Recently, I played a few old RTS games (Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun) and a few more recent ones (Red Alert 3, Grey Goo) and I was struck by how differently paced they are.
In the old games, everything happens slowly. You accumulate resources slowly. You build units slowly. Your units trundle across the map slowly. In Tiberian Dawn, for example, building even a single medium tank is a significant investment of time and money. Building a second tiberium refinery can effectively double your income, but it also means making yourself vulnerable for a long time if your opponent decides to put that initial investment into a rush instead. Everything happens slowly enough that you have time to act deliberately, and every action feels worth deliberating.
New RTS games, by contrast, feel like anxiety simulators to me. You rack up resources quickly. You churn through your build queues quickly. Units charge across the map. There’s never enough time to do all the things I need to do. Oops, I tried to use proper combined arms tactics to assault an enemy base, but that stole my attention away from my build queue, causing me to ram my resource cap and now I’m pissing away credits. Oops, I tried to get my build queue in order and in the process my unit blob was left vulnerable and now the enemy’s flanked me and destroyed my artillery. Oops, I tried to set up base defenses and while I was doing that my enemy beat me to that highly contested resource field by a few seconds.
When I lose in an old RTS, I feel like it’s because I wasn’t clever enough. When I lose in a new RTS, I feel like it’s because I wasn’t fast enough.
I play tons of the old Starcraft, X-Com Apocalypse, Jagged Alliance 1.13, Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire, Faster Than Light, Company of Heroes 1, etc. Maybe Transport Tycoon Deluxe could be sort-of decribed as a RTS also?
Older games from the 90s-early 2000s have this certain enjoyment factor that many (but not all) newer games lack. Being able to also cheat in an old game is amazing, like absolutely dicking down an enemy with a squad of 12 Terran Battlecruisers. Or modifying weapons like the early-game laser cannons in X-Com: Apocalypse to fire extremely fast and at longer ranges, to then subsequently level 90% of the city in a constant maelstrom of piss because a UFO spawned in. Oh and also there’s so much piss onscreen that a modern gaming PC with a Ryzen 7 starts to dry-heave on a game released when Nelson Mandela was still president.
Death to AmeriKKKa