The first two titles, Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns and Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift, combine an innovative economic model with an intriguing take on hero units, resulting in a deeply strategic 2D RTS mostly free of micromanagement. Timegate’s Kohan series answers both of these questions with compelling designs that sadly made less of an impact on the genre than they should have. Even so, the bulk of the first decade of RTS games involved a lot of unit babysitting and precision base-building. Total Annihilation made resource gathering a function of structures rather than units in 1997, and Cavedog’s Ground Control (2000) emphasized tactical positioning over quick inputs, while eliminating in-mission base-building and unit purchasing altogether. Without a streamlined economy or the ability to avoid harvester losses through quick tactical thinking, victory is impossible. As any Starcraft player will tell you, managing SCVs, drones, and probes on both a macro and micro level is critical to success. Age of Empires really raised the stakes – it features four resources, and a vast array of units and buildings dedicated to and relying upon each resource.īut with great economic diversity comes great vulnerability. In 1995, Warcraft II shook things up a little by adding a third resource, oil, to the familiar gold and wood economy. Peasants and peons in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans gather lumber and mine gold. Both Dune II and its immediate heir, Command and Conquer, feature a single resource collected by autonomous units. RTS games have also experimented with economy, even as mostly automated, individually controllable resource-gathering units remain a core feature in the Blizzard model.
Nowadays, purely narrative RTS games are fairly rare, and the MOBA phenomenon is a direct result of modders taking advantage of Warcraft III‘s novel hero philosophy.
Hero death in Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal and Starcraft almost always ends the story – but Warcraft III changed the status quo by more or less adapting the cavalier, respawn-friendly attitude towards death familiar to Diablo players. Since they’re generally vital to the story, speaking in cutscenes and generally justifying the game, it’s usually necessary to keep them alive – making them a serious liability in battle. Hero units have long been a fraught feature in RTS games, especially in single-player campaigns.
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