Planetary Annihilation

Did PC gamers stop playing real-time strategy games? This game should be the biggest thing in the history of the genre. So why does nobody give a single fuck about it?

It's not very good

It's literally just a worse SupCom.

It does seem like starcraft killed the interest in the genre.
4X and grand strategy would be what more people are into nowadays.

People are still interested in the genre, but playing the same kind of game with relatively few changes for years and years is going to get old eventually. In addition, it's a genre that's difficult/expensive to do well and I imagine most developers aren't going to try and compete with blizzard, and a lot of the developers that used to do RTS games have shut down or had something else happen to them.

Yeah that's kind of what I meant. Devs don't feel like it's worth to go into the same market with starcraft.

A little over 1 million units in the past 2 and a half years.
Unfortunately, if it's not Total War, it probably won't be all that popular.

Too much emphasis on micro and apm play rather than building bases and strategic dominance. Halo wars 2 is coming out but the betas wore out their welcomes way too quickly

Wait, so how many people play Total War and why does only that series have a visible community?

Total war isn't that popular either in comparison to titles in other genres, it just happens to be fairly near the top of the heap for strategy games

Because it sucks ass

>Only 1 fucking faction
>Retarded spherical maps

wtf were they thinking

rts died when everyone started making "balanced" "competitve" games. foolishly they (being RTS developers) thought that e-sports was the way to go forward, that they could siphon this popularity and money from starcraft.

there is too much emphasis in the genre on micro, apm, and so on and almost none whatsoever on actual strategic play.

It had some neat ideas, but prioritized gimicks over solid mechanics.

Anything over 1 million in less than a year is pretty damn popular, and TW: Warhammer sits at ~1.1 million owners.
Total War as a whole has millions, even for non-RTS games it's a popular series.

>retarded spherical maps
Isn't duking it out in space as well as on the surface the point of the game?

>why does nobody give a single fuck about it?

because supreme commander is still better than PA. a LOT better.

Nobody is even TRYING to make a slower-paced RTS?

Grey goo came out not that long ago and didn't do particularly well.

Okay, this is now. I'm intrigued, how so?

I play it. I can't figure out how to make the camera controls tolerable. It's also lacking and I'm not interested in spending 20 bucks for the expansion.

RTS games are stuck in the 90s, and not in the good way.

>hitscan/homing projectiles that always hit and ignore terrain
>units are just a pool of health that decreases until it dies (no armour thickness, damage to components, etc.)
>no flanking or such positioning (e.g. a tank doesn't take more damage from the side)
>generally uninteresting maps that are just a heightmap (no cities, bridges, shit Tiberian Sun had decades ago)
>almost no verticality in said maps
>maps are static (no terrain deformation)
>usual basebuilding fare with 2-3 resources popping out of the ground near it
>usual rush-favouring balance with offensive power greatly outpowering defence

more factions, more units, more depth, more complexity, more everything. and better maps.

That's fine, but if that's your goal, you should try to make your precious spheres less samey and not a pain in the ass to navigate.

I'm pretty sure Wargame had at least half of the features you want. Unfortunately it didn't really take off.

Because this game fucking sucks. Play total annihilation or supcom instead you imbecile

Please make an rts game user you are so fucking right it hurts.

This is the perfect example of a kickstarter delivering exactly what they promised, and it simply turning out to not be very fun.

Men of War Assault Squad 2 has some of what you want, damage to components for example, interesting maps from what I've played.

You have 10 seconds to name an RTS that had partial building destruction rather than just 1hp = perfectly fine, 0hp = boom.

I just want to play starcraft
Why should I play this instead of starcraft?

Nah.

Problem with Planetary Annihilation was that it had a lot of issues. Issues that initially caused people to turn their backs on it.

Then they fixed it all with the expansion, but the damage was done. BIG TIME.

THIS.

A good RTS is a RTS that does the real-time thing its own way and if it does want to take in some elements from other RTS games, then it should take as little as possible, while building its strengths on the elements that make it unique.

Look at Metal Fatigue. That game was fun because you could fight on three levels (underground, surface and orbit). You could even attack from underground and from orbit, and even then you could shoot a land torpedo and blow up the enemy that was underground.

But that wasn't it's actual strong-point. It was the combots and the ability for players to build them from multiple parts and it made the game fun. Not to mention stealing and reverse-engineering the parts you took from your enemies.

RTS these days are, and I dare to say this, but stagnant.

SCII, despite how bad it is, is actually praised for the campaign mechanisms and that they gave the game units, upgrades and abilities that don't appear in skirmish or multiplayer.

Previously games like Emperor: Battle for Dune and Red Alert 2 did it with the units, but the former allows you even to include other sub-factions (a lot as Ordos), while the latter (especially Yuri's Revenge) allowed you to recruit all sub-faction unique units (thus you could get the French Grand Cannon and British Sniper in the Allied Campaign, and the same was for Soviets).

RTS games should be in fact two games in one. The campaign should differ from skirmish and multiplayer a lot.

Problem is that making a game this different and make it interesting would require a lot of time, money and dedication.

In reality, these games need unique technologies to make them truly shine. Technologies that would require time and money to develop.

Cossacks had it I think.

Company of Heroes? I might be wrong about this.

>they fixed it all with the expansion

Of fucking course they did. Damn developers who pull shit like that.

>Kickstarter
>Spherical maps just because they coud
>Don't actually make the maps huge like in Supreme commander so the curvature of the planet is really fucking annoying
>Half assed mediocre units and tiers
>Shitty "campaign" that's a glorified single player
>Generally feels unpolished as shit
>Sold it as Early access for full price
>Slapped v1.0 on the unfinished game when they got tired, announced they would be halting support of the game
>Attempted to start another Kickstarter whilst not bothering to finish their first Kickstarter game, alienating everyone who backed their original kickstarter
>Get their shit slapped
It was a fucking mess

>SCII, despite how bad it is
I don't really understand why people hate SC2.
Is it because they don't want to learn it?

blitzkrieg online
stronghold crusader

What about Ashes of the Singularity?

There's Halo wars 2

This is the most unique viewpoint I ever read about strategy games.

its because most rts players are bronze, not even kidding

instead of fucking off and playing coop mode and having fun turtling or massing shit like I was doing in warcraft 3 as a clueless kid, they pretend sc2 is only 1v1 coop

user, game development COSTS MONEY.

Fuck UberEnt. I'm still salty about SMNC

Honestly part of the reason I got into PC was games you could play with a more complex control scheme but I can't be assed to sit at a desk at all anymore to play video games, my shoulders and back will just hurt

People are rightfully mad at it because the initial release was very lackluster and the fixed version was sold again as a new game.

Now it's pretty good. performance is still terrible though.

but sc2 coop mode HAS all the cool shit from the campaign, it's literally the best addition to the rts genre in years

fucking install that shit and try it its free to play even

Yeah, and fuck developers who release a broken product and then fix it with a 40-60 dollar expansion.

>its because most rts players are bronze, not even kidding
That's probably correct.
People don't want to play competitive RTS, they want to play simcity with guns.

And as I said later, it was too late to fix the damage.

And pity, since it also added some extra stuff, but then again it's their fault for not polishing it enough and giving those things into the base game.

Now I also reminded myself of Divinity: Dragon Commander and the fact that it was to have so, so much more, but had to cut it out.

I don't understand why Larian didn't make a Director's Cut version.

No, it's because they shit all over the previous game by making all three factions "perfectly" balanced, the game is in the end reduced to "whose ball of death will kill the other player's ball of death" and not to mention that instead of building the game by including elements from WCIII, they simply made a inferior Brood War with 3D graphics.

Thanks.

Not only. It also requires technology. Technologies that require even more money.

Thus instead of COSTS MONEY, I'd say that it COSTS SHITLOADS OF MONEY.

Will give it a try. Heard it actually is fun.

>We will never get a sequel

Damn right I do, but Simcity with guns is a very rare occurrence.

>Sim city with guns

I would want to play this. Imagine if you could have the intricacy of Sim City/Cities Skylines combined with an RTS. Manage your cities at home, earning money to fund your armies and then manage the war effort.

which is fucking fine, you can do shit like mass vultures and create literal minefields in coop, you can load up 15 siege tanks into one space shit and teleport around the map

you can have infested buildings that uproot like night elf buildings from warcraft 3, you have all these cool units

they also make it non-repetitive, you can experience early atacks, various enemy compositions like mass air or stealth units or shit like that
there are like 2 commanders specialized in defensive buildings, if you ever played warcraft 3 tower defence maps imagine that, you make units that help you towers shoot faster and shield generators and crap like that, you also use orbital bombarments and other cool shit

thats kind of similar to civilization wars, only there you dont control the armies you just control the army compositions and they spawn and atack automatically

I remember when you could buy PA Early Access for 90€.

Blobbling mass formations isn't really strategy my friend. We want more cover based and blob punishing like in Company of Heroes.

>whose ball of death will kill the other player's ball of death
that is not at all what starcraft plays like, not even in 200 supply vs 200 supply lategame engagements.

The reason starcraft is interesting is not smashing deathballs into each other, but rather the way you get your deathball and how you can rebuild it.
It's a game about making and spending money.

>instead of building the game by including elements from WCIII
Warcraft 3 is a game that is completely different from SC2 and BW, because it's not about getting a deathball quickly and having the means to make a new one once it dies.
Warcraft 3 is about getting the most out of your army and controlling it well.
It's a completely different game, because the core idea is a different one.

>inferior Brood War
at least SC2 has worker rally and functional pathing
That alone makes infinitely better than brood war.
The reason BW was APM masturbation was because it's barely playable without it.

SC2 is not a strategy game.
It's an economy management game with guns.

>Only there you don't control the armies you just control the army compositions

Yeah, I would want to actually control the armies. Of course, I doubt any engine or computer would be able to manage the simulation of a city, let alone multiple ones while also managing many units in combat ala the typical RTS games (total war, etc).

rts games take a lot of time be good at and people have invested their time Warcraft 3 and starcraft bw and 2 and when another doesn't matter how good a game gets released people just cant give their expertise like that just because it's a new RTS. all the rts games have their own mechanics and stuff. thats why its quite a risk for devs to make a game which will only be bought by people who either havent played rts or don't play anymore and just are familiar with them, since all the rts Crowd is taken by warcraft 3 StarCraft, starcraft 2, supcom. aoe2 and command and conquer, i bet someone who's even a little good will not stop playing the game hes good at for some new plant.

>"campaign" that's a glorified single player
I have nothing against that part conceptually. Campaiigns like Warlords Battlecry or Dark Crusade are great fun. It's just not done too well in PA.

If you're good at one RTS, you're pretty decent at all of them.

>I have only played Starcraft: The post

Company of Heroes, Men at War, Wargame, and SupCom have a majority of these things. Not all, but most.

Did Chris Taylor work on Supreme Commander?

nah a good sc2 player doesn't matter how good will have to learn and practice aoe2 from the ground up.
rts is not like fighting games, also supcom is really different as compared to other rts games like cnc sc wc.
almost all of the fighting games have hadou motion.

>that is not at all what starcraft plays like, not even in 200 supply vs 200 supply lategame engagements.

Still needs more polish.

>Warcraft 3 is a game that is completely different from SC2 and BW, because it's not about getting a deathball quickly and having the means to make a new one once it dies.

Yep.

>Warcraft 3 is about getting the most out of your army and controlling it well.

Indeed.

>It's a completely different game, because the core idea is a different one.

Still it has some similarities, though both differ in scale and lack/addition of other mechanisms.

>at least SC2 has worker rally and functional pathing

It's the few good things about it.

>That alone makes infinitely better than brood war.

I'm not a fan of playing it too aggressive and SCII is going that way.

>The reason BW was APM masturbation was because it's barely playable without it.

Everyone has their tastes.

>SC2 is not a strategy game.

I may not be a fan of it, but it is still one...kinda.

>It's an economy management game with guns.

I really want something like that, but more complex.

AOE2 still going strong, I also main Alberto Barbosa

>4X and grand strategy
Never really got into it, except AOW3 which was conquest based and had pretty nice combat. Still prefer HoMM though.

>It's the few good things about it.
yeah, but these features are such amazing things that it makes every other game that is alike completely obsolete.

Sorry, I referred to the wrong game.

What I meant to as was: did Chris Taylor work on Planetary Annihilation?

This sums it up pretty good.
I even waited a long time to get the Eaccess on sale after it was out for several month.
Still buggy as shit.
Path finding of the units was absolute abysmal.
Random crashes when planets or asteroids hit each other.

When they said the game is finished and you could now get these cool new units with a DLC just as expensive as the base game, I flew into a fit of rage thinking about bombing Uber entertainment or whatever.
First and last time I get jewed out of my money on some EA scam.

It's not very good.

RTS in its classical form needs revamp. It's obvious that old and trusted "blocks" that used to be the staple of the genre don't work anymore. PA failed despite being Supreme Commander(which itself took lessons from Total Annihilation and made it in super big scale) successor. Grey goo wasn't great either. Cossacks 3, despite being exactly like beloved(in some circles) Cossacks 1 failed to gain traction.

Meanwhile RTT's are doing decently. Men of War series is as popular as it always was, you have some promising titles on the horizon(Ultimate General: Civil War) or Wargame which is also popular.

Which means that people want that kind of gameplay but for some reason the base-building doesn't "do it" anymore.

>MoW
>Wargame

Neither are RTS games, they're RTT. They show however that people do want to command units and do warfare, the


>SupCom
>CoH

SupCom has the ballistics and CoH has some degree of unit depth with armour and stuff, but that's about it, they cover all the other points. SupCom is far from standard RTS and improves on some stuff but again it takes several steps back from Total Annihilation, which came out many years before it.

>>I have only played Starcraft: The post
Stop projecting, user.

This is the last PC game I bought in physical form... Best purchase of my life, I wish I knew where I put it though.

Only thing I want in life is open world dwarf fortress or rimworld. Fuck everything else. I want online multiplayer for these games or a mmorts.

>RTT

Real time what?

Real Time Tactics. Games like MoW which do not include production and resource management like base-building strategy games do. Wargame blurs the line a bit, you don't build bases or the units you use, but you do have to mind the logistics of supplying your units.

RTT is fighting the battles, RTS is fighting the war, basically.

Supcom is probably one of the few ones where many skills you learn by playing starcraft don't apply because it basically doesn't have economy outside of "build this for money and this for the other money, which is more or less supply".

The most important thing you learn in starcraft is timings, figuring out how to make things fit together.
For instance, you know that it takes X amount of time for your upgrade to finish, so you move your army over to the enemy base, so it gets there when the upgrade is done. And starcraft is basically all about this developing a sense for these things.

These things you learn with it apply in AoE2 and WC3 just as much.

It feels like you really don't like this fast gameplay sc2 and all those games have.
What I like about SC2 1v1s is that I can play 5 games or even more in less than an hour, I appreciate it being really fast.

>Still it has some similarities, though both differ in scale and lack/addition of other mechanisms.
The similarity is "make an army and kill your opponent".
That's basically it.

>I'm not a fan of playing it too aggressive and SCII is going that way.
It really isn't that aggressive, you can play your passive macro style and win most of your games just fine.

>Everyone has their tastes.
Yeah, I'm pretty slow with my mouse, but I still want to be somewhat decent at the game.

>I may not be a fan of it, but it is still one...kinda.
Well, it's an RTS for sure.
It's a real time game and there's some strategy beyond a-move involved.

>I really want something like that, but more complex.
Starcraft is that, but there's a billion things going on all the time and you lose if you don't have income if you don't lose to something else.

It's worse than supcom in almost every way, and they substituted that with some gimmick where you havfe multiple planets.

I really like the concept of fighting on multiple planets and moons and shit but the execution is just so goddamn horrible.

Thanks for clarification.

Titans really improved the game but every time I play it I find myself wishing I was playing SupCom instead. Gameplay tends to be sluggish and not very fluid, battles aren't all that satisfying, also teching up feels really strange compared to SupCom. All that being said the large scale of taking/defending/attacking expansions is amazing, and more in-depth than any previous TA or SupCom, and the planet-killing weapons are a really cool way to end a stale mate. There are also a shit ton of different unit types in the game, and T2 actually feels really strong and not like slightly upgraded T1. If it simply felt tighter and less awkward to play I'd love it completely over SupCom, but as it stands controlling the game always gets in the way of it's gameplay.

Tactical.
>Neither are RTS games, they're RTT. They show however that people do want to command units and do warfare
What's interesting however becomes clear after you look at MoW more closely.

Multi was always popular, single player campaigns - not so much. I mean the pre-MoW games from the series were super-fucking hardcore(Outfront - in the very first mission you've had to blow fuel depot or something like that with 3 guys armed only with small arms against like 60 Germans, armoured car and a fucking tank guarding it), later on it got only little bit easier, and yet since Assault Squad happened people started playing single player. And mind you that both in multi and AS single player you can call in reinforcements.

And yet when the same reinforcements are made by buildings people stop buying the games.

One of the things that annoy me about PA are the maps. Planets without fleets are basically several flat planes interconnected by teleporters (orbital movement) wrapped around spheres. If you take those planets and lay out their "skin" onto a flat plane, you end up with some VERY boring maps. The fact that they are wrapped around a sphere doesn't make it ok, it just makes the game extremely dull. You won't be seeing great shit like Seton's Clutch in PA (also because the planets are technologically limited to a tiny size so it's not feasible even if they wanted to).

TL:DR planets are a fucking gimmick, at least the way they are implemented in PA.

>And yet when the same reinforcements are made by buildings people stop buying the games.
because once you bring buildings and money into it the game starts being really really difficult.

I seriously doubt that given the amount of clicking and micro MoW needs and offers, building and economy would be "too much" for the players.

dunno never played it.
but macro is a the main issue most players have in starcraft.

They are indeed a gimmick. There are custom maps that play like SupCom (and feel great) but you still have to deal with spherical BS. Interplanetery combat doesn't happen often enough to warrant the way things are. It's mostly just funneling shit through teleporters.

The games mechanics sounded amazing but the way they implemented them was disappointing, the factions were similar and there was no difference in units and gameplay focused on who could spam the most units, the game was made off of inspiration from Total Annihilation but they weren't even close so the community fell apart and the hype died

The gameplay has shifted away from factory spam and into getting T2 at an optimal time. Too bad that if you want to play like this they're charging everyone for an expansion.

The most embarrassing part is that spherical maps were done better ages ago.

Straight strategy games have become overcomplicated to the point where the challenge of picking up a new one isn't worth it. Paradox games get around this to an extent due to their go at your own pace philosophy and in general just being more fun to commit to for a playthrough, but if you ask me the future of strategy is in other genres adapting strategy elements. Like an open world RPG where you can dungeon crawl and explore if you want but also use the resources you collect to build up a faction that you can take to war against the others. Think Fallout 4 meets a good development team meets Mount and Blade.

The thing that currently bugs me is that I've been a longtime RTS fan and managed to get my friends into the genre through SCII. I had one friend try out CoH and SupCom and he loved both. Then we get into Planetary Annihilation and I'm thinking to myself "Holy shit this blows, I wanna play SupCom instead" and then I realize that PA is becoming my friend's favorite RTS. They haven't even experienced the classics to know what good RTS is and now I'm stuck playing PA cause that's all the shitters wanna do. And to top that off they blow absolute asscheeks at the game, with no understanding of the fundamentals. It's actually an amazing spectacle really, seeing someone be so bad at the game.

fuck you and your fucking death laser

I think singleplayer RTS is boring.

you can still play it online
google for a multiplayer patch

>red alert 3 was the shit, soviet all of the day bro
>planetary annihilation was overpriced but great too
>buy grey goo during winter sale
>refund after three games

Any other rts worth trying?

just play sc2 if you're not a casual shitter

But I am and prefer to play versus easy bots to win.

Holy fuck that game was just pure bliss to play.

why are most RTS players awful at the games?

if you want to get fucked by ex-westwood employees go look at the 8-bit series. really great concept that was totally botched like every single petroglyph game.

15 minutes no rush no arty glhf :)

All I want is a RTS game where I can tech endlessly.

Supcom FA came so close. you always had a better upgrade/unit to strive for.

if you havent yet tried the blackops mods for supcom you need to. they add in basically a new tier for everything and let you turn your commander into a god of war.