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[Frumple]

The technical aspect hasn't been a substantial barrier since at least like bloody '06 -- the non-TA game I named above would easily see multiple thousands of units die per MP battle (I remember drawing vs. AI skimishes out a few times and ending with a total game killcount that was over 20k), barely had spec requirements worth mentioning, and a few hundred units on screen at any given time was basically normal, for a frankly half-assed in a lot of ways game that's a decade old. Supcom, Spring, those are other easy examples that kinda' spit on the concept that the problem is technical or hardware limitations.

The general problem is design intention (which is fair enough, it's just some of us would really like something different now!) and lazy (/otherwise focused) coders, near as I've ever been able to tell. We have the capability, we've had the capability, and we're still on a two decade starcraft unit limit fellation streak despite it. RTS games have long had the same problem stuff like LoL or DotA does -- they're still basically crawling up the ass of game design from twenty years ago, design that was made and hammered out under technical restraints that no longer exist and often were worse than the at-time current practices could manage besides. It ain't technical capability that's stopping us from having a game where the infantry takes movement penalties because the ground's turned to a bloody mush and they're having to parkour up corpse walls while sucking up artillery fire.

It almost certainly won't be this game that does it, but damn if there's few established IPs out there that would fit that kind of thing better than WH40k.

[Virtz]

It's so technically possible games like Sup Com have simple boring combat where units go into range and start statically shooting till HPs go away. Total War meanwhile has units locked in formations by the hundreds (which is not great for anything past colonial era combat), and then gets fucked in path-finding the minute there's a large enough obstacle in the way.

Like maybe it is possible, but the two mentioned examples are not exactly a good proof of concept for this science-fantasy shoot-bang-melee fest, I find.

[Hanzoku]

Yeah, that's a Knight, not a Titan. Still massive and stompy, but something like a Warlord would cover half the map on its own.

[Shadowgandor]

I'm still hoping for different "game"-styles per race. Playing as the Space Marines would involve more micro-management with less units while having more abilities per unit, while playing as the orcs would play similar to Ashes of the Singularity or AI War (set a waypoint, build wave after wave of units or blob them together for a massive death ball, no abilities). I found it really weird that playing as the Orcs in the DoW2 retribution campaign had you control a few orcs at a time, similar to races like the Eldar and Space Marines.

Basically, I'd like to see it like this:
Macro races (unit heavy):
Tyranids, Orcs, Imperial Guards

Micro races (ability heavy):
Space Marines, Eldar, Chaos Space Marines

Pretty sure we're not going to get it like this, but ah well

[Parsely]

Before I played Dawn of War I never would have thought that the Space Marines would be their own faction. But I like being the Imp Guard with their ridiculously huge squads.

[ragnar119]

About This Game
Step into a brutal battle between three warring factions

In Dawn of War® III you will have no choice but to face your foes when a catastrophic weapon is found on the mysterious world of Acheron.

With war raging and the planet under siege by the armies of greedy Ork warlord Gorgutz, ambitious Eldar seer Macha, and mighty Space Marine commander Gabriel Angelos, supremacy must ultimately be suspended for survival.

UNLEASH THE GIANTS
Take control of towering war machines and tip the balance of battle in your favor with the biggest characters in Dawn of War history. Turn the tide with the mighty Imperial Knight (Space Marine), the clattering Gorkanaut (Ork), or the haunting Wraithknight (Eldar).

COLOSSAL BATTLES
Dawn of War is famous for its epic action and those immense clashes are back - but now they're off-the-scale. Wage war with massive armies across violent volcanic terrain or onboard battlecruisers travelling fast through space.

CALL UP YOUR ELITE
Take your battle plans to another level by deploying powerful collectible elite squads, each boasting their own special abilities and bonuses that will help you unlock and develop new attacking strategies to conquer your foes.

DESTRUCTIVE ABILITIES
Cause devastation on the battlefield with powerful super-abilities. Rain down total destruction on your enemies with the Space Marine's Orbital Bombardment, the Eldar's blistering Eldritch Storm or the Ork’s Rokks to counter your unsuspecting rivals.

THREE-FACTION CAMPAIGN
Learn what makes each force formidable through alternating missions. You'll soon come to understand the combat advantages of Space Marines, Orks, and Eldar and the rules of a universe with no heroes or villains… only war.

ONE ARMY TO RULE
Build your own universal army from the very first moment you are matched in a melee. Progress through battle after battle with loyal troops by your side across both challenging campaign missions and dominating multiplayer maps.

A NEW DAWN ONLINE
Your army will wreak havoc in online co-operative mode. Join the multiplayer community and forge new alliances - then turn the tables on your new 'friends' as they become foes in explosive, chaotic and competitive maps.

[Retropunch]

It's so technically possible games like Sup Com have simple boring combat where units go into range and start statically shooting till HPs go away.

BURN THE HERETIC!!!!!!

SupCom is one of the least boring RTS games ever made. I mean seriously, SupCom:FA is pretty much as deep as you can get in terms of strategy at an RTS level. Granted, the unit tactics aren't exciting - you're not using abilities or anything, but in terms of strategy it's incredible.

I really don't know why we haven't moved out of the Starcraft-type limited unit count RTS game. We could easily do massive scale battles and - with a little bit of work - we could combine that with CoH style covering/advancing/pathfinding/tactics. It's something that I've found strange for a while.

[Drakale]

CoH style tactics kinda break down at more than a few units though, since it becomes impossible to micromanage everything. You would need some decent AI taking care of the smaller decisions so you can focus on the bigger picture.

[Parsely]

It's so technically possible games like Sup Com have simple boring combat where units go into range and start statically shooting till HPs go away.

BURN THE HERETIC!!!!!!

SupCom is one of the least boring RTS games ever made. I mean seriously, SupCom:FA is pretty much as deep as you can get in terms of strategy at an RTS level. Granted, the unit tactics aren't exciting - you're not using abilities or anything, but in terms of strategy it's incredible.

I'm trying really really hard to like SupCom but I can't get into it. I haven't given up yet though. GiglameshDespair keeps encouraging me to play.

[Hetairos]

Cossacks and American Conquest could potentially feature thousands of individual soldiers. Combat was relatively simplistic, but AC introduced things like a morale system, guns dealing different damage depending on distance, garrisonable buildings and so forth. They didn't have to worry about 3D graphics, though.

Yeah, that's a Knight, not a Titan. Still massive and stompy, but something like a Warlord would cover half the map on its own.

There is an entire DoW1 skirmish map based around a half buried Titan. Forgot which class, might be Imperator.

[umiman]

Virtz's comment actually physically hurts me.

While Supcom doesn't have WHOAL33TAMAZINGMICROBUTTONSPELLS like Starcraft and DoW 2, it had a lot of nuance and quirks to each individual weapon and unit that made pro play very interesting and diverse. Did you know you had to path units differently against different units to maximize their survivability? This is because projectiles fired by units had their own trajectories and speeds and changed dramatically depending on what you faced.

So if you were in an early game skirmish against UEF, you'd be moving your Cybran units in strange zig-zags as their tanks lobbed slow moving shells that tracked your movement and exploded in an AOE. However, if you were an Aeon player facing against the Cybran in the same scenario, you'd be kiting them by hovering backwards and shooting while exploiting your superior range. Even the basic T1 turrets are completely different depending on the faction, the game just refuses to tell you and you have to look up the differences yourself for some bloody reason. I remember some very heated MP games where my opponent would go "Why the hell does your bombing run work when mine doesn't?!" Well, I pathed mine to maximize the chances of success against your kind of AA so I took multiple diagonal lines and manually dropped the bombs whereas you just left it on autoattack.

In 1v1 or 2v2 games of Supcom, TA, or Spring it gets very intense between good players as everyone micros like crazy. It makes Starcraft look like a joke. Have you ever microed over a hundred T1 light bots to harass an entire base at once? Not suicidally rushing them to their death but constantly kiting and doing hit and run tactics across every single direction at the same time? Fighting against scouts, engineers trying to expand, turrets, heavier T1 tanks, and the enemy ACU. At the same time managing your entire base yourself, maximizing income and build orders / designs, and building out more units to go all over the map. Because that shit happens in those games.

In Starcraft that doesn't happen until way in the late game as before the most you get is with cheese strats like the zerg rush. Even then you deal with like... 20 zerglings or so. Supcom has experienced players fighting crazy micro battles with hundreds of units 5 minutes into the game and it only gets more intense from there. Every time I played it online I got such a massive rush as till today nothing has ever taxed me so mentally as that. A good 1v1 game of Supcom was the most incredibly tense shit I've ever played in my entire life and even though it's been more than a decade I can still clearly remember my matches from back then. I remember sending out my ACU out to the frontlines so he could fight off the endless waves of troops while constantly moving erratically to avoid enemy tactical missiles. I remember the Frenchman who taught me how to properly time Cybran stealth ambushes to coincide with the time that engineers finish constructing their base. I remember desperately screaming at my teammate, asking if the enemy has T3 Omni radar up as the only chance we had to break their base was to move the Cybran max-upgraded invisible ACU with death laser into their base and we suicided hundreds of T1 scout planes into them trying to find if they did while hiding the ACU under a triple layer of stealth fields.

I remember Bay12ers doing 1v1v1v1v1v1 battles across massive maps for 2 hours where we'd trick each other into different alliances of convenience or fake each other out and launch surprise attacks with T3 amphibious siege bots coming out under the sea, able to get through torpedo lines because you could manually micro them to avoid the incoming torpedoes.

I honestly think the only reasons it didn't take off was because it was so hard on computers back then and it was stupidly hard on players as well.

-----------------------


tl;dr:

So ok. If you say Supcom has "simple boring combat where units go into range and start statically shooting till HPs go away" then yeah. Sure. It does have that. But just like in Starcraft if you tried to do that against other people, you'd just end up losing extremely hard until you actually learned how to play.

ps: Sorry to everyone else for me spamming this shit out. Also this game looks pretty cool. The graphics look kinda simple at first glance but when you zoom in close in the screenshots the models actually have a lot of depth and craft into them. I hope the campaign is decent though. I'm glad they went back to DoW 1 style as I never liked DoW 2.

Edit: Except horde mode. That was amazing. And the campaigns had pretty cool stories. Especially Kaptain Bluddflagg and hats.

[Frumple]

I'm trying really really hard to like SupCom but I can't get into it. I haven't given up yet though. GiglameshDespair keeps encouraging me to play.

Maybe try some of the spring games? Mostly MP only (but still with a decent playerbase, if much of them very able to kick a new player around like a tin can), and several of them are mostly just updated total annihilations (not that there's anything even remotely wrong with that :V), but the gameplay and scope is fairly similar and it might click better with you. Considering it's free, it wouldn't hurt much to give it a shot, heh.

Also, to the other discussion, seriously, Heroes of Annihilated Empires. Game was substantially melee focused, and while the animations weren't exactly the most amazing things in the world (Again, '06, middling system reqs, still largely the sort of fantasy RTS normal for its time, unlike TW's shtick), they generally looked fine, especially considering how well the game ran performance wise. Pathfinding was as functional as just about any RTS manages. Most smaller units didn't have much in the way of abilities, but that's because they were dying by the dozens (and freaking seriously, there's nothing stopping someone from just adding extra attacks to a unit -- there's no goddamn reason an infantry squad needs to be constantly told to throw grenades). It's another spot on example of how RTS battles can be scaled up substantially without losing much, if anything, in the process. Insofar as large scale battles go, folks could be doing a hell of a lot better.

Though yeah, from what I recall HoAE was actually influenced by Cossacks somehow or another. Same region of origin or something like that?

... also +1 to umi. I never had the reaction time to be able to pull off even a half of that, but yeah, calling the TA line's combat simple is just... wrong. Badly wrong, and has been wrong since TA, which itself was one of the first RTS games to actually use ballistic trajectories, projectiles with genuine travel time, and copious use of units able to fire on the move.

[Virtz]

Virtz's comment actually physically hurts me.

Good.

I wasn't even talking about special quickbar abilities. I mean basic actions, like units having multiple weapons, being able to get knocked in the air and fall prone, getting pinned down and demoralized, or even the gratuitous fatalities. Those sortsa details that make a video game more exciting than an excel spreadsheet or a MOBA. Details that something like Total War or Men of War actually feature.

Point is I don't care how massive it is if the basic unit behaviour is no more complex than in Dune 2. It doesn't look good or interesting. It's moving further away from something resembling realism and closer to gameyness. For someone suggesting this mid-small scale combat is regressing the RTS genre, you guys are sure proposing a return to 1997.

[nenjin]

My issue with Sup Com was primarily that it wasn't evocative. I'm sure at the pro level there's plenty of nuance to appreciate. But just jumping in it didn't grab me on any level other than how massive it was.

[Parsely]

I love and even prefer Men of War over most RTS, but I can still understand the difference between SupCom's method and the hitscan attacks in Dune and Red Alert. But yeah, like the nuance of AoE2, it's not something you pick up on until it's explained to you. It's true for almost all games. I'm sure almost everyone has run into that one game that really clicked with them that doesn't click with anybody else and you feel like you understand it on an intimate level.