I think I fall into that camp of people of love RTS games, but find it too stressful to play competitively. I like to turtle up and build my cool base and then run over the enemy with a wave of tanks. Command & Conquer was my jam.
Between SC1 and 2 I probably played a couple dozen straight up competitive matches. I much, much, much prefer custom games/'use map settings' in SC1 parlance, or good old co-op comp-stomps.
Do any of those actually have a competitive scene? I think the thing I have missed most in the recent RTS was the lack of place to bump into people like you used to be able to. It's the same criticism I give to most of the modern FPS which have replaced the tools to allow a community to be born (lobby mostly) with matchmaking. While I follow SCR/SC2 fairly closely I haven't heard of any ladder/informal competitive arrangements for any of those other games.
The problem with many RTS games from a longevity standpoint is that most RTS fans do find them at some point, they play through the single player campaign, and multiplayer is either stagnant/busted/a mere shadow of the actual singleplayer campaign/has lousy game cycle/no useful replay system. I feel like too many of the recent generation of RTS games have fallen down these paths. People always need to keep in mind when thinking about SCR/BW one of the tricks to making it competitive was running the game on the fastest speed to make it interesting and fix the game cycle. Most of the newer RTS's often do not expose such interesting knobs to help find the competitive mode in the stock game, or are missing map editors and other tools to help create new content for a game and fix perceived problems for multiplayer within the confines of the shipped game.
The first thing would be that almost all competitive RTSes are one-on-one games. Can't really flame your team-mates for getting pummelled.
And yep they're mechanically stressful. I used to play Broodwar competitively and it really felt more like exercising than gaming at some level. But it's also rewarding if you get into it, because just like in sports beating someone through mechanical skill is fairly satisfying.
You seen to either get games where the multiplayer scene is non-existent, or hyper competitive like SC2, where you feel a bit brutalized.
One reason I think I was drawn to the warcraft/starcraft custom games when I was younger was that it just seemed too much effort (and kind of tedious) to get "good" at the main game. Goofing about with strange maps seemed more attractive.
+1 for SC2, this game really punishes turtling especially when played online. Brood War is great as well but the dated visuals and difficulty involved in managing large numbers of units makes it a bit less friendly.
I started this post with the Starcraft campaign example, and then as I kept writing, was thinking that I might have to backtrack and get rid of SC completely.
To be fair, the campaign is very contrived, but in most 1v1s, I feel like strong opinions were the way to go, with the “unwanted adjustments” you talked about, like waiting a few seconds longer to take your natural after your opponent’s scout leaves. It’s also why after many thousands of games, I sort of lost interest in Starcraft. Based on maps and matchups, besides cheese, most games played out with both players just executing their predetermined builds until one player made a mistake (the game breaks down to balancing economy, army size, tech and army positioning, so a miscalculation along any of those axes). I did enjoy some of the ICCup seasons with new maps before people figured out optimal builds where it wasn’t as repetitive. But mostly I stopped playing cuz of all the long drawn out PvTs :)
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".
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.
I think StarCraft (2)'s pacing and focus on fast 1v1s is its downfall here. Personally, I find both Chess and Hearthstone very stressful because of how much thinking ahead is required. It's analysis paralysis, amplified and gamified. In an RTS, you're generally not working at that level of strategy and have a much smaller state space to search through at the tactical level.
RTS games are just too stressful. They require 10+ minutes of full concentration. Whether you've just won or lost an engagement, you better keep up with scouting, building your army, gathering resources, expanding your base, preparing for the next engagement, etc. You get absolutely no downtime.
Every other game gives you downtime. Shorter round based games like fighting games give you time to catch your breath. Respawn time is a reprieve for both sides. Even just being on the queue screen for Starcraft II was enough to get my heartrate up in anticipation for the stressful games.
I stopped playing SC competitively because it's too stressful. Both physically and mentally. Hitting 300 APM continously in a game for up to 60 minutes at a time makes your hands go numb. And the adrenaline rush makes you want to go running afterwards. With games like LoL/DoTA at least you have a chance to take a break after a gank/farming/ team wipes. With starcraft every decision has a significantly higher compounding effect
sure- but just like chess, it's about finding an opponent of equal skill to have fun with and play together.
SC2 specifically has a few options for this. one really fun option is playing 2v2 vs CPU. or 1 v CPU on easy mode (it is essentially a passive CPU). the expansion is also introducing "archon mode" which is 2v2 but each team of 2 controls one base/army. "comp stomps" were prominent in SC1 because even though they were, by definition extremely easy, it's a fun social way to play. there are also "fastest" modes that completely eliminate the need for resource management by giving all players unlimited minerals.
my point is that while SC2 is daunting, there are a dozen options for players of all skill levels, even those who don't intend to play competitively.
maybe a better analogy than chess would be learning an instrument. it's difficult to become a good guitar player, but it takes an advanced lack of interest to not have fun learning.
I don't like Brood War as a game, both to play and to watch. I much preferred Starcraft 2 over the original, but unfortunately the esports scene died for it. In any case, RTS games just don't seem like good games for humanity, it's very easy to get repetitive stress injuries from them at high APM play.
Unfortunately, even though these games were really popular, there's nothing reasonably current with their style of RTS gameplay. I think the Age of Empires franchise was probably the last one that had the same feel to me. SC3 is more of a twitchy high-speed reflex game that's too hardcore for a casual like me. Modern mobile games go with the town + battles setup, probably because games need to keep drawing you in (and getting you to pay) and not just be a session when you want it.
It's probably that combined with the nostalgia of 'old folks' like me. I'd love to relive the Wilhelm scream and cheesy futurism of C&C. And I will always love the wololo of AoE.
Between SC1 and 2 I probably played a couple dozen straight up competitive matches. I much, much, much prefer custom games/'use map settings' in SC1 parlance, or good old co-op comp-stomps.
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