Zero-k: A libre sci-fi RTS game, with an economy based on metal and energy

Is Zero-k still popular now that its cousin https://www.beyondallreason.info has matured ?

To compare the two:

Zero-K allows 16 vs 16 battles (and it works!), each player controls a relatively smaller number of units. In Beyond All Reason, there are 8 v 8 battles and each player controls a larger number of units, maybe 200 or so at the peak of battle. (There are some strong, but predictable AIs for both games.)

Zero-K has more units that are less realistic and have more variety. BAR has more realistic units and less variety. BAR has tanks, Zero-K has flying tanks that can also turn invisible (this is a made up example, but illustrates the idea).

Zero-K has a limited economy, you have to control land to to generate income, and fighting has more influence on who wins. In BAR, the economy is more exponential, and at high tech levels controlling land doesn't matter, you can generate a huge income in a tiny corner of the map and win because your economy is exponentially stronger than anything your opponents have.

To clarify, ZK doesn't population caps like e.g. Starcraft. The actual limit is actually the CPU/GPU (and maybe your bandwidth too). ZK's 16vs16 host, the "lobster pot" as they call it, can barely be playable if your rig is too weak.

ZK doesn't population caps

That sounds like poor RTS design.

Popcap is one of the simplest and most effective "anti-snowballing" mechanisms. Once you're "maxed out", you cannot get further ahead - you must attack and trade to build new stuff. If you can just keep making stuff without ever being forced to trade, whoever gets ahead first, eventually wins.

Supply also serves as a comeback mechanic - you were even, but took one bad fight, so you can immediately spend all your money to get a new army. Meanwhile your opponent must construct additional pylons before they can get much further ahead - they grow stronger slower than you regrow the lost limbs.

Screw that, everyone is afraid of 1000 vs 1000 unit battles. This is what I want!

Total Annihilation and its ilk balance that by having the commander unit, which is game-over if lost. There are a lot of really underhanded tactics one can employ to sneak a win here. (My favorite is picking up the enemy commander with a transport and then scuttling the transport...) Plus the large army size means the player likely has exploitable gaps in their defenses as their attention is split so many more ways.

Oh well I guess that depends on the win condition, and yes I can imagine 1000v1000 units can be fun (myself am an avid enjoyer of 4v4 in SC2). But especially as the number of players go up, I think the popcap should be going down. I've played a couple custom 2v2 games in SC2 with a reduced popcap (100 instead of 200) and the games were wiiiiiiiild: you have very little economy and turtling is just impossible, so the games end up being constant and insane back&forth to claw an advantage.

I guess what I really don't like in RTSs is turtling. If I wanted to play SimCity, I'd be playing SimCity.

I love turtling. I hate that the prevailing strategy seems to be always be on the offense and micro eighty million stupid little things. esports and APS have ruined competitive RTS play.

Turtling lets me build up my base and economy and nurture a curbstomping offense after which I can overwhelm my opponents. If I wanted to play a tactical RTS there are a million options out there that limit you with horse-blinders

So your preferred balance is that both players build and nurture a base until one goes an overwhelms and "curbstomps" the other? That doesn't sound satisfying. Remember, 50% of the time you need to be the one getting curbstomped. Just imagine that base you nurtured getting rolled over and there's not much you can do; is that fun?

It's easy to be too optimistic when balancing a game. It's easy to imagine "oh, this unit will be nearly indestructible, and I can watch it destroy my opponents and their bases". But what really happens is "my opponent destroyed me, I tried everything I could but his unit was nearly indestructible".

(This is why we need strong AI for RTS games. First, we get strong AI, then we find ways of dumbing it down in fun ways. In the end we have a creative AI that offers a few surprises, but is content to let the human player win 95% of the time.)

Again, that's why you need the one-unit-that-loses-you-the-game-if-it-dies.

there's not much you can do; is that fun?

since when is losing supposed to be fun? I don't want to give my opponent chances at a reversal. I want to win, reliably and assuredly.

I don't know what the 'indestructible' unit has to do with any of this, even the most impenetrable fortress has weaknesses. You have to declaw a turtle slowly and methodically, or just straight up overwhelm their defensive lines. A turtling player cannot be everywhere at once, they have weaknesses.

I assume you're talking about competitive play, since you mentioned it, and lamented that competitive RTS play is ruined.

since when is losing supposed to be fun? I don't want to give my opponent chances at a reversal. I want to win, reliably and assuredly.

This comment explains why this theoretical opponent of yours doesn't exist. You want to play against another human who you can defeat reliably, and who has no fun being defeated. Why would anyone ever want to be your opponent? It's not fun for them, and they have little chance of winning. This is why, as you observed, there's many tactical RTS games that people are playing, but nobody plays games like you imagine.

there are a lot of games where turtling is a viable strat, just not for the entire game. a game without a counter to turtling only ends when one side gets bored.

the fact that any popular game attracts a bunch of sweaty gamers that want to optimize every little thing is not related to the viability of turtling.

A popcap would have to be logarithmic or something. The most expensive ZK unit costs nearly a thousand times more than the cheapest one !

http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Detriment

http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Flea

Not sure why you would expect that turtling (porc(upine)ing) would work in a competitive game with 2 teams, the opponnents will just take the rest of the map and then crush you using these extra resources. And a lower population cap would make it easier to turtle, not harder, so I'm kind of confused as to how it worked in your example ?

"Playing Sim City" is a common insult thrown at team mates BTW in TA-derived games (too).

Not sure why you would expect that turtling (porc(upine)ing) would work in a competitive game with 2 teams, the opponnents will just take the rest of the map and then crush you using these extra resources.

That's exactly the issue, when playing in a random team. Matchmaking can be a real dice roll in a small playerbase (which SC2 4v4 is). Sometimes I get teammates 500MMR below me, where the metagame is almost always turtling to T3 behind infinite static defense.

Being the only aggressive player in a game with 7 turtles feels extremely unrewarding. Sure I can go expand first into 80+ workers before making a single army unit. I just think games like this suck.

Even if you execute your initial greed correctly, you're still vulnerable because they've been building T3 units, you have more places to defend, and a bigger part of your popcap is taken by the workers. Maybe it would actually be good here if SC2 didn't have a popcap (so that you continue to capitalize on your initial greed for the rest of the game), but that would make Zerg incredibly broken - they make more stuff (including workers) faster than any other faction.

And a lower population cap would make it easier to turtle, not harder, so I'm kind of confused as to how it worked in your example ?

Lower popcap means you don't get to continue building an even bigger, more unbeatable army behind a wall of turrets or cannons. Static defense doesn't really help against armies (only deters harassment), because siege weapons. Sitting on a maxed army is throwing away a temporary advantage. It incentivizes to attack first, because even if the opponent is maxed too, any time you take an even fight near an enemy base, you get to deal a little bit of damage to their eco or production (the win condition is to destroy all enemy structures).

SC2 recently rotated the entire team map pool; many maps now have very few bases and a very short rush distance. Some people still try to turtle, but it's difficult as attacking early is so much stronger. The average quality of the games has IMHO gone way up.

I'm reading this as confirmation that turtling is a good strategy.

Never said it isn't; like every strategy it boils down to good execution and working to avoid getting countered.

I just personally hate to play against turtles ;)

Popcap is just one of the ways to design an RTS, there are others.

Zero-K solves the problems solved by popcap in other ways. Income tracks map control, and controlling more of the map is hard, so players that are ahead don't have the freedom to sit back and build up an overwhelming army. Armies are fighting or jockeying for position throughout the game and army size and composition keeps escalating. Defenders advantage shifts to attackers advantage as things escalate, so people can't just sit in their base. The overall effect is that, while there is a pop cap at the technical level, it is 10x higher than the unit counts that even the largest battles tend to equilibrate to.

Talking about the lack of popcap is a bit backwards in a way. There are just so many subtle things that mean the question of popcap never has to come up. Maps are pretty open, units don't fire through each other, AoE exists... the list goes on. A better question might be why games with a popcap couldn't be designed away from the failure mode of people sitting in their base making larger and larger armies. Having to put a hard cap on army sizes, that people regularly reach, is sort of a drastic measure.

On supply, I'd say what you said about supply is pretty important. But the aspect of it you bring up isn't limited to popcap. Eg C&C games have power plants that act as construction supply. Rebuilding your base is easier the second time around, as long as you keep your power plants. There is something similar in Zero-K with energy. Metal comes from points around the map while energy can be built in your base, and both resources are used for construction. When you take more metal spots you also need more energy, and the energy is nowhere near as vulnerable. That is the main supply-like comeback mechanic, which works since part of your economy is always vulnerable. Reclaiming wrecks for metal is another comeback mechanic.

(GoogleFrog used to be a high-level ZK player and also part of the dev team of ZK, if I'm not mistaken.)

Snowballing also happens a lot in SC2, and also even in Chess. That's simply the normal way to win, even if on the other side it feels bad when you get steamrolled by overwhelming forces.

Comebacks in high-level SC2 games don't usually happen as you say. More often, the losing party relies on their opponent overlooking some peculiar tactic like using DTs (for those who are not familiar with SC: invisible units that can only be detected with specific means). Otherwise a bad engagement very often means defeat in short/mid/long term.

Finally, ZK does have very long range static weapons that can hardly be countered (unless you destroy them). If the opponent "camps" in their base, you just start to build one that will either vaporize their army or buildings, or slowly wear them down. But really, camping is usually newbie-level strategy.

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but it's interesting to solve that problem other ways. For example, a high tech unit that can kill hundreds of spam units, or just making more expensive units more economical and better to build than endless spam.

That said, BAR is trying to balance the game to reduce spam currently. Having an endless stream of trash units charging ahead is great for scouting, even if they don't do much damage.

I haven't really seen it to be an issue in TA-derived games.

I guess because economy still requires territory control, and a bigger territory is harder to defend ?

Also it's probably not a coincidence that these games have a lot of units dealing area damage, and most importantly, units cannot shoot through each other, and when they try it can often end in friendly fire, which makes snowballing weaker ?

Anyway, desperate situations where the underdog eventually manages to turn the tide are not uncommon. I even recently seen it happen in an AI vs AI match !

Wasn't aware there's a successor. Screenshots make it seem very similar. Anyone played it?

They are similar but different. BAR is more of a unique game (for better or worse), while ZeroK is much closer to an HD remake of Total Annihilation.

It's pretty much the inverse : http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/29067

BAR used to stand for "Balanced Annihilation Reloaded" - so it's sticking very close to TA, while Zero-K has been experimenting much more freely with what is possible in the Spring/Recoil engine.

It's also probably a factor that BAR has spent a decade in development hell (under a different team than now ?), so it just didn't have the velocity to fork away sufficiently, even if it wanted to.

Eh, no? Zero-k was there first, and gathered vital info. The original setup for spring rollout of games was thoroughly inadequat to supporting large number of gamers. Fuck, the first lobby server wrote match infos into a freaking textfile.

The first indicator of that popped up, when valve ended greenlight, and just greenlit all the things. Which propped Evolution RTS upon the steam front page for half a day, flooding the original lobby system and showing how inadequat the whole ecosystem was for that. The original Evo dev Forb learned from the whole mess after he returned from his day job.

Zero-k then learned the lessons, developed a ingui lobby, started the whole matchmaking and better server deployment, detached from the whole "one central server" thing of the spring eco system.

BAR did some graphical overhaul, with Floris, Beherith, Sprung and the whole original crew supported by new faces like Teifion and on and on. They optimized the Spring engine into a new version- more tailored to BARs needs and reworked alot of the stuff.

Its gpl open source, so the project order and who invented what is pretty flowy.. everybody copies from everybody, one progress is everyones progress..

I don't think it's much about the timeline but more about the feel of being close to TA. In which case BAR indeed is closest to a some sort of TA-sense while Zero-K is more unique (and that's great!).

How does it contradict what I said ?

I disagreed about «BAR is more of a unique game (for better or worse), while ZeroK is much closer to an HD remake of Total Annihilation.»

P.S.: You might also be mistaken about EvoRTS' Steam release being specifically behind the motivation of Zero-K splitting up, since according to lead ZK dev the second at least partially predates the first ?

http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/236480#236480

2012(ish): Zero-K splits off to its own infrastructure after disagreement with infrastructure developers. From my perspective they were very stubborn regarding extending the protocol to allow for new stuff (Eg matchmacking, more advanced planetwars) and would make sudden changes that broke our autohosts.

2013-2014: Evolution RTS is greenlit on Steam and released in 2014. I don't think Steam was on my radar at the time, but now it looked like a possibility. Looking back at the dates we actually put up a greenlight campaign five days after the Evolution RTS release.

(Lobby interface issues being another thing, but then IIRC EvoRTS had already tried to improve on this before release, though not successfully enough ?)

Are you sure?

BAR units are generally similar to TA units. It captures the feel of "what TA would be if it was full 3D and high resolution". Of course, balance is different, but TA balance was very odd.

ZeroK seems to have terrain modification mechanics which is not present in TA.

In BAR terrain can be damaged by big explosions, but it's very limited.

FWIW I never played ZeroK but based on their intro video BAR seems to be closer to TA visually.

Not really a successor, but as the poster above said, a cousin.

This lineage of open-source games started from Total Annihilation, which had a lot of mods that ran into engine limitations. This resulted in a bunch of enterprising open-sourced devs to develop a compatible engine, without those limitations. This engine (Spring Engine) has then evolved into something much more impressive and capable. Zero-K was implemented on this engine. Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine, which is a fairly recent for of Spring.

Eh, the engine was a accident. It started out as a 3d-viewer, capable of replaying ta games by the svedish yankspankers (clan sy).

What started out as a viewer, escalated into a 106.0 version long engine, providing a war that consumes planets, each side with only one final wish - Total Annhilation at Zero-k, beyond all reason.

Naw, the community comes and goes ebbs and flows. Its mostly on recoil discord, some are still on the irc server, the rest is on the BAR discord.

svedish yankspankers

Presuming that the main code contributions also come from the Swedish scene I'm not entirely surprised that this happened. It sort of fits my impression of the gamer/programmer culture here (although I can't quite express why)

3 months of night, either tinker, drinker or metal guy torching towns church(thinker).

torching towns church

Surprisingly, that was only one metal band and every other metal band hates them for it. I have been told the average metal fan freaking loves churches and their acoustics. They might not like The Church, but they love churches.

BAR has a small but active community, they also run tournaments. In terms of gameplay, it is superficially similar to Total Annihilation but much more polished. The UI and unit control mechanics are a masterpiece in their own right. A lot of what makes a strategy game "fun" is the feeling that you are actually in control of your army, and that your decisions matter. BAR delivers that better than any other strategy game, in my opinion. You can control large armies of tiny units without feeling overwhelmed by micro, and still have the option for individual-unit controls when you need them. Give it a try!

It's THE game with my friend group right now. We play FFA, team v team, team v bossAI. Great polish, watching playbacks is sweet, observer seats is great.

Overall fantastic experience, really impressive for FOSS

Yes, Beyond All Reason is a great RTS. Most people seem to be interested in 8 vs 8 team mode, but there's a plenty of other options, including FFA.

I don't know how it compares to Zero-K.

But it perfectly captures the spirit of the original Total Annihilation.

BAR is more similar to the original Total Annihilation (and successors like Supreme Commander). It's a lot of similar units (e.g. tanks) with subtle variations, multiple tiers, with a focus on out-numbering your opponent.

Zero-K went a different route. They simplified the economy (metal cost = energy cost) but added a whole lot of mechanics like overdrive grids and made every unit unique. There is a lot of variety with mind-control, jumpjets, shields, unit-throwers, self-replicators, teleports, terraforming, etc.

Zero-K has been on Steam for a few years, I think BAR is working towards it. They are both good worthwhile games, they share some common elements, but they are both worth trying in their own right.

unit-throwers

Was the BAR peewee-launching gun inspired by Zero-K ?

More likely the unit cannon from SupCom 2 ?

https://supcom2.fandom.com/wiki/Noah_Experimental_Unit_Canno...

But if I'm not mistaken Zero-K's pulling/pushing beam weapons predate SupCom2 (combined with terraformed ramps you get a unit cannon, though making the unit survive on landing is an additional challenge), though Lobsters came out after :

http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Newton

http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Lobster

Zero k used terraform Ed ramps and newton's?

Not as much as BAR. I do prefer Zero-K though, it has a much less degenerate economy (no exponential growth) and actual unit AI.

Thanks for the BAR link, I'm going to share that with someone who'll find it useful. Appreciated!

This link might be helpful: https://www.beyondallreason.info/faq/what-are-the-difference...

Popularity has been waning naturally, just like the popularity of Spring lobbies before it, with respective peaks around 2017 and 2010, but AFAIK the newfound popularity of BAR has been also bringing significant new blood to these other Spring/Recoil games.

(Without commercial levels of advertising, a lot of Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander / RTS fans had never heard of them, word of mouth can only go so far... at least until Twitch streamers became super-popular ?)

Would I need a fairly powerful machine to run this? I can run Starcraft 2, is that enough?

I've toyed with Total Annihilation, but the graphics were too old, even for Brood War fan such as myself.

I always liked the Total Annihilation graphics and think they passed the test of time quite well for a game that's 25 years old. A lot of the maps were downright pretty (especially when I modded them ;-) and the top down perspective was a better "3D" than isometric (or much of the low poly full 3D of the time). The lasers and build nanobots and explosions were a bit cheesy I guess...

Yes, I like the terrain. But the unit designs really show their age.

Tbf the unit designs (those solar panels!) were pretty weird at the time, looks like this has a similarly odd-looking ships and factories and the same penchant for big coloured panels on everything

Looks like the big advantage of this is that the unit AI is supposed to be quite clever rather than really stupid at how it carries out the tasks you give it...

They are bragging about having a challenging AI.

We will see, I've just downloaded the game. Hopefully, the AI is better than Blizzard's 98's Brood War brain-dead computer :)

I didn't have direct experience with the AI on ZeroK, but if it uses some variation of BarbarianAI that is available on BAR (cousin project mentioned in other posts here) it's as impressive as being a decent benchmark for beating a human that has a borderline decent grasp on the game (which makes it an actually good challenge).

Note that the parent poster was referring to unit AI, not enemy AI. Units can do a lot more with a single command compared to something like StarCraft and StarCraft II, which forces you to do much more heavy micro (because your units will pretty much walk in a straight line to their goal, not attack unless they're A-walking, and then stand in a single place without moving as they attack). APM is not as important a factor in TA-heritage games, and many Spring games go to great lengths to reduce APM as much as possible, by doing things like automating "dancing".

Projects like these tend to attract AI programmers, compare SC1's native AI with what Brood War API users came up with :

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

Speaking of which, you might be in luck, this just happened this weekend, and in my on-and-off experience with Spring games, I don't remember seeing AI exhibition matches very often compared to regular human competitions :

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1981220857

http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36943

P.S.: Don't confuse unit AI (that even players have direct access to) with general AI.

It basically came out a few years before SC2, being even less graphically demanding. (At which point my own PC with a GeForce 4 which, for comparison to today, had either 0.064 or 0.128 Go of VRAM, would struggle to run it.) Some graphic improvements have happened since then of course, and the requirements are now somewhat higher.

Now the issue is that it doesn't have the unit caps that SC2 does, and the number of players (now up to 16vs16 in a normal game, sometimes even 32vs32, while in 2009 8vs8 would have been the max), map sizes, and number of units (typically up to ~0.5k in 2006 compared to topping up at ~5k-10k today) only kept growing.

So if you want to play big team games, and have a much worse CPU than the average player, you might not have the best time in the endgame.

Are there any popular 4vs4 games?

I will first start versus AI, then take it from there. Not really a competitive player anymore. Playing Brood War kinda makes you dislike multiplayer RTS after a while, haha.

You might have to advertise for them in chat / forums.

All games : http://zero-k.info/Battles

All games with 8 players (though not only 4vs4) : http://zero-k.info/Battles?Title=&Map=&PlayersFrom=8&Players...

If you can run SC2 you prolly can run ZK. It does uses nearly all of the 4 Gb specified in the minimal requirements, though. But if you are at minimal specs, don't think about engaging into the popular 16vs16 battles.

A fair bit above them, only graphics are a problem.

Intel i5 11th gen, Intel Iris UHD graphics, 16GB RAM.

According to the Steam page:

    Processor: 2.0 GHz dual core CPU with SSE (Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent)
    Memory: 4 GB RAM
    Graphics: 512 MB graphics card with OpenGL 3 support (GeForce 8800 or equivalent)
    Storage: 6 GB available space

I would guess that you can run this game.

linux support but no macos support? Aww

I'm 41, gamed since all the way back... but feel silly for asking... what sort of macros would you use in games like this?

MacOS not macros

In Supreme Commander you could have build templates for building layouts, eg. fortifications (point defence, shields, artillery, properly aligned, rotatable, etc), I relied on it extensively in multiplayer to quickly get foothold. (SC was successor of TA, these games started as clones of TA).

Just tried BAR, and the build templates would be really handy.

You can program your own widgets and have them run commands client side

They said Macintosh Operating System, not macRos, but in Spring-Recoil games like these, you can basically program whatever you want using Lua widgets, and there's a fairly easy scripting for commands allowing for things like «when I press button X select half of the currently selected units, in a radius of Y around my mouse cursor, picking only the ground combat ones with more than Z% health».

Can you build from scratch?

I didn't see a source link on the download page.

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Zero-K:Develop...

Games have their own distribution method, but you can download the source and the engine will handle it. In ZeroKs case (https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/).

The most straightforward method to compile the engine reliably I'd say is with the docker container: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring/wiki/SpringRTS-B...

Edit: spelling,links

Seems the support would be a realistic feature, though, because it's based on https://springrts.com/ that does support MacOS X.

Noise about macOS died down back in 2018, and seems the linux port is riddled with bugs. This project is basically dead in the water.

macOS dropped when Apple stopped supporting more advanced OpenGL features.

linux port is riddled with bugs

That's... interesting... as many of the engine and game devs also play on linux (and a considerable part of the playerbase)

If you're looking for the codebase Zero-K and most previously spring mods are based upon you should look at: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring

The engine heavily relies on OpenGL features Apple dropped support for. The best bet would be to await for a decent translation layer (Zink, MoltenVK, idk).

Edit: clarity

The strange thing I cannot play war games any more. Not after Russia invaded Ukraine. War now seems Really Evil and playing with it doesn't seem appropriate. I wonder does anyone else feel like that?

I am OK with war games as long as there's no humans or human-likes in the game. ZK's sentient robots are fine for me, contrary to something like 0 A.D. (which even has female workers - maybe I'm old school, but that's even more a no-go for me).

In Total Annihilation, the Arm side had actual humans inside the robots. Has that lore changed in Zero-K?

I feel like such a pedantic nerd asking this, but the debate over people vs. sentient robots was the whole reason for the war!

IIRC the robots have won against humanity, but then the robots started to fight among themselves for resources. The player is one of those robots who has some sort of amnesia. Well, this matters as much as the details of the trees in a racing game, in my view.

Well, now I kind of feel obliged to share this reaction to (a) Zero-K story by... "Hitler" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IP1mp3cgRo

(I'm not exactly sure what the current official lore is - at some point it has been added to the campaign though, but also of note : both TA faction have been compressed into one and then split into 11+1+1 factories for gameplay reasons.)

Such a strange thing to say. Are you saying war did not exist before Russia-Ukraine war?

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...US instigated wars aren't evil enough for you?

No, they were far away and not my problem. It is silly from a rational standpoint, it is probably unjust from a Universal Justice standpoint, but I'm not talking about rationality or justice right now, I'm talking about emotions.

Understandable.

Sorry, let's hope for a quick and just peace then.

Why Russia / Ukraine? There is nothing particularly notable about this conflict compared to others. War has always been war.

Yeah, I think you are right. But I didn't feel it before it hit me into the face. Me personally. Wars seemed too far away to feel real.

Nah it’s still ‘just’ a game for me. It would have to be exceptionally immersive to trigger that response - the Walking Dead games by TellTale for instance, caught me off guard. I remember there was one big moral choice that I kind of just say and stared at the screen for what seemed like half an hour before I could finally make a decision for my character.

But a birds’ eye view of a somewhat sci fi RTS? So far removed from real life and practical considerations that it doesn’t even blip the radar for me.

same.

I hadn’t heard of this before, and was excited that a new RTS was being announced, given that RTSes seem like a fading genre.

Of course it’s just a link to an older game. I guess the days of the RTS really are behind us. :(

The Planetary Annihilation devs are coming out with a factory-rts hybrid game akin to Mindustry.

That seems the direction RTS is heading in general, hybridizing with other genres.

link?

I want them to take my money.

Update: They have taken my money. There are few groups that have kept my trust as well as these folks. I know they'll deliver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB49yJp-rJI

https://industrialannihilation.com/

Very interesting, I wonder how they are going to balance supply chains being hard to set up but easy to disrupt ?

It reminded me of an old game : Mechanized Assault & Exploration (M.A.X.) :

https://www.gog.com/en/game/m_a_x_m_a_x_2

Gameplay : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TdjQZz0lFY (stretched, sigh...)

So you need to use surveyor units to scan for underground resources (metal, fuel, gold), build mines that extract them, but then also have to transport them (also ammo) to the place where they will be used (buildings, constructors, units) either by using specialized units or via connectors (think Factorio's overground pipes).

It's quite complex, so it's turn based (either simultaneous real time, or sequential turns). M.A.X.2 also experimented with real time (as well as 3D map, inspired by Total Annihilation ?) but sadly it's basically a rushed mess.

Annoyingly this brilliant game has been plagued for decades by memory issues :

https://www.gog.com/forum/m_a_x_series/changing_dos_extender...

But it looks like we finally have the solution as a "port" !!

https://klei1984.github.io/max/

Seems to be working as advised (the only thing not working yet would be network multiplayer and some of the various non-critical bugs already present in the original game).

Stormgate is one of the recent promising titles.

There's a lot of promising RTSs currently in development, that can trace their roots to Blizzard and/or SC2.

As wheelerof4te suggests, I'd keep my eyes on Stormgate. It's being developed by the ex-Blizzard team that worked on SC2 and WC3. More big names involved than I care to drop. <https://playstormgate.com/>, <https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012510/Stormgate/>

ZeroSpace came out of the blue a couple months ago with pre-alpha gameplay videos, kickstarter, tournaments, etc. They have several SC2 pros and community figures involved in development (Scarlett, CatZ, PiG, GiantGrant, Maguro). Their kickstarter just raised over half a million dollars. <https://www.playzerospace.com/>, <https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/>.

There's also Immortal, which has been in development for a longer while. The team has previously built some great SC2 mods, and the pre-alpha got some attention from SC2 pros. <https://sunspeargames.com/>

The big "problem" with RTS is that the genre in general is not very accessible. SC1 is clunky (1998), SC2 is extremely lethal (splash damage vs glass cannons), team modes like 2v2 are not considered seriously (people want to play with their friends), getting good at the game requires learning all the rock-paper-scissors of dozens of units per faction that make Pokemon type charts pale in comparison. The 1v1 ladder is designed to give you an average 50% winrate, hence it demands that you consistently play at your best or deal emotionally with a giant lose streak.

The team making Stormgate is aware of these (and many other) problems, and takes a lot of input from the community on Reddit. It's gonna boil down to execution, but I have faith that they can make a fun game that's gonna be appealing to a much broader crowd than the hardcore RTS fans.

I'd still recommend it though, it's very fun.

It's a bit like calling Magic the Gathering «just» an older game. («It came out in 1993, how old, must be bad !»)

Your complaint would have more merit if the many innovations of Spring-Recoil engine games had been adopted more widely in the genre, but even Supreme Commander 1 came short (except for polish maybe).

You cannot expect RTS to become one of the biggest genres again, but it's still quite lively (yes, even outside of SC2 and AoE2) :

RTS is fun, actually (and you can learn it): a video essay - CloudCuckooCountry :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl4myN8q_KM

A list of upcoming(ish) RTSes :

The Most Anticipated RTS Games in 2023 & 2024... SO MANY! - GamerZakh :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKujSK4FRWk

(Notably, including BAR, another Spring-Recoil game.)

(Yes, most of them will suck and fail, such is life.)

As someone who still watches the Korean Broodwar scene, how are the mechanics in this game? Is there micro? Or is it more sc2 style where you put all your units in a single control group and then death ball them into the other death ball?

The game is much less click-intensive, but you need really good situational awareness for it. It doesn't have "traditional" micro, you don't need to manually queue units or babysit every single unit so it doesn't die immediately, but to win, you need to micro in key areas and most importantly, manage your economy well.

Interesting. Does managing your economy mean being efficient and keeping resources low or are there more complex elements to it?

Some basics (from someone who played the game a bunch a decade ago): There are two resources, metal and energy, neither can "mine out". To build something, you need equal amounts of both, and the thing building can only spend them at a certain rate ("buildpower"). Notably, metal income is effectively proportional to the amount of territory you control, whereas energy generation can be built anywhere. Buildpower is local to factories and builder units. Neither resource needs to be "moved around", it can be spent by builders anywhere.

One important economy management aspect is matching your metal income with at least as much energy income and buildpower so you can actually spend it (excess energy is turned into a bit of extra metal). And then yes, you should spend it, but the factories support queues (including automatic re-queueing), and you can of course shift-queue buildings.

Another important aspect is that dead units leave behind metal scraps. This can boost your metal income substantially (e.g. if a failed enemy attack leads to a bunch of dead units near your base).

In short, balancing metal income (/territory expansion) with energy income and buildpower is the core economy management loop. But because units have pretty capable AI (e.g. auto-kite when applicable), you can devote a lot more of your attention to this aspect, as well as higher-level decision making.

Thank you so much for the detailed response. Seems interesting.

Because ZK doesn't have an exponential economy, each unit is important, even the cheap ones. There's also metal reclaim in battles, which tends to be about half of your econ. So fights become terf wars to make sure the enemy doesn't reclaim each battles' spoils.

Not heavy micro I'd say, but death balls won't work very well normally, the composition of your ball matters a lot, as does how you position it.

More like SC1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0lYXap5rbM

Still, there are just too many differences from both SC1 and 2. Starting with a higher importance being placed on team games.

For a similar, yet different gameplay, see Beyond All Reason.

I used to play Total Annihilation online back when I was in secondary school in the late 90s

We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP.

Eventually I got into creating new units for the game. You had to animate them with a C-like language, and I was trying to teach myself C at the time so that was part of my programming journey.

The 'Swedish Yankspankers' were a clan that had a channel on the IRC server, and my recollection, which may be wrong, is that they started building an app, 'TAreplay' that we could use to record and rewatch tournament games. People used to pass the exe around - not very secure, but those were the times!

It's amazing to me that those players hacking little apps together for themselves, have spawned a lineage of RTS engines and games that are still going all this time later.

A small but incredible example of hacker culture.

You'll love what the community did with Supreme Commander, Chris Taylor's spiritual successor to Total Annihilation: https://www.faforever.com/

They even created a Coop-Campaign and a completely new faction.

Supreme Commander's getting its own spiritual successor:

https://www.sanctuaryshatteredsun.com/

I thought Planetary Annihilation was a spiritual successor to both TA and SC

That's technically true. Planetary Annihilation was a heroic effort lead by Jonathan Mavor (formerly of Gas Powered Games) that fused elements of TA, SC, and its own crazy ideas on what amounted to a shoestring budget.

Supreme Commander's budget was about $50M USD (circa the mid-2000s), and Mavor was lead engineer on the project.

Beyond All Reason is arguably more similar to Total Annihilation than Planetary Annihilation.

By that same token, Sanctuary is the closest thing to a complete remake of Supreme Commander. Granted, Forged Alliance Forever has had such incredible work put in by the community that it comes close, but it's ultimately stuck on the same engine.

Turns out Mavor has a new company now, and I'm elated to hear someone's finally combining Factorio with a decent RTS component:

https://industrialannihilation.com/

I am incredibly excited for Industrial Annihilation, really looks close to my ultimate dreams RTS.

IA is a unique blend of genres: deep factory building combined with real-time strategy action.

I put a lot of hours into SupCom. It was always a buggy mess, but I do remember it quite fondly. Planetary Annihilation has felt like the right progression in the spiritual series. It was always a very smooth experience and fixed the technical issues with scaling up to massive scale combat while fixing the balance issues of turtling. The skill ceiling is immense and I could never beat high level bots. The nature of having one to many planets also means you can play cooperatively with up to several friends. It's a good time.

It’s still some of the same folks - SJ and some of the other SYs wrote the Spring Engine that Zero-K uses.

I myself learned how to code writing .bos scripts and hanging out at Annihilated, TAU, and #gnug

If you want to see some of the stuff still possible and being done in the TA engine, check out TAUniverse.com

I wish people were slightly more up front about their games being Spring Engine mods.

Calling this a mod would be like calling Dota a mod.

Historically, games made under Spring/Recoil are called mods.

If Spring is an engine, then this is a game not a mod. What game does it MODify?

Would you call a game that used Unreal Engine an Unreal Engine mod?

From https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/:

About > > Open source RTS game running on the Spring engine

In the place where code is present, things pertaining to code are present. You don't need to throw technical details to potential players at your front page.

Does Zero-k or another SpringRTS game support "strategic zoom" or building structures/units with real-time debt (as in you can construct a unit that requires 10000 mineral when you are only making 600 a minute) such as Supreme Commander?

I think pretty much all Spring games support that. Zero-K and BAR both do anyway. Both strategic zoom and real time “streaming” building came from Total Annihilation and Spring games are TA based.

They all do (Zero-K, BAR, and most of the games built on the engine).

You can also reclaim metal from dead units and structures.

I feel old now :-)

SpringRTS is actually older than the first Supreme Commander game.

I mean Total Annihilation pioneered that concept and Spring RTS started as an open source clone of Total Annihilation so definitely some Spring RTS mods do, and Zero-K almost certainly does.

Custom games? :D I miss playing "tree tag" on Warcraft3 Battle.net

These types of RTSs are way less "arcadey" than Warcraft 3 or Starcraft, so I don't think supporting custom games is on the devs radar.

What you're usually after in these games are huge battles on massive worlds with thousands of explosions leaving craters and debris everywhere.

What? Custom game modes is ABSOLUTELY on their radar. Less so than the main game for sure, but to say ZK doesn't support custom game modes is flat out wrong.

Kind of : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr3RVDMJsEY

Though in WC3 (and SC1/SC2) IMHO this was enabled by a very easy to use «map» editor, combined with a tremendous popularity of the base game.

So if even, in theory, you can do even more (libre software), in practice what you see is not as ebulliently diverse.

You can also compare it to the Spring lobby games - Zero-K has improved on the presentation, but something has been lost by not being able to easily fork the game yourself, build on it, and then just put up whatever the resulting mess is, start a game, and it being listed in the list of games :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8by5C6dJDA

Including «Com Shooter» FPS using the built-in «possess unit and use FPS controls» showcased here : https://youtu.be/MpKqQxTURik?t=107

Which shows another tension in game development : more recent Spring-Recoil games disable that feature outright, because of the balance headaches it causes, and potential modders can't use what they are not aware exists !

But modding scene does exist in ZK : http://zero-k.info/Mods

(In addition to the game setup itself being typically WAY more open than what you find in other RTS.)

It's multiplayer only right?

Nope. There are various levels of AI that can serve as opponents, including an AI and game mode that sends waves after waves of enemies until you kill enough of its stuff that it sends the final boss you must defeat to win the game.

There's also a campaign that introduces units progressively. I'd recommend to start there.

Nope, even has a campaign that can be played in coop (coop through Steam only) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfVdH02RUQ8&list=PLi9_tXwdXO...

Don't expect an extraordinary story though, it's much more focused on being a series of puzzles showcasing various game features.

So happy to see this here! I used to play this a lot with my boyfriend - we were pretty evenly matched, and the game allowed for so much freedom which made every game wild. The most impressive feature is - in my opinion - the wide variety of commands you can provide to your units and how their AI interacts with them. For example, if you build a crowd of fast and agile grunts and make them match speed with a slower tank, they will still avoid enemy projectiles with their superior speed.

One of the features I used the most was the "distributed move/fight" command. That just made it so easy to deploy e.g. a line of heavy tanks in front of a line of artillery.

Or mines that were actually useful. I played a game were my opponent got super paranoid after running into the first mine field.

Good times :-)

Indeed !

https://youtu.be/7qEGJlBLJSg

(Most, but not all of these are shared with other Spring-Recoil games.)

that looks like it's heavily inspired by Total Annihilation

Zero-k is based on Spring Engine, that started as a community project to be a 3D engine for TA. So you are very correct.

That's an understatement. They're effectively family.

Still no Mac support... I know the technical reason why so not upset, just sad.

Just get a steam deck and connect mouse to it. It's the best solution to anyone with Mac and wants to game

This game is absolutely insane. There's so many tricks and plays possible with the selection of units available. Ever seen a commander rocket jump and shoot down a bomber plane mid air?

Zero-K = Noita RTS :

https://imgur.com/iCUnQy6

This is a great game that I play for many years. I tried various other RTS-es but none had the right combination of crazy strategies, good balance, lots of use of physics (not perfect but at last tries and mostly succeeds to make you feel like those units are real objects and not icons on the screen) and mostly enjoyable PvP

I definitely would recommend although can have a steeper learning curve than others.

Best game ever, other favorite is BA. Nothing to conpare these to.

It's fascinating that this grew out of a project that was originally a 3D map viewer for Total Annihilation.

WOAH! Did NOT expect to be here. I've been playing Zero-k for over a year and it is so. much. fun. I play BAR (Beyond All Reason) and Zero-k with some of my friends.

This has a very strong Warzone 2100 vibe to it, I like it :)

Lovely to see Zero-K on the HN front page.