What game are you currently playing to get your TA fix? And which project are you most excited about?

@SuperKitowiec

4 ай бұрын

Beyond all reason is great 😊

@leagueofboosted3318

4 ай бұрын

@@SuperKitowiec all day everyday!

@qsfff5099

4 ай бұрын

you can choose option to use right click for orders in TA, it becomes to be like modern rts

@robson668

4 ай бұрын

BAR and Sanctuary

@Eewokney

4 ай бұрын

for me SUPCOM FAF is the best RTS; and successor of TA. BAR is okay but the community patches of FAF makes it a masterpiece

Thank you for telling this story and obviously, including BAR in here! We're honored to be part of this list and this strengthens our devotion to reach that release on Steam even more. ❤ Thank you, again!

@jamesyoungquist6923

4 ай бұрын

I got TA when it launched after reading about it in PCGamer (dad drove me to bestbuy :p), and was ecstatic when i came across BAR a little while ago. Thanks a million for keeping the dream alive, really is the best RTS

@GreatGreenGoo

4 ай бұрын

BAR in my opinion is the best spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and in many ways surpasses it. I am curious if your ever going to do a campaign?

@MrDerKnofi

4 ай бұрын

You guys are amazing and insane. I love watching replays, because I just suck, but it is sooo good.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey! Thanks for featuring my video on the Discord - I'm glad you enjoyed being part of it. I've certainly been enjoying BAR and I look forward to following its continued development :)

@BeyondAllReason

4 ай бұрын

@@GreatGreenGoo We're in the preparation-phase for a campaign to be actually made as we want it to. This involves writing new code that can properly handle triggers, actions, events etc. And hopefully we can write this API in an easy way, so other people can create their own missions and/or scenarios as well. We already have a first mission with a rough version of the triggers/actions and it works pretty well already.

What I like in ZK and miss in basically all other RTS-es incl BAR is unit AI. Skirmishers kite, raiders run in zigzag patterns to avoid easy targeting by enemies, cloaked units automatically hold fire until decloaked, and cloaked scouts automatically fall back to avoid being detected (and then return to their position), there is auto-return to repair zones on per-unit configurable health threshold, and then there is Central Build Queue, or constructors AI, where you just place buildings and reclaim orders, and cons will automatically execute the orders in a reasonable manner, avoiding enemies and considering current resources (reclaim goes first when metal stalling). And of course, auto-reclaim, not just around the idle cons, but everywhere with line of sight of any of your own's or teammate's units.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Good point. It's definitely something that can be improved in BAR but I think is somewhat patched over by the fact that people tend to get funneled towards multiplayer pretty quickly.

@Albert_C

4 ай бұрын

You should try warzone2100. It's a 1997 RTS that came with unit automation like "auto-return to repair zones on per-unit configurable health threshold" albeit a much smaller scale.

@treyslider6954

4 ай бұрын

@Ianbus123 No, not player AI, *unit* AI. If you're in a 1v1 match with two humans in zero-k, and you order your skirmishers to attack a group of enemy units, they'll try to stay at their maximum range from the enemy, moving forward if the enemy retreats but also backing up if the enemy advances. Faster units will often try to orbit the enemy, maintaining their maximum range but still moving in order to dodge slower shots like rockets and such. ZeroK provides that your units will micro themselves (admittedly not as well as a human could if they gave that single unit their undivided attention), which is something the vast majority of RTSs basically ignore.

@moreproblematic

4 ай бұрын

It's a deliberate design choice, BAR chooses to be micro heavy. Personally I don't love the heavy micro, and that's what ZK significantly improves on by making units more autonomous. It's nice to be able to not micro rear line tasks that I don't need to be actively managing because I have bigger shit going on, or being able to control large armies without just zerg blobbing

@FlyWR

4 ай бұрын

@@moreproblematic yea, I know, and there are too many such games and not enough of the other way around. It even applies to RPGs, where "click enemies to death" aspect prevails. At least among RPGs, there are alternatives (still nothing like Dungeon Siege I though 😕)

zero-k is easily the greatest thing to come out of TA. not a clone, but a unique rts with amazing features shame it's so underrated and overshadowed by bar that's not to say bar is bad, both teams did great work and cooperate

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Yeah I kind of framed the video as a competition but I think the saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" applies here and there's room for them all to succeed. I like the Sanctuary "Cross-Pollination Series" where they play other games such as BAR and Zero-K.

@KevinJDildonik

3 ай бұрын

ZK mods are awful. Like a couple of admins openly support zoophilia (sex with animals) and ban anyone who doesn't agree. That's why they never took off. Lots of people have gotten banned from the game because some mod didn't like they way they played. Not cheating or griefing, I mean like, we prefer you put that building to the left of that other one so now you're banned.

@genericgoosereturns

3 ай бұрын

@@KevinJDildonik moderation is very lenient. also i highly doubt anyone ever got banned for that reason. the handful of people that did get banned would start drama and carry it over into the game repeatedly, which is the reason for the ban.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Argh wtf? @@KevinJDildonik

@BlueTemplar15

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 Speaking of rising tides and cross-pollination, this retrospective of yours is great, but I fear missing one crucial bit of the story : Zero-K and BAR didn't just pop up out of nowhere ! Calling "Spring" (released in 2005, so before SupCom1) an "engine" is technically true, but misleads about how important the "modding" (= game making) community was around it, and how important was the matchmaking software that allowed anyone to jump between wildly different (though usually TA-derived) games in multiplayer in just a few clicks ! From I've seen of lobby developers comparing player counts, it seems like Spring lobbies peaked around 2010, at roughly the same number of players (magnitude-wise) than Zero-K in 2017, BAR ~today (and SupCom1:FAF in 20?? ?). And Spring lobby games still exist : most notably BA (Balanced Annihilation) is still having ~yearly tournaments, Tech Annihilation still seems to be developed, the developer of the first Spring game released on Steam : EvolutionRTS is now making a new one called Splinter Factions... (If you do go looking at that history, Zero-K used to be called Complete Annihilation, and BAR might have used to be called BYAR, though BAR - formerly Balanced Annihilation Reloaded - has a bit of a foggy history involving a decade of almost no progress by what might or might not have been a mostly different dev team ?)

Worth mentioning: The game called "Planetary Annihilation: TITANS" can be seen as sort of a prequel to the TA storyline. In PA, the factions are at the precise war, the TA intro video talks about.

The main issue with Planetary Annihilation is the planets are too small .

@royasturias1784

4 ай бұрын

Must be how you configure your planets by size and also how many, including moons and asteroids

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I see another commenter saying that if you go for larger ones it was very CPU heavy

@markquavertune2003

4 ай бұрын

Then perhaps a planet could represented by a traditional map .The when zoomed right out the planet being represented .There would be a tier 3 or 4 building that could alter the rotation of the planet so to allighn the interplanitary weapon systems .

@Marinealver

4 ай бұрын

Too small and not entirely balanced.

@pfeilspitze

4 ай бұрын

​@@markquavertune2003 TBH, I think it's the same problem as Starfield. Planet hopping is, for gameplay, the same as island hopping. But planets bring along impossible expectations of size, as well as fundamental UI problems from the spherical terrain. There's a reason the space has "ships" in a "navy" in most settings.

I'm wary of Industrial Annihilation, it seems like a cool idea but one of the big features of the factory/automation genre is that your economy becomes increasingly fragile as you establish long supply chains with many interdependent parts. Having watched BAR replays where whole matches can swing due to a small raid of units managing to pick off a few vital economy buildings, I feel like it'd be a case of trying to defend your highly vulnerable industrial engine from damage while you try to hit your opponent's and that the first side to land a hit will likely carry the day. I hope it's not the case and that they make something great, but just from hearing the concept that seems like a big design challenge to overcome.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, I'm not sure how "harassing the economy" is going to play out in this context or if there will be some sort of Chinese wall separating production and battles

Total Annihilation was the very first RTS game I ever played online. This was back in 1997 or 98 when I was still in highschool. Today it's simple to join an online game but back then, in the days of dial up to manage to get online with a friend from school and battle one another was like PC gaming magic. It was janky as hell and crashed every time the wind blew, but that still didn't stop us from spending hours online waging large-scale war. Because of this TA will always have a special place in my heart.

@filanfyretracker

3 ай бұрын

And that is IMO part of why Starcraft took off so hard, the fact that Battlenet made connecting up online so easy, I remember trying to fiddle with things like Westwood Online or stuff like Gamespy to make other games work. Bnet however just plain worked. One of the TA expansions had this thing called a "Targeting Facility" I used to remember trying to sneak radar planes near an enemy base and then drop Big Bertha rounds. Always loved Bertha because when its your own artillery its always fun to fire it.

Something I only just realized while watching this in the GoG section, is that the TA successors are missing a real sense of "impact". In the original TA more powerful weapons and units getting killed would give some screen shake, have a little flash of light and some polygonal gibs would fly everywhere. In the SupCom games, most unit deaths would be a little flash of light and that's it. There's also the sound choice, TA explosions sounded meaty and mean instead of the various little scifi zips and pows.

@Kuba_K

4 ай бұрын

Nah, idk how much supcom you played but screenshake and debris would make experience much less pleasant. The impact is still here, heavy artillery and experimentals have amazing explosions (for a 2007 game) if every unit had that brawls of 200 t1 units would be unwatchable

@Xerxes17

4 ай бұрын

​@@Kuba_K You could make it depend on the distance between the explosion and the camera, and make it optional.

@Kuba_K

4 ай бұрын

@@Xerxes17 thats exactly how it works in supcom though? If you zoom in you get detailed explosion, nothing flashy but realistic. And some screen shake.

@themogget8808

3 ай бұрын

Yes, and much ado has been made about higher unit counts, but I feel that just turns into mushy blobs glowing as they meet. Part of what made TA frustrating was also its advantage - squad level control and combat was both satisfying (impact of individual unit destructions) and effective. The unit limit and smaller scale in general just felt tighter and more meaningful.

Supreme Commander 2 may not be loved by many, but it was my introduction to grand scale RTS games back in the day when I rented it for the 360. As someone who had played lots of C&C Generals on a weak laptop it was a whole new world and caused me to pick up the first one years later when I got more into PC. Going back to other RTS after it has caused me to totally bounce off without strategic zoom, they are all so claustrophobic.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It's still a decent-good game, it's just a bit of a step down coming from SupCom and Forged Alliance, which left fans disappointed

@azrielsatan8693

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 I tried it out more recently with friends and some mods, but it's definitely more experimental biased than even the original. I do think some of the new experimental it introduces are interesting, but the FAF community is so much bigger and with BAR, Zero-K and Sanctuary it will only end up even more forgotten than it already is (not even accounting for BAR and Zero-K being free).

It is interesting how under served the RTS genre is that so a number of new projects are started specifically to be successors to older strategy game formulas. Total Annihilation has perhaps spawned the most successors of any of them. I still remember borrowing the game from my public library more than 20 years ago, and booting it up. Coming from Red Alert and Age of Empires, Total Annhilation felt like something utterly more ambitious in scale and systems. I think that might be the game that really made me love sci fi settings, too. Something that doesn't receive as much attention when TA is talked about is the bombastic soundtrack Jeremy Soule created for it. The music still sticks in my head.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It was only ~6 tracks but they were all great and it felt like the "recovering" and "brutal battle" themes kicked in at the perfect time based on the action. I know it actually did in SupComm but i'm not sure in TA

@benjaminfranklin329

3 ай бұрын

I have kept those tracks in my music library since the early 2000's. It was definitely something that completely changed the atmosphere of the game.

@Netherminded

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 17 tracks actually. But so atmospheric. Sounded like it belonged to a movie. Soule went on to have quite the career for a reason, I suppose.

@Netherminded

3 ай бұрын

@@benjaminfranklin329 Decided to go back and listen to it just now. Man its still good. Forest Green might be my favourite in there.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

RTS being where it is can be blamed squarely on the big names in publishing and game development; everyone wanted their own Starcraft 2 (hardly an RTS, just a click-fest), and pushed so hard to try to do that, it caused all of their projects to fall apart. SupCom2 wasn't part of that, it predated it a bit, but it was hampered by being forced to scale down everything to fit inside a console's limited hardware. With the rejection by RTS fans of messy click-heavy micro-heavy tactics games (I refuse to call SC2 a strategy game), several games studios abandoned RTS all together, and most gave up trying to appeal to RTS fans, leading to ""RTS"" mobile games, which don't bear any resemblance to strategy and are only loosely real-time. I think it was an EA exec who proclaimed "RTS is dead", squarely holding the pillow on its face, so to speak, after having just effectively slaughtered a genre juggernaut and giant, Westwood.

Good old Brawlers. You can kill ANYTHING with enough Brawlers.

@Rakanarshi2

4 ай бұрын

They way they moved left to right in a large swarm reminded me of a snake

@danielemarrocu2717

3 ай бұрын

endless pewee wave fan here they die like ants but they are so easy builted that you can put literally a wall of them constantly at the enemy

@themogget8808

3 ай бұрын

Brawlers were considered cheating within my play group.

@bluedistortions

3 ай бұрын

Except hawks, they patrol into any air battle and instantly take out anything that isn't a hawk, and they can bomb as well. There was literally no counter to mass groups of hawks.

@Rakanarshi2

3 ай бұрын

@@bluedistortions Whoa, I am going to have to try that.

From my understanding Chris Taylor now works as a tech manager at a non-gaming company. Its fair to say that he has more or left left the gaming industry. I don't know if his browser only game will even come out, nor is there much evidence that he is putting substantial work into it.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

given he was spitting out buzzwords and leaning on image-theft algorithms to do the work for him, it wouldn't make it far anyway

TA was best, nothing can even compare to it. Music, great units design, graphic, 3d (mountains, water) and atmosphere. 10/10.

@ondrejj.1900

3 ай бұрын

try bar. for real man. try bar. it is essentially the ta. where krogoth was accessible only to core, there is t3 gantry available to both sides with multiple options. mechanics are same, eco is same. but what is different is the scale. 12v12 with 1000 units on large maps.

@termitektermit7889

3 ай бұрын

@@ondrejj.1900 thanks, gonna try it out!

Nice video! A lot of the Quality of life features you've mentioned in more modern games are soon to be available in TA itself, thanks to the work of Axle, who is running Total Annihilation Forever. You can already change the click interface to your preference. Currently, online TA is played with two main mods - Escalation and ProTA. Escalation takes TA in the Supreme Commander direction, where as ProTA looks to stay truer to OTA, but include some balance changes and bringing in new quality of life features. Feel free to see what's going on in the game that spawned it all over at Total Annihilation Universe! When I interviewed Chris T for my channel, we talked about Kanoogi briefly. It seems like a fascinating idea and I'm interested to see where it goes.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Ah that's really interesting and thanks for watching. Great channel! I have a lot to learn about TA

Forged Alliance Forever is the true succesor to TA. I've spend too much time on it, so I quited. But the amazing team has been polishing Supreme Commander all these years. And it really shows. SC FAF, is for me the best game ever made. Life goes on though. Currently I am most excited about a non TA like rts game. Silica. It's a mix between rts and fps. To be able to control a battlefield with real humans playing is wild and could give amazing gamepaly if executed correctly. As for TA like games, I think Sanctuary has the highest change to be the TA succesor of this day. BAR is a great project, but the game just plays so much different.

I was in college at the time and we played _so much_ Total Annihilation. Good feelings remembering all this.

Another fascinating video mate, can also tell you’re getting more confident in your delivery, enjoying hearing your opinions coming through as well as the information. Looking forward to the next one!

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Thank you

TA was my childhood man. Lavahighground and metal heck! Still play a cheeky bit of supcom to this day

I like the idea of Planetary Anhelation but for some reason the community only want's single planet maps. They should have made at the very least 2 factions, and make orbital and planetary transfers much easier. Maybe some more aircraft that could go interplanetary.

@Quickshot0

4 ай бұрын

It was a crowd sourced game in the end, admittedly they probably didn't have any other options at the time to get funds together. But unless you're a truly astonishingly successful campaign the amount of money to work with from such is a bit limited. And you can kind of tell with Planetary Annihilation that they could have used more time to try and get things together better. Ah well, I guess on the plus side it can be studied on how to make a multi-map game better in future. What works, what doesn't, why doesn't it work, etc

@luka188

4 ай бұрын

PA tried to do things way ahead of its time, and way out of its budget (They received a little over a million from the fundraiser they did, which is nowhere near enough to make something as ambitious as PA). The only thing that does something similar today, that I know of, is Dyson sphere program, and even with the new RTS features, it isn't exactly an RTS like PA. Unfortunately PA just wasn't able to realize the grand vision, because frankly it was far too ambitious for its time, and even today it would be hard to successfully realize the vision that game was build on. I think perhaps, if RTS games like that are still something people want to play a few decades from now, we can have something developed which realizes the dream of solar system wide RTS action with thousands or tens of thousands of units clashing on different planets and in space, planetary wide annihilation, etc.

@Zipperheaddttl

4 ай бұрын

Playing on multi planet maps unfortunately wasn't that fun. It was really hard/impossible to build a beach head on a enemy planet, so the game devolved to who could build the game ending planet buster first. Which was amazing the first time you did it, but was super boring on the 20th. PA honestly really shines when you are using T1: units.

@user-zn4pw5nk2v

3 ай бұрын

@@luka188 with a budget of 1 million $ you can make PA work, for the full every voxel is simulated it will be taxing on the system, but all of the tech was there back in 2013, but only on the mechanics side, and with a lot of intern hours. A years worth of funding and a team of 10 people it could happen, but without the polish for which you would need additional 2 mill. The story is a bit different if you start with diablo 3 's destructible terrain engine and Supreme commander texture pack, which can be bargained down to reasonable amount of cash (it would still require rework to function).

@user-zn4pw5nk2v

3 ай бұрын

@@Zipperheaddttl for that you need some orbital bombardment units that are cheaper mid game and some surface to orbit base defences that are more expensive than having a fleet. What you described is lack of game balance. To prevent it they could have made planetary movement a lot harder to achieve maybe use an asteroid to hit a planet and establish a beach head, not enough to win you the game, but to be a looming threat that needs to be dealt with when noticed. (Bigger planets smaller asteroids with less damage potential)

What a great video! Supreme Commander is a game that's yet to be paralleled. It's been such a long time, but I really do feel like the future is bright for the concept.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.

Nicely covered. I think you may appreciate knowing that BAR and Zero-K are now running on a fork of the Spring RTS Engine, called the Recoil RTS Engine. This is significant because the latest versions of each engine are not compatible with each other (though Recoil is more compatible with older Spring RTS versions than the latest Spring RTS version by some bizzare twist of fate.)

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey! Thanks for watching. That's really interesting. I definitely have to do a bit more research on the whole Spring story and what the state of play is nowdays...

@dakat5131

4 ай бұрын

Wow I've been away from Zero-K for too long- I didn't know they changed that.

I have my hopes set on Industrial Annihilation personally, primarily because I think the biggest thing that's setting back RTS games is the overemphasis on Action. I'm pretty jaded on abilities due to burning out of Mobas and concerns of my wrist, so I'm more interested in the more Strategic elements of RTS, and its something I see a lot of whenever I watch less skilled players who really regard RTS as a basebuilding game where you just build this massive economy, massive army, and then send it at your enemy. Meanwhile a lot of devs come from hardcore competitive spheres who look at the success of Starcraft and try to replicate that over again (good luck trying to find the next South Korea). We need to look at RTS less as a gamer-fuel/Energy Drink genre, and more as a Tea/Hot Chocolate genre.

@dominiccasts

4 ай бұрын

Honestly I think there's room for both, and I'm glad that both are getting developer attention, but then I'm apparently the weirdo who enjoys both Zero-K and StarCraft. Also, IMO, the more important thing for making an RTS strategically interesting as it gets explored is having multiple simultaneous goals that you can't focus on at once, such as how AoE4 handles both win conditions and resources like the boar. Industrial Annihilation seems neat, but I expect that the optimal factory setup patterns will be worked out fairly quickly unless your ability to build optimally is restricted somehow by the game's mechanics, or maybe if you have to sprawl so much you can't feasibly defend it all...but then that gets us right back to emphasizing action

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It's tricky because you have the broader "strategy game" genre with 4X games or something like Total War, then you have RPGs which may be better for storytelling. To some extent RTS is only left with action as it's unique feature - but I'm hoping to see some innovation change that...

@dominiccasts

4 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 I would specify that RTS has multitasking and attention management as its unique feature, which is why I tend to point out that you can't really remove the "action" part because there's always going to be some additional thing to do or to optimize that someone who is more practiced with a game will do. Arguably this applies even to turn-based games, just in those cases it's about doing the optimal set of actions in a minimum number of turns.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I guess it leans back into being overly competitive but I love managing my opponent's attention in the wrong place :) In terms of multiple objectives and build orders being worked out, I hope there will be a lot of diversity in terms of objectives and also resource systems or just the resources themselves. They got quite creative with that in SC2 from a map-making perspective (the KeSPA map makers primarily). It feels like quite a thin wedge to aim for in terms of where RTS sits between turn based 4X etc. but the amount of activity in the genre lately shows developers think it has a (lucrative) place...

@dominiccasts

4 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 Of the games that seem to be gunning to be the SC2 successor, ZeroSpace seems to have the most emphasis on multiple objectives and general map control (though only one win condition), followed by Immortal: Gates of Pyre's 3rd resource (the global ability casting resource) being bound to a creep camp system. Stormgate has the healing locations with creep camps but from what I've seen that system is the least impactful of the three games. As for being lucrative, I'm curious what will come of these new games. It seems like most of them are small projects (Sanctuary, D.O.R.F.), or volunteer-driven (Zero-K, BAR), and even the ones getting serious money aren't getting much beyond making the underlying tech, units, and maps, and maybe some small SP scenarios. If we get to the point of there being full campaigns and generally less focus on any one component then I'll be confident that publishers think the genre is lucrative, though being able to build coherent products that stand alone...that kinda relies on median wages going up, which game devs don't have control over. Otherwise F2P storefront-driven games that prioritize just getting people to play with other people, because other people are the cheapest content, will still be the order of the day. That brings us right back to all the complaints I see leveled at RTS as a genre, because ultimately those complaints boil down to "winning against other human beings consistently is really hard, and very frustrating to try", which is the tradeoff with multiplayer-only games. Granted, I may be wrong, RTS may have it's FROM Software who just makes good singleplayer experiences that fit a niche and make enough money to trudge along just fine. Note that I *like* multiplayer-focused games, but I know I'm in the minority, and the genre as a whole can't survive with just those.

This is a wonderfully put together video, well done dude.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I'm glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the feedback! More to come hopefully ;)

Enjoyed the video! Staying around for more. Nice to hear about new games like TA.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey - thank you! Hopefully you'll enjoy upcoming videos too

Found you from this video rec, cheers to you being a big channel in a couple years.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Hey - thank you! Need some consistency first :) Back on it soon...

@vermanshane

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 Take your time, it's a marathon not a sprint in many ways. Best of luck to you!

I think Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation would fit in this video as well. It's been a long time since I played it, and it's not as great as some of the others, but I think it nails one of the premises of the genre in a way that none of the others do: battles are *always* massive. While this is often true in e.g. Supcom, it is not always the case. Rushing a single nuke, artillery piece, warship, bomber, or commander upgrade is often all you need in order to crack a base. Not so in AotSE in my experience.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

True - that's one I overlooked but seems to have a reasonable following still

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

you may want to play with some more competent custom AI because the "one thing wins" strategy *rarely* works against them M28AI (When it isn't flipping the metaphorical table by hard-freezing the program) can play as well as a mid-level ranked player, and is fairly resilient to single focus attacks. AI-Uveso is...not the best but still a step up from vanilla's frankly tragically handicapped AI

Me: *Gets back into RTS with Beyond All Reason - never having heard of Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander* Also Me Watching this Video: *Leonardo Dicaprio Pointing Meme*

Thanks for the breakdown. I had a chance to play BAR recently and it was quite interesting.

Thanks for featuring Sanctuary

TA allows you to choose between left or right click to give orders (AKA C&C or Warcraft style), if the default doesn't work for you check the options menu.

Give your money to BAR. Everyone working on that game is doing it for free and wants the game to be the best that it can be.

It's really important to note that Supreme Commander was NOT a commercial success for GPG. Chris Taylor is on record that the game did not sell enough for GPG to meet its obligations to THQ, resulting in the title being a loss. SupCom 2 was designed to have a broader appeal and to work better on consoles, for better or worse, in an attempt to hit sales figures the first game couldn't.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

And that's a real shame :(

Has nobody here played Mindustry?! It absolutely fits in with the industrial-type TA successors.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Damn, I haven't. Really good feedback to it on Steam - time to check it out... thank you!

@inertjohnjunk

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 You need to try both versions. The dev has made a massive, almost genre-changing shift in the creative direction. The game got most of its popularity from the first, shall we say, branch, and the second almost withered away because it was just too big of a deviation. Personally I don't want to badmouth the new direction the game is going in, but I very much preferred the first version, even though it's less RTS and more Factory sim.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

@@inertjohnjunkparticularly the change to planets campaign style was awful, and the removal of a permanent ability to finish a map was an insane mistake. The game was alright before that but now it's just a frustration simulator. Not to mention the units that can now just ignore terrain and aren't aircraft, for some reason

@inertjohnjunk

2 ай бұрын

@@vaelophisnyx9873 Oh I agree. In my very personal opinion, the new version is trash, especially the removal of certain conveyor pieces, which has massively frustrated my ability to automate production on almost every single map.

I still have my original 1997 CD set!

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I wonder if any of them are worth anything? I looked into it a bit during lockdown and some of my "black label" Playstation 1 games were worth a bit. PC seems less collectable for some reason.

@Racistobama

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 I lost one of my discs when I moved :(

Thanks for this. Weird that I never heard of any of these except SC2. I grew up on Command & Conquer (Tiberian Sun was my 2nd RTS after Outpost 2, also played a ton of Red Alert 2 in college). Definitely going to check out Zero K and BAR.

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS comes with its own mod manager. That game + mods is superb, definitely brings it up to the hype it promised originally.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

when it isn't crashing, at least. Or frying a GPU

Great video. I still have fond memories of TA as the first 'serious' video game I ever played and still in my mind the most revolutionary RTS ever. I've just come across (thanks to the KZread algorithm after watching this and your BAR video), a game called Sanctuary Shattered Sun which looks like a sequel to SupCom. It's a kickstarter though, so.... I guess no guarantees.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Hey - thanks for watching and glad you enjoyed the vid! I've got high hopes for Sanctuary

In the OG TA you can change the settings to be right click to move/default orders. Also, without mods, the OG TA has some legitimate bugs that require a patch to fix when it comes to its networking, but those are easy to find on tauniverse.

there are aspects of BAR i really like and aspects of zero-k. honestly if i could just combine both games into one glorious masterpiece id be so happy. as it stands now, every time i play one i miss features that the other game has and visa versa and thus im never fully satisfied no matter which im playing.

That first song in the background is awesome.

im playing Bar from a while now and i can confirm that is sick! i especially love the raptor invasion mode for fight alongside other players in a starship troopers vibe bar make me know about the TA game stile that before i just hear about the title but i never seen it once im going to try zero-k now ty for your video

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed the video and are enjoying BAR!

I'd be all over a WH40k version of the upcoming Industrial Annihilation, let me simulate a forge world of the Adeptus Mechanicus and mass produce machines of war to launch at another planet where you control them in actual RTS style combat. Added bonus is a relatively niche sub-genre of RTS would get a lot of eyeballs on it from the fanatical 40k community.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Feel like there's a lot of demand for 40k in strategy that hasn't been tapped yet, especially with all the total war: warhammer making people think about a 40k version

@royasturias1784

4 ай бұрын

Outside of the Dawn of War games and both Battlefleet Gothic Armada games

@kettelbe

4 ай бұрын

​@@royasturias1784that s not massive tho :)

@Ontinara

4 ай бұрын

​@@Ianbus123 Funny that you'd mention that

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

MORE @@royasturias1784

Another thing worth mentioning is both TA and SupCom have extensive modding scenes, with TA in particular having nearly 30 years worth of custom units, maps, and total overhauls. Several which are still being worked on today like TA: Escalation and Total Annihilation Zero.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

True although I did think Spring was seen as a way to move forward and get past enginge limitations of TA, so it's interesting to see TA keep progressing

currently BAR is the most accurate copy of TA and definetly a faithful descendant, however when it comes to over playability and qol, supreme commander FAF is the upgraded TA that will stand on it's own for quite a bit. Sanctuary deriving from supcom fans who took this into their own hands is promising on its own, but it will take a lot longer to develop than BAR, either way each game has something to offer

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Looking at the development timeline for Sanctuary recently made me realise it does have a very long way to go...

I've spent the last 16 months trying to remember the name of this game, thank you very much.

Planetary Annihilation: Titans is my favorite RTS game. The spherical maps open up so much strategy. That said, IMO, Beyond All Reason is by far the best RTS game ever made. It’s not even close to me.

Pretty cool man. Someone needs to do a series like this around tactical top down games like X-Com

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey Thanks! Do you think there are enough games of that type to make a video? Would you group in turn based strategy and 4x style games such as Civ?

Industrial Annihilation is not made by the PA people. The PA people abandoned the project and then the fan modding scene bought out the game. So industrial annihilation is not made by those people.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

They're certainly marketing it as being the people behind PA... guess I need to do some more digging. Is it all a bit messy? :(

@MrCatofdoom

4 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 youtube.com/@WPMarshall?si=m817ImvMzKI2mxOb

@MrCatofdoom

4 ай бұрын

It's a weird thing and it looks like they changed quite a few things after the fact. This channel used to be where all their changes came from after the community transition.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Interesting - thanks. I'll take a look in to it

Great video! Growing up I never had a powerful enough PC to run these games in their full glory other than the original TA and TA:K. Having had the chance to rediscover the series as an adult has been amazing. I've been playing BAR mostly for multiplayer, Zero-k for campaign, and I'm most looking forward to Sanctuary with a curious eye towards Industrial Annihilation (Factorio being one of my most played Steam games). That said, I'm still waiting for the next Kings & Castles vlog ;) ... I haven't given up hope that a spiritual successor to TA:K can emerge at some point. I'll never let go of the idea of a massive scale RTS with strategic zoom and fully-simulated projectiles in a medieval/fantasy setting.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Did you enjoy Kingdoms? It certainly divided opinions. I didn't really give it much time. I was on to Baldur's Gate and EverQuest at that point.

@RocketCatRTS

4 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 The great thing about gaming back then is I didn't have to worry about other opinions. I was just a kid buying cool looking boxes! While of course I play it today and can appreciate all the ways it's inferior, I still have a TA-style medieval/fantasy RTS-shaped hole in my heart, which Chris Taylor's Kings & Castles never got the chance to fill :(

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I remember buying the original Age of Empires based on seeing the box. Great decision in the end :)

@RocketCatRTS

4 ай бұрын

I got Age of Empires from a cereal box. Those were the days. :D

Spot on throughout :)

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey - thanks for watching!

Zero-K is definitely the best RTS I've ever played. A big plus, that I find quite sad the video didn't talk about, is the single player campaign. Personally, and I know a lot of people in my case, campaign have always been the main appeal of RTSs and it's the focus on multiplayer of a lot of titles that let me drift away from the genre and just replay old games. Zero-k, with its 71 mission campaign have filled that niche for me. Plus it is co-op compatible.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

I have to look into the Zero-K single player campaign more for sure

Could you share what are the songs playing in the background at ~7:20 and 9:20? 😊

Westwood Command & Conquer games are the best RTS games, hands down.

To me Planetary Annihilation was three quarters of what I actually wanted from a Total Annihilation or Sup Com sequel. Hampered by just how bland it was. It really struggled to find a unique identity. And the lack of multiple factions was a big turn off for me. Reducing the strategic depth massively.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It felt a bit like a sand box to me, as does BAR right now but for some reason I just find it more addictively playable already.

PA was awesome and it had such a big community. Really surprised to hear a TA fan didn’t enjoy it!

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

I just found it a bit overwhelming in the sense that the interface was difficult and multi planetary gameplay was a bit of a chore. Maybe I'm just bad but I gather people gravitated to one-planet games?

@robinwright531

3 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 I definitely played a mix but more/bigger planets certainly featured more prominently in bigger games with more players. And 1v1s would be on 1-3 smaller planets. And obviously everyone's taste is there own, I was just surprised :)

PA really screwed the pooch. Instead of polishing and improving on the initial release of the game, they started a kickstarter for an entirely different game and basically abandoned PA. This caused most of their fanbase to ignore their kickstarter, leading to a spectacular failure and the company behind PA going into a sort of maintenance/stasis mode. Eventually, after years, they managed to turn a good profit off of PA, but damn, if they had just been honest with their community and STUCK WITH PA instead of going off trying to do other random projects.. it could have been awesome. PA's core design was also somewhat flawed in that it pushed the "micro ceiling" incredibly, insanely high. This came from having multiple planets, and needing to manage a *multi-planet economy* while *also* fighting across one or more planets (spheres, which are harder to play on compared to a traditional 2d map). The game's core functionality had a built-in second/third camera so you could watch stuff in multiple locations at the same time... it was just ridiculously complicated. Funnily enough, the competitive scene agreed and most competitive games are played on a single planet, removing most of what is unique about PA in the first place (which is hilarious imo). For this game to work and get traction like Supcom/TA, the gameplay and unit AI should have been focused around macro and making high-level tactical decisions. IMO, it would have been better if you didn't even have direct control of your combat units *at all* and instead were forced to give general orders while setting up groups of units as "armies" that would automatically work together. Though, this still doesn't solve the problem of resource snowballing being totally out of control in a game like this. Starcraft and similar RTSs understand that resource collection and unit limits have to be *tightly* controlled if you want a game to be a balanced "fight" over more than a minute or two. However, in PA, you have effectively no unit limit, massive weapons that can theoretically destroy 100x their cost in units due to AOE, and resource sources such as gas giants that can allow for infinite resource scaling... this means that a player that is *slightly* better at macro than another player, will be able to snowball that advantage into an unwinnable situation in even just a 10 or 20 minute game. It effectively means that the game is already decided by the mid-game.. in which case, why did you even bother wasting the time to design all of these cool late game units/planetary combat/titans/etc... when the game is already over? Sigh. Hoping the best for industrial annihilation as well, but if you look at the SEC filing on how they handled their startengine crowd funding/investing, you can see that they still don't really "care" or want to treat their community/backers very respectfully. The terms of the "investments" being made by backers on Startengine have *zero* protections in terms of future funding rounds, dilution, and eventual ability to ever exit from their position. The terms given to backers are so unfavorable, if Galactic Annihilation (the "branch" company borrowing IP from PA since 2021) tried to give these terms to an institutional investor or VC, they would be absolutely laughed out of the room. This sort of shows that the team behind IA still doesn't seem to really be willing to embrace their backers as "full fledged citizens" of a sort, and are still seen as just wallets to be opened and money extracted from, unfortunately. Sanctuary is going to be *the one to watch* in this space for sure, though.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey thanks for watching and great comment. It's a shame the PA/IA story is so murky...

@mavor101

4 ай бұрын

@@Ianbus123 for sure

Zero-K is the best Total Anihilation like game there is. Thank you for bringing it up

Demigod had worse problems that than my guy. What happend was the Ceo did interviews in which he proclaimed that pirating the game is fine, and people that pirate it will be able to play said game with other plays, and if they like it they can buy it. What happend during the first 3 months was 10x the amount of people that bought the game where using the servers causing the entire thing to be unplayable. The sheer amount of servers they needed couldnt be purchased with the budget they had received from sales. and planetary annihilation did me dirty. I owned the orignal but wasnt given a discount on titans forcing me to pay 40$ for like 4 new units.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

I played a lot of WoW arena and I really thought/think that this is an untapped niche. Do you remember Bloodline Champions? I thought that might do it. I think Demigod suffered from being a bit before its time as well. I was unaware of the server overload though. No wonder the "netcode" suffered!

@ArcaneAzmadi

4 ай бұрын

Whenever someone says that piracy doesn't hurt games, point out Demigod and watch them try to stammer out a justification. GPG decided against intrusive DRM because they didn't want to treat their customers like thieves and trusted that people would buy it to support them, and 9/10 of every players was a pirate, completely killing the servers. I bought the game and played it honestly and thought it was cool, but it never had a chance. It had other issues (it was trying to get into the MOBA space when MOBAs were only just starting to become a thing and consequently got all the key points wrong), but a 93% piracy rate is still probably the biggest one. Just goes to show that pirates aren't _always_ heroic swashbuckling rebels defying the corruption of the greedy corporations. Sometimes they're just greedy lazy assholes who wouldn't piss on their mother if she was on fire.

@Serphentin

4 ай бұрын

​@@ArcaneAzmadi Normally, game piracy doesn't hurt the creators directly because the pirate didn't cost the studio anything. But trying to allow the pirates onto your own servers... that's a recipe for disaster. It's one thing to have people play for free, it's another thing entirely to pay *for* them!

Advertising new players to join zero-k, the game is an absolute baller RTS. THe game plays so tightly and there is no meta at all! Any tactic can be countered by strategic plays! AND IT IS FREEEEEEEE

One thing that TA may have accidentally nailed (or maybe intentionally) was the scale. It was big enough to do that whole quantity over quality attitude, but also had a few unit types and strategies where a tactical squad man could really punch above his weight. It felt balanced. While the person putting out more clicks-per-second generally won, it wasn't too exhausting either strategy. The system just wasn't really good with long oversize cluttered fights, and I don't think that the added library with the expansion and units like the Orcone were more fun than Peewees and Levelers. I understand the race to nukes is a fun element of the game, but only when balanced with early game and tactics that matter. Also I just don't have the patience to keep building more stupid energy collectors. Ugh. I am surprised that SupCom 2 'wasn't well received'. In my college days it was THE game with my group and the Supcom flow-field navigation was a revelation. The multiplayer system was lively if small and clunky, and with the smaller tighter maps and 'dumbed down' system just felt faster and more fun than SupCom 1 for me. But then again I am an early-game tactics man. I sometimes rushed 2 Megaliths or 2 Terrors, but that wasn't an engine thing it was a finisher move. Some maps were so big you had to play long game, so something for everyone. The walking ship tech upgrade and other novel unit types were so cool. I only quit playing it when the servers dried up.

@volodymyr_budii

3 ай бұрын

Basically, Supcom2 was a good game by itself, but terrible supcom sequel. Basically everything people loved supcom FA for was taken away from supcom 2. No streeming economy, no proper build power system and engineer assist, very small maps and scale oveall, "weak" experimentals and commanders, and more smaller things. The only thing that was better in supcom 2 then FA was pathfinding. Oh, also I really disliked the fact that Aeon had no fleet.

Great Video!

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it :) Hopefully more to come with not such a long gap this time...

TA was not technically fully 3D, the map was a 2D image with a invisible 3D geometry mesh to interact with projectiles and units.

One of the main issues with faf or pa is it's netcode and engine lag. No matter how strong your pc or how good your connection, he game will lag no matter what. That's why I'm looking towards sanctuary, since devs stated that all terraforming and other vfx that would tank the engine will be calculated by dedicated servers, so even a low end pc could play the game with stable fps. As for supcom2 I need to mention it's unique pathfinding system. It's still considered a revolutional system, which prevents units colliding or stutter with each other.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

FAF is fairly lag-resistant, if you aren't running 8 AI opponents at 1500 unit cap on a poor-rated CPU (though tbh I do not put stock in the CPU rating math) its netcode is actually fairly robust, all things considered for the era. Also do not put stock in cloud-computed games. That's just another thing they can claw away from you to force you to subscribe, to never properly Own the game. It also rarely works, Google tried twice to make a console that could do it, and it failed resoundingly both times. There's just not a connection fast enough in the world to transmit to and receive from a server to handle gaming tasks, especially if its not ALL handled server side, leaving only a client window.

Demigod was basically like the early MOBA kind of thing - much in the same style as DOTA or LOL. And once it flopped, Supreme Commander 2 released also in much undercooked state - and based on MAB design, it borrowed a lot of its design philosophy from Demigod - especially unit pathing, maps with very clear and distinct lanes. The problem with Supreme Commander 2 is that when it was first released, it lacked many quality of life features that made Supreme Commander 1 good. Especially the flowing economy - it was completely gone - and initially you could not even queue units if you didn't have resources for them - which made building anything a massive chore. This was patched in later, but damage was already done. Scale was also much smaller than Supreme Commander 1, and the game was optimised to run on consoles, which again further propelled the impression the game was dumped down. The designs were very... toy-like. Entire Aeon faction got reduced to having units that were very cheesy puns. The plot was basically a Saturday Morning Cartoon level. This didn't help the game either. The sense of epicness was gone. It massively overshadowed the positives of Supcom 2 - namely vastly superior AI and pathfinding. After all the patches, Supreme Commander 2 basically lands in a "good game, horrible sequel" category. Planetary Annihilation killed itself among many fans due to deceptive early-access campaign. The game released in a horrible state - and creators pulled bait and switch - they abandoned the game and released Planetary Annihilation: Titans instead - completely screwing over early access backers in an attempt to hide the negative reviews of the Planetary Annihilation - they basically released the same game the second time, with patches included as something new.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Great post and I can see from the comments on this vid alone that there is still a lot of animosity towards how PA was handled which is reducing any anticipation for Industrial Annihilation

Me, build a stealth airplane fleet and you can clobber anything

great video! Just an editing comment. A text overlay for your footage with the source game would be helpful. I'd also love to see a look at some of the more ambitious RTS games coming up that do include space as a battlefield as well as land. (Fragile Existence comes to mind)

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey - thanks, appreciate the feedback and glad you enjoyed it. I am working on a video showcasing 2024 RTS titles and I'll be sure to have a little overlay showing each game's title and release date etc.

Beyond all reason isn't just the best total annihilation-like rts. It's the best rts period. I never liked TA or supcom style games before BAR and now I'm addicted

Man, I just want a fun RTS like TA, SupCom, StarCraft, C&C, and Ashes of the Singularity with a simple but enjoyable single-player mode with big maps and big battles in addition to a strong RTS multiplayer side. TA was my favorite game, including the vast modding potential provided by legacy sites like TAUniverse allowing multiple, new units and buildings to be added.

Thank you!

BAR is pretty addictive. I like clicking the unbound cmdr setting.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It defo has that dangerous Civ vibe to it. Eats time like few others!

Nice vid :)

@skoub3466

4 ай бұрын

You there?! :o

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Hey! Thank you - glad you enjoyed it.

I really appreciate your mellow tone. It seems everyone just yells and tries too hard. So yu got my sub 4 sure

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Awesome! Thank you

i think one of the reasons TA was so great was that it had the right amount of anything. i would be more than happy to play, mechanically, the same game but with updated graphics. PA for example had to much going on on to many fronts. i hated it that there was a fight going on on the other side of the planet and i could not observe whats going on. in TA i had at least the minimap that gave me enough info. the idea that anything new needs to break ground is flawed.

BAR is a pretty good experience so far, I was playing it a lot before July and then went to the USA on a visit. Otherwise, a streak broken, I might have tried to get good enough to participate in the team tournies. Early access or not, its a good game

Man, I'd love to see a modern remake of Dungeon Siege. That would be great.

No - the endless war to replace COMMAND & CONQUER. No other game ever came close.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

StarCraft and TA were only a few years after it and have as much if not more of an enduring legacy in RTS. EA are determined to desecrate the C&C legacy with mobile game garbage as well which doesn't help.

Unfortunately for Industrial Annihilation is that Dyson Sphere Program Dark Swarm has beat them to the finish line. They'll seemingly have to do something extra to not feel like a DS clone.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

True, but from what I've seen on YT being first isn't everything if someone with a bigger platform and more resources comes along later... There's probably enough room for both to succeed, right?

BAR is a great game for a Coop LAN Party with the fantastic PVE Mode/KI to fight against, we had so much fun for FREE!

Best $8 I spent on a game. Only thing that sucked was ground troops were basically worthless if there's any choke point, as the first few guys get dead, and congratulations, the rest of the troops are stuck behind them, and theres no easy way to remove their corpses in a combat zone. Also, wish they had automated flying transports to where they could be commamded to automatically move ground troops put in one are to another area. As it stands, where each individual transport has to be commanded to move each individual unit, over and over, theres never a good use for what should have been an otherwise revolutionary unit.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

SupCom fixed that with the Ferry order and Transport order. The latter being a "drop everyone here" command and the former being "Pick up everyone from this marker and drop them there, forever" order

I feel like we will never see a big studio RTS entry again. At least not in the form that people love them, EA will probably periodically shat out C&C mobile games and I suspect Starcraft and WarcraftRTS is totally abandoned because it cannot be monetized(I suspect the reason Activision went all in on Overwatch was it offered great monetization above that of even selling new mounts for WoW.) Which does make me kind of sad to see the biggest gateway drugs of RTS (C&C and the 'craft games) basically be hung out to dry because they are not endless monetization wells.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

I think Microsoft/Activision/Blizz will try to monetize the WC/SC name but with a less risky (and easier monetize) format, sadly. A large part of acquiring Blizz (in addition to the WoW subscribers) was the catalogue of IPs to monetise

Beyond All Reason is my favorite

Forged alliance..With the core mod fix the best part of the series ..can rember sub com battles lasting for hours while in game time was like 40 mins just by the lag them corpses create

Industrial Annihilation sounds an awful lot like Mindustry, you might want to check that out.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Thank you!

Planetary Annihilation suffered from excessive ambition. Making a multiple planet game in large scale is pretty easy - just run each planet and interplanetary space part on a seperate CPU core. They nailed that early. But they really wanted (and advertised) having large, single planets too. Unfortuantely, that is just not feasible. You cannot have more then 1 CPU per planet. So they run into one of the oldest limits of game development - single core performance. That one invariably limited the scale. And made their promises fall flat.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

It's a real shame because playing it safe results in a bunch of boring dross (see Blizzard, all the CoD games etc.)

I worked in tech support for Cavedog et all. I got paid to play that game lol.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Did you still manage to enjoy it? I used to know some Blizz CS people when they had a Dublin office - being a GM was not all it was cracked up to be :(

I think it's ridiculous and just kind of sad that 17 years after the release of supcom we still don't have a clear and present successor. There are plenty of spin offs and supcom/TA 'inspired' games but they all fail to innovate in the same way that supcom did. Supcom moved the genre forward into the 3D space and had (for the time) jaw droppingly beautiful graphics and scale, it added a third then a fourth faction, had multiple single player campaigns, a thriving modding scene, and that's all without getting into the multiplayer that's still kept alive to this day through FAF. So many of these attempted successors, though still fun, just don't have the special sauce that supcom brought to the field. I hate to say it, but I think forged alliance may be the swan song of the genre. Also, what's the deal with so many of the spin offs using to blocky retro esque graphics? In 2007 they could have hundreds of concurrent units with their own hi res textures, effects, animations, etc. but in 2024 we have to make units out of bricks to not tank performance? Even with all the advances in modern hardware? Come on now.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

The positive thing is that although there is no direct successor, there is more activity in the sub-genre than I can remember. Chris Taylor's own project seems very far away though...

@mergele1000

3 ай бұрын

The problem with such high quality graphics is that they are a lot of work. I do agree with your sentiment, SupCom really put up a high bar and so far most choose to not even compete. But I'd rather have them running than beautiful and half-finished and abandoned.

Huh, I expected a mention of Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Game's still being updated too.

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

I wasn't aware it will still actively being developed!

Quality video

There's a game I just found called Executive assault 2 with some planetary annihilation/ sins vibes

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

Another RTS/FPS hybird! Cool - I'll check it out, thank you.

Sadly I just can't get BAR Working. It refuses to launch on my PC and I have no idea why.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

That's rough :( Hopefully a Steam launch in the not too distant future could help

I still play both of them. Just used SCFA yesterday. I'm having to build another Windows XP machine in order to play TA though. Not JUST for that reason, of course. I could never get TA to work in Win7+ - video issues. But to me, TA is worth it because I have about a CD's worth of add-ons to put into the game to make it more fun.

You can change the mouse buttons in Original TA

What's better Sanctuary or BAR? Im mostly playing Total Annihilation, being a retrograde and all. :) Seems like Bar is Total Annihilation 2 when Sanctuary is more true Supcom 2, right?

@Ianbus123

3 ай бұрын

We don't know much about Sanctuary yet as it's in development but no kind of open alpha/beta. It has some promise according to Chris Taylor, though!

TA and Warcraft 2 are the only RTSs I've ever finished a campaign (TA-Rebels, WC-Good Guys). I couldn't seem to get into Supreme Cmdr.

I still play Forged Alliance vanilla. it's the most recent game I can find for which I can do the meta and the micro in equal measures. others' opinions will differ, but I feel all of the newer titles lose out for QOL, as mentioned in the supcom portion of the vid.

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

You should never need to micro much at all in SCFA. If you do either get out of ranked, there's lunatics in there who play ranked; or just learn how to eco faster/better/harder. The game is all macro, micro has no place in it. Also go try out FAF, it's great. Even has fixes, and handful of new relatively balanced units. Even supports the campaign! (In multiplayer, even) Hell FAF also has a unique game mode you can swap to that introduces a 5th unique faction

BAR is goated

New videoooooo 🤩

I absolutely find supcom a direct evolution to TA. The developers actually solved a lot of issues in supcom 2, the problem is, they solved it by simplification a lot of times (for example shooting through the ground instead of keep shooting it, or scrapping ballistics for tracking shots), however in some cases the mechanics really improved (dinamic squad grouping was a welcome addition). I think it is no wonder the strategy game genre is having a renesaince, since the moba genre did fail to improve in the formula and became an offsoot to it. Industry annihilation might be onto something. People realli liked to destroy their sim city 2000 creations.

@Ianbus123

4 ай бұрын

Was always fun to call in an alien attack :)

@vaelophisnyx9873

2 ай бұрын

Simplifications were unfortunately, the worst way to go about things. It also is just an artillery fest, since 90% of the maps are absolutely tiny. Far too small to be a SupCom game.

Total Annihilation. I have tools that allow me to alter fan made units. So I got all the arsenal I'll ever need. But there's a lot of them incoming. I'm surprised. I'm focusing on the futuristic ones.

@Marinealver

4 ай бұрын

So I tried some mobile game called Rusted Warfare. It reminded me of Total Annihilation but had some issues. There is also a Steam Release that has a bunch of mods.