The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre more or less died in the mid 2000s with Age of Empires II, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft being the ones that left a mark.

Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene. Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.

Which is a damn shame because RTS games are my favorite genre, with Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 being my favorite games of all time.

It's really a shame to me that the most popular multiplayer games these days seem to be FPS games, or games where you just control a single character. Don't get me wrong those games can still be fun, but they entail a fraction of the strategy as RTS games.

I hope one day we'll see a resurgence of the RTS genre.

There is the free and open source Beyond All Reason (BAR) inspired by Total Annihilation, which is very polished and a lot of fun. It's got features I've not seen anywhere else yet (in terms of possibilities for commands and customisation) and also has a growing competitive scene. It's worth checking out

'Beyond All Reason' regularly ranks second place behind SC2 on Twitch.

I loved empire earth II as well

> seeing no new games worthy of note to this day

I think Stormgate[0] will be interesting here, when it comes out.

[0] https://playstormgate.com

C&C is another hugely popular one. Though I was in the minority of not enjoying Westwoods RTS so much. I much preferred Warcraft and StarCraft. But my favourite was The Settlers.

This was also an era when business simulation games (you could argue as another “style” of RTS but not combat based) were popular too. Like Transport Tycoon, Theme Park, etc. From past conversations on here, it sounds like City Builders are still popular.

I feel Westwood's games were always more about the single player experience. The maps were pretty well designed as sort of puzzle boxes you needed to figure out. The amazing soundtracks and cheesy FMVs were also very good at building atmosphere. Multiplayer felt unbalanced in a not very fun way.

Agreed, StarCraft and friends got a big multiplayer scene that I was never into; I'm not a good enough player.

But C&C were fun to play through, and felt accessible to scrubs like me. (To be fair to Blizzard, StarCraft 2 is the ONLY Blizzard RTS I ever completed - or at least the episodes I bought ; they did exceptionally well on the difficulty scaling for that game.)

Competitive multiplayer was always meh for us, we loved comp stomps, and I somewhat am sad that the AI was so "bad" that you never really could get a good balance between "destroyed you instantly" and "easily overwhelmed".

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/04/the-armageddon...

Capitalism 2 also, I played that extensively.

I picked up a copy of C&C red alert a year ago. Sadly, it's unplayable on modern PCs. At least it was for me. Too many issues, crashes and the game speed not being changeable before game launch and by the time you can change it in game, it's too late and you're basically already way too behind to catch up. It's a shame because it was one of my favorites from the era.

There are open source engine reimplementations which use the original assets to play the c&c games on modern machines. See https://www.openra.net/

Both the first C&C game and Red Alert were remastered in 2020 as a part of the "Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection".

That version should run on modern machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remaster...

They're currently on sale for a few bucks on Steam too.

Northgard is pretty good and the devs are very active.

Northgard is more of a City builder that an rts.

Why do people want constantly new games otherwise they think that something is dead? This is like saying basketball is dead because basketball people only play basketball and not something else.

Because in the time between Warcraft I (not the first RTS but let's take it) and Starcraft, each new game was amazing compared to the previous. People who grew up in that loved that; but we've kind of leveled off, you can't really make things as amazingly better than current iterations graphically as the difference between WarCraft 1 and even StarCraft.

> Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene.

SC2 still has a fairly healthy playerbase, and even War3 and BW still have some players.

> Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.

You think AoE2 is alive but SC2 is dead? SC2 has very little support and will eventually be passed by AoE2 for playercount, but I don't think it's there yet. Pretty sure SC2 still has more players.

SC2 is certainly smaller than it was in its heyday, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I think going f2p is largely what's keeping it alive. It's still a hard game to learn, but I think it's got a fairly well thought out on-ramp with custom maps, co-op and 4v4s as relatively "safe" modes and a series of logical steps for eventually getting comfortable with 1v1.

> The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.

Stormgate, Tempest Rising and Sanctuary are ones that RTS fans are looking forward to. A lot of people also like Beyond All Reason (a recent TA-like fan game).

> they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance.

The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made. Company of Heroes 3 has already dropped below Company of Heroes 2 playercount despite having come out just a few months ago. AoE4 also had plenty of problems (no ranked ladder at launch? it took 6 months), though it being Relic, that's not very surprising. I'm on the r/realtimestrategy subreddit a lot, and basically every RTS that flops, well, there are very good reasons for that that you'll see people mention. It's not just "oh I'm cool with AoE/Starcraft and won't try anything else". There are some quite cool fan games, especially in the Total Annihilation-like space, but of course they don't have as much splash/marketing.

One of the core problems is probably devs streamlining away complexity, especially mechanical complexity or base building. Nearly every RTS dev for the last 15 years seems to beat on this drum of, "We're not gonna be Starcraft! We're gonna be easier for casual players!" and then they fail miserably and you look at the top 3 RTSes: Starcraft 2, Age of Empires 2, Starcraft 1. It's almost like mechanical complexity and base building can be good things!

I think Starcraft 2 had the right of it with the endless co-op mode introduced in the second expansion, that thing was very popular with more casual players (it was the most popular mode in the game at least for a while). While it retained the same core feel and mechanics of the 'regular' game, they had a lot of variety with the different commanders (basically subfactions) that could appeal to different players, including ones that were easier/had less base building. But you could still have a fairly traditional commander if you wanted one, so it was the best of both worlds.

And it's easy to see how the mode could be expanded on too: more army customizability, more variety in missions (instead of nearly every mission being 2 bases, you could vary that number up), unlockables/items/rewards from missions, varying numbers of players on a team instead of exactly 2, raid missions, mini-campaigns or storylines, etc.

Frost Giant is also planning to make 3v3 an actual competitive mode in terms of balance and design for Stormgate, which is...rare. I can't think of a competitive RTS off hand that was balanced around teams rather than 1v1, or in addition to 1v1. That might help too, team games are more social and often more popular.

It's hard to make a good RTS that both satisfies the competitive players and the people who want to just do various forms of comp-stomp.

AOE4 has been an interesting journey for someone that prefers the good ol fashioned comp-stomp. It wasn't long before I was easily taking on 4 of the hardest AI and easily stomping them on certain maps, like mountain pass. But, they've progressively made the AI into a much tougher opponent. It's actually challenging now, and I'm only back up to 2 hardest, 2 hard with AI teammates on the same map. Can't speak to pvp; I've not tried at all.

Having a semi-structured form of this would also be really good imo. Starcraft 2 sorta has this -- there's a UI section similar to ladder that pits you against increasingly harder AI's, but it's just a single track and doesn't go far enough imo.

I can easily imagine a set of 'tiers' of challenges, where the bottom tier is super easy stuff for beginners and then each tier up increases the challenge until you're fighting a bunch of hard-level AI's simultaneously or whatever. Or maybe a Mario Bros-style world map that has various different challenges in different directions.

I don't think it is, really.

Brood War was famous for 7v1 comp stomps being very popular in custom games, and it was obviously huge competitively, it's the super hardcore competitive RTS, even if it wasn't really planned that way.

The PvE comp stomp crowd seems to really like the co-op mode in Starcraft 2 that was introduced. To the extent that they have complaints, it's mostly that they wish there was even more stuff in it.

I think for the most part, the things that competitive players and casual players want aren't really at odds. They're usually orthogonal desires.

But what does exist, are a lot of people who say "I want to play RTS, but" and will never be satisfied. Like, there's always tons of people saying that they just want an easier to play RTS than Starcraft, and there's been tons of those, and hardly anyone plays them.

> The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made.

Not only that. Playing a game today is going to a store, get a download code, wait half of hour for the game to install, make an online accout, confirm it, wait another half of hour for the game to update, start the game, shows you unskippable movies, then it starts some role playing and then finally the RTS or FPS starts. Sometimes you need a permanent connection to internet which makes the experience even worse.

With old games it is just: install the game then play.

The games that survived for so long are simply that good (so it's basically survivorship bias). There are plenty of new indie RTS games on PC, the vitality is definitely there. But there's no longer big publisher money behind it like in the heydays and without big marketing campaigns those games are much less visible.

But if you search a bit in the RTS section, there are definitely some gems on Steam (e.g. Northgard comes to mind, and currently I'm having a lot of fun with Timberborn, although that's a city builder, not a competitive RTS). Oh, and WARNO, even if it still has a lot of early-access roughness.

It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the symptom showing that there's little interest for competitive AoE2 play among newcomers. Like Starcraft Brood War, that still features Flash, Jaedong and Bisu.

You can compare it to Starcraft 2, whose scene remains quite attractive, and the top 4 European players (all of them being top 10 world) are just 25 23, 21 and 18 years old.

>It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the symptom showing that there's little interest for competitive AoE2 play among newcomers

This isn't true. Hera & Lierey are two of the best AoE2 players and are both young.

There's an S-Tier tournament happening this week for anyone interested: https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/King_of_the_Desert/5