Battle Aces/David Kim RTS Megathread (2024)

pro:
visually nice to see, that UI is clean.
love the glados voices
very simple to understand
time limits is a great idea imo, but definitely not for a lot of players

drag formation would work so well in this game

con:
units clump up a bit too much
the strategy is nice but imo could get repetitive, good thing is the units themselves are all fairly unique in their role.
I am not a massie fan of the massive resource dump into high tech units ball, I feel like this could be very frustrating.

The momentum of a successful defend and counter push will be difficult to balance imo. there's no building defense and game rotates around aggression.

1st of all, why is it so goddamn zoomed in?
2nd of all, no base building... basically you control creeps from any moba.
3rd, a time limit for a match...
4th, non-stop action & micro

This ain't it, chief. Not what I am looking for in a future RTS.
Am I the only one who wants base building, larger scale engagements and a balance between micro & macro? Starcraft: Brood War, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, Armies of Exigo, Warhammer40K: Dawn of War 1... I could go on.
This feels like its made for a zoomer audience with an attention span of a goldfish that wants "action!!! now!!!" without any build up to it.

On June 08 2024 09:14 Kitalpha wrote:
The good thing they are doing, which was barely mentioned by anyone else, is they are making a game-play based game. Not a lore or setting based game. They have tried to identify the key elements of RTS, that emerged from lore&setting based games in the past. And to bake them in deliberately into a multiplayer only game. Which only rarely seems to have happened.

I do think the gameplay looks fun, and something that could appeal to casual players beyond RTS diehards. I don't think any other RTS games could explode the way Hearthstone or autobattlers did, but I can see it with this one.

It's just underwhelming to see Marine Arena with a budget when people were praising it's innovation. This kind of game will exist in Stormgate as soon as the editor comes out, same with Zerospace if they release an editor.

From Steam...

Coveted assets among the system's powers, they ignite fierce competition for their allegiance and serve contracts to claim territory and military objectives.

On June 08 2024 08:58 Kitalpha wrote:
The video watched really odd to me. As an RTS veteran, I had a hard time following. It seems that the commentary was completely scripted. But maybe the game was spontaneous and then copy & pasted together with Tasteless & Artosis.
I had a really hard time understanding what the bases were and where the units came from. Those platform structures, are they a base or not? Couldn't tell. They also didn't explain resource gathering. So Apparently, there are 'worker, but those are just things that automatically spawn, and 'killing' them just times out a RoT increase.

Artosis' video was pretty clear about this. Your units come from the main structure, workers spawn after a fixed amount of time (roughly 1 minute) and generate a fixed amount of resources per second. So if you kill 8 workers, then for the next minute, your opponent loses out on the resources they would generate. Pretty straightforward.

Also a bit confused about unit decks. So if you before the game have to limit your number of units. Like holding a hand of playing cards during a card game, how does this increase strategies during RTS? Wouldn't you always have more strategies in an RTS if you never limit the number of units a player can select from? Yes, limiting things can lead to deeper gameplay. It might potentially lead to more diverse gameplay though because you may not be able to build your ideal unit given that game. Imagine it as playing a matchup, but removing the best unit for each race. By removing the very best unit, you force players to use the other units. Even if they are bad. But that then will be some rock paper scizzors before the game starts? And where one player picks wrong and is on the defensive? As if they were playing black in a game of chess? I think this can actually work. With quite short games, you have a Bo5 or something. And you just get a few bad unit card decks, and you have to play an inferior strategy because you can't use your best unit. But the next game, maybe you will guess right and your opponent will be the one without the ideal unit.

Your deck consists of 2 Tier 1 units, 2 Tier 2 units (one from the Factory and one from the Starforge [which can produce air units, but not exclusively]), 2 Tier 3 units, and 2 wildcard slots of your choosing. The first layer of strategy is in deckbuilding: do you go for a well-rounded composition? go deep into air harassment with tanky ground units? go for mobile units? cheap units? do you double-down on one tactic so you can win early? The second layer is in your approach to countering: you can see your opponent's deck, meaning you know what they are capable of building; therefore, you can either choose to proactively adapt or simply ignore it and opt for overwhelming pressure instead. Inherently, this will create a sort of tug-of-war of "what can I get away with and still survive?" similar to a fast expo in BW. In theory, there is built-in tension with this approach, and that could end up being compelling.

I echo the concerns in this thread about factional hom*ogeneity. One of the big appeals of strategy games as a whole, at least to me, is the power fantasy of commanding forces which resonate a particular motivation. If you're playing Terran, you're the scrappy, cost-effective hit-and-run experts. If you're playing Soviets, you've got big tanks and mutual destruction. If you're playing Orc, you're masters of unit preservation. If you're playing Aztecs, you're specializing in early game aggression and control. Age of Wonders 4 has premade factions, but you can also customize their loadout so that you can build anything or do anything outside of that factional fantasy - and then your eyes kind of glaze over as you wonder why you're playing a game that lacks immersive qualities. I see Battle Aces in a similar light - you can build anything and do anything, but then, who are you? What is your role? Where is the emotional investment in the power fantasy? And without that, where is the staying power for the game?

I don't think what you describe is important at all. We had that for 25 years in all RTS. And people don't seem to need it. People who played thousands of games of RTS don't get the same escapism that they get when playing the campaign mission for the first time. Your brain abstracts all that stuff out.

You will definitely create meaning differently around being a BATTLE ACE than conventional RTS faction, but I don't think it will be completely absent of fantasy or completely abstract for people. To make sense of this large amount of possibilities there will be some kinds of archetypal groupings that will bubble up from the culture.

Just for example grabbing a seldom used unit or pair of units could result in a lot of identity formation for someone, same way playing an unpopular MOBA hero or playing a hero with non-traditional builds can in those games.

Also If you didn't see the bots are made by different manufacturers, kind of like John Deere and Milwaukee tools and so on. (or Weyland-Yutani Corp) If they sell unit packs based on these it could also result in something like a faction, especially since people won't own everything so there would be re-occurring types of loadouts seen amongst players.

+ Show Spoiler +

Instead of like this:

+ Show Spoiler +

There seems to be an allergy to making units spread out and have large hit boxes so we can actually see what's going on and become immersed in what is supposed to be a cool sci-fi battle.

I get that Brood War is like The Empire Strikes Back of RTS but no one seems to have a clue or wants to learn much from it.

That's part of why it's so interesting to me, because they consciously set aside some of the immersion, factional identity, and base-building aspects that appeal to the campaign-playing group of RTS players. Instead, they focused on some of the most action-y parts of Blizz-RTS/SC2.

I found it quite fun and so did many of the testers with SC2 backgrounds (however credible you think we are given our incentives), and my feeling is that Uncapped won't have a problem enticing hardcore 1v1 SC2 players. However, I think their 'RTS for anyone' rhetoric is pretty nonsense as it's a pretty hands-heavy game, and it makes you wonder "WHO IS THIS GAME FOR?"

Still, I'm very glad someone is taking a big swing at this with a big budget. The industry has shown that difficult and demanding multiplayer games can succeed, and I'm happy that someone is trying to reconfigure RTS to try and be one of those successes in the modern environment.

That's actually one of the things I am inclined to agree with them. I think the concept of races/factions is a bandaid fix for creating diversification. The problem with it is that it becomes so hard to race-switch that you are locked into a race and therefore you don't get the opportunity to try out the majority of all the units in the game. As as terran player it would be cool to try out High Templars, Mutalisks or Warp Prism.

So I am glad someone finally stops copying what all other RTS's have been doing since the 90s and try something they think is a better fit for the next-gen RTS games. There should be much better ways of accomplishing diversification than the race/factions approach.

Sure, but is this the type of gameplay you want as your selling point?

Mine would be almost the opposite. Lot's of skirmishes all over the map with multiple big fights.

Focusing only on gameplay and not lore and campaigns is a good thing for sure. I do worry for ZS/SG that they just don't have the budgets to make several different gamemodes they intend to.

Agree with this. I very much appreciate that they are trying to figure out how to make the competitive 1v1 mode playable for casuals (as well as harder core players), focussing on that and nothing else.

Even if it doesn't turn out to be my ideal game I am much more likely to give it a try as opposed to Stormgate, Zerospace - as the learning barrier for those games appear to be higher. This seems much simpler to get started and have some fun microing.
And any type of issue/problem/design problems that may be encountered in the future, hopefully should be a lot easier to address.

The reason is that 3d engines are so powerful. Either you create a 3d model, put it in the game engine, and you can do everything immediately. You can also add animations to the 3d unit and deal with that as a fixed issue. All in one go. Or you have to make an artist draw many graphics of the same unit from different angles. And if you want animations in your mode, you have to do every single viewing angle, with every single animation change.
In modern games, this is kind of impossible.

Maybe AI can solve this problem in the future. But you need to go over it with fidelity.

In parallel, I do not think that 2d game engines have anywhere near the optimization tricks that were figured out the last 20 years in 3d game engines.

This is why modern games look so bad. Especially in the battle royale age, there were so many games, all 3d, all with horrible graphics. With zero character. There's so few 3d games that actually have prettily drawn models.

On June 08 2024 14:32 Hider wrote:
There should be much better ways of accomplishing diversification than the race/factions approach.

There is a time limit to the game... that is really cool. Its great taht you can get in and out in 10 minutes.

I wonder if Battle Aces could be put on the Next Gen Nintendo Switch.

Glad there is someone enjoying it or what they see, but this is definitly a big no for me.

With 5 minute average game-time I think a lot of the way we think about issues in Starcraft-context needs to be rethought. Usually we generally don't want snowballing/1 mistake into GG in "classical RTS games" - we rather want a bunch of battles that gradually change win probabilities.

However, here, does it really matter? You play --> you mess up --> you lose --> you think about what you are gonna do differently --> requeue --> new game --> All within 5 minutes. In that case it almost makes more sense to think of 1 "classical RTS game" as a collection of Battle Aces games.

I still have a diferent vision for the next-gen RTS game (something that looks more like the best of late game Sc in a more accessible way), but this is a different and even more simplified version, and it might just work.