Flat land from high-rise buildings, farmland into factories, knives and guns are invincible to artillery, technology instead of manpower, RTS as a classic strategic category its core development also follows the trajectory of the development of civilization and technology, but its conformist, lack of innovative content mechanism seems to have failed to let him occupy a place in the current market. Times have changed, and player tastes have changed, but there's always a group of people — RTS fans in the post-RTS era who have been longing for that glorious past to be seen again in the near future, and there's no doubt that it's too difficult to be true.
Today, however, an RTS called Diplomacy is Not an Option (hereinafter referred to as "Battle for War") caught the attention of the author, and now (February 10) EA has ended and is officially launched on Steam.
Steam Rating 90%
The same category of RTS seems to be a little different, the game background does not have the grand worldview of "SC", the player will rule the world as a medieval feudal lord in a mid-life crisis, constantly promoting economic development, planning and managing the city while also preventing a large number of terrible enemies, evil beasts, and even a peasant rebel army from attacking the homeland.
"Battle for War" also does not have the more realistic style of "Age of Empires", whether it is units, buildings or environmental presentation, the game adopts a low-poly expression method, which is simple but cute and pleasant.
The vast majority of players have a positive attitude towards the game
In this comparison, it is actually unfair to this game, just like UFC lightweight vs. heavyweight - the game file size of this game is less than 1 GB, although its screen and content volume can not be compared with the current tens or even hundreds of GB of 3A masterpieces, but as far as RTS is concerned, the tactical and battlefield design is called the valve of category quality, and the picture and world view cannot fully determine the quality of the game. In terms of players' viewing and playing experience, the performance of "Battle for War" is obviously outstanding.
Official promotional video for "Fight for War"
Although sparrow is very appropriate to describe this work, what really attracts the author's attention is the interesting understanding of the future RTS development path of the development team of the game, Door 407 - the game pace of "Battle for War" is moderate, its unique confrontation system is extremely novel at the moment, although the playability and strategic depth are far less than the traditional RTS in the glory days, but its proper integration of tower defense and strategy seems to point to the future direction of RTS.
Take the retreat as an advance, lightweight design ideas
The content carried by a single game work is always limited, so expanding the game volume, improving the game screen, etc. as far as possible to use the carrying capacity of a single game to create a very deep content mechanism has naturally become the vanguard of RTS games to meet the desires of current players, especially Sid Meier's "Civilization" series, Ubisoft's "Era" series, P Society's "Continental" series, "Crusader King" series, etc. are all excellent masterpieces, but these works belong to another branch of RTS in a narrow sense ——" Grand Strategy Game", also known as a 4X-RTS game.
There are four basic resources: wood, iron ore, stone and food
4X game will explore, develop, expand, annihilate in one, it is undeniable that its four major features are easy to let the player on the head, but whether it is the learning cost or the difficulty curve of the setting in the eyes of the current player is slightly cumbersome, so this game and the previous "Million Zombies" "Dark Ages" on the same road to lightweight, on the one hand, the game does not have complex resource intersection, which means that the basic resources can be directly involved in the construction of units and buildings, more directly reducing the amount of thinking that players need to think about planning facilities linkage.
On the other hand, "Battle on the Edge" added a relatively new confrontation system, the game players can not launch a strong encirclement action against the enemy, can only do is to protect their own acres and three points of land, this passive counterattack play experience to a certain extent enhances the player's desire for accumulated resources, while focusing more on how to defend against wave after wave of enemy attacks.
Countdown to the next wave of enemies
The three keywords of inability to attack, passive defense, and offensive tide seem familiar? Yes, this is the embodiment of the typical tower defense element, and the addition of this element greatly weakens the need for exploration and expansion, and adds the nature of leisure and relaxation to the game while reducing the degree of brain use, of course, this leisure and relaxation does not mean that it is difficult for players to "bleed" in the play process. In addition, the enemy and the player control unit are more uniform in terms of numerical settings, and their own combat AI is different from the enemy AI, not only standing, but also knows how to set fire enemy units, making the player rely on manual micro-manipulation Of the low cost performance, so the game is extremely friendly for casual players - F2A is finished.
A variety of law settings
Bury the bodies by building the Gravedigger's House
According to the development team, even the player's most loyal citizens will die from time to time for various reasons, such as illness, aging, depression, or serious injury on the battlefield. And when they die, the player must bury them well to prevent the spread of the plague and the moral collapse of society.
The game's physics performance can be described as very refreshing and realistic, the catapult's powerful power will blow up the enemy attack tide out of the "splash", and the unit AI hit feedback is only a point of physical performance, such as each gun made by the player has a certain range, and the medieval shells are projected in an arc; arrows cannot shoot through the wall, but they will be bounced off the wall; the archers on the city tower have blind spots, so the locked gate is not only an obstacle to the enemy, but also to the player's troops. In addition, players may also find some interesting facts about the nature of things in the game, and these facts will have a positive impact on the battles in the game.
In addition, the game also added a magic element, in addition to the player can manually control the skill to release magic, every soldier who died on the battlefield and the lumberjack who died of overwork has the risk of joining the enemy, in other words, if the player fails to bury the body in time, not only will there be plague and other situations, they will also come back to life and mix your home into a mess.
"Battle for War" and the setting of this technology tree, players can use basic resources or advanced resources to methodically improve their own units, buildings and other aspects, while improving the depth of strategy and experience at the same time spawned a sense of cultivation pleasure. At this point, the "lightly loaded" "Battle for a While" has become a simplified version of the 2X strategy game.
Where to go in the post-RTS era
Lightweight this move is also a helpless move to conform to the times, players generally respond to the difficulty of RTS is too high, in fact, games with higher difficulty than RTS abound, such as soul like ACT games, music games, etc., obviously the biggest problem is not the difficulty, the key is that the failure feedback of RTS competition is one of the strongest - there is no equipment in the game, no luck, the player's failure in addition to their own dishes, there is no shield to speak of.
Therefore, in order to save RTS from fire and water, the reform trend has also been put on the agenda, and in fact, from large-scale unit operations such as "Age of Empires", "Red Alert", "SC", to the heroes who occupy a large proportion of intensity in "Warcraft", the traditional RTS attempt at lightweight has long begun, but it is unintentional to plant willows, and the lightweight practice of RTS has led to its fusion of RPG elements and derived another category, MOBA.
Lightweighting out of a new category meant that the road was not working, so another attempt at lightweighting followed - no longer by focusing on a single unit to simplify the scale of the battle, using a simplified operation, battlefield separation design, this design method is particularly evident in "Tooth and Tail", with the help of the innate luck elements of cards plus RTS came into being, Harry Potter, COC, Red Tide It is this lightweight scheme: the class is carried on top of the card strength, and then presented in the form of a wargame, so the player only needs to decide when to play, what to play and how to put it, and all the remaining actions will be automatically deduced in the form of "self-propelled chess", which can greatly weaken the frustration caused by failure (after all, cards, if you lose, you have luck to take over the pot).
At the same time, the game's peaceful strategic management and combat propulsion operation exist in the partition wall, successfully avoiding a major pain point for modern players to play classic RTS - greatly weakening the two-pronged chaos caused by the two-pronged operation of the store and the factory before and after the battle operation. Unfortunately, simulation management, as the most core fun point of RTS, is on this road, and it is becoming more and more detached from the combination of cards and RPGs.
Steam's 88% positive Northgard
So the light weight of the post-RTS era has one more way - restore the simulated business experience, increase the survival experience, that is, by strengthening the resource competition and resource consumption to improve the difficulty of game survival, this program by adjusting the player's operation ideas, from attack and defense to attack and defense, and even complete defense, which makes the game unit time need to think and click the amount of greatly reduced, while retaining the core fun points, greatly reducing the threshold for RTS to get started.
Steam's 92% rating of Galaxy Breaker
The production team can use the seasonal mechanism to strengthen the urgency of resource collection, focusing on defense rather than offense, such as "Northgard" with a significant reduction in winter production; can add defensive pacesetter tower defense game elements to increase the difficulty of survival with wave after wave of attacks, such as the game "Battle for War"; it can also set a growth threshold while setting up RPG elements, so that enemy AI becomes stronger with the player's game flow, such as "Galaxy Cracker".
It can be said that although "Battle for War" is a small-scale game, its unique solution seems to point to another way for the development of the post-RTS era - organically combining tower defense survival elements with RTS to produce a casual RTS that is more suitable for the current player group.
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