RTS Thread - Naval Edition

also do me a favor and tell me your names there, i don't want to invite randoms

Current name is "gunships"

i blame the poorly positioned boars for my loss

wanna go again?

alright fug me, i guess i need more practice against the AI
my economy was working fine till castle age, but then for some reason i fucked something up
i did make town centers but i think i didn't have enough food/houses to pump villagers fast enough
not to mention i had no idea what to do with my military

why did you think it was a good idea to break through my walls during feudal?

What about Anno?

was gonna try to rush
i didn't realize how poor of a choice it was to do that with infantry rather than cavalry

It's pretty much never a good idea to rush on black forest

which anno user?
Taste will vary depending on your answer dont pick the shit ine

Less-popular RTS with Holla Forums when?

R.U.S.E. night? :^)

Heroes of Annihilated Empires?

does metal fatigue have multiplayer? can we run it with anything

Battle for Middle-Earth?

Rises of Legends?

Red Alert

IM GOING TO SAY IT Holla Forums

I FUCKING LOVE RED ALERT 3

Yeah I hated it when it first came out

But I don't even know why after replaying it two years ago

The co-op campaign was an awesome and genuinely innovative idea (although admittedly awkward if you play single player), and I had a great time playing it with my day. The cut scenes, while not quite capturing all the magic, still had some of the heart and weren't bad.

The units were unique and awesome. I love the gameplay in RA3.

I dunno. I see where you guys are coming from, I hated it when it came out, but then I replayed it a few years later and I honestly think it's not so bad.

really?

...

It didn't deserve as much of the hate it got but it's not particularly amazing. While they did the co-op campaign really well it is not innovative, just done well since each mission was played with it in mind which is both a strong and weak point of the game.

This.

I cant remember when was the last time I had so much fun playing video game.
I also have major fetish with micromanaging assets like this game allows.
It has slight learning curve,but it shouldn't be too hard to get into it.

Depends on what we can get working.

This
I'm for any game with elves in it

DID SOMEONE SAY ELVES

...

i bet you hate eldar too

...

As expected from a dwarf
crude language and the inability to not know your place

Remove elf.

Coming from a race with disgusting bearded women, i didnt expect anything different
You are simply jealous of our superiority

Hating elves is just a fa/tg/uys meme.

...

Fucking double negatives, how do they work?

i was waiting for someone to spot that

/tg/ are smelly overweight neckbeards playing games that involve a lot of numbers in dank, dark taverns and constantly acquire a hoard of trinkets and treasures.

/tg/ has been and always will be dorfs, you elven twat.

When was the last time you saw someone on /tg/ doing physical labor, particularly of the digging variety?

Go back to munching on your dung covered flowers you beardless treehumping sissies.

...

how do i git gud as saracens in aoe2?
i just got beat with them by some filthy huns just because they kept spamming halberdiers/knights the entire game, while i was limited to camels/hussars that can't do shit against halberdiers

you choose a less shitty civ

Just spam shitloads of arbalests to take out their halbardiers, and defend your arbalests against the knights with your own halbardiers.

Create a small 10-20 man footsoldier force with a couple onagers to go around fucking up their barracks.

don't blame me, it was random civ

saracens don't get halberdiers :^)

DWARF MASTER RACE

Welp

You're basically fucked if going against a civ with a strong cavalry if you can't get a strong spearman force to counter it. Best thing you can do is build towers and a wall and turtle and let them burn themselves out trying to get to you. Don't forget to build catapults to defend against the inevitable catapults the computer will be trying to send your way when it gets frustrated that men on horses hitting your wall with swords and dying in 2 seconds isn't working.

The Saracens are the camel civ. You know, the anti-cavalry unit?

I've never really played them, so I don't know how camels work. If they're infact an anti-cavalary unit, basically mounted spearmen, all the better, I guess.

If they don't cost much to produce, just make an army of them and back them up with arbalests and you should be fairly unbeatable unless the enemy starts coming at your army with onagers.

problem is that camels are useless against enemy halberdiers, or an enemy that doesn't even bother using his cavalry aside for raiding
problem is that they also cost gold, so it takes me a while to make them

Depending on computer AI level, most difficulties won't care if you send some villagers out to remote goldmines. They might get picked off if the goldmine is near a major infantry route to and from your settlement, though. I usually always send 5 villagers out to every goldmine. Gold is never the problem for me, it's always fucking stone. Don't forget to abuse your markets if you are hurting for gold. By mid game, you should be overflowing with wood and food, just sell your excess.

in my situation it was online, black forest
what remote gold mines are you talking about, everything is trees
i just had another game 3v3, and i did better
we still lost though, partly because one of us was still in feudal when we were imperial, and the enemy had 2 goth players swarming all of our trade units

Spam arbalests and pikemen then. That can beat a halbredier and knight army as long as you aren't retarded with positioning your units.

If you're on a black forest map, use onagers to clear paths through the trees to get to remote goldmines. But you probably knew this by now.

Ouch

Can always set a couple knights to guard a trade cog. Won't really prevent a loss, but at least then it'll force your enemy to put forth a larger force to take care if it rather than send one guy to harass it until it dies.

You know what I meant

Red Alert 3 IS alright. It's the last fine Command and Conquer game, really.

The only use a dwarf is good for is making mugs

are monk rushes any good of an idea?
i tried doing a saracen monk rush against a hun AI, and i was more or less useless until the imperial age since i had to manually make each monk target different units for conversion
and by the time i got the tech to change that, the enemy was already swarming me with hundreds of cavalry archers, while i could only make a few monks
and i had the gold for it, it's just that the monks died way too easily

Monks are a good counter against early castle age knights, bad idea against archers, and too hard to manage during the imperial age.

Anyone interested in this piece of shit? 8-bit armies was atrocious. Now they're re-doing it, but this time it's melee.

$8 is probably all they'll spend on it.

Make a ton of Mamelukes, they have an anti-cav bonus. Mix in camel meatshields depending on how many paladins your opponent brings. Some ranged support to your taste.

Monk+Mangonel can work on maps where nobody bothers to make army before Castle Age, like Arena or Black Forest, because it's difficult to stop when you have no army yet. But you have to follow it up with a castle in their face into regular army or something.

i figured i was doing something wrong
i was playing 2v2, my partner was retarded and never bothered to build a wall so he died pretty fast
i made 4 siege workshops and a few monasteries, had about 10 monks and 8 onagers
i couldn't get them up to siege onagers though, since my partner's market was dead and i had used up my gold for monks and monk accessories
problem was that the monks were pretty useless once the enemy started attacking, since he was using the viking castle unit, which from what i understand is resistant to conversion
my walls fell quickly, he destroyed my onagers and mostly resisted the monks
in retrospect i should have used spearmen or skirmishers as fodder while converting

also, should i buy the WE WUZ KANGS dlc, or at least wait for a sale again i would have bought it earlier, but as far as i've seen it never went as cheap as the forgotten?
i've only got forgotten
i could just pirate the thing and play on voobly, but i somehow tend to get better connections on steam

You should quit playing aoe2 and go play a less shitty game

Monks aren't a main party of the army in Imperial, they're support. Don't even think of going monk/siege only if you're not rushing someone.

but those are even harder

Planetary annihilation is pretty easy user
In fact i recommend all Aoe2 players go give it a try

it can work on win7 but fuck knows about multiplayer

...

You know, I feel exactly opposite. At first I found RA3 quite enjoyable and I think that was because of skirmish. I decided to play it again recently starting with campaign and dropped it after sixth Soviet mission, I have no desire to continue even now. What I really hated is that there are shitton of naval missions and the second thing after that was co-op. They could make co-op missions in the same way they did for RA2 and everything would be better.

It was a so-so game and previous games are way better, even TW with broken balance in campaigns is better.

I wish they just made C&C or Dune clone without minecraft graphics shit, for fuck's sake, they were so close with 8-bit Armies. They could actually ask for Dune license too, unless Herbert's son is asking a insane price for it. EA lost its license for Dune which is why they didn't re-release Dune 2000 and Emperor.

...

They made co-op missions for RA2?

Yeah, there were multiplayer coop maps, don't remember about vanilla, but Yuri had them.

wait for steam sale, maybe by that time we might have got into a new RTS, alternatively a new RTS might have come out that is actually good
tbh user, the expansion was cheap, it was already done better by some Russians before it came out and my own personal demon they changed the meat icon to grain because they didnt want to upset some fucking vegans

i'm only expecting cossacks to be good, and i still prefer the AOE aesthetic more

...

any particular reason why i shouldn't?

because how dare you be anything other then jaded and depressed

pretty much this

depends on how jew Sergei decides to go

Why is Rise of Legends such trash? I love Rise of Nations, but the ""Sequel"" is just utter shit. And Holla Forums always spergs about how good it is. What's the appeal here?

Why is fucking supcomm so hard in multiplayer.
I'm the lowest point guy in every FAF game.

What s a valid build order that gets me out of the mud ?
I tend to spam power nodes around the main production building, make a second one and only then try and upgrade t1 extractors to t2.

what's the quickest way to reach castle age in aoe 2?
i usually make 3 houses, send 2 villagers to chop wood and make everyone else get food via sheep/boars/berries/farms
at 20 i go to feudal, and in feudal i only make 10 villagers for stone and gold
however the AI is starting to outdo me in the economy even if it's making troops, so clearly i'm doing something wrong

You don't suppose its because most of the people you are playing with have been playing that game for a decade?

That much is a given, but I want to git gud anyway.
The game is among the very few RTS games with a fun multiplayer and alive community.

RTS games aren't actually about strategy, they're about micromanagement. Your units are generally completely braindead and will commit mass suicide if you look away from them for 2 seconds.

20 is FAR too early. 20 is scout rush pace. You should be able to finish Feudal -> build two buildings -> start Castle (gap of two villagers at worst). You should be using deer as well. There are many fast castle tutorials around if you want to look one up.

AoE2 is fundamentally a game about macroing ahead of time. It takes you longer to gather resources than it ever will to do anything with them, so plan ahead.

Microing is more important than macroing. It doesn't matter how good your strategy is if you can't stop your archers from running into enemy TCs or your mangonels from killing all of your own units.

checkmate atheist

Even on those kind of maps, managing your siege is a fucking atrocity.

Sometimes, if you order a bunch of trebuchets to attack a caste, the one in front unpacks at maximum range, and the ones behind get stuck and end up doing nothing.

Sometimes, if you take a group of units and tell them to move somewhere, only one of the units actually goes to that location, and the rest of the units shift their positions so that they're in the same location relative to the unit. I still have no idea what causes this behavior.

Yes, unit control in AoE is fucking garbage. You're still not going to find a more macro-heavy game than it or TA/SupCom, though.

fuck, i give up on monk rushes, these things are fucking impossible to micro when your enemy can easily take them out with about 20 good men
i'm still gonna try and do some kind of saracen castle rush though, this time i was able to get my castle age first out of 4 players, and i could have rushed with knights if i wasn't dumb by making monks

Does anyone else cringe whenever they announce a new RTS game these days or hell anything based on a popular franchise? You get a bunch of e-celebs getting to talk about a game series they know fucking nothing about and pretending they give a massive shit. They only jump on board cause the series is popular in an attempt to get some more "fans".

Does anyone wanna play TibSun or DTA? Ill be watching the thread, please play ,-, I got a teamspeak we can use, itll be fun.

So Sudden Strike is returning?

Let's play Dune 2000.

I know it's been like 4 hours but if you're still there i'll be waiting in the DTA lobby with the same ID that this post has, if you want to games just ping it.

TA

feels bad

Not sure how you get bad nostalgia from TA. The game is still alive, go to www.tauniverse.com

It feels bad because i know i will never enjoy an RTS as much as TA because RTS's are dead

bump

i managed to beat someone as filthy saracens
and i reached castle/imperial first
i think i finally figured out how to play the fucking game

Saracens are pretty based user and can trigger modern mudslimes

naval combat is very prominent on some maps of total annihilation, especially its expansion, core contingency

the clunkiness is actually a key part of total annihilation obstacles severely hampering manuverability of larger vehicles.
the "dragons teeth" tank traps were no joke in this game

i dont remember, did supreme commander have naval wreckage to reclaim? i dont think it did?

I dont think it did, but i really never double checked, Aeon experimental battle ships destroyed all other naval if buffed up with a few submarine destroyers

there's another nigger who actually played this? too bad it only has like 4 maps.

i cant actually get it to run these days

you have to go into the game files and launch the .exe, it should work then

I do like how you can do larger forces in it than you can in other rts games

i meant, it launches but all the text is gone or zalgo

I love playing the necro mage, that can walk onto a battlefield after everything is over, and resurrect hundreds more skeletons for you army

But necro mage was the only feasible empire, all the others were shit in comparison

WTF have i been missing?
i preferred to empire too much

Fissure was great, because you could also use it to erase resource points on the map, if you really wanted to fuck with people.

Fug going to try it again tomorrow
Any help advice? like some mods that might balance it or something?
cause necros are just so much stronger than all the other teams

I didn't even know it had mods. I mostly only played ai, since the few times I got other people to play we had issues with it crashing.

I trtied playing the flaming skeletons mods, but it turns out it didnt balance anything

Tried*

Do yourself a favor and quit this shitty game. Your units are so fucking retarded they'll actually move in the opposite direction of where you click.

They were shit, ruined the lore and didnt make any sense
Plot was full of plot holes
Like Einstein being dead but allies still having prism technology

They were beyond shit

but the camels are fun

So I played Dominions 4 and yes i know it's not rts but it made me discover something. I love strategy games where it's possible to customize a special unit to become overpowered. In Dominions 4 you could recruit captains to lead armies and they gain experience in combat and then on top of that you can give them items that make them capable of taking on several opponents that they usually aren't able to fight. In Total war i know that giving generals army abilities are usually more important but i always loved giving them personal combat abilities and charge them into enemy lines. Is there any RTS that has this capability? It kind of loses it's charm if the RTS is revolved around this which is why i don't like RPG's much.

So anons, replayed the last mission of RUSE. Ending hinted at a Pacific Campaign that was never to surface. Why did RUSE do badly again? In many ways it's a lot better than Wargame if I am honest, it just needed heavily refined.

You talking about this?

What the fuck.

Did you not know that Loyalists can send missiles back to sender?

Had no idea. Do nukes even count as missiles ?
I thought only anti-nuke missiles take them down.

Yes, but I wouldn't recommend relying on them as an Anti Nuke System

So what do you do for defense ? Spam Loyalists in a defensive line from the direction, from which nukes come ?
I am normally the noob in multiplayer, but I haven't seen anyone do that.

Only the ACU's mini nukes do.

No, don't do that. Quite literally it's a one in a million shot getting a Loyalist to bounce back a nuke. Anti-Nukes are much more reliable.

Also this

I remember one patch the Loyalists could even bounce back a Yolona Oss but that has been fixed. Backback nukes are the only ones it works on now.

Sage for double post

What if i'm playing from a fresh CD installation?
Can i still bounce back those shitty Yolona Oss's?
because i fucking hate them

Nope. I just remember it being some bug introduced in a patch that was quickly fixed.

Although if you did find the patch, you'd have to stand directly underneath the missile

Sergei as in Stalker sergei? I thought he stopped being involved with video games after STALKER.

Actually, that's okay because I'm shit at all RTS and I'm not sure if anyone would want to play that game. I still haven't played a lot of it.

He owns GSC, who makes Cossacks

the "billy" counts as a tactical missile i believe.
or maybe its just the lower trajectory

I think the biggest question needed answering is:
can you start a bounce war?

I've just pictured in my mind Loyalists playing tennis with tactical nukes.

It will end up with two factions spamming loyalists in an attempt to prevent the tactical nuke from landing on their side, thus causing an endless battle between two tides of loyalists
And presuming the ACUs keep sending out nukes, eventually end up in a situation where one base is destroyed instantly by nuclear fire

dead

gaming in general?
or just this genre?

Genre

...

Because people who buy games are moronic obviously
Imagine Spore if every aspect of it came out good?
Imagine the RTS aspect being actually fun
My hate for the people who ruined this annoys me to no end
The fact that I had more fun in a demo than the actual game shows someone really dropped the ball

Dead

Jim?

a-anyone wanna play something?

We'll be back when Mental Omega 3.3 comes out. Which is to say NEVER EVER.

Mental Omega? More like Meh-ntal omega amirite guise?

The things I would do to that squid.

Do not sexualize the Ika

Are you squiding me? She even comes with tentacles.

Hi Aabid, I agree, we shouldn't give sexual pleasure to girls.

DO NOT SEXUALISE THE IKA

Shh… just relax…

REAL TIME STRATEGY GAMES

Why is there so little Rule 34 of Supreme Commander?

UEF a shit

I wanted to post some TA first, but I couldn't find any. These are dark times.

I need to know if there's Elite Commander Dostya x Crusader Rhiza lesbian r34.

Though I'm sure you didn't mean porn of the human characters.

Maybe we should ask for R34 SupCom next time there is a Drawfag thread?

it could happen

Well we did get a drawfag once to draw R34 of C&C in an RTS thread. Of a Titan fucking a Cyborg Commando if I recall.

because its a strategy game with no characters outside of cutscenes.

Who let the newfags in?

Way to oust yourself

Get out of here Cybran.

8ch plays the Tiberian Dawn when

dead

Anyone interested in playing some Supreme Commander? I'm not good at all but it could be fun, and I really don't want to play against the randoms in FaF.

thats just your opinion user and its right

Would Doom make a good game if it was an RTS?

I could be really well and take place before DooM (because thats when his buddies was still alive) and would be about them trying to fight off these aliens and slowly failing.

It would end up being UAC Vs Hell, but it'd be rad as hell. Also, someone tried making a Doom RTS already, but they quit long ago.

Fucking plebs.
I am still shit at the game. I play random to git gud at em all and it is fun.

i don't even really like naval power in RTS but god that felt good

It already exists.

Dwarfs are just fucking manlets

heard you talkin shit like i wouldn't find out

Why am I not surprised?

Its not tha bad user, The cybran one is better and builds far more quickly

What do you think about War Wind 1&2?

Somehow I have missed this back in the days, and looks fairly interesting.

still dead

WarWind 1 and 2 both just got rereleased on GoG three days ago.

Fucking loved that shit, even if it made no sense to me as a child.

Best Dwarf Game?

Dragons Crown or Dorf Fortress

But if we have to pick an RTS, there is a few

What is it about schnazuers and being adorable faggots.

They look like old homeless people turned into dogs
essentially its similiar to how pugs are cute

silly space elves

This is possibly the funniest, most apt analogy to anything I've ever read in my life.

I'm fucking dying. I feel like I'm high and just listened to the best joke ever.

Eldar are fine so long as they never remove their cone helmets.

My nigga.

Dwarves are unbearably slow in that though. At least you can get them drunk to get a combat and speed boost. Also the voice acting for them is hit or miss.

ONE, TWO, THREE, BERZERKAH

Should send chris a box full of shit as thanks for what happened to spore.

Fuck him.

Why do I feel like I'm missing something crucial here?

At least they're not as bad as dark dwarves

However dark dwarves can get chaos magic, and the speed mutation can make there golems pretty quick

Bronze golems moving at mach 10 is pretty fucking great.

Not gonna lie though I spent a lot of WBC drowning thel and in endless tides of spriggan dick.

Would Pyromancer be a good class for any team that spams cheap infantry?
I mean that ability to give all your units fire breath looks pretty neat, except its completely worthless for expensive/high pop units
to be fair though it probably might be useless for say the swarm, as they their general can summon fire elementals, which admittedly a late game unit, are still significantly more effective

I just cant help imagining a whole swarm of fire breathing skeletons

When you said pyro I was thinking more about the one ability that grants units free XP.

I haven't thought too much about troops outside the really early game since my hero ends up doing all the heavy lifting. One of these days I gotta make a non-combat hero and actually play the RTS end of things.

But can soul flame even compare to that divination magic, the one that gives units the ability to exp steal from their kills like wraiths?
Honestly i find the divination one more effective against fey
fuck fey

Depends on how quickly you tend to kill enemy heroes. If their hero is dead their units tend to spawn with 0 xp barring factions with +xp research.

No joke their titan is fucking garbage though. It hurts me how bad archers are in battlecry.

at least its not the worst titan

Are you saying there is one worse than the forest lord?

I find it hard to believe unless the plague lords have one, I wouldn't know since I refuse to play them.

People want more robit smut? I can take another crack at it, I guess. What do people want, exactly?

The worse part is that plague lords wouldn't be so bad, if only they had a unit that was proficient in spreading disease
Like seriously, if I remember correctly, theres the slime unit and all the rest are single targeted abilities and need to be manually activated (an autocast would really help)

although by worst titan i was referring to the dark elf one, Kargoth which is shit
The plague lords actually get a decent titan in comparison, if you can bother to play them enough to build it, if only they didnt have such shit units

Like why would you ever give a general the ability to summon a scout?
Scouts can easily be filled with actual offensive units rather then shitty fucking eyes, so why not give them an actually good summon, like even slimes are preferable considering slimes and plaguelords are the only actual units capable to giving disease

Hell, if you gave the plague lords autocast and the ability to summon slimes i would put them above wood elves

Just curious, what sort of classes/races do you play? I find myself falling into fey/minotaur/undead a lot with lots of shamans/paladins/necromancers.

I prefer Dark Dwarves, the swarm and knights and sometimes srathi usually with Bards an tinkers and i did attempt to make a srathi dragon slayer, but that huge amount of stone needed to build dinosaurs was a huge turn off

I love knights for the voice acting more than anything.

I never really gave the swarm a fair shot, how have you found them?

There biggest weakness is the the fucking sound of their workers, fuck that shit
Honestly i think its unfortunate that they work the same way as the undead, and tbh i think the undead has the better swarm in the end, even whilst they share the same weaknesses, the swarm suffers due to being much more expensive
also the breeding upgrade that halfs all build speeds takes way too long to get, and when considering the time you actually get it, its not build rates that are slowing you down but rather a fucking lack of resources
Although I think they have the better general, being able to summon fire elementals is bretty gud, especially when you lack any kind of good artillery

also Scorpion centaurs are useless, its better to build scorpions

This is why i main dark dwarves, only 2 weakness, units that do lightning damage and their slow speed
Chaos magic potentially gets rid of one, although i think a tinker's resource allocation is better in the long run
Mach 10 golems aren't exactly useful when the enemy has twice as much as you

There's a great amount of irony about the forces of famine being starved for resources constantly.

The best part is that i dont think it was even intended

Just a question, what level do you usually max your heroes At?
Currently All I've played is the campaign, several custom matches and a few LAN matches

Combat heroes need to stop at 20-25, any further than they will just curb stomp the fucking world alone.

Non-combat heroes cannot possibly level up enough.

Dead

Dead thread for a dead genre.

I want RTS to not be dead.

Let's make RTS great again.

...

Forgive me user, I forgot the name user

how about a non-english RTS

Did you even watch the expo they did of the game way back when?

0AD?

Axes and Allies!

TripleA is basically Axis and Allies. Also free.

Looks like Stardock have decided to copy Planetary Annilihation.

its time for me to play warcraft 2 again. i keep running in to this problem where the colors get all fucked up, but at least it isnt affecting the game or the cutscenes.
running it with these settings temporarily fixes it but it seems to come back by next mission. id screenshot it but it wont let me.

man, the way the map scrolls is jarring, full tiles at a time instead of a smooth pan.

copying planetary annihilation might not be a good idea, it had a lot of cool concepts behind it, but it had kind of shoddy execution. if they do it right i cant complain.
but just what are they copying about it?

Fucking over their original customers by re-releasing the game featuring the content that was promised and abandoning their old game, forcing the customers to buy a new game?

i havent really followed aots and i have no idea what promised features didnt make it. mind going in to detail?

Didnt kingdom wars do the exact same thing?
Fuckers even sent me an email about how good kingdom wars 2 was going
fuck them

To be fair it was OP's post……

Generally Ashes is seen as an unfinished game. Devs look like they are abandoning it for their next project rather than fleshing out the game.

not dead

Not yet.

I played Ashes of the Singularity recently and I came to the conclusion that it is missing something that could make it a great game, and that thing is more dakka!

When you see units engaging each other it's often rather pathetic. There is literally no weight to any engagement. Your units feel like boats casually strolling along the water gently tickling the enemy. The game needs explosions and for engagements to feel like clashes. At present it is just a dull prodding with weightless energy beams. It needs cannons to shake the very earth as units explode in fireballs. Needs more variety of units, not just hover units and some aircraft. It needs vehicles with treads, mechs and yes boats that make an impact on the environment. The devs also need to put more wreckage and for the environment to be scarred more from battles.

At present I am sadden by it, cause it is a comfy RTS that could be so much better and interesting.

It pretty much plays like a Beta.

I decided to pirate it and give it a go. Pretty much this. It is a bit dull. A bit too slow and there is no impact to anything. All it is is advancing in lanes till you get locked in battles. No air transports means you can't really deploy armies behind enemy lines or even move units to your frontlines. It's feels like Sup Com if you removed 4/5ths of the units and buildings.

Supcom FA(F) has both the most complex and most balanced naval combat of any RTS. You cannot prove me wrong.

There is a reason why Supreme Commander Forged Alliance is considered the Jesus of all RTS games.

Fair point, does any RTS have such a variety of naval vessels at play that are actually useful?

Not really no, only games like Supreme Commander and Red Alert where the maps allow for naval combat are the units ever used and even then it can be rare to go full naval.

Is it just me or did the devs really screw the pooch when designing the PHC faction? So many worthless/obsolete units.

After pretty much the early game all of the PHC frigates bar the Medic are worthless. You are just better off spamming Cruisers, speaking of which is the Athena makes the Zeus completely obsolete. It's moves faster, kills faster and as result survives better than the Zeus. That's before the retarded Unit AI that will sit and do nothing as it gets shot to bits.

Seems like all the dev's time and effort went into designing the Substrate. Their units have clear defined uses and roles, and even their frigates can be viable to use mid to late game. Their unit AI also seems to be far less retarded, something I noticed heavily with their aircraft especially with bombers. Hades will just sit an circle around aimlessly maybe dropping the occasional bomb while Punishers will actually get shit done.

This
its easier to go air than naval
Cybran have an advantage because they're naval go land, but even then its more viable to have gunshits and artillery installations

Same problem with Total Annihilation I recall. Air was just the way to go.

Man, I wish there were more unusual RTS games. Post-apocalyptic, for instance. Dorfguy, I hope you're still lurking. Haven't seen anything new posted on your Tumblr in a while.

The last unusual RTS i played was grey goo
it was shit
Publishers just dont want to try new things anymore, they have a sheep mentality that keeps telling them to do what other publishers are doing

Giggty Goo seemed to play like a shittier version of Starcraft. I had honestly completely forgotten about it.

Holy shit I forgot that game existed!

Neither they want to try old things. I don't think there are good recent C&C or Dune clones. All what I can think of is one game for mobiles which is getting PC port, the devs went to Greenlight not too long ago. Don't remember the name, I think it's called Red Storm or something. Oh, and some Russians are making Mars 2000, basically Dune clone, but I don't expect it to happen too soon.

Does anyone remember Achron? It's an RTS that incorporates time travel as a main mechanic. They put a lot of work into the time travel shit and that one aspect is actually really cool. Sadly it wasn't cool enough to save the game from falling into obscurity.

I remember hearing about it, did it actually release?

It did, actually. According to the steam store page it recieved some praise from review sites. Still, the last time I heard of it was at least a year ago when I saw a multiplayer match on youtube. It's probably dead, but I never bought it or pirated it so I can't say for sure.

Huh, there's a demo too.

Seems they focused on the gimmick so much they forgot to invest time and effort where it counted. Like Unit pathfinding and UI.

What's the next RTS game that's going to fuck up everything and fail hard?

Dawn of War 3

Fuck think you are right.

Looking for an older RTS game in which you could create/recruit/train/whatever dragons as units
FFS I can't find it and it's nothing but a vague memory

It's not:

Total annihilation Kingdoms?
user you're too vague, dragons are units in a lot of games
like:
warcraft 3
Rise of nations rise of legends ( i think)
heroes of annihilated empires
spell force 2: dragon storm
Warlords Battlecry 3
seven kingdoms (i think, one of them)
Magic and mayhem I or II
Majesty? (fuck if i can remember)
fuck theres even more i cant remember

Thanks for the titles, man.
I realize that and that's what is driving me nuts. I remember playing the game and seeing a flock of dragons steamrolling a base and I can't even identify the art style.
Out of your list TA: Kingdoms feels like the one but I don't have the Eureka moment watching gameplay. I'll keep searching until I collapse

TA kingdoms usually only hs one dragon at a time
Still a fun game, just not as good as normal TA