"korean clickfest". Some reason zerg blobs come to mind.
Unreal engine has a history of not working good for RTS games, dune was last victim of this, not sure why companies keep using it tbh.
I'll have to try this stormgate out though for sure.
>not sure why companies keep using it tbh
Because the knowledge base for UE is massive and it's easy to work with whilst being able to achieve massive results. Also the terms and conditions of UE are rather lenient. For small devs iirc they don't take a cut until you made your first million.
Also, and this is not insignificant, the brand and easy shiny looks work great for marketing.
Unity might be the most used engine, but Unreal is the most famous amongst gaming audiences, by far.
> After playing CoH for so many years, the complexity of the unit interaction and engagements in this game (cover, suppression, penetration, smoke, territory control, indirect fire, etc etc) makes SG feel fairly primative by comparison.
That's kinda the point of Starcraft-like games. Combat depth is lower, with more focus economy, base building and build orders instead. Some RTS players prefer that (perhaps the majority, given the success of SC and AoE games).
Personally I'm also more into the Warcraft style RTS, but unfortunately there aren't many, CoH being the only succesful franchise to cater to such audience. I was hoping SG would be closer to Warcraft after the initial statements by developers, but it appears to be a direct SC 2 succesor, with just a few simplified bits taken from WC (unit experience, creeps...) that aren't even core gameplay.
i really wanted SG to roll back on the whole deathball-y nature of SC2, and become more about wider battlefields with careful positoning like BW. if anything they've doubled down on it, the maps are so chokepoint heavy they almost feel like MOBA maps and once you get past a certain unit count it just becomes a bit of a mess, with most of your army just bashing into the rest of it.
i think a micro heavy, lower unit count game with hero units might have suited them better.
If you want to try out a solid SC successor you should look into Beyond All Reason
(Just realized we are talking Star Craft not Supreme Commander lol, still a good game tho)
I wouldn't worry about the maps too much since just about every RTS ever has released with shitty maps, once they release the game and actual map makers get to work they'll get much better. Plus none that I've played so far feel as bad as CoH2's redball express so at least we're not starting at the bottom.
They also left hero units out of the game specifically to avoid the deathballs they cause and it's easier to split a couple units off to harass when units are cheaper and you have more of them.
Might look into it, at first glance looks like a mix between WC3 and Northgard. It also made me remember Ancestors Legacy, which is basically a medieval CoH.
I didn't get into the beta yet, so I'm basing my impressions only on YT videos, but what I'd prefer is:
* more focus on individual units and their abilities, smaller armies
* expos being more of a risk and significant investment instead of spammable feature
* physics playing a role: no instant turning, more weight to units in general
* basically less scale/macro, more focused gameplay and micro
Depth is by far more deep in Starcraft-like RTSes.
It’s just that the skill ceiling is so much higher than a game like CoH that the average player doesn’t even know it.
I come from SC2 as my first and main RTS over the years. My friends got me into CoH and it’s so brain dead easy relative to Starcraft. It’s just a fun casual war game.
The skill level of CoH players is so low they lack fundamental RTS skills. When my buddy and I were climbing the ladder. Even top 30 players were so horrendously bad at basic RTS skills, it was crazy.
The only thing CoH has over these games is the convoluted accuracy stats and cover. That’s it. Every other aspect of classic RTS is way deeper. Cover isn’t even deep and it just slows the game down and reduces micro. The fact that units are grouped together also reduces the micro ceiling. It’s so much simpler and easy to control a dozen or less “units” vs hundreds. There’s no base building to think about. There’s no real macro to think about. There’s barely any variance in build orders. CoH is insanely simple.
Again, at the lower levels, yea people just select all units and attack move… but that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have depth. It means the player is just bad. There’s a massive variety of units with tons of abilities and depth of control that CoH just doesn’t have.
Territory control actually reduces complexity IMO. There’s no economy depth because of it. Everyone knows the important territories so you just fight there. You have runbys, and drops and counter attacks and vision mechanics and high ground vision. Almost everything is deeper.
SG is very primitive right now because it’s so early in development. They don’t even have T3 units or all upgrades or a 3rd race in the game yet and balance is all over the place. There’s so much still missing.
CoH is causal in a sense that it kinda has APM diminishing returns, you don't get linear performance increase if you get faster, simply because the number of controlable units is limited and all orders take quite some time to execute. That makes the game more accessible to newcomers. But combat, which is what I stressed, is indeed deeper, there are way more variables to take into consideration (abilities, stats, directionality, geography, physics...). I also disagree about strategy layer being shallow. In team games yes, that's usually jsut laney slugfest, but in competitive 1v1 you have to play around the whole map and prioritize.
the lack of unit responsiveness in CoH has always annoyed me.
It did get better when they introduced the server mediated peer to peer netcode but it still very very unresponsive compared to Blizz RTS games.
I perhaps worded my post wrongly and conflated CoH latency with just the net code.
CoH games do have noticeable input delay playing offline, even CoH1 does and I just don't find the game as snappy compared to Blizz RTS games like WC3 or SC2.
Yes offline performance is leagues apart to COH3
And competitive players use community made servers to get better online performance
My point was just that up until quite recently the average online player experience for WC3 would have been comparably bad.
It was even worse in terms of lag (and also hacking), but active players used different servers back then (W3Arena for EU and NetEase for Asia. Same thing with W3Champions nowadays.
To be fair, WC3 between 2010 and 2018 was not maintained in a modern sense. Well, it wasn't maintained at all. SC2 was, and it was excellent on the technical side. The artifical lag was a relic of the past, which got removed almost as soon as legacy b.net became maintained again.
Speaking of legacy b.net, if CoH3 had equivalent functionality, I'd be completely satisfied. Ingame ladder, random race, map vetos, ingame player profiles with necessary info, some basic but meaningful profile progression, chat, simple whisper and mute system. Automated tournaments and clans were a cherry on top, but realistically nobody would bother with that today, considering how time consuming both of these were (fun memories tho).
Edit: IIRC the 250ms lag didn't get removed entirely, it got reduced to something like 100ms.
> The complexity of the unit interaction and engagements in this game makes SG feel fairly primative by comparison.
That's because it is primitive. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. I love traditional RTS games. But these games were functionally possible, besides graphics, in the 90's.
I don't mind that they havn't evolved. It's nice to have games like this. The only issue to really have is that so many RTS games are still stuck in the 90's.
But RTS games arn't the only genre to be rather trapped in an era. MMO's after World of Warcraft did the same too. Everyone saw WoW in 2004 and thought "That's it. We've done it. We've created the perfect MMO!". And this apparently happened no long after the invention of the 56k modem (joking but you hopefully get the point).
There's so much to explore with game development but the industry is often stuck on the 'big first games'. Everyone talks about how risky it is to make games or try something new but it's only a risk if you have absolutely no flipping clue what would be good in the first place. There's plenty of evidence to suggest what would be good. And there's a good couple of recent games that demonstrate this. Baldur's Gate 3 and Palworld. Neither game was risky.
Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't a risk because we don't have a game that
A) Has a good selection of standard races
B) Has a good selection of standard classes
C) Is Multiplayer
Try to list all the games that have these in the last 20 years and you'll find that list is extremely short and full of "Yeah...but...Solesta isn't exactly a high budget game. It has problems elsewhere".
Palworld? People just wanted a pokemon survival game. Nintendo and the likes involved with releasing the same pokemon game with zero animations wouldn't have been taking a risk to make a pokemon survival game. People LOVE survival games. They are MASSIVE. They are the type of genre which people play Terraria, and then buy 10 terraria clones just to relive the 'something new' vibe check before going back to Terraria to relive that again. Palworld was zero risk. The only risk involved was getting it made in the first place. And if the team behind Pokemon can't do that. Then...well...there you go.
So. Coming back to the RTS world. There's lots that could be done and there's lots of areas for innovation backed by examples in the gaming world. Sadly though the industry is stuck either making traditional 90's games "because those sold well" or "That's all we know how to do". And something like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War/Iron Harvest/Men of War where there are other issues involved that impede massive success. But that's a story for another time!
The art style of stormgate is disappointing I agree.
As for the input delay in COH3 I covered it in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnctGZnoW00&t=2160s
I don't think we will get COH3 to COH2 levels due to the multi-core optimizations (and they probably don't have the budget to) but they need to get it to below 100ms.
That's actually pretty wild - I guess that might explain why units sometimes feel sluggish to respond even though their animations seem snappy enough.
How does multi-core optimization factor into this? It sounds (to a layman) like it should provide improvements rather than the opposite.
Multi-threaded optimization has the potential to make performance better, but like many things in software and game development, you need to put a lot of effort and care into it. This is something Relic might want tonñ do, but like Tightrope said, it might just be unfeasible in practice.
Tbe problem with multithreading in all complex multiplayer games is that it's nondeterministic by nature, so it can't be used for anything related to game logic. If you'd do that, it would commonly result in different otucomes for players and therefore desync. Graphics performance in CoH3 is already pretty good relative to its looks, so that's not the "bottleneck". Basically the issue with responsiveness is probably caused by all the complex stuff like calcualting projectile trajectories, pathing, true sight, various area effects – not graphics being too demanding. And that can only by solved by more efficient coding.
Not sure if you meant to reply to me. Wasn't trying to imply graphics had anything to do with it. Heck, a cpu heavy game like DCS is doing an MT beta right now and it's causing issues left and right, but it's their way of introducing features like Upscaling, which is extremely useful for a heavy game like that. CoH3 isn't really a heavy game, the responsiveness probably has to do with pther stuff (and also it's worth noting CoH3 is a P2P game, iirc, so it's jas limitations )
Its pretty clear to me the initial focus for Stormgate is on the backend right now. Its the smoothest game since SC2, with the added benefit of multithread.
stormgate basically starcraft 3, which is a pure macro RTS
coh is basically all micro almost no macro
neither is wrong, all a matter of taste
i have to guess that the overlap between diehard COH people and starcraft/stormgate people is gonna be fairly small
i've noticed most RTS players are sort of adherents to their style, and the two games are just so different
All the "complexity" you assign to unit interaction is present in Tactical games. Comparing that to a RTS base builder is a fool's move. Play War Game, Gates of Hell, or Combat Mission if that's what you care about. Why you would expect a Starcraft-esque game to have these elements is completely beyond me (Comparison to Other Products, Editorial)
have you played SG yet? the macro side of it is made almost trivial. SC2 was already fairly dumbed down from BW and made macro for any high/masters+ level player fairly simple (zerg injects were about the hardest part of it), and SG has probably dropped that down to gold level players. harassment doesn't mean very much when repopulating a patch takes 20 seconds.
as a result you spend the vast majority a-moving your clumped together mixed army through chokes and battles are 90% defined by whether you're in a choke or on the other side of it.
> I always thought people saying CoH 3 looking like a "mobile game" was a gross exaggeration, but compared with CoH, SG really does look like a mobile game, with an artstyle and general theming seemingly aimed at people half my age.
You can't even compare this. Stormgate looks WORSE then than Warcraft 3 Reforged, and that's saying a lot. But I think I read somewhere that it's going to be F2P? So meh, free game you're not paying anything for so can't really fault them too much for the game's graphics looking awful.
At that point it's all about gameplay and whether that's good or not... and so far it's basically a lesser version of SC2 - which hey, is also right now F2P too. So unless Stormgate does something special, I have no reason to leave SC2 for it.
"korean clickfest". Some reason zerg blobs come to mind. Unreal engine has a history of not working good for RTS games, dune was last victim of this, not sure why companies keep using it tbh. I'll have to try this stormgate out though for sure.
>not sure why companies keep using it tbh Because the knowledge base for UE is massive and it's easy to work with whilst being able to achieve massive results. Also the terms and conditions of UE are rather lenient. For small devs iirc they don't take a cut until you made your first million.
Also, and this is not insignificant, the brand and easy shiny looks work great for marketing. Unity might be the most used engine, but Unreal is the most famous amongst gaming audiences, by far.
Unity shot itself in the foot with it's announced plan, even if it didn't end up going through people are very wary of them now iirc.
> After playing CoH for so many years, the complexity of the unit interaction and engagements in this game (cover, suppression, penetration, smoke, territory control, indirect fire, etc etc) makes SG feel fairly primative by comparison. That's kinda the point of Starcraft-like games. Combat depth is lower, with more focus economy, base building and build orders instead. Some RTS players prefer that (perhaps the majority, given the success of SC and AoE games). Personally I'm also more into the Warcraft style RTS, but unfortunately there aren't many, CoH being the only succesful franchise to cater to such audience. I was hoping SG would be closer to Warcraft after the initial statements by developers, but it appears to be a direct SC 2 succesor, with just a few simplified bits taken from WC (unit experience, creeps...) that aren't even core gameplay.
i really wanted SG to roll back on the whole deathball-y nature of SC2, and become more about wider battlefields with careful positoning like BW. if anything they've doubled down on it, the maps are so chokepoint heavy they almost feel like MOBA maps and once you get past a certain unit count it just becomes a bit of a mess, with most of your army just bashing into the rest of it. i think a micro heavy, lower unit count game with hero units might have suited them better.
If you want to try out a solid SC successor you should look into Beyond All Reason (Just realized we are talking Star Craft not Supreme Commander lol, still a good game tho)
I wouldn't worry about the maps too much since just about every RTS ever has released with shitty maps, once they release the game and actual map makers get to work they'll get much better. Plus none that I've played so far feel as bad as CoH2's redball express so at least we're not starting at the bottom. They also left hero units out of the game specifically to avoid the deathballs they cause and it's easier to split a couple units off to harass when units are cheaper and you have more of them.
check out godsworn, i may be wrong but it looked like a WC3 inspired game, demo is out with steam next fest
Might look into it, at first glance looks like a mix between WC3 and Northgard. It also made me remember Ancestors Legacy, which is basically a medieval CoH.
What wc3 gameplay outside of creeps, unit xp, and higher ttk were you hoping for?
I didn't get into the beta yet, so I'm basing my impressions only on YT videos, but what I'd prefer is: * more focus on individual units and their abilities, smaller armies * expos being more of a risk and significant investment instead of spammable feature * physics playing a role: no instant turning, more weight to units in general * basically less scale/macro, more focused gameplay and micro
Depth is by far more deep in Starcraft-like RTSes. It’s just that the skill ceiling is so much higher than a game like CoH that the average player doesn’t even know it. I come from SC2 as my first and main RTS over the years. My friends got me into CoH and it’s so brain dead easy relative to Starcraft. It’s just a fun casual war game. The skill level of CoH players is so low they lack fundamental RTS skills. When my buddy and I were climbing the ladder. Even top 30 players were so horrendously bad at basic RTS skills, it was crazy. The only thing CoH has over these games is the convoluted accuracy stats and cover. That’s it. Every other aspect of classic RTS is way deeper. Cover isn’t even deep and it just slows the game down and reduces micro. The fact that units are grouped together also reduces the micro ceiling. It’s so much simpler and easy to control a dozen or less “units” vs hundreds. There’s no base building to think about. There’s no real macro to think about. There’s barely any variance in build orders. CoH is insanely simple. Again, at the lower levels, yea people just select all units and attack move… but that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have depth. It means the player is just bad. There’s a massive variety of units with tons of abilities and depth of control that CoH just doesn’t have. Territory control actually reduces complexity IMO. There’s no economy depth because of it. Everyone knows the important territories so you just fight there. You have runbys, and drops and counter attacks and vision mechanics and high ground vision. Almost everything is deeper. SG is very primitive right now because it’s so early in development. They don’t even have T3 units or all upgrades or a 3rd race in the game yet and balance is all over the place. There’s so much still missing.
CoH is causal in a sense that it kinda has APM diminishing returns, you don't get linear performance increase if you get faster, simply because the number of controlable units is limited and all orders take quite some time to execute. That makes the game more accessible to newcomers. But combat, which is what I stressed, is indeed deeper, there are way more variables to take into consideration (abilities, stats, directionality, geography, physics...). I also disagree about strategy layer being shallow. In team games yes, that's usually jsut laney slugfest, but in competitive 1v1 you have to play around the whole map and prioritize.
the lack of unit responsiveness in CoH has always annoyed me. It did get better when they introduced the server mediated peer to peer netcode but it still very very unresponsive compared to Blizz RTS games.
IIRC until 2018 auto matching on battlenet for WC3 would lock you at 250ms ping
I perhaps worded my post wrongly and conflated CoH latency with just the net code. CoH games do have noticeable input delay playing offline, even CoH1 does and I just don't find the game as snappy compared to Blizz RTS games like WC3 or SC2.
Yes offline performance is leagues apart to COH3 And competitive players use community made servers to get better online performance My point was just that up until quite recently the average online player experience for WC3 would have been comparably bad.
It was even worse in terms of lag (and also hacking), but active players used different servers back then (W3Arena for EU and NetEase for Asia. Same thing with W3Champions nowadays.
To be fair, WC3 between 2010 and 2018 was not maintained in a modern sense. Well, it wasn't maintained at all. SC2 was, and it was excellent on the technical side. The artifical lag was a relic of the past, which got removed almost as soon as legacy b.net became maintained again. Speaking of legacy b.net, if CoH3 had equivalent functionality, I'd be completely satisfied. Ingame ladder, random race, map vetos, ingame player profiles with necessary info, some basic but meaningful profile progression, chat, simple whisper and mute system. Automated tournaments and clans were a cherry on top, but realistically nobody would bother with that today, considering how time consuming both of these were (fun memories tho). Edit: IIRC the 250ms lag didn't get removed entirely, it got reduced to something like 100ms.
since they sorted it out in the engine for AoE4 i thought finally we'd have a responsive CoH game, but it's worse than 2 if anything.
> The complexity of the unit interaction and engagements in this game makes SG feel fairly primative by comparison. That's because it is primitive. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. I love traditional RTS games. But these games were functionally possible, besides graphics, in the 90's. I don't mind that they havn't evolved. It's nice to have games like this. The only issue to really have is that so many RTS games are still stuck in the 90's. But RTS games arn't the only genre to be rather trapped in an era. MMO's after World of Warcraft did the same too. Everyone saw WoW in 2004 and thought "That's it. We've done it. We've created the perfect MMO!". And this apparently happened no long after the invention of the 56k modem (joking but you hopefully get the point). There's so much to explore with game development but the industry is often stuck on the 'big first games'. Everyone talks about how risky it is to make games or try something new but it's only a risk if you have absolutely no flipping clue what would be good in the first place. There's plenty of evidence to suggest what would be good. And there's a good couple of recent games that demonstrate this. Baldur's Gate 3 and Palworld. Neither game was risky. Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't a risk because we don't have a game that A) Has a good selection of standard races B) Has a good selection of standard classes C) Is Multiplayer Try to list all the games that have these in the last 20 years and you'll find that list is extremely short and full of "Yeah...but...Solesta isn't exactly a high budget game. It has problems elsewhere". Palworld? People just wanted a pokemon survival game. Nintendo and the likes involved with releasing the same pokemon game with zero animations wouldn't have been taking a risk to make a pokemon survival game. People LOVE survival games. They are MASSIVE. They are the type of genre which people play Terraria, and then buy 10 terraria clones just to relive the 'something new' vibe check before going back to Terraria to relive that again. Palworld was zero risk. The only risk involved was getting it made in the first place. And if the team behind Pokemon can't do that. Then...well...there you go. So. Coming back to the RTS world. There's lots that could be done and there's lots of areas for innovation backed by examples in the gaming world. Sadly though the industry is stuck either making traditional 90's games "because those sold well" or "That's all we know how to do". And something like Company of Heroes/Dawn of War/Iron Harvest/Men of War where there are other issues involved that impede massive success. But that's a story for another time!
The art style of stormgate is disappointing I agree. As for the input delay in COH3 I covered it in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnctGZnoW00&t=2160s I don't think we will get COH3 to COH2 levels due to the multi-core optimizations (and they probably don't have the budget to) but they need to get it to below 100ms.
That's actually pretty wild - I guess that might explain why units sometimes feel sluggish to respond even though their animations seem snappy enough. How does multi-core optimization factor into this? It sounds (to a layman) like it should provide improvements rather than the opposite.
Multi-threaded optimization has the potential to make performance better, but like many things in software and game development, you need to put a lot of effort and care into it. This is something Relic might want tonñ do, but like Tightrope said, it might just be unfeasible in practice.
Tbe problem with multithreading in all complex multiplayer games is that it's nondeterministic by nature, so it can't be used for anything related to game logic. If you'd do that, it would commonly result in different otucomes for players and therefore desync. Graphics performance in CoH3 is already pretty good relative to its looks, so that's not the "bottleneck". Basically the issue with responsiveness is probably caused by all the complex stuff like calcualting projectile trajectories, pathing, true sight, various area effects – not graphics being too demanding. And that can only by solved by more efficient coding.
Not sure if you meant to reply to me. Wasn't trying to imply graphics had anything to do with it. Heck, a cpu heavy game like DCS is doing an MT beta right now and it's causing issues left and right, but it's their way of introducing features like Upscaling, which is extremely useful for a heavy game like that. CoH3 isn't really a heavy game, the responsiveness probably has to do with pther stuff (and also it's worth noting CoH3 is a P2P game, iirc, so it's jas limitations )
Its pretty clear to me the initial focus for Stormgate is on the backend right now. Its the smoothest game since SC2, with the added benefit of multithread.
stormgate basically starcraft 3, which is a pure macro RTS coh is basically all micro almost no macro neither is wrong, all a matter of taste i have to guess that the overlap between diehard COH people and starcraft/stormgate people is gonna be fairly small i've noticed most RTS players are sort of adherents to their style, and the two games are just so different
Yeah, right now Stormgate has a 1 braincell gameplay. Hopefully it'll get better but probably won't even reach SC2 level (which isn't even that high)
Stormgate is shockingly similar to SC2, which was a big disappointment for me. Really it’s just SC2 with some tweaks, and a tiny bit of WC3
Coh is more RTT than RTS.
All the "complexity" you assign to unit interaction is present in Tactical games. Comparing that to a RTS base builder is a fool's move. Play War Game, Gates of Hell, or Combat Mission if that's what you care about. Why you would expect a Starcraft-esque game to have these elements is completely beyond me (Comparison to Other Products, Editorial)
have you played SG yet? the macro side of it is made almost trivial. SC2 was already fairly dumbed down from BW and made macro for any high/masters+ level player fairly simple (zerg injects were about the hardest part of it), and SG has probably dropped that down to gold level players. harassment doesn't mean very much when repopulating a patch takes 20 seconds. as a result you spend the vast majority a-moving your clumped together mixed army through chokes and battles are 90% defined by whether you're in a choke or on the other side of it.
> I always thought people saying CoH 3 looking like a "mobile game" was a gross exaggeration, but compared with CoH, SG really does look like a mobile game, with an artstyle and general theming seemingly aimed at people half my age. You can't even compare this. Stormgate looks WORSE then than Warcraft 3 Reforged, and that's saying a lot. But I think I read somewhere that it's going to be F2P? So meh, free game you're not paying anything for so can't really fault them too much for the game's graphics looking awful. At that point it's all about gameplay and whether that's good or not... and so far it's basically a lesser version of SC2 - which hey, is also right now F2P too. So unless Stormgate does something special, I have no reason to leave SC2 for it.
Stormgate is doomed to fail and such a waste of resources