Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
It's great to hear, yeah I researched this topic a bit further and there are clearly some very determined people who want to bring BAR to more platforms, excited about the progress! Floats will be a big pain in the ass for sure and will cause countless desyncs, same story prevented playing supreme commander FAF on ARM processors, though a lot of attempts have been made
There is an interesting technical reason why its a challenge (and they can't just swap in a supported library):
> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
There’s a very “we’re selling business software” feel to this webpage, which makes me wonder what it would be like for business software to be marketed like a video game.
I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)
You’re right - it’s not a campaign as such - it’s a set of scenarios (currently 22) in increasing difficulty. I haven’t played for a while after getting stuck but checking now I got stuck on the 5th scenario - even worse than I thought. :)
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
The game is very mature and well thought RTS. The user experience and performance is beyond anything on the market now. It beats all well known AAA studios attempts at it by far.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
I love watching BAR multiplayer games but definitely felt a bit overwhelmed in the midgame with this one. How anyone can comprehend a 40v40 in real time is beyond me haha. I guess it's just a muscle to build.
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
Just note, 40 vs 40 are effectively "meme" games. You can't play them normally, they are special events only. 40 vs 40 is very much not representative of BAR experience overall ;).
We had Matrix bridge for a few months to some channels related to development. Pretty much no interest (except for 1 person that asked for it), no legitimate activity, yet, there were spammers showing up quite often.
Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.
Some of the folks who give running commentaries on matches make it entertaining even if you don't play. Derp, Gyle, Willow; I've spent way more hours listening to their humorous takes on plays and strategies than I would care to admit. And frankly, it's the "average joes" of the game (lower ranked players) whom don't really follow the meta that often make it the most entertaining.
I definitely enjoy RTS more as a spectator sport than as a player(I am probably not competitive enough to enjoy playing vs people) but I do enjoy a good match every once in a while. But... I hate the "casts" I much prefer to watch a single player just play the game rather than inane talking points and jumping all over the place loosing the narrative.
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
FAF has a good community. it’s clear some people are better than others and you won’t get yelled at for not knowing what to do and can ask for help. the problem with FAF isn’t community, it’s technical. the game and connectivity are so painful that it might take you an hour to get into a game. and then you play 30 mins, get to the core part of the game, and someone drops. it’s a 10/10 experience when it’s good but it might be good 10% of the time. you’ll frequently see comments that it’s a lobby simulator
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
It is an intense game with open chat, so someone will inevetiably let you know if they think you blew an hour long game. That said, I have found the community to be quite nice. there are noob clans and people running training clinics.
Even the guy that let of steam after losing will probably give you tips on the next go round.
They're not very toxic, but my experience is that it's a small, elite community and they're very good at the game.
You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.
Fully second doing some learning. A lot of the critical 'meta' is fairly basic. Factory first, don't stall energy, reclaim wins games, commander strong early.
Also if you see me(same username) online and are starting out, feel free to reach out over the FAF chat system, for some simple coaching. Game gets a lot easier after some of the meta is learned. I can't garentee I'll even respond, but I would hate for someone to bounce off due to the learning curve.
It's not as bad. I came from faf to bar and was an ok setons player but my first setons/supreme match on bar I was literally being flamed out of the gate for not being totally optimal from the jump. On faf it seems you will get flamed if you don't know the broad strokes but people will cover for you especially if you're lower rated.
Lobby wait time is rather extreme, and false-starts are really tough (40m to get full team -> get it balanced -> launch game -> someone disconnects on start, or went AFK because of the long wait time -> re re re re in chat -> launch new lobby -> only 60% rejoin -> match is now unbalanced -> wait 20m -> some god among men with 2500k ELO joins -> match is un-balancable
My approach is to queue up for a FAF lobby before I start a work sprint. Being interrupted from my tasks by the loading screen is always a pleasant surprise.
Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
Different people get different things out of video games (and everything, really). For some, the fun is learning, and the game stops being fun when you understand it (this is me). For others, the fun starts after they're learned, and starts being good at it, but still have competition with others. For yet others, mastering it and being the best is the fun.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
Bullying is a way to have fun. Additionally, some people are desperate for approval, and will even chase being bullied as a way to get attention from others. It’s not exactly a mystery, it’s just sad.
I think the situation aetherspawn is "highest rank in a low-rank lobby", e.g. an experienced player playing together with newbies. That might be a person who's just enjoying executing a specific strategy.
True top-tier players are very flexible and love high-risk tactics like flying your commander to enemy base. They also happy to "go next" if something went wrong.
This very much depends on the lobby. I don't think this is unique to BAR either - it's just that 8v8 is the most popular mode.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG - that is, micro-ing just a dozen of units and optimising every rocket or bullet hit or whatever, which is kind of what front is like.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
Mechanics of course depend on the map and meta. However, you cant really go into a 16 player game and expect to get the spot you want. Both backline and front line should be working non-stop and both have a lot to do. It is a sweaty game.
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
> My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
I'm not sure what are you trying to prove and refute in your post really.
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
Understanding a bit about BAR but not really understanding those multilayer games, I found it a helpful counterpoint to the assertion that front is basically t1 spam then die. The idea that you should budget and save for your t2 con because your opponent also has to is useful, and the idea that greater strategies also open up after micro becomes second nature actually makes me want to play these multilayer lobbies more, whereas the initial post seemed quite negative and just intending to moan.
I was top 30 in 8v8 a few years ago. The recipe was pretty simple.
Step 1 - Raid and harass nonstop in the early game, never fight fair engagements, abuse range, tax your opponent's attention. Ideally harass multiple players to mess up all of them. Greed behind this, it's not expensive to raid.
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I don't see how your comment makes sense. You're not part of any "community" but you also never play with random strangers?
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
Well, while every group of people is definitionally "a community", you can absolutely have your friend group not be part of "the community" of the game. Just like you can have a LAN and not be "on the net", watch implies the internet.
Uhh if you are playing games consistently with your friends, then they are a community that you're playing with.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
I think by “community” he meant the whole community of a particular game, where you communicating with people, consuming same content, get influenced, etc
The vast majority of people don't fall into the category you're describing, but they nonetheless have to compete against the very few people who do, and so larger and larger proportions end up falling into the same "meta" bullshit.
Not really, because there are players at every level who watch Youtube. So at every level of skill, those players who are up to date on the latest "meta" will win. Not enough to beat the meta players at the next level up, but enough to beat the non-meta players at their own level.
The bigger issue is that these springengine games don't really have large communities. And they're usually team battles... So yeah, you're not getting 8-16 people with similar elo rating within reasonable timeframes
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
If matchmaking is working correctly you should win some fraction of your matches, probably ~half.
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
Correct, and if 100% of the people who beat you are using all the same "meta" then that suggests it's not a skill variation that explains it. That makes the game extremely boring.
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
I think Overwatch and League of Legends are the best examples of this effect. Both games are entirely unrecognizable today compared to 2016.
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
Agreed on “finding meta” as just being part of any game. But thinking games are more restrictive than chess might just be a lack of exposure to competitive gaming.
Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.
I don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
Perhaps simpler in the relevant choices presented to the player? The fact that a specific meta can be found, and victory requires using the meta, means that many important choices have been removed from the player.
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can predict if you lose 2 or if you lose 3 pieces because of your next move, and you're expected to use this knowledge. The strategy of chess is about perfection in every turn.
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more complicated situations it's still a lot less predictable than chess. Even the examples you're giving can only happen probabilistically outside very early game.
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
Starcraft might be more complex in absolute terms (not sure about that - discrete combinatorial problems can be genuinely more complex can continuous ones, from an algorithm point of view, because solutions are harder to come by)
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
Id say it's only natural when importance or value are placed on the outcome of the game.
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
I think that is projecting a lot of expectation on what games are supposed to be like. Cometitive games have always existed, from knights jousting to sailors gambling.
It's amazing the degree tencent shills have taken action to stop people in the west from enjoying games online. This is not natural and it didn't used to be this way.
I think that's a normal evolution of these games? In the end they are cooperative so your teammates depend on you. Although you'll find plenty of people at the top of the ladder spamming werid strategies and being successful.
Normal evolution yet somehow wasn't really a visible force on video games until streaming and is now the predominant force on pretty much every single online competitive game.
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
Seems people in general have started to project their lifes disappointments, stresses, and greater human needs onto a digital dimension like video games. Growing up they used to be about fun. I have endless memories as a child playing Mario N64 and it not needing to be about playing a particular way; only as a I got older and competition and disappointments being human as an adult added up did I notice this shift you mention in online game communities.
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
I don't know, I won a friendly Super Smash Bros tournament circa ~2011 with kirby spamming down b with what was it, the c-stick? Whatever it was where you could do the super move or whatever automatically instead of having to choose how much power you wanted and just generally clicking random buttons.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
> edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
ah yeah I could have just not said that, it was just a brash thought dump, not really thoughtfully considered and not something I'm too pressed on digging a moat into. i.e. its not a strong belief I hold, but an intuition. The goal really was to explore the idea that something shifted that has led people to lose the fun in games. If I were to repost that, I'd say that instead and not try to make conjecture about politics.
I remember playing Malzahar support before it was meta, because that was the only character I could play well in League of Legends.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat
/ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
Overwatch has similar issues - common advice for playing Competitive is to just completely disable text chat and voice chat. Yeah, you'll miss genuine, helpful suggestions, but they're a tiny, tiny minority of messages at the lower ranks. Not that it necessarily improves a lot at the higher ranks, as I understand it, but is less awful.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
EVE to me is an odd duck because it's an explicitly cutthroat universe - many people log on expecting monsters. There are a lot of supportive players out there among the trolls; where the knives of betrayal really come out is in the politics of player-controlled space.
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
Yes and the worst part of that is that I really enjoy working out my own strategies. My best RTS memories are on StarCraft 1, playing with friends in the early 2000s, and we all just were figuring it out for ourselves.
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
I think that's why I like prerelease (and sealed, generally) the most of any format. For day 1 prerelease, a lot of the players are reading the cards for the first time. For sealed later on, even if you know the meta for that set, it's more about playing the best deck with the cards you've got. Knowing the meta doesn't change your pool. (As opposed to draft, where if you don't know the meta you might inadvertently pass excellent cards and miss signposts other players will catch)
Well playing Fortnite is the opposite. If you suck you get into crappy pools. Every once and a while it someone resets and you spend a few matches getting victory royale until the competition gets better. Way more fun for everyone this way.
I think more than meta chasing, the problem comes from laxk of actual community due to the crazy effectiveness of online matchmaking. When all you had where community servers and rooms, toxicity was more manageable. With other players all being nameless folks you will never play with again, the worst side of people can more easily come out.
Nope , you haven't been in this community. The most fun i had been in gaming . They teach each other and help each other , share unit , share economy. Its not like COD or LOL communities.
I agree. It is crazy how much sharing units is a major part of bar. T2 cons, transports, even units to micro by the front line. Simply typing im low on energy will often result in teammates sending a few windmills or tidals. Its a great change in rts games. Plus when i play vs bots with my kids i can send them more metal production so the can be the one marching in titans or dropping nukes and destroying all the bots without realizing the extra componding econ i sent them. They have a blast.
No campain but there are stand alone scenerios you can play. There is also a fun swarm defense sort of thing(rapters) if you like tower defense style gameplay.
BAR does have a series of scenarios for singleplayer / offline play.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
As other mentioned it has singple player Scenarios and Skirmish mode, including two special tower defense/survival modes. We are also building a dedicated campaign now.
I might try it, then; I liked Total Annihilation, but have absolutely no interest in multiplayer online. I think that the passionate fans, that obviously are the ones that drove the creation of this game, may not realize the abundance of more casual players that just want a decent solo experience. It seems I've seen several recreations or homages of games that drop the single-player aspects.
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
I'm a casual gamer who also played TA in the olden days. I have enjoyed playing through the BAR scenarios / tutorials and have had fun playing maybe 100-ish hours against the built-in AIs.
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
Me and my friends just play against the AI. We'd last 2 seconds against real players but we're slow and old RTS gamers and just have a good time stacking up a few AI opponents and smashing them.
This is a common reaction and the response is common too: this is only the case if you follow the herd to 8v8 and the two club-like maps they fixate on. But if you study the community for 5 minutes first, you can walk past those two “pubs full of toxic jerks fighting” there are a dozen other options. Single player, PvE, 1v1 through 4v4 and FFA. These (smaller) game modes lack the level of drama you see in 8v8. You just have to go into the quiet restaurant with nerds playing chess and other board games instead of the obvious mess of a drunken bar across the street.
Hey, PtaQ here, BAR’s Community Manager. I’m sorry this was your experience. There are definitely some very competitive lobbies, but harassment is not acceptable. Please report any players involved, as reports are the only way we can identify patterns and take action. We have an active moderation team and do review them.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.
I don't think that's true at all. I mainly play Rocket League, and while you do have bad games, I'd say at least 80% of them are fun.
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
What if hostility is a feature? They have a culture that works for them. Many organizations do not survive massive influx of new members - numbers inflate quickly, community adapts rules because you cannot manage a big community the way you'd manage small community, old members leave, new members get bored and also leave, the community tries to manage a small community the way you'd manage a large community, whole thing collapses. Meanwhile if you're hostile to new members you avoid unsustainably high expansion and complete collapse of the organization's management structure because there is no expansion. Expansion is not a measure of success if it sacrifices maintaining current culture. Asian societies famously function like that.
Hostility might be a feature for someone who is (or views themselves as) in an "in" clique. But it's poison for the long term health of the game, because it discourages most participation. The only ones attracted are those who view vitriol as a pleasant environment.
"Hostility as a feature" has been tried many times, from the old newsgroups of the late 80s to Quora and Stack Overflow. It tends to herald the death of the platform.
There's not much hostility in Beyond All Reason outside of certain "newbie" lobbies. Occasionally somebody has a conflict, but people who take game seriously avoid offensive words as they don't want to get banned.
BAR offers some 'hold the fort' maps, where there is a strong/fortifiable area and then the 'outskirts'. These are catered to offer great gameplay for battles against Raptors (previously known as 'chickens') and Scavengers.
Hey PtaQ, I appreciate the comment and that BAR is putting effort into improving the community, but I raised a pull request to edit the community code of conduct to clarify that players shouldn’t be banned simply for allowing a game to run its natural course, and virtually every dev disagreed with me and favoured the idea of kick banning a player who won’t surrender immediately after front is lost because “the game is clearly won”.
If you want to make the community better, delete all the rules that encourage players to gang up on other players for subjective reasons. These kinds of rules punish non-verbal players, who easily fall prey to verbal players (I’ll just call them bullies) who can use the rules as a justification basically to harass someone whilst getting branded a hero.
Also, a large majority of players have fun, even when they’re losing. Asking those players to accommodate a hyper-competitive few who want the tightest loop possible to winning and restarting is anti-fun. Both from the perspective of the person winning (I get so disappointed when I win front and they just surrender before I get to blow up their base) and from the perspective of the non-front players who are pressured to quit as soon as front is lost.
Won plenty of games in more casual lobbies (kind of rare) where the front player, after dying, was happy to just receive T2/3 units to control, and due to being able to focus on just controlling a few units, won the game.
Not my experience at all when I played around a year ago. There were plenty of noob-specific / noob-friendly lobbies with a mix of helpful players and fellow casuals.
This is a classic take by a non-competitive player that would be better suited playing PvE or campaign games.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
It’s not a bad culture fit, how did the culture become toxic to begin with? We have toxic people who perpetuate and defend being toxic. They take over and push out anyone who doesn’t act like them. This is how communities become toxic, and it’s exactly what you are doing now.
> We have toxic people who perpetuate and defend being toxic. They take over and push out anyone who doesn’t act like them. This is how communities become toxic, and it’s exactly what you are doing now.
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).
Context: So I have 3 friends that I have been playing video games with for over 30 years weekly. So we would be playing half (as a team) of a 4v4. Now, we are never going to be competitive, we are basically playing to socialize.
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
I play with my brother and an old friend of mine. I'm getting close to forty.
There's no "leagues", it's just lobbies you join, and you gain or loose OS (Elo) per battle. Party up with your friends, find a lobby that says it's for noobs, has some other nonsense in the title ("rotato" is for map rotation) or just seems to have a lot of low-OS players, and have fun. You can avoid or mute/ignore people. Or start your own lobby so you can be boss and set the tone in the title.
Spectate a full match or two before you just jump in, to sort of see the pacing. Announce to the team that you are noobs... But yeah, I think it's perfectly possible for old friends to have fun in BAR PvP ranked; you just ignore / tell off the flamers, or bounce to a nicer lobby. Most people are friendly if you are friendly. Heck sometimes the spectators jump into the player chat and banter while the battle rages.
And yes, the artillery still hits just as hard as it did before.
I used to enjoy TA back in the annihilated.com days. Does this not have stand alone offline story/skirmish modes? Does online with random people not work any more?
I've played beyond all reason for a little bit, although I'm not very good at it. I've managed to avoid toxic lobbies by searching for terms like co-op or noob.
BAR is a deep and challenging game. It's also a team game. If your plan is to jump right into PvP you're going to be deadweight hanging around your team's neck and will rightly be criticized for it. You will never experience toxicity in 1v1 games, and only the normal amount of toxicity for online team games if you can pull your weight. Also, the community rarely surrenders early so OP clearly didn't play that many games and let 1 or 2 lobbies distort their perception of the game. Just remember, if you can't beat the AI, you don't belong in PvP games yet. Take your time, learn patience, walk before you run.
This is by design as it’s built by seniors unwilling to let go of their lawn. It’s a brilliant game, built by jerks. If they truly cared, it would be random spawn somewhere within a polygon of territory.
Pretty much the only case I've seen where a person is kicked out is either griefing (deliberately playing bad) or refuse to listen to advice.
If you don't know basics there's plenty of opportunities to learn outside of a real match (spectator, bots, special lobbies, etc.) Learning basics during 8v8 match is just extremely disrespectful: you're wasting time of 15 people. I think you missed that part.
And JFYI generally high-level lobbies (20+ is) have less drama. So it's mostly beginners having drama between themselves
Playing RTS since long time, TA to SupCom to FaF, I need to say that I totally understand your condition, especially considering my own experience and evolution on BAR.
I've seen lot of new or learning players being disoriented from the start, trolled and attacked during games, even kickbanned because of their sub-optimal playing after being FORCED to play front because of rating and placing/slot login in BAR.
While personally having a strong RTS background and even very specific to TA and FaF (basically BAR) I had to went through the same high toxicity problems.
The solution has been to don't give up, self learn through pain and few friends tips all the gaming micro details expected by other players and hidden in pro player knowledge.
IMHO this happened mainly and simply due to the lack of a well structured and established learning path for new players, that instead of opening a lobby list and joining the heat to get instantly rammed by toxicity should have the possibility to obtain basic game positioning, build and control knowledge in an more appropriate and structured way, in game info guidance on start -> tutorial?
Regarding the point of the poor newbie have to go as front player and holding while the pros stay in the back, is still kinda normal since the back positions, as especially the tech ones, are more fundamental later in the game, meaning that having a newbie there would be much worse game wise. and dont forget this is valid only for skill draft mode, there are othe draft modes too, even if the skill one is used "99%" of the time.
I find totally off topic and even offensive talking about needing to have had hard skin to go through this toxicity, or referencing completely different game types and generalizing on community and human interaction problems.
Again, a new player should have an "onboarding" path easily available and providing necessary basic logic to be able to start decently. And based on long and wide experience this seems to be mainly a BAR problem!
While I always heavily appreciate the effort behind such types of games/communities and respect it a lot (due to having done similarly in other game cases) I keep playing, learning and evolving with BAR because I miss TA and FaF BUT I often receive stress and leave after a series of bad toxic matches with "bad back taste" and this is sad for any game and community, abd should be reduced as much as possibly.
Sadly I also need to underline that I've personally seen unprofessional and sometimes also abusive or corrupt moderation from staff members, including abusive lobbies or manipulation behind player bans. Hence asking for player reports here doesn't seem decent neither, and a more legit and rock solid moderation could also help in compensating this type of issues.
And the last sad cherry (being an OSS enthusiast) is about having heard about strange forks and attribution from past work that leads now to publishers and money being involved, sad feeling but details would be needed before confirming any judgement.
I play it, I like it (because of TA and SupremeCommander Forged Alliance) but still (with all due respect for all the members behind and their effort) I often leave with a bitter or fishy back taste leftover by a generally hostile setup and community.
Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.
The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.
Hi, PtaQ here, Community manager for BAR. The idea behind the monetisation is to sell what has been built through the publishing funds. Everything available today and a lot more content will be released for free too and always available.
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
Yes they can. Firstly, you can do anything and then someone may or may not sue you for it and they may or may not win. Secondly, if you're the copyright owner you can do whatever you like.
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
That's not it. They will keep the assets closed and under license. There will be no free version of the full game.
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
The multiplayer game (the thing available now) will remain free including all the updates and improvements to it. What will be behind a one-off-payment will be the campaign. We've had a few bad actors spread word that the entire thing is going to be behind paywall, microtransactions, pay-to-win etc but none of that is true.
I think their plan is to make assets closed licensed. It's all pretty lame. Now any open source code contribution is packaged up and sold with someone else getting the check.
Fighting fire with fire, what's to stop me from using GenAI "create new versions of all of these assets but with a Norse twist" and publish these under my GPL+CC BY-SA 4.0 fork?
The owner of the copyright can do as they please with the licensing. What I've not seen is someone retroactively changing licensing terms, but even that might be possible.
I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.
I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.
Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
The current version isn't on steam due to a variety of (mostly infrastructure related) issues, the free version _will_ be on steam in the future though you will still be able to get the free version from the website for those who want to avoid steam.
I know this is kind of silly, but even though TA's game mechanics are obviously great, I really liked its ambience and story. The sort of a melancholic vibe of a slow-moving neverending war.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
Hey there, BAR Community Manager here. Nothing on the website is written by AI, we have a strict no AI art policy. Admittedly the text there is a bit old and we should update it soon.
I literally just said it's not AI and you felt the need to disagree with me saying no, it's not AI, because you skipped past that and focused on the word "slop". AI slop isn't the only kind of slop out there.
I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
I played a ton of ZK back in 2016-21, it's the most polished game of its kind imo. The cold takes series is excellent, rts balance is such a hard problem and it makes for interesting systems analysis.
The cold takes themselves are a fantastic proof of the care and attention the devs put into this game, as well as the depths of their design philosophy.
Interesting, tried this game just 2 weeks ago and beat one of the pve modes with a friend just yesterday.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
I had the most intense battles with my brother, even well into our 30s when we only met a few times a year.
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
Supreme Commander was that follow up. Basically the same team as worked on TA, making more or less the same game but with larger maps and higher unit counts.
I've got it. For me, I can't hope to beat the AI using low tech spam to grab wide open resources. But when resources aren't to scattered I almost always win against the AI.
TA is the only game I consciously went out to buy a faster machine to play. Upgrading from my 133MHz to a 400MHz so I could run more units in TA.
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
You know, just the other day I dropped back into RA3 for a few hours and left wondering why they set every map up so that everyone runs out of resources 15 minutes in as the collectors go empty, so nobody can really do much. Makes for battles that are really limited in scope for seemingly no reason.
Al (most?) of the other RTS games are very resource constrained. So, you have to focus on tight unit mixes, concentrate on individual battles, doing micro, and running about.
TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.
As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.
But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.
Bullet hell, or rather bullet heaven. TA was the first game where I saw the PC struggle during big battles and it was a pleasant experience, unlike the lag in multiplayer games where I mainly played against people across the pond.
I set a scenario against multiple AIs on the large metal map. The only way to survive was to quickly construct barriers between the buildings to seal off your base because the AIs weren't programmed to destroy barriers. Then came the job of hunting down the AI commanders (I played killing the commander kills all of his units otherwise it was impossible to win).
I always love RTS games and am sad to see how they've largely disappeared.
some of my first experiences 'hacking' were modifying .ini files for command and conquer to make a new version of the game for my friends. it was... very unbalanced
I really enjoyed TA back in the day. And I still remember the fantastic music background which dynamically changed if you went into battle. Starcraft was released after and it looked so ancient compared to TA in my view. But all my friends played SC at the time so it took over.
I once reported a bug to Cavedog and stated I didn't have Internet access out in the country to download a patch. They were kind and sent me the patch with the fix via floppy in the mail!
As someone who loved Supreme Commander, I really wanted to like BAR, but I found it felt like death by a thousand cuts. I last played more than a year ago, so things might be different, but the QoL felt really lacking.
There are so many qol things in bar that I would love to see in faf. Area mex build, for example. Sticky unit grouping, draw unit formation is essential. Reclaim/repair area. Unit and command queue jumping. That said there are a few faf ones I would like to see in bar too.
SupCom was my first RTS and I have fond memories of turtling on massive maps that would crash after hour 4.
Planetary Annihilation scratches the itch and reminds me that I am very bad at strategy games whenever I think I might be smart. It's probably the most fair game I've played that I am completely awful at.
BAR is amazing but there's a hurdle for new players.
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.
You do need to lose a few games to be rated properly then you'll be stacked with the best players (relative to average skill in the lobby). Good players will eat the whole map for you.
This game is so great, particularly the depth behind the different roles you can play. You could be in the frontline and fight for every cm, or be behind, following your carefully crafted recipes to build an exponential economy that will eventually sustain your team late game.
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.
Best RTS ever made, in my subjective opinion, but incredibly toxic player base despite active moderation.
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
The game has an easy and hard AI. Easy is great for getting started, hard difficulty varies by the map. They are nearly impossible on a large map where you try to turtle in a corner, but if you get the frontline close to them they're usually fairly straightforward to get under control. The game also has a raptors PvE mode that's great fun, especially with friends.
I tried playing SC2 for a few years but controlling units was too difficult: the only thing I could do is to send entire army to fight.
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...
pohl | 11 hours ago
gloosx | 7 hours ago
1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.
2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.
The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.
The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"
UPD:
Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:
https://appgl.pages.dev/
p2004a | 7 hours ago
On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.
Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936
The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.
gloosx | 5 hours ago
dimitar | 2 hours ago
> What makes the “simulate inputs” approach work is that the engine takes utmost care to keep calculations identical on each client. This is not trivial because you still have to work with things that naturally differ on each client, such as mouse position or which units are selected - this is called the unsynced state. On top of that, there can be hardware differences that have to be worked around to get identical results - the huge effort involved is one of the reasons why Recoil is not available outside x86-64.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/netcode-overview/
zeafoamrun | 10 hours ago
gertrunde | 10 hours ago
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
wffurr | 9 hours ago
qznc | 8 hours ago
Which is a fork of the Spring RTS engine: https://springrts.com/
kcb | 8 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 6 hours ago
Teifion | 8 hours ago
p2004a | 6 hours ago
- All the code is GPLv2, MIT and other open licenses.
- Some assets are CC-BY-SA but there are also a quite a bunch proprietary ones
Waterluvian | 10 hours ago
hilariously | 9 hours ago
inigyou | 8 hours ago
gbuk2013 | 10 hours ago
Perz1val | 10 hours ago
gbuk2013 | 9 hours ago
I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!
Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(
SockThief | 10 hours ago
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Here's a cast of 40 vs 40 players by a former Star Craft 2 pro player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1a5dkjUq3o
j4k0bfr | 10 hours ago
Looking forward to a break where I can get into BAR, I've been utterly nerdsniped. Uthermal's VODs are good stuff [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBIBYkD7tyY
Perz1val | 9 hours ago
__turbobrew__ | 6 hours ago
NorthernGulch | 9 hours ago
SockThief | 9 hours ago
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Winter_(American_player)
energy123 | 9 hours ago
p2004a | 6 hours ago
analog8374 | 5 hours ago
Thank you very much.
encom | 10 hours ago
[ eye rolling emoji ]
Sharlin | 9 hours ago
MarsIronPI | 9 hours ago
p2004a | 6 hours ago
Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.
bob1029 | 9 hours ago
https://www.faforever.com/
NBJack | 9 hours ago
somat | 8 hours ago
This is such a dissociative experience (what I enjoy vs what everyone wants to provide) I wonder if there is a market opportunity somewhere here for professional sports. Just a cam feed focused on on a single player and their contribution to the game. A second person cast rather than the normal third person view.
energy123 | 7 hours ago
foolfoolz | 7 hours ago
unfortunately FAF is an evolved TA with better mechanics than BAR. BAR is just modern graphics TA. which just feels old and outdated to me after spending so much time playing FAF which is better across every angle
energy123 | 7 hours ago
Do you think the BAR community is good too, if you've played it? I want to hear what you think so I can get a comparison/relative viewpoint across the two games.
s1artibartfast | 6 hours ago
Even the guy that let of steam after losing will probably give you tips on the next go round.
Aerolfos | 5 hours ago
You're going to have to go all in on learning the game, putting in massive effort into every game just to keep up, and will still probably lose most games. I just don't have it in me to play that kind of competitive RTS game like you're trying to climb the SC2 ladder to the top during peak Heart of the Swarm playercounts or whatever, so FAF multiplayer was a no-go.
chainingsolid | 3 minutes ago
Also if you see me(same username) online and are starting out, feel free to reach out over the FAF chat system, for some simple coaching. Game gets a lot easier after some of the meta is learned. I can't garentee I'll even respond, but I would hate for someone to bounce off due to the learning curve.
adammarples | 3 hours ago
RetpolineDrama | 6 hours ago
bob1029 | 4 hours ago
aetherspawn | 9 hours ago
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
RugnirViking | 9 hours ago
scns | 9 hours ago
tasuki | 9 hours ago
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
embedding-shape | 8 hours ago
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
NikolaNovak | 8 hours ago
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
mock-possum | 6 hours ago
killerstorm | 48 minutes ago
True top-tier players are very flexible and love high-risk tactics like flying your commander to enemy base. They also happy to "go next" if something went wrong.
Panzer04 | 9 hours ago
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
aetherspawn | 9 hours ago
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
s1artibartfast | 6 hours ago
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
ghosty141 | 4 hours ago
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
izacus | 4 hours ago
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
What was your goal with this post, really?
adammarples | 3 hours ago
bar2 | an hour ago
Step 1 - Raid and harass nonstop in the early game, never fight fair engagements, abuse range, tax your opponent's attention. Ideally harass multiple players to mess up all of them. Greed behind this, it's not expensive to raid.
Step 2 - spam pulsars (Clyret's meta)
estearum | 9 hours ago
embedding-shape | 8 hours ago
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
estearum | 8 hours ago
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
falcor84 | 7 hours ago
estearum | 4 hours ago
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
kridsdale1 | 7 hours ago
kbelder | 5 hours ago
estearum | 4 hours ago
blks | 6 hours ago
estearum | 4 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 5 hours ago
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
estearum | 4 hours ago
ffsm8 | 3 hours ago
im3w1l | 3 hours ago
estearum | 3 hours ago
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
fc417fc802 | an hour ago
Losses against someone with better logistical choices is normal and expected. You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
I recognize the adjacent commenter's point about the small population though. It might be difficult to be appropriately matched up unlike a AAA title at launch.
estearum | 37 minutes ago
> You should quickly pick up on what they were doing and learn to counter it. If you can't then how can you claim to be better than they are?
You must not be familiar with what "meta" means. Modern video games seem to all have an across-the-board superior configuration. And yes, the way to "counter it" is to copy it, which is why this strategy spreads like a virus through the game until 100% of the people who beat you are all doing the exact same thing.
If the desired outcome of the game design was for everyone to use the same configurations (the meta) in order to "counter" the meta, then why have configuration options at all? Give everyone the same exact thing all the time.
The reason they don't do that is because it's extremely boring. But unfortunately the "meta-finding" capability of the streaming community yields the same functional outcome anyway. Ergo: the games are made boring by the community, as stated at the very top.
bob1029 | 8 hours ago
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
eutropia | 8 hours ago
and also it's a lot harder
falcor84 | 8 hours ago
Alexss | 7 hours ago
Otp333 | 8 hours ago
bheadmaster | 8 hours ago
fluoridation | 8 hours ago
irishcoffee | 7 hours ago
Insanity | 7 hours ago
rpdillon | 7 hours ago
zemvpferreira | 7 hours ago
annasnna | 7 hours ago
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
kbelder | 5 hours ago
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
summa_tech | 5 hours ago
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
chongli | 3 hours ago
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
summa_tech | 2 hours ago
But I'm thinking about TA-style games, the topic of this discussion, which pride themselves on large armies. Though, to your point, early game of Supreme Commander is also quite chess-like, because of how restricted the set of opportunities is.
nextaccountic | 3 hours ago
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
doctorwho42 | 6 hours ago
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
s1artibartfast | 6 hours ago
estearum | 4 hours ago
negergreger | 8 hours ago
nnevatie | 8 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 7 hours ago
nnevatie | 4 hours ago
rvba | 46 minutes ago
TrueSlacker0 | 42 minutes ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
StopTencent | 7 hours ago
paulmist | 7 hours ago
estearum | 4 hours ago
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
mannanj | 6 hours ago
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
goodmythical | 5 hours ago
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
Apocryphon | 5 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 2 hours ago
Apocryphon | 2 hours ago
parineum | 4 hours ago
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
mannanj | 4 hours ago
Sorry.
wafflemaker | 4 hours ago
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
ipsi | 3 hours ago
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
snerbles | 18 minutes ago
What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
SkepticalWhale | 3 hours ago
stouset | 3 hours ago
Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
samhclark | 3 hours ago
gesis | 2 hours ago
The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
calvinmorrison | 2 hours ago
tm-guimaraes | 2 hours ago
v3ss0n | an hour ago
TrueSlacker0 | 47 minutes ago
b3ing | 9 hours ago
HeavyStorm | 8 hours ago
somat | 8 hours ago
NortySpock | 8 hours ago
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
Teifion | 8 hours ago
PtaQQ | 7 hours ago
kbelder | 5 hours ago
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
semi-extrinsic | 4 hours ago
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
adammarples | 3 hours ago
jpwgarrison | 8 hours ago
PtaQQ | 7 hours ago
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
nekusar | 7 hours ago
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
Teifion | 7 hours ago
IshKebab | 6 hours ago
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
thunfischtoast | 6 hours ago
IshKebab | 5 hours ago
energy123 | 5 hours ago
goodmythical | 5 hours ago
But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.
anal_reactor | 6 hours ago
rout39574 | 3 hours ago
oh_my_goodness | an hour ago
killerstorm | an hour ago
herodoturtle | 4 hours ago
avereveard | 4 hours ago
icexuick | 3 hours ago
avereveard | 2 hours ago
fhn | 4 hours ago
searealist | 55 minutes ago
aetherspawn | 46 minutes ago
If you want to make the community better, delete all the rules that encourage players to gang up on other players for subjective reasons. These kinds of rules punish non-verbal players, who easily fall prey to verbal players (I’ll just call them bullies) who can use the rules as a justification basically to harass someone whilst getting branded a hero.
Also, a large majority of players have fun, even when they’re losing. Asking those players to accommodate a hyper-competitive few who want the tightest loop possible to winning and restarting is anti-fun. Both from the perspective of the person winning (I get so disappointed when I win front and they just surrender before I get to blow up their base) and from the perspective of the non-front players who are pressured to quit as soon as front is lost.
Won plenty of games in more casual lobbies (kind of rare) where the front player, after dying, was happy to just receive T2/3 units to control, and due to being able to focus on just controlling a few units, won the game.
bavell | 7 hours ago
scotty79 | 7 hours ago
sevenzero | 7 hours ago
antisthenes | 6 hours ago
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
Chance-Device | 6 hours ago
antisthenes | 5 hours ago
It's just a bad culture fit.
> It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic.
What's toxic to A can be good advice to B. With the person saying it being person C.
Chance-Device | 5 hours ago
antisthenes | 4 hours ago
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).
stephen_cagle | 6 hours ago
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
NortySpock | 2 hours ago
There's no "leagues", it's just lobbies you join, and you gain or loose OS (Elo) per battle. Party up with your friends, find a lobby that says it's for noobs, has some other nonsense in the title ("rotato" is for map rotation) or just seems to have a lot of low-OS players, and have fun. You can avoid or mute/ignore people. Or start your own lobby so you can be boss and set the tone in the title.
Spectate a full match or two before you just jump in, to sort of see the pacing. Announce to the team that you are noobs... But yeah, I think it's perfectly possible for old friends to have fun in BAR PvP ranked; you just ignore / tell off the flamers, or bounce to a nicer lobby. Most people are friendly if you are friendly. Heck sometimes the spectators jump into the player chat and banter while the battle rages.
And yes, the artillery still hits just as hard as it did before.
stephen_cagle | 2 hours ago
And good idea about spectating a match to get the flow of things. That probably will reduce 50% of friction.
singingtoday | 5 hours ago
hdgvhicv | 4 hours ago
MikeTheGreat | 4 hours ago
rayiner | 3 hours ago
Wherewolfed | 3 hours ago
Melatonic | 2 hours ago
reactordev | an hour ago
v3ss0n | an hour ago
killerstorm | an hour ago
Pretty much the only case I've seen where a person is kicked out is either griefing (deliberately playing bad) or refuse to listen to advice.
If you don't know basics there's plenty of opportunities to learn outside of a real match (spectator, bots, special lobbies, etc.) Learning basics during 8v8 match is just extremely disrespectful: you're wasting time of 15 people. I think you missed that part.
And JFYI generally high-level lobbies (20+ is) have less drama. So it's mostly beginners having drama between themselves
giov4 | 47 minutes ago
I've seen lot of new or learning players being disoriented from the start, trolled and attacked during games, even kickbanned because of their sub-optimal playing after being FORCED to play front because of rating and placing/slot login in BAR.
While personally having a strong RTS background and even very specific to TA and FaF (basically BAR) I had to went through the same high toxicity problems.
The solution has been to don't give up, self learn through pain and few friends tips all the gaming micro details expected by other players and hidden in pro player knowledge.
IMHO this happened mainly and simply due to the lack of a well structured and established learning path for new players, that instead of opening a lobby list and joining the heat to get instantly rammed by toxicity should have the possibility to obtain basic game positioning, build and control knowledge in an more appropriate and structured way, in game info guidance on start -> tutorial?
Regarding the point of the poor newbie have to go as front player and holding while the pros stay in the back, is still kinda normal since the back positions, as especially the tech ones, are more fundamental later in the game, meaning that having a newbie there would be much worse game wise. and dont forget this is valid only for skill draft mode, there are othe draft modes too, even if the skill one is used "99%" of the time.
I find totally off topic and even offensive talking about needing to have had hard skin to go through this toxicity, or referencing completely different game types and generalizing on community and human interaction problems. Again, a new player should have an "onboarding" path easily available and providing necessary basic logic to be able to start decently. And based on long and wide experience this seems to be mainly a BAR problem!
While I always heavily appreciate the effort behind such types of games/communities and respect it a lot (due to having done similarly in other game cases) I keep playing, learning and evolving with BAR because I miss TA and FaF BUT I often receive stress and leave after a series of bad toxic matches with "bad back taste" and this is sad for any game and community, abd should be reduced as much as possibly.
Sadly I also need to underline that I've personally seen unprofessional and sometimes also abusive or corrupt moderation from staff members, including abusive lobbies or manipulation behind player bans. Hence asking for player reports here doesn't seem decent neither, and a more legit and rock solid moderation could also help in compensating this type of issues.
And the last sad cherry (being an OSS enthusiast) is about having heard about strange forks and attribution from past work that leads now to publishers and money being involved, sad feeling but details would be needed before confirming any judgement.
I play it, I like it (because of TA and SupremeCommander Forged Alliance) but still (with all due respect for all the members behind and their effort) I often leave with a bitter or fishy back taste leftover by a generally hostile setup and community.
plopz | 9 hours ago
Panzer04 | 9 hours ago
gertrunde | 9 hours ago
(In theory!)
insanitybit | 8 hours ago
PtaQQ | 7 hours ago
Basically, the paid content will boil down to a single-player campaign.
The funds help us finish and release the game which still needs a lot of focused effort which is not something you can reliably sustained without commissioning some of that work.
The post below explains it in detail.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
inigyou | 8 hours ago
netsharc | 8 hours ago
gacgacgac | 8 hours ago
The thing the GPL requires is that I also provide it for free. Now, why would anyone buy a free thing? To support the devs. To encourage this sort of business model. To get a build that's known to be working and supported and not have to deal with the hassle of compiling things themselves.
kcb | 8 hours ago
Not sure why we should encourage using open source as a vehicle to market and get free work building your fundamentals. Just to reap the profits yourself later.
Teifion | 7 hours ago
kcb | 8 hours ago
falcor84 | 7 hours ago
etdznots | 6 hours ago
orthoxerox | 6 hours ago
fluoridation | 7 hours ago
Teifion | 8 hours ago
redrobein | 7 hours ago
NortySpock | 7 hours ago
You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)
The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...
https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...
Teifion | 7 hours ago
abc42 | 9 hours ago
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.
qznc | 8 hours ago
Apocryphon | 8 hours ago
icexuick | 4 hours ago
Apocryphon | 4 hours ago
amitayk | 9 hours ago
inigyou | 8 hours ago
cwillu | 8 hours ago
Ariarule | 8 hours ago
What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?
PtaQQ | 7 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
joseph_council | 8 hours ago
Qision | 7 hours ago
etdznots | 6 hours ago
goels | 8 hours ago
mboerwink | 8 hours ago
WillMorr | 4 hours ago
gavmor | 2 hours ago
queuep | 8 hours ago
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now
tobinfekkes | 7 hours ago
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.
nekusar | 7 hours ago
jansan | 7 hours ago
It is sad that there never really was a successor that was as good. They could have lifted the 255 units limit, made the game more balanced, added a few more maps and units (but not too many), enhace the graphics (but keep it 2.5D, I do not want 3D in this kind of games) and make connectivity easier.
Cavedog released a fantasy game after that, which I wanted to like, but it was crap. And the Command & Conquer games were never for me. Tried them but never felt them.
jon-wood | 4 hours ago
LorenPechtel | 4 hours ago
whartung | 7 hours ago
I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.
Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.
You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.
All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.
But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.
The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.
And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.
Loved that game.
moffkalast | 6 hours ago
Hose vs. hose sounds epic af.
whartung | 2 hours ago
TA is more a game of raw tonnage, not of finesse and subtlety.
As the same time, original TA is notorious for not being finely tuned or balanced. And I'm sure that's much more important in PvP.
But in PvE flinging two industrial powerhouses against each other, where subtlety is replaced by 100, throwaway, Flash tanks, it's just a different play experience.
samplifier | an hour ago
taplayer | 6 hours ago
Great game!
parpfish | 6 hours ago
some of my first experiences 'hacking' were modifying .ini files for command and conquer to make a new version of the game for my friends. it was... very unbalanced
jq-r | 5 hours ago
jadbox | 2 hours ago
mholm | 6 hours ago
adammarples | 2 hours ago
icexuick | 2 hours ago
adammarples | an hour ago
willis936 | 59 minutes ago
Planetary Annihilation scratches the itch and reminds me that I am very bad at strategy games whenever I think I might be smart. It's probably the most fair game I've played that I am completely awful at.
corysama | 5 hours ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5F36yViPz7w
Thundernerd | 5 hours ago
I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.
dang | 3 hours ago
Beyond All Reason – open-source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42826983 - Jan 2025 (4 comments)
Beyond All Reason – An Open Source RTS Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431216 - May 2024 (2 comments)
Beyond All Reason – Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39012392 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 - Aug 2021 (101 comments)
InsomniacL | 3 hours ago
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.
energy123 | 2 hours ago
Lucasoato | 2 hours ago
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.
bar2 | 2 hours ago
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.
CrzyLngPwd | 2 hours ago
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
Is this game it?
bartvbl | an hour ago
pelorat | an hour ago
killerstorm | an hour ago
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...