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[Deshara]

and I'm glad it's dead.

Not the RTS Skirmish genre where it's PvP on even footing or PvA offline skirmishes where it's the same but with an AI.
I'm talking the campaign maps where the player has the toolkit of a full Skirmish mode dropped into a map that's filled with enemies with no enemy AI controlling them, for the player to work thru at their own pace (read as: build a base for 10 minutes, queue a doomstack, read a book while it trains up, ctrl+a & attack-move to the objective and then resume reading until army is wiped & repeat steps or until win ensues), or where the map is scripted to throw waves of enemies at your base (which causes the same but you queue for longer bc enemies show up every ten or so pages of your book and thin your ranks a bit), or worse contrivances.
That was always bad and it's a good thing it's dead bc there's subgenres of the RTS genre that never got their chance bc every studio was busy belly-crawling after the worst of the SC & C&C franchises w/o realizing the best parts of those games was always A) the skirmishes and B) the dungeon crawl levels.

Wanna see a good example of what the RTS campaign always should have been? If you haven't, play Dawn of War 2, it's a case study on good design decisions.
No unit production whatsoever so there's 0 reason to read a book during a mission, units are downed instead of killed so a poorly won fight doesn't negate your ability to finish the map, skill trees that are unique and give interesting choices to make that aren't mutually exclusive, a random level-locked item drop system that works perfectly bc instead of unwanted items being sellable for cash (which you spend on an item that'll either become immediately worthless when you get a better drop, or if not renders all drops worthless by being better than them) they're sellable for XP that gives you a way to equip items you're excited for but can't use by dumping your spares and then once you can equip the new item you get to sell off the items you're swapping it with which can push other characters over their level limit freeing them up for new equips which furthers this cycle and it feels REALLY good.
DoW2 is the best Diablo and StarCraft (campaign) game ever is what I'm saying, try it.

[Grievous69]

I agree that those type of missions can be really boring but as you said the skirmishes are the real thing, either vs AI or other players. If the gameplay is good there then it's kinda ridiculous to say that the whole game is bad. To me, campaigns in RTS games are almost the same as in FPSs, they're just there for flavor and to guide you through the various units/guns and all mechanics the game has to offer. Sure, having fun and challenging missions is imperative but at the end of the day you'll spend far more hours playing PvP or basically any other mode that campaign. As a fan of RTS games myself, I can't count how many of them I've played yet barely touched campaign in 70% of them.

While we're on the topic, it's really a sad period for classic RTS games. Either they're a complete ripoff of something else or they have no base building and play just like a MOBA but with more units (like DoW2). First decent game that comes out will kill Starcraft and then maybe we'll finally have more good ones being developed.

[ArkAngel]

I’m probably the odd man out, but I actually always enjoyed the Starcraft campaigns. They had different flavors and objectives to them, and I always liked to go through the story. That said, I do like the pvp skirmishes of rts as well. It honestly depends on the campaign mission. Some missions you can afford to sit back and doomstack, but a lot of the recent sc2 ones have either extenuating factors ex: fire walls of death coming to eat yoyr base, or some kind of time crunch. Sometimes the AI can even attack your base unexpectedly.

As for first person shooters, I feel like their canpaigns have been in a steady decline in quality for a while. I definitely enjoyed some of the older ones, but they’re getting repetitive without a whole lot adding to them as a on rails rollercoaster.

[Linnis]

Starcraft story/single player mode was fine. Play on harder difficulty and try to finish missions as fast as possible. The fun is in the challenge that you have to place on yourself. Also I disagree with the idea that potential studios wasted time. If you wanted to play dungeon crawl levels there are tons of better rpg games. The rts crowd has always been small, there are tons of really good rts games that no one plays because the genre attracts people to all play the same game.

[Thaago]

My biggest gripe with starcraft style RTS is the name - its real time tactics, not real time strategy. Even in the best of matches there is maybe one strategic choice being made.

[Linnis]

You did the strategy part while not playing the game itself. May it be looking up builds on the internet or looking at your replay to figure out how you can not die to some other strategy.

But that layer only exists if you try hard and spend all the energy of your day on the game.

Not that I am really defending starcraft single-player, because it is pretty boring. The horrible story dons't help either. All Blizzard games have bleh stories anyways.

Real time strategy would be like Civ games but with turn time limit. But then you could also call games like overwatch or dota games real-time-tactics. So I am fine for the sake of differentiating genres.

[Deshara]

You did the strategy part while not playing the game itself. May it be looking up builds on the internet or looking at your replay to figure out how you can not die to some other strategy.

But that layer only exists if you try hard and spend all the energy of your day on the game.

well that's true but it's kind of a thing that, if allowed to, players will optimize the fun out of any game.
And by "optimize" we don't mean beating the game in the quickest, most time-efficient way but in the most effort-efficient way.
That's why people will play cookie clicker games or the incremental upgrades genre that A Dark Room spawned(?) (I cant remember what its called) for 8 hours straight despite those games having almost exactly 0 content for the time invested bc the actual process of playing them, even if extremely time consuming and incredibly non-rewarding, is pretty low-effort and requires little mental taxation.

[SCC]

My biggest gripe with starcraft style RTS is the name - its real time tactics, not real time strategy.

Common understanding of these terms is that RTS allows you to build more units and RTT does not. Not that true, but it serves its purpose.

[Schwartz]

RTS would have been fine if not for competitive gaming. When you gain an advantage through utterly un-fun stuff like micro and clicks per second and hammering key combos, of course you'll do that.

I enjoyed the *Craft games and the C&Cs for myself and with my friends. We never played competitively.

I also still enjoy slower and more 'big picture' RTS games such as Dark Crusade or Supreme Commander.

[Deshara]

TIL I LEARNED RTT!!

You just helped me become a better game dev & critic, SCC bc the moment I googled that term I immediately recognized that the RTT genre (with all unit production & resource management removed from the combat gameplay) is something I value a lot and all my favorite strategy games that clearly aren't RTS's are without me having been able to put it into words (like how every Total War game has a hard divide between unit production and combat)

hot take that wasn't concise enough to share before now: the worst thing about every Homeworld game is that they are RTS games where you can do resource management & unit building in-mission and nothing is done between missions; if you wanna see Homeworld's persistent army survival thing iterated on well, Ultimate General Civil War does it way better by removing all in-combat resources and unit-building, making it so the only way to "get resources" is to play better and take less damage to your armies bc all troops lost in battle have to be replaced between battles which draws from the same guns, money and men resources that you need to create new units -- all of which interplays really well with a lot of the missions being designed to be impossible to win without taking heinous losses, forcing you to make decisions about which battles to abandon your allies to defeat simply to give yourself a boon in upcoming battles against an enemy who will be empowered by their victory -- which feels vastly more like being a general making hard decisions revolving around the survival of your troops than anything the RTS genre has ever delivered

[Linnis]

hot take that wasn't concise enough to share before now: the worst thing about every Homeworld game is that they are RTS games where you can do resource management & unit building in-mission and nothing is done between missions; if you wanna see Homeworld's persistent army survival thing iterated on well, Ultimate General Civil War does it way better by removing all in-combat resources and unit-building, making it so the only way to "get resources" is to play better and take less damage to your armies bc all troops lost in battle have to be replaced between battles which draws from the same guns, money and men resources that you need to create new units -- all of which interplays really well with a lot of the missions being designed to be impossible to win without taking heinous losses, forcing you to make decisions about which battles to abandon your allies to defeat simply to give yourself a boon in upcoming battles against an enemy who will be empowered by their victory -- which feels vastly more like being a general making hard decisions revolving around the survival of your troops than anything the RTS genre has ever delivered

Yes, thats because "Real time" strategy is almost an oxymoron. Good strategy takes time to think over and can't be done while in game in games like C&C and Starcraft. Though watching pros play, there are certainly people that can change and adapt their strategy while in game and they do gain an edge, the top 10 players in the world for starcraft has both control apm and ability to adapt and change strategy mid-game.

For real time based games, the strategy only come after one has somewhat mastered the controls to tactical situations. But that takes actual training.

I do agree homeworld could have benefited from Ultimate General's style of stragegizing between missions. But it was made in an era where "RTS" games were doing quite well and being popular.

On a side note, homeworld multiplayer in traditional RTS style is hella fun. Too bad the Spaceship+RTS genre is a combination of small audiences to the extreme.

[TaLaR]

Which is why I prefer turn-based games or ones with command pause (blizzard rts technically do have pause, but as if it was made for single purpose of mocking me - you can't issue commands during it...).
Obviously, can't play pause-based games in multiplayer, but I'm fine with that too.

Really don't like how pure RTS make player attention and apm yet another resource.

[Deshara]

I think we, as a culture, need to just accept that good RTS multiplayer structure looks nothing like good RTS singleplayer structure and we need to not be making RTS games that play the same online as they do offline.

[Linnis]

There is a limit to having "strategy" versus AI opponents. The difficulty slider sure is not the same thing as rating based matchmaking.

[xenoargh]

Wanna see a good example of what the RTS campaign always should have been? If you haven't, play Dawn of War 2, it's a case study on good design decisions.

Man, I hated DoW II, frankly.  DoW I was a classic RTS heavily influenced by Kohan II; it was fun to bash AI with all day long. 

DOW II made for fiddly micro and the campaign was pretty lame; I didn't enjoy it very much at all, and skipped DOW III entirely because it looked like more of the same.  I get that, for some people, building turtle bases or rush-stomping AIs that cheat isn't actually all that fun, but honestly, I like RTS's where I get to queue, crush and consolidate, so long as the actual micro of the fights is fun.  I could care less about MP, too; and yes, the research says that's been a huge and under-served audience in the world of RTS design in general, ever since StarCraft and DoTA showed the industry that they could make ridiculous amounts of cash on MP sometimes.

DOW II felt more like an exercise in save-scumming, because you just weren't going to recover if anything went horribly wrong, and that's kind of boring; I'd rather lose after a series of desperate comeback attempts than be like, "oh, it's 5 minutes in and I missed that one invisible scout unit that's just wiped out my irreplaceable unit".  I get that that's a matter of taste, but the sales figures pretty much speak for themselves. 

Between making the completely tragic mistake of not wholeheartedly supporting modding for DOW II (and III, from what I read, is even worse) which was pretty much betrayal to their modding community for DOW I, which was expecting a much-more-open engine that time around and their designs, THQ pretty much ruined a perfectly-good game series by continually forgetting that their core fanbase didn't want radical experiments in game design- they wanted more giant hordes to smash around with.