produced was also in that group. I haven't seen this duplicated either.
Seperate move & shoot behavior controls: Some games give you the option of having a unit be agressive or passive or whatever, but TA seperated movement and firing options. For movement you had "hold still, tether (follow enemy a short distance and then return), and free roam". For attacking, they had "hold fire, return fire, and fire at will". In warcraft three you can order a unit to hold still, but you can't order it to hold it's fire.
Select all of *: TA had LOTS of keyboard shortcuts to let you select all of a particular group of units. Some of those groups included "all units that can attack", "air units" "ships", "construction units", "all the units on the current screen", "all units of the same type as the ones currently selected", stuff like that. Oh, and "all units".
Production Queues: You could order a factory to keep producing a given unit forever. You could order 5 fighers, then 10 bombers, then 5 more fighters, then 3 scouts, THEN keep building fighters forever.
Foritifications: You were allowed to build little barracades called "dragons teeth". They could be shot over with indirect-fire weapons, but direct fire hit them, and it took quite a bit of damage to destroy them. You could build your own walls.
Pay as you go production: Producing units drained resources over time, rather than paying for everything up front.
Unlimited resources: There was no limit on how much of a given resource was present. A "metal patch" with a miner on it would continue producing X-metal-per-second until it was destroyed. More of a gameplay descision than a control feature, but still noteworthy.
If you didn't like TA, you either
* Need to take another look
* Don't have the same tastes as right-thinking people (me).
And it was REALLY mod-able. Quite a few total conversions floating around out there. Sadly, many were based on someone else's IP and shut down (star wars, various other RTS's duplicated in TA, stuff like that).
Incidentally, Chris Taylor did quite a bit of "new spin on old ideas" in Dungeon Siege too. Sadly, he seems to have removed some "fun" stuff, along with many of the hassles. And I pray that he goes back and does that sci-fi RTS he's threatened to do on occasion.
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2, Insightful)
There wasn't much of an in-game personality, I admit. *craft has always had a more detailed 'unit personality'... particularly when you start clicking on the same unit over and over again (FUNNY stuff in there).
But I was immediately hooked on it... the sheer scope of TA was great. A
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2)
Starcraft may not have been as ahead of its time as TA, but it's still an awesome game. Blizzard have never been great innovaters - their strength is refining and polishing. And Starcraft is one of the most refined, polished, well-balanced games I've ever played. That's what makes it great.
No Myth? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's strongest quality was mostly the fact that it cut out all the annoying resource gathering and just let you work on the strategy part of killing your enemies.
I was hoping the ideas it brought to the genre would catch on (I think maybe Sacrifice is the only game I've played since that comes close) but it never caught on.
Doesn't change that it was an awesome game though.. I would have replaced that stinker 'Age of Empires' with Myth on that list any day.
Re:No Myth? (Score:1)
Re:No Myth? (Score:2)
C&C: RA2 (Score:1)
Battlezone, Battlezone, Battlezone (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I tend to get annoyed with the number of RTS games where you're winning wherever you go, mopping up every last unit of resistance and levelling the battlefield. Battlezone isn't like that - you're constantly battling to get out of the level alive and achieve the objectives before you get overpowered. That crucial difference leads to a very different mindset that I find more enjoyable in the long-term because you don't tend to end up with levels where you're hanging around for ages desperately trying to build up the army for the last final push, knowing you'll make it eventually just by storming the base and killing them all. You have to get it right just to live, and that's a victory in itself.
Superb game - if you can track it down, do.
Re:Battlezone, Battlezone, Battlezone (Score:2)
Reminds me of Command and Conqueor Renegade. cept a hell of alot better.
Re:Battlezone, Battlezone, Battlezone (Score:2)
* Gathering resources
* Building bases
* Commanding units
* Attacking enemies
and all in a mission-based structure, in real-time, as anything other than a descendent of Dune 2.
Stuff genres, though - I don't care whether something fits or not and it's very, very good.
Re:Battlezone, Battlezone, Battlezone (Score:2)
One glaring omission (Score:2)
Sure, I've played tons of hours on PC based RTS games and I did my time with the original C&C and Starcraft, but these guys didn't even give a nod to the million+ selling Advance Wars series (which by the way started well before the Herzog Zwei on the Genesis).
Sure its not as 3D pretty as PC based ones, but its portable and majorly addicting. I've killed more flights with that game
Advance Wars? Um... (Score:4, Insightful)
The List (Score:2, Informative)
2. StarCraft w/ Brood War
3. C&C Red Alert
4. WarCraft 3
5. Age of Empires
6. Homeworld
7. Close Combat 2
8. Rise of Nations
9. Medieval: Total War
10. Empire Earth
Honorable Mention: Dune 2
Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (Score:2)
As I recall, the biggest complaint was that
Dune 2 (Score:2)
What's with the honorable mention crap? (Score:2, Interesting)
Warcraft II (Score:2)
Does SimCity count? (Score:2)
If it counts, it'd be the only game on the table that's not about battle in one way or another.
SimCity was great. SimCity 2000 was better, because its gameplay was considerably deeper. (SC 3000 went a bit too far, I thought, into micromanagement; and so the first sequel in the series re
Re:Does SimCity count? (Score:2)
A game wherein two or more sides, each of which has a base on a single battle map, build facilities and units in order to destroy the opposing base(s) while defending its own in real time.
This definition excludes games where you don't build units or facilities on the battle map (e.g. the Total War games) or at all (e.g. Myth). Both of those examples would be real-time tactics (within a turn-based strategic shell, in the
After reading the article (Score:2)
Rob (Note that I didn't use the word "begs," grammarians)
Empire Earth made the list? (Score:3, Insightful)
They put out a half finished game and made you wait 6 months before it was playable.
The AI was laughable. It was so poor at resource management it cheated on every difficulty level, evey easy. It was totaly incapable of building an army, it would simply spam buildings and vills with the occasional military unit thrown it.
Nealry every age was hopelessly unbalanced, for a game that stressed how important counter units were, Persian cavarly would dominte everything on the battle field for 3 or 4 ages only to finaly be replaced by another unstoppable army.
Maybe they fixed it in 2.0 patch/Expansion pack but i never stuck around to find out. There were far better games out there, like ones that a person could stand to play.
To put EE on there and snub good games like Warcraft II or Stronghold Crusader or even Cossaks, is inexplicable.
Only two contenders... (Score:4, Interesting)
Any other RTS I've ever played I've been able to consistently use overwhelming numbers to beat the other players, be it online or off. Problem is that, yes, there is some strategy involved, and in an evenly matched battle the one who can effectively micromanage special abilities or troops will win. But in all the games I've played (sans the two mentioned, and I've played just about every game called an RTS out there, and some that weren't but still qualified) if you have at least 1.5 times more troops than your enemy, nothing will save you. (I'm talking equally skilled players here, an idiot will lose no matter how many troops he gathers)
Rise of Nations really took the idea of borders to the next level, which made it incredibly hard to effectively attack enemy territory because you could never affect the economy directly (before an assault) of any player with decent skill.
Homeworld because the concept of specific units being effective against other specific units actually mattered. Yes in other games it's been done, and using that to your advantage could mean a win, but it wasn't a critical factor. In Homeworld even basic fighters never really lost their effectiveness against more advanced ships (Fighters ate Ion Frigates for lunch), and combine that with future releases like the Beast infection beam or the cannon you could add to the mining ship, you really had to stop and consider how to make an attack.
I'll throw in two honorable mentions:
#1: Total Annihlation. Although not revolutionary in terms of the engine, the modability and the diverse units (Land, Sea, and Air in a Sci-fi setting) really made this game shine.
#2: Dune 2 and Warcraft 2. These I only mention because they were the games that sparked the RTS industry. Yes others came before them, but these two became so popular that they made the difference. (Just like Half-Life/Couter Strike for FPS, Diablo for dungeon crawls, Falcon series for Flight Combat Sims, etc...)
Cytron Masters (Score:2)
As someone who doesn't play many RTSs.... (Score:2)
TA -- Yes, they made the right choice. (Score:2)
TA reigns supreme!
I can honestly say that I don't understand how StarCraft could come in at #2. I'd been playing and hacking around on TA for a year when StarCraft came and did nothing better than TA. I gave up the SC campaign on the third of fourth map and never went back.
TA I played again a couple of weeks ago and had a good time. Works very well on newer faster machines, though it's a little hard to play over the internet due to the way network play is implemented and the problems with NAT.
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Although gamespy liked the graphics, I had a big problem with them. Yes, it was 3D, which made for some beautiful maps. However, the units, IMO, were plainer than plain. They were all boxey and ultimately had very little character (as contrasted to Starcraft, where eveything was quite distinct and enjoyable to look at, and listen to).
Then you've got this comment "You don't just order an attack -- you send in a WAVE of hundreds of units, a wall of steel death that will fill the screen with awesome-looking explosions for minutes on end. You can build a nuclear missile capable of destroying a screen full of units, but it's worthless to build just one: Typically, you send them over in batches of a dozen or more. Obscene? YES. That's Total Annihilation! Every game was non-stop action, carnage, and brutality at a level never seen before or since. ". While I am sure there was lots of strategy involved in competitive TA play, this statement belies that fact. Mass and attack has very little strategy to it. Weapons that destroy an entire screen full of units, that can be mass produced, is not much in the way of strategy. Its like asking a 12 year-old and a 40 year-old their favorite movie. One is going to say "Super death explosion 12" while the other is going to say "Mystic River".
Perhaps, I'll dust off TA and give it another try. Being a Blizzard fan, I never really got into it all that much.
However, I was a little disappointed not to see mention of one of the best RTS pre-cursors, Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. That game had many of the elements that are in current games and did it back in the mid 80s.
Also, another game not mentioned was 7 Kingdoms or its sequel. While I could never really get into it, it did have a number of really interesting features that I would love to see in future games, such as spies that took on the enemies color and could be integrated into their force.
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:5, Informative)
I used to play TA tournaments: a LOT of strategy was involved (especially before Cavedog started monkeying around with the balance with the units they released weekly, after Chris Taylor left IMHO things went downhill pretty fast).
Yes, when you see newbies play it's going to be pretty boring, but expert play is a completely different kettle of fish. It =can= happen even among experts that you'll have a pretty sizeable battle where you throw everything at your opponent, but obviously before you do that you have to be pretty sure you're going to win (recon, selective bombing, multiple fronts,
TA's greatest strenght is its UI in my opinion, being able to queue things so easily, creating groups, pathing, guarding and so on gives a lot of flexibility to the experienced player.
Install TA, grab TA:M (TA mutation) and some of the latest AIs (that are MUCH better than the one shipped with the game) and you'll have a lot of fun, believe me.
See TA experts in action (Score:2)
For those that would like to see some great TA games - more than just newbie vs. newbie on an all metal map - you might want to check out the excellent fan-created Demo Recorder [clan-sy.com]. Then, you'll probably want to download some TA game recordings. [planetannihilation.com]
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:2)
I bought and played Seven Kingdoms II several years ago.
Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed. It had some novel ideas (the spy and mercenary system) but overall it failed to hold the attention of gamers.
The single player campaign (although randomized) was not terribly interesting - human civilizations fighting a war against demons (the Frythans) sounded pretty cliche to me. Plus, when they went for the randomized campaigns they had to ditc
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:1)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:2)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:1)
Why? Gamespy pays you by the click or something?
I don't see how putting the list on
Well, they're damn right! (Score:1)
Re:Starcraft? (Score:4, Interesting)
The missions were pointless. That's what Battle.net was for. That's where the strategy was.
Starcraft balanced recourse gathering, unit and building production, expansion, technological progression, and battle tactics in a clear and elegant way.
In my opinion the only problem with Starcraft was people's tendency to play games with lots of resources (think Big Game Hunters) and sit behind defenses and build carriers. It made it hard to find a game with decent players :)
Re:Starcraft? (Score:2)
I did this against one player four times in a row.
Re:Starcraft? (Score:2)
Arguably the best AI I've ever played against.
Re:Starcraft? (Score:2)
Re:Starcraft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Rushes kinda killed the game, cause its a way for a decent player to discourage those that learn. Experts playing never even rush, cause if your opponent knows how to defend it, you are toast.
Re:Total Annihalation (Score:2, Insightful)
I ask because I'm a viciously good TA player and I don't think I've EVER seen a successful "mass rush" without thought behind it--as in scouting, diversionary attacks, and multiple fronts.
Sure the AI sucked. But for pure strategy/tactics, it's much better.
And as for Starcraft/Warcraft, I have yet to see a successful player who doesn't use a pre-memorized (And usually researched online) build order
Re:Total Annihalation (Score:2, Insightful)
TA had build orders too. It just wasn't popular enough for them to become common. any game like this, when faced with high levels of competition eventually optimize their strategies. TA does have less variety fo units. The only varibales for th euntis are range, damage, speed, and hitpoints. If it had the 20,000 players daily that Starcraft or Warcraft has it too would start having commonly used strategies. Pre-canned build o
Re:Total Annihalation (Score:2)
IMO the high point of Starcraft (and in particular Brood Wars) is that no unit ever becomes obsolete*. A few examples:
1) Medics and marines never get useless against Zerg unless they go with massive amounts of ultralisks in which case you ought to be smart enough
Re:warcraft3 (Score:2)
Re:warcraft3 (Score:2)
Re:Herzog Zwei! (Score:2)
I never played it but I do still play Dune on my genesis all the time. In fact the first time I saw starcraft was in a class. The guy sitting next to me was playing it on his laptop. It looked cool so I watched a while and once I had an idea of how it worked I told him- "Hey, that's just like Dune on my Sega"
Re:Dune 2 (Score:2)