pgoeleven — Long comments are something that make me feel far less nerdy and dirty due to the high volume of material I write in each of these three (eventually four) parts of this series alone. I’m fairly certain that if I combined all the reviews and editorials I’ve written alone into a compiled book, the ending volume would have enough mass to knock a grown man unconscious.

In a simple/grand sense, I think my RTT/RTS distinction works. It, obviously, doesn’t hold up for all games of either genre (look to the recently released Joint Task Force for an example of a game which doesn’t fall neatly into either category) all the time, but I think as a bare metric it does the job adequately. Mere base-building doesn’t constitute a RTS necessarily, but most RTSs are not actually tactical games. Similarly, some tactical games have base-building in some sense (the Total War series, for instance) but are titles I wouldn’t consider real-time strategy. Chris Taylor is quoted as saying something along the lines of: “Strategy is what you do before a battle, and tactics is what you do during it.” I think it’s actually a fairly decent way of categorizing the differences between the two words. That said, I’d consider the Warcraft an RTS due to the fact that everything a player does is simply a lead-up into a few choice skirmishes across the map. The battles ultimately decide the winner of a game, but in terms of overall gameplay, they constitute a very small amount of actual play-time.

Also, no matter what, I’d say that Company of Heroes is probably one of the best RTSs released in recent years. It’s fairly typical Relic fare, but it does so many aspects of the genre well that it feels fairly revolutionary even if it isn’t actually that. It’s one of the two (maybe three) games I’ll put a big focus into for Part 4, though.

Thanks for the comments, guys!

OK apparantly you did touch on the subject of RTS vs. RTT (but you seem to have a different view of the matter. In my book, base building does not consitute strategy) and Soldiers HOWWII. I did not see the first parts due to the link I followed here.

Finally some one who gets the history and inter-relations of RTS games right.

It is kind of sad really, I started out - like many probably - on the C&C series, such pleasure I got from those games back in the day… Then came a lot of clones, which were OK, but really did nothing to further the genre. The last of the games based on the C&C formula that I could enjoy was WarCraft 2. It didn’t innovate, but it copied really well and was just plain fun.

Then we had TA, the single greatest “RTS” game in my book. After that, it just went downhill I think, for a long time at least, until we got games like Homeworld. I always found it strange that TA was never copied, it baffles me in fact. The queueing of orders? Why was that never copied?!

And here we are 2006, and basically developers are still basing all of their games off a formula that was introduced well over a decade ago (with computers being a lot more powerful you’d think you’d be getting MORE units on screen instead of less) but now with the obligatory RPG element. Apparantly it works for a lot of people (Company of Heroes being the most recent example), but I just can’t be bothered anymore. I’ve done all this before: rubber band a lot of units and send them towards the enemy… sigh.

I suspect Supreme Commander will bring new hope to the genre for me. I just hope it gets the attention it deserves and doesn’t get plowed over by Blizzard again (you know they have a lot in the pipeline).

Before I finish my long-winded comment (lament? :p), I’d like to talk a bit about the misconception between “strategy” and “tactics”. In fact, none of these games are really strategy games in my book. They are all tactical games. The only games that have a strategy element to it, as far as I know, are the games in the Total War series. (and you can argue that that element is not real-time :p). It seems a lot of people reserve the word “tactical” for games like Soldiers: Heroes of WWII, just because it is on a smaller scale.

(I find it a serious omission btw that no Total War game was discussed, and to a lesser extent Soldiers.)

Good read.

As of the latest patch to Brood War Terran is the MOST deep and complex race to play.

And Starcraft didn’t add innovation to the genre? Compared to Warcraft II, the races have actually become differentiated, instead of being clones of each other with different animations.

Though, I will admit, I do digress a lot.

And yeah, Code, I do think Supreme Commander will really be to Total Annihilation the way that Starcraft was to Warcraft 2.

Repetition is bad, being boring is bad. But having a lot to say? Never apologize for that, as long as what you say is interesting.

Myrddin