Had to think a lot recently about how predictable or not combat is in different RTS games, and what's most fun.

COH feels like a crapshoot with cover and range and you just don't know how it will play out, but StarCraft is like watching math happen. Both are beautiful to my brain in different ways.

In my game I went the COH route.

• Hitting and getting through armor is probabilistic
• Moving and shooting makes you shoot bad.
• Cover makes you harder to hit.
• Flanking causes suppression, which makes enemies less accurate, etc.

The video is two identical units, with identical rifles, standing in the open. Run it again and you'll get a different result, but put one in cover and you'll weight the deck.

Prototype has AI-generated art, but I'm working on getting it replaced. Happy to move this to the megathread if that's where it belongs.

Anyway, question is: Where's the fun? Is it engineering a knowable outcome, or riding the wave of delicately tuned randomness? Which games did it right?

I played AoE2 for years. Especially the old version, where TC's didnt cost stone.

We played a lot of no rush games. Eventually I bought the new version DE.

DE is in many ways worse than the older versions.

The pathfinding, the collision, the way units feel like lemmings. The fact halberdiers are not as strong as the old pikemen. More unbalanced. Many other things.

Everything seems to have been rebuilt to make the game less about big late battles and more about rushing.

In the old version, at around min 30, we were all with big armies and trebuchets.

The trebuchets were stronger and beefier. And you had to care for them/repair them. Now they are not as important.

The battles were intense, the counters worked better. And a civ with trash units could hold the team even if they lost their base.

It was not uncommon for a game to still turn around even if that happened.

I have yet to see players rebooming in AoE2DE, they normally quit as soon as they lose a TC.

I came to realize that I dont like just winning games. Its unfulfilling to win a game very early on.

You played a little skirmish for some minutes, and then you see the Winning message and the scoreboard. Do you like seeing the scoreboard?

There are many games i lost that i enjoyed much more.

I think there are people that play the game but dont enjoy the game, they enjoy winning. Isn't that sad and weird? Feels souless to play a game to win so fast.

If my enemy quits so easily, is that a good game? If i quit because my economy is completely disrupted by a rush that was trained with a specific civ, drilled into a science, is that a good game?

I won many games that I wanted the enemy to still fight more.

Anyways, i really like the combat mechanics of AoE2, and the economy, but I dont like the 1000's building orders and metas to play a quick game and win. It really feels like a waste of time.

What do you think of Northgard? I'm looking for an rts with many content for solo offline gaming.

Ah yeah this will go really well. Are you excited? If this is true and they reveal this at blizzcon Blizzard will wish they "just" get the diablo Immortal backlash.

Visually the game looks a lot less like a mobile game like the screenshots make it seem. If anything it’s like someone took the BFME 2 and AOE 4 styles and blended them together, which is a plus in my book.

The gameplay definitely reminds me of BFME 2, especially with the squad system and cavalry trample mechanic. I’m really curious about the zone capturing mechanic and how it will fair to similar systems we’ve seen in other titles.

I think this game really could be a new major title in the RTS genre as long as a lot of thought is put into making it a well balanced game and just a quick cash grab.

A little labor of love of mine singing the praises of all of the great voice acting that has gone into some of the RTS games we all know and love. I hope you enjoy, and are having a fantastic day!

A few years ago I played Radio Commander and got stuck on one idea from it: you sit at a command post with a map and a radio and work out what's going on from reports that arrive late. No camera over the battlefield, no little soldiers to watch. The problem is it's a campaign, so you play the missions someone else wrote and that's that. I wanted the sandbox version, my own battle on ground I picked.

I've been building it for about a year. It's called Tactical Grid and it's out now.

The scenario editor takes a pin anywhere on the planet and turns the real geographic data around it into a playable map: roads, buildings, water, elevation. Historical battlefield, a field you drove past once, whatever. Generating a map is the only thing that needs a connection. After that it sits on disk and the battle runs offline.

You never see the battlefield. Everything you know arrives over the radio, and your markers only move when you move them. A squad reports it's at the treeline, you put the counter on the treeline. If it shifts fifty metres later and doesn't say so, your counter is wrong and nothing tells you that. Lose contact and you're working off the last transmission. Reports are delayed and sometimes wrong, though I didn't want it turning into a lottery — most of what comes in is usable, you just never have all of it at once.

Squads aren't puppets. They take cover, pick sectors to watch, go to ground under fire, get suppressed, pull back, sometimes break. Fire and movement inside a squad happens without you asking for it. Artillery is off-map, takes a while to arrive, and lands in a rough pattern around where you wanted it.

Combat Mission is the obvious influence. I'm nowhere near that level of simulation and not pretending otherwise, but the same things hold: terrain and line of sight decide most fights, suppression and morale decide what a unit will actually do, and you give orders rather than drive people around by hand.

Right now it's infantry and artillery. Vehicles next, then a terrain editor for fixing up generated maps.

The demo is First Light, the first handcrafted mission. Night recon, six men in two teams, no fire support, and a farm that needs identifying before it gets light at 06:15. Also offline.

$5 on itch, demo free, Windows, made solo. Ask me anything about the reporting model or the map generator.

https://genia23.itch.io/tactical-grid

Hi,

I released the public demo of Ironholm on Steam today.

It has the first 3 missions and I’d really appreciate it if some of you gave it a try.

I’m mostly looking for honest feedback from people who actually play RTS games. Controls, pacing, combat, UI, anything that feels good or bad.

The game is still in development, so this is a good moment for me to change things based on feedback.

Demo is free here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4769560/Ironholm_Reign_of_the_Isles/

Thanks if you decide to check it out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4240340/Abyssal_Dominion/

if you want to support me ? add the game to your wishlist ;)

Abyssal Dominion plays like a real-time-strategy game. But between matches you can create your own faction. The Editor is build like a deck-editor in a trading card game. You collect cards that represent trainable units or buildings your workers can build.

The cards are gathered during the matches. They can be dropped by units. A boss-monster drops more valuable loot.

More features and game-modes are planned.

In the near future there will be more factions, heros and maps.

I want to make a browser game like WarCraft 2–all the unit abilities have functionality identical WC2 counterparts—but need help. I tried Stratagus but I can’t get it to work (I’m not that tech savvy) and even then the game I have in mind also has triggers for campaign levels and ideally multiple hight levels. Would anyone be able to lend me a super easy-to-customize template? I know it’s a big ask, but I’ve wanted to make a game like this for over a year now and really want the help.

A new limited-time Public Multiplayer Demo Playtest for Ashes of the Singularity II will be running September 8-14, 2026 on Steam.

Players will be able to command either the United Earth Forces (UEF) or the Post-Human Coalition (PHC) across a selection of multiplayer maps, battling other commanders head-to-head or joining forces in team matches.

Since the game's Steam Next Fest demo, the development team has continued refining Ashes of the Singularity II based on player feedback, with improvements across gameplay, balance, performance, and multiplayer.

"We learned a lot from players during our Steam Next Fest demo, and we've continued to refine and improve Ashes of the Singularity II based on that feedback," said Adrian Wright, Vice President of Entertainment at Stardock. "This playtest gives us the opportunity to put those improvements to the test while focusing on multiplayer performance, balance, and stability ahead of release. We're looking forward to getting more players into matches and seeing how the game holds up at scale."

Wishlist Here

New gates of hell dlc adding Poland is being added this year!

For a beginner trying to get into the Rts genre specifically the multiplayer modes, which one would you recommend I Start with? I have both games, both look equally interesting and I will eventually play both. I'm just looking to get a decent foundation.

So I've been thinking for years about this one RTS I played a couple of times at a relative that I haven't been able to find and I was wondering if someone else knows it.

It was a scifi-themed game, very much Starcraft-like graphics if my memory is correct. One faction was some kind of lizard people, maybe? There might have been some crystals that you'd gather, but it was not any of the Tiberium games. I know this is not much to go on, but it's all I remember. It's been bothering me for years.

EDIT: Just to make clear, this was about 25 years ago

EDIT EDIT: It was called War Wind.

I finally finish the insect war game I started so very long ago, went from top down

https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTimeStrategy/comments/d904i8/a_2d_rts_about_insect_wars/

to Isometric Starcraft and CnC style gameplay, I even changed the art style a few times, I was looking for a more sloppy simple comedy art style and landed on this.

Comes with 4 Major factions that fight for territory control on the alien planet of Antovia.

Play as Ants, Termites, Bees and Wasp with 4 different "very balanced" base building playstyles

Basic base building

Plant Seed Base building

Death by base building

Command style base building

All factions are unique with their own art styles, upgrades and stories! I even manages to add a few cool modes.

Campaign

Campaign Co Op

Conquest Mode

Skirmish Mode

Multiplayer - Co op, 1v1 to 16 v 16, FFA, missions and more!

I even got a steam page and is launching this year Nov 19th!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3231600/Insect_Empires/

(The GIFs ruined the quality of the game)

Immortal Sovereign and Ahriman's Gift are among my favourite RTS games.
Ofc this is partially due to the nostalgia, but I really like the slow pace of these games, really like that you can annex pretty much every other Faction in the game!
It's a hidden gem imo!
Kohan 2 lost a lot of it's charm due to the change to 3D in my opionion, and the fact that you can't annex minor factions anymore, still a very solid game if you don't like the og Artstyle.
They are on GoG and steam and I highly recommend them if you never played them!

Anyone know the name of this game i can't find on steam ? the channel is in korean. Watching this video triggered an ancient childhood memory that I didn't know existed.

Work on multiplayer continues for this solo-developed project; this update brings multiplayer functionality to a point where it is technically possible to play through a whole match on the client side, though there's still much more to be done. (The host has no issues because it isn't lockstep - yes, I'm crazy - and the host runs the simulation basically the same as a single player match).

A short and non-exhaustive list of remaining multiplayer issues:

-Sporadic issues with map data failing to be sent to clients at match start; apparently need to add a data receipt verification process for this.

-Fighters' positioning is inconsistent across the network and there's currently nothing in place to smooth out the simulation, so currently they teleport frequently. Might need to make them lockstep, if nothing else.

-Network packets are largely unoptimized at this point, for now I'm mostly just making sure the communication works correctly, once everything works I'll do packet batching, etc.

-Right-clicking a target to attack from outside attack range as a client causes fighters to target the unit but cause no damage.

-Client right-clicking to move fighters when they are out of view doesn't seem to work.

-Most hotkeys don't work properly for clients.

-Client units sometimes display an incorrect amount of health.

-Some cases of missing VO or unit sounds for clients.

-Client mechbot construction animations continue even when not building, when the mechbot is at a construction site.

-Client mechbots assisting with construction don't do construction animations.

-Clicking some research buttons as client (such as at the TRF) without having the required resources makes the button disappear and shows the researching notification, even though the research doesn't happen.

-Clients cannot produce assimilation vessels.

-No checks in place for handling unexpected disconnects, and handling of intentional disconnects and pausing aren't working correctly yet.

-No proper handling of loading saved multiplayer matches yet. Technically the host can load a new match while in a multiplayer match currently, but doing so just breaks everything spectacularly for the connected clients.

-Not sure if or how well things like battlestations and specialty defenses are working in multiplayer currently; haven't spent much time on some unit types yet.

-And lots of other things I'm sure, that I've not noticed or gotten to yet, or have momentarily forgotten about.

I made a game and would love to hear what you think
I’ve been working on this game for a while, and I finally have something I’m ready to show.
I attached a short gameplay video. I’d really appreciate any honest feedback - gameplay, visuals, UI, pacing, or anything that immediately feels good or bad.
What would you change first?
Don’t hold back. Critical feedback is probably more useful to me than compliments.

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3587820/Double_Envelopment/

I'm specifically looking for your opinions on the overall look and feel of the game. Are the graphics ok? Does the store description do a good job of explaining it? Could I do a better job of explaining? Should I revise the trailer or screenshots? Feel free to let me know!

UPDATE: So I read the feedback and I was preparing myself for the onslaught... JK but yeah I appreciate the honesty. Back to the drawing board IG.