Another game with really frustrating is (still pre-release) Age of Darkness.
Units typically get slaughtered if they traverse uncleared regions of the map. But you can't tell them not to, and you can't even see ahead of time what pathfinding will choose for them.
It's amazing how much cognitive load is added by having to prevent units from doing super-stupid stuff.
This sort of RTS sub-genre (of which They Are Billions is the only other example I can think of) probably needs different unit AI than a typical RTS.
In case anyone is not familiar with these games, you are building a base, the map begins unexplored and is populated by monsters which will attack you in waves, so it is a sort of inherently player-vs-environment, very asymmetrical game.
Because the enemies are basically expendable and your units aren’t, your units should… try not to sacrifice themselves so much. They should avoid the fog-of-war areas unless explicitly instructed to go there. Melee units should flee when injured. Ranged units should stay out of melee range. Total War unit AI (where ranged units typically skirmish by default) might be a better starting point than Age of Empires style unit AI.
Although, it is a niche within a niche, so I guess I’ll take what I can get, haha.
Sounds a lot like Factorio. Quite different and you generally don't do things involving pathfinding in the first place; so not sure if it scratches your itch.
I did enjoy Factorio (and also Mindustry) a bit. For Factorio a lot of the fun seems to be in really optimizing the heck out of your factory, which I didn’t really enjoy as much, so it was only good for like one or two playthroughs for me. One or two fun playthroughs though, no complaints.
It is sort of funny, I do enjoy optimizing, but in a game I prefer setups where you have to kinda intuitively optimize by your gut rather than really tweak things. The 50-80% efficiency range, rather than hitting those 80-99% targets, so to speak.
There are a few playstyles, both modded and unmodded, that will allow for more of the "we're under attack!" panic and less optimisation of your factory.
Ramping up the number of biters in an unmodded world (deathworld) can be really fun.
Modpacks like Warptorio 2 add a very different dynamic but has that same frantic feel.
You don't need to get in 80%+ optimization in the slightest in factorio. The jankiest factory in the normal difficulty settings in the end will get there just fine.
But in vanilla yeah, if you don't enjoy optimization for sake of optimization and building bigger there is not that much more to do once you played it once or twice.
There are few more directed mod/modpack experiences to play, but they generally also add complexity to the build and not everyone enjoy figuring out complex builds for that.
StarCraft is a great example because we can talk about it now without the threat of ultras. Like its audience has gone away, people only feel nostalgia for it but they don't really play it anymore. It's easier to talk about the objectively bad and clunky things about it.
I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft, is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game harder in ways that were not fun. Which is too bad, because it was a phenomenally engineered RTS engine (starting with WC3) that brought us many other game formats in its custom scenarios.
Compare to Supreme Commander, which had very sophisticated pathfinding and in my memory more interesting micro. Compare to all MOBA formats, where if you're going to have WC3/SC style micro, you might as well focus on micro of one unit. There were many ideas that came after StarCraft that are in an important way, objectively better.
It has a lot of other clunk. The way you have to manage resource gathering. The unit building queues and how spending occurs. The spellcasting. The selections. It has so much legacy.
StarCraft 2 had to cater to a very specific eSports skill base that probably led to it going into the same level of obscurity as EverQuest: Gen X people still have strong nostalgic feelings for it, but they don't play EVE Online, they're not 20 anymore with oodles of time and no responsibilities, they don't want hard permadeath single instance experiences. They want something much gentler but they still feel very positively about like, this one clunky thing they may have mastered a long time ago when their brain power was so much more plastic.
Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a technical engineering point of view? In my opinion, no. So besides the existence of an ultra audience, I don't think there's a good reason to celebrate the crappy pathfinding anymore.
I find it really hard to believe that AoE2 "ultras" exist. It's a pretty small community with mainly older players, just like StarCraft. Many people still play SC:BW and SC2, there are still tournaments and hardcore fans that cheer for their favourite players.
> I personally don't think micro, as it exists in StarCraft, is interesting or even worthy. It only made that game harder in ways that were not fun.
That's you're opinion. I think the exact opposite. If those games didn't have the micro opportunities they did, they would have died long ago and would have been forgotten in history like most other RTS games out there.
I find RTS games without micro extremely boring. I
Micro makes it exciting because it's not immediately obvious who will a win a fight. You can choose to gamble and be slightly greedier in your economy and rely on winning a fight that you should lose. It also forces you to constantly choose between where your focus should be. Do you focus on the fight or your economy? And when there are multiple fronts to a fight it gets even crazier. I think those things are core to the RTS gerne.
> Is the AoEII engine similarly as worthy as SC2, like from a technical engineering point of view?
I mean you are comparing games from different eras. But I think AoE2 is extremely worthy from a technical engineering point of view. You have so many ranged units shooting many projectiles, each with it's own collision detection back in '99. It's nothing short of a work of art.
AoE2 doesn't have much in terms of simulated ballistics (and units pushed around by impacts !) though, compared to Total Annihilation (and derived) games.
Mostly a nitpick, but StarCraft has little to do with the WC3 3D engine, and is a full 4 years older than WC3. Perhaps you meant WC2?
Also, the SC2 and even SC communities dwarf Supreme Commander, EverQuest, or EVE Online. There are still worldwide SC2 tournaments, sometimes televized, with price pools in the millions (well, until this year, when Blizzard dumped the prizes significantly). SC is still quite popular at least in South Korea.
I couldn't disagree more, Forged Alliance Forever or Beyond All Reason are infinitely more interesting to watch if you don't care about obnoxious micro skills.
N.B: Age of Darkness is an inherently player-vs-environment game (Survival RTS… it is sorta like They are Billions if you’ve played that). So, I think super high action-per-minute PVP style gameplay is not really the goal.
Some games have issue in moving groups of units, with some units moving slowly while others move faster, end up reaching the destination at different times, and get easily taken out by enemy units one by one, unless the player painstakingly babysits the entire movement to ensure same time of arrival.
This stuff has been solved by middlewares like Unity for ages.
> bad
What I really wanna get into: the cognitive dissonance of being a programmer and an AoEII ultra at the same time.
Game mechanics do have a certain objective truth to them. They are also pieces of software, they follow a lot of the same rules as Gmail and Instagram and whatever. As a matter of objective reality: when your game does not aspire to specifically be clunky - this distinction is sometimes called "QWOP" - it seems valid to say, okay, this pathfinding is the word you used. I have the wisdom to not use that word you used in this forum to describe something people feel ultra about. But it is true.
People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of gameplay.
I wonder how to harness the resources poured into something like 0AD to make "Better AoEII" or "Better AoM." I'm not sure how often that question is asked and how it is answered. That's why this cognitive dissonance matters.
Your phrasing and word choice is very peculiar. It’s a bit difficult to follow what you’re saying to me. For example, you say you’re an AoEII ultra. Is this an ultra fan? Or ultra what?
> People feel so strongly about bugs and clunk in their social media YouTube drip. The same ADHD personalities love clicking around villagers! I mean what a "something" piece of gameplay.
If I had to rephrase this section based on my understanding, I would interpret it to say something like:
Often, people are bothered by bugs and other issues that happen in commonly-used apps like Facebook or YouTube, but when these bugs manifest in video games, it’s viewed as part of the character of the game. For example, the micromanagement of villagers that’s required due to bad pathfinding in AoE II (to prevent them from running under turrets and such).
Is that correct? Any ideas why your phrasing would seem so foreign to me? I’m very curious why.
> it’s viewed as part of the character of the game
Yes.
> I’m very curious why.
People feel very, very strongly about their nostalgic retro childhood fun cozy times like playing AoEII. They're ultras, right? It's like talking about football. It can be perilous.
I see where you're coming from, but (in my opinion) you're over indexing on the issue. If someone gets bent because you said some video game has bad pathfinding, so what? Seems like their problem. It isn't a mean spirited or unreasonable thing to say.
Another game with really frustrating is (still pre-release) Age of Darkness.
Units typically get slaughtered if they traverse uncleared regions of the map. But you can't tell them not to, and you can't even see ahead of time what pathfinding will choose for them.
It's amazing how much cognitive load is added by having to prevent units from doing super-stupid stuff.