What beginner friendly RTS game can you recommend?
As a quick background, RTS is completely new to me. I spend majority of my time in FPS type games but want to branch out a bit and try out something different/new (to me).
Requirements:
- Somewhat casual (if that’s possible)
- Somewhat easy to learn
- Relatively modern with decent graphics (something that looks nice)
- Runs on Linux (of course) and Steam
I’d recommend Beyond All Reason. It’s open-source and utilizes a realistic scifi theme. You essentially manage metal and energy to produce more units, to fight against other player’s units. It’s very easy to learn, and looks nice graphically. The only caveat I can think of is that it is not on Steam. Game Link: https://www.beyondallreason.info/
PvP only?
There’s some not really relevant history, but Zero-K has an extensive single player campaign, and is based on the same engine as BAR:
No, you can play co-op or against bots if you’d rather.
Looks interesting, do you use the AppImage or Flatpak install method?
I use Flapak to run Beyond All Reason. It does include its own updater, which makes it more portable.
StarCraft II. It’s on Battle.Net though so you’ll have to download it through Lutris.
The first campaign is free and there’s a coop mode for casual players. Entirely free except for cosmetics, some coop commanders, and the other campaign episodes. It’s easy to pick up IMO but VERY HARD to master. Graphics still hold up better than a lot of games despite being 13 years old. Despite its age, I believe it’s the peak of the RTS genre. There’s are a lot of community-made mods/maps that you can play for free. You can even play a remake of the WarCraft III campaign there.
Other RTS games that I like:
- Age of Empires II (Steam). Graphics look decent enough for the remastered version on Steam. Complex economy system and slow rock-paper-scissors combat. Very slow-paced.
- StarCraft Broodwar (Battle.Net). Remastered graphics also look decent enough. Unit pathing might still have annoying quirks like the original. Slightly slower-paced than StarCraft II.
- Northgard (Steam). Beautiful game with a unique event-type economy system. Slower-paced than StarCraft II with some colony-building elements.
Not really an RTS game but I’ve been putting so many hours into RimWorld (Steam, native) this year. At its core, it’s a colony-building game but it does have some RTS elements to it (economy, combat, and unit management). Lots of mods available.
Upvote for SC2. People always talk about it being difficult, but that’s only the competitive ladder. There’s so much single player campaign, challenges, co op, and arcade custom map modes that you can play for ages and never even feel the need to touch competitive play.
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+1 for Northgard. Dune from the same studio (shiro games) is really nice, but quite hard to master.
command and conquer remastered.
Why not start with the best, greatest, and one of the progenitors of the entire genre?
Also worth noting OpenRA openra.net if you want a FOSS variation you can try out for free - it’s a open source engine for the C&C Red Alert games.
May also be worth looking at the FOSS Warzone 2100 wz2100.net - If you’re on Linux, it’s likely in your distro’s package manager already.
Noted!
I recently checked out BAR and liked it. I don’t like micro in RTS games, because I always think “a computer can do this better than I could”, so it’s nice that they’ve got good unit automations available.
What do you mean by micro?
Micro is a RTS term for how well you control your units. In starcraft for example you have the unit “stalker”, which can teleport. Professional players with very good micro can use that teleport to always teleport out a Stalker just before it would die. This means because of good micro they don’t lose their units.
The opposite is macro, which mainly talks about how good a player is in managing the game on a grander scheme like managing their resources and having an overview over the whole map
(I hope my example is still accurate it has been years, that I watched an rts game)
I would like to take this for a spin although I see two install methods, flatpak and appimage? Any recommendations here? Seems like both are on par as far as versions go
Makes much more sense now
It just means having to micromanage a particular unit’s actions. I like it more when I can say “patrol this area, return fire and advance a bit if necessary, but no further than this”, instead of having to flip back to those units constantly to manage them. IMO it’s more thematic anyways for a sci fi game, you’re probably going to have units with a basic AI in them in-universe.
Your Linux distro probably packages 0ad, which is free and open source.
It also probably also packages spring, an RTS engine – originally TA Spring, based on Total Annihilation, and it looks like it’s also on Steam. Can play a couple of RTSes that use it, like Zero-K, which is similar to Total Annihilation.
Age of Empires 2.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad game, but that game is absolutely ancient, and he has “Relatively modern with decent graphics (something that looks nice)”.
Check out the definitive Edition then which was released in 2019, the latest DLC with new civilizations was added a week ago. It’s a fantastic game with a large active community around it.
Any thought of AoE 4?
I don’t know how it runs on Linux, but as a casual AoE fan it’s in my opinion the best AoE game. It stays true to its roots, but basically does almost everything just better. Units can stand on walls, civs all play different, graphics are fine, and it maintains the AoE feeling that made all the older games good.
Starcraft 2 is the solid bet, the campaign teaches you a lot.
But Supreme commander forged alliance for just a crazy amount of fun, almost 20 year old game and still has the game play to keep you landed, and they have YouTube games online.
As a casual RTS player I never really liked SC2 too much, at least in multiplayer. It’s one of those games where you get instantly punished when you don’t play optimally. In AoE or Supreme Commander or something I can at least build a base in peace for a while before I get absolutely destroyed.
Edit: I agree with forged alliance though. It runs on Linux and is an awesome game. Great sense of scale, and also nice for casual play
How has nobody recommended Supreme Commander (Forged Alliance)? It’s the inspiration for other games in this thread like Planetary Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It’s so good that when the official servers shut down the community banded together and formed their own server and dev team to continue regular balancing and updates. It’s on steam and works on Linux with minimal tinkering. You can either play the campaign on the Steam version or head straight over to Forged Alliance Forever, the community-hosted server, to access the campaign (with added multiplayer support!), all the new patches and mods, and play some multiplayer games too.
I was and still am a big fan of the original Warhammer 40k: dawn of war.
This and CC Generals are the best non-Blizzard RTS to date, IMHO.
Generals is hard to run on Linux, but DoW runs flawlessly.
I’m almost positive I have 40k somewhere but last time I looked at some gameplay, it seemed very overwhelming
Edit: my apologies, it looks like I got Total War: Warhammer confused with Warhammer 40k. Total War: Warhammer 3 is the one I have and it seemed huge in scale and very overwhelming
Since some other good recommendations were already made, I’m gonna put something a bit different here: Tooth and Tail. It’s not a classic RTS, and you can’t really micro your units like in other RTS games, but it’s fun and fast paced. Games only last 15-ish minutes at most and the gameplay is relatively simple. It’s 2D so it probably also runs on anything from smart toaster to supercomputer.
I’m not 100% sure if this meets any of your requirements but I always enjoyed homeworld can’t remember if I’ve ever run it on Linux since switching tho.
As to the other requirements, I don’t think I found it that easy to get into as it took a while to get into the whole 3D map thing, and the graphics may have aged
Chiming in with Starcraft 2 (and 1). You can run it through Lutris like I set up for my friend or Steam which I use myself. The game runs great, it’s highly polished, and still has a big community and pro scene. Somebody here complained about getting stomped in competitive, but both games use an MMR system so after some placement matches you’ll get paired with roughly even opponents who are just as bad as you are :) There’s also a (tiny but slowly growing) Starcraft community here on Lemmy and many on Discord. There are also more casual team games and co-op commander games as well as many popular custom game types/maps. One of my favorites is Battle Poker where your cards are units and the winner is determined by an automatic battle between player’s units who don’t fold.
I’m gonna recommend Northgard. It’s a tile-based RTS with modern sprite graphics, as opposed to some games like Starcraft 2 or 0 AD (a free/libre game) that use 3d graphics. So, in some senses, it looks more indy or dated than a lot of modern offerings.
But it has really good gameplay, good base clans, good DLC, and is consistently updated. This can mean balancing/clan changes, but I must say that even when there was significant balancing action on my favorite clans, I come to accept and like the changes. Major DLC releases also come with content updates for the main game, and it really feels like Northgard is a labor of love.
It has a story mode that starts out easy-peasy and slowly ramps things up as you get better. It has multiplayer vs friends, random onliners, and/or bots of various difficulties. It has challenge modes per-clan that unlock new cosmetics.
Gameplay:
There’s a lot of complexity here, but the campaign does a really good job of introducing it at a rate that’s palatable.
This is a brief overview, mainly to show that, though Northgard may have simple graphics, it’s really an in-depth and balanced RTS.
- Map tiles: you start with one, and acquire more.
- Seasons: Winter is a bitch. Always be extra-prepared for a bad winter.
- Random events: stuff to join in on or avoid. Rats, undead or ghost attacks, kraken, ceremonial bonfire, mine for the dwarves, exploding volcanoes that drop rock baddies that you can mine for stone
- Neutral factions: earn their favor to avoid their ire or to become their allies. Giants, kobolds, a wyvern, dwarves, myrkalfar - all have different potential benefits if you earn them.
- knowledges: learn and improve skills, gain clan specials, reduce costs - this is basically the tech tree.
- win conditions: domination, fame, economic, and even clan-specific or map-specific win conditions
Resources:
- happiness - earned through various means - nonphysical, not storeable - when positive, people work hard and new colonists come to the colony. When negative, people slack off and no new colonists arrive. Each colonist takes up happiness, except units that generate happiness, like bartenders.
- lore - earned by loremasters and various means - nonphysical, storeable - buy knowledges
- food - earned by food-producing units like farmers, fishers, hunters, healers, and idle colonists - storeable, infinite supply - all colonists need food to survive. Also used for colonizing new tiles and holding feasts (boost production and provide fame)
- wood - earned by woodcutters - storeable, infinite supply - build and repair structures. Keep people warm in winter.
- krowns - earned by sailors, trading posts, markets - storeable, infinite supply - money. Used in all kinds of areas. Used in training military units.
- stone - earned by miners - storeable, limited supply - building upgrades
- iron - earned by miners - storeable, limited supply - unit upgrades, hero spawn
- military experience: level up your military along an attack, defense, or strategic path
- fame: level up clan skills
- economic influence: it’s complicated
Regardless of all of that complexity, Northgard manages to sum it all up into engaging, understandable gameplay, with clear stats on who’s made the most progress on win conditions, etc, and a straightforward and manageable learning curve.
You can undergo cascades when things don’t go right - a winter freezing without wood leaves everyone in poor health, often unhappy, performing at a fraction of their usual production - thus nobody’s needs are met and everybody stays unhappy and underperforming. A ‘simple’ fix is to make everyone into regular villagers again, then farmers, woodcutters, healers, and other roles as you can afford them.
Also - Linux native.
Awesome write up! Sounds like an interesting contender!
I always liked planetary annihilation. It is really easy, looks decent, and has a native Linux version. That it’s placed in a planet system makes it different to many other RTS.
Haha, a PA fellow here!
PA is very cool when you find players matching your skills. I have good memories of 4V4 games, when both teams synchronise to puts players with the same level at the same starting location so everyone have fun.
It does not have that much soul, IMHO, and performance problems when games stands too long on multiplanetary systems.
I know many don’t like it, but Supreme Commander 2 is very fun 1V1. It’s a good mix between build engine and classical RTS.
Just don’t play the campaign, its a disaster.
I think most people hate it because it’s meant to be more appealing to a casual audience, not a bad game, but not what Supreme Commander fans wanted.
