Warcraft 2 / Starcraft type games ( or clones, or engine recreations )
Im missing a lot of charm that w2 and first starcraft games had, and i did not see any open engine recreations, nor clones that lived to this day. With warcraft 3 i only ever finished half of the game, by the time sc2 came out, i was already too old to even bother trying.
Earth 2150 includes the base-building, as well as a very cool “persistent homebase” mechanic for the singleplayer campaigns, where you build bases in the mission sites but also have a home base that you can transport units to/from, for use in future missions.
I would add the 1999 game Warzone 2100 to this list. Much like Earth 2150 you can design your own units and it also has the persistent homebase + mission outposts system. It was open-sourced in 2004 and has received quite a bit of love since then.
If you’ve never played Dune 2 or Dune 2000 or whatever other iterations and remakes of the Dune RTS series, I strongly recommend it. It seems like a lot of Warcraft’s DNA comes from Dune.
Yeah, seems like. Like when I was a kid and I played Dune 2, then played Warcraft a few years later, the one seemed to inherit most of its ideas from the other.
But I didn’t like go look up the dates or exhaustively check that no other game came up with the format first. I know the first Age of Empires is somewhere vaguely in that same time span too, but I’m not certain of the order.
Oh sorry it seemed offensive or negative in any way, I just wanted to clarify that “seems like” i s a vast understatement. Dune 2 predates all of them, and became a template for mechanics and layouts. We’ve gone a long way since, but dune was the first of the models that we build RTS games as today
I don’t know that I would call Northgard a Warcraft clone. The mall is divided into tiles and each tile has its own resources and building limits. Units can only attack other units that are in their tile. There’s a much bigger emphasis on building up your tech tree and taking tiles.
Still, it’s one of the more interesting and fun evolutions of the RTS genre. If sci-fi is more to your taste, Dune the newer gameby the same studio is similar.
Just so you know, StarCraft 2 is free to play now, including the terran campaign. It even has a more relaxed co-op vs ai mode with a lot of replay value for the people who can’t put up 300 apm any more in competitive play.
Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.
For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.
In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.
I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.
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