"more modern predecessors" on screen: (ancestors) its funny you corrected it and still got it backwards

I like how in Halo Wars, an infantry "unit" is actually often times an entire squad of soldiers cobbled together and acting as an individual But they ARE indeed separate, they each have their own health bars that aren't shown outside of their main, shared one If the health bar is low but not zero, often there will be just one soldier left And if you use a heal power on them, the missing members are resurrected (or you could just say more were added back to their squad)

I think there are a lot of examples of how entire genera's of games are held up by one or a few hyper massive games MOBA is clearly League and DOTA FPS is likely just CoD keeping it going Competitive FPS is either Valorant or CSGO OWSC is likely Minecraft (even if people want to argue it's something else it always comes back to Minecraft) OWSB is whatever the new GTA is 4X i want to give to the Endless series over Stellaris but that might not even be a debate to some people Asymmetric has to go to Dead by Daylight, the Graveyard that is my steam Library weeps the 1v4 games that tried to claw their cut of DBDs pie and live Extraction shooter: is Escape from Tarkov still around or did it die, either EFT or Deep Rock Galatic (special mention to Helldivers 2 though) Subscription MMO is WoW i don't think another exists F2PMMO Old School Runescape Don't care enough about mobage to learn so some slot machine simulator with anime characters RPG likely still Skyrim or Fallout

go play total war, problem solved :D

Maybe you want to check out the old game "Seven Kingdoms" (first game, not second) there is an open source alternative and maybe even a community still alive It's and game as old as the first star craft, and it's a game series that I do not understand why it's not talked more often. Roughly said: it's an RTS 4X game. You have two resources (food and money) and every single pop is one unit. The majority is bound in Settlements that produce food/gold and support workforce for other buildings while also growing more population until max limit, but you can always open another settlement anywhere there is space. To produce gold, you can gather natural resources (3 types) refine them in factories, while workforce lives in settlements close by or founds one. The end product is placed on a market and can be sold to close by settlements or transported via caravan or ship to other markets, or you buy stuff from other factions. Any unit (worker, soldier etc.) has experiences in his craft and gets better over time, any unit has loyalty that's determined from the standing of your nation to the skill of your unit. Also, the further away a unit is from your king, the less loyal it gets. Soldier are taken from villages, placed in strongholds and trained under a general. Generals are promoted from any soldier and have to gather another line of experience different from combat. Better generals train soldiers faster, make settlements close by more loyal, but are also easily disloyal if there isn't much around them or there are far off from the king. Also, better soldiers have more health than untrained, and some even get special attacks. A max veteran soldier has ten times the health of a peasant, but it takes ages to train them. So you can research unmanned war machines that can be crafted in factories, but they can be trained and need lots of investment and money. There are spies ... that can infiltrated any place of another kingdom as any other unit/craftsman/soldier ... it's even possible to get appointed as generals, or you bribe them, or you close a mine or factory with a strike... or you can assassinate the enemy king. You command everything like an RTS, can choose if buildings close should interact with each other via simple clicks and has most common diplomacy functions from war, peace, trade and science agreements, can trade gold and food and everything firmly rooted in the game world itself. Also, there are fantasy monsters to be looted, or they raid you and special mythological units can be summoned too. The only problem the game had, was a terrible second game and the whole series ended... nobody covers it ... nobody remembers it.

Consider Lord of the Rings, Battle for middle earth 2

It’s for the most part already explained that for one there were lots of technical limitations involved as well as gameplay/player limitations. Map sizes, unit speed / time, but also the passing of commands and information back and forth is completely off. First, RTS for the most part are still games. Nobody expects chess to be in scale, it's still fun, challenging and better training then nothing. The point isn't to command a whole army alone, but rather than understanding that units with different specifications can support and that you probably can't win without worthwhile trade-offs. Most modern RTS with base building/resource gathering just added another layer of economy to this balancing act. When to expand, when to defend, what to look out for. Total annihilation added more scope, devaluing a single unit even more, making timing and preparation even more important, similar to modern warfare. @8:15 there are a few that handle it as squad based units like WH 40k Dawn of War or company of heroes as shown in the video. True, the single unit has stilled its own health, but when it comes to commanding structure it's still better than everything being its own entity.

Rise of Nations used the squad as health bar along with Close Combat: a bridge to far

I'd say the small scale in the original C&C mostly worked. Both GDI and Nod task forces were supposed to be relatively small units of elite forces skirmishing mostly out of sight of the world at large, with their rapid deployments made possible by Tiberium massively simplifying logistics and manufacturing. 3-D printing came along decades after the game came out, but a lot of the fluff describes in-game production as working in similar terms to that process. Of course, it's still left to the player to theorize how the troops themselves get to the battlefield, even if their tanks and rifles are basically printed on-site once the production building goes up, but the premise of Tiberian Dawn comes pretty close to fitting the scale.

There is only one really important factor, fun ! And Command & Conquer has a lot of it.

Thats why I loved Cossacks. Shame it never got mainstream. Infinite units, no caps, infinite resources, realistoc scales. (ships are massive)

Man, I wish there was a strategy game that accounted well for terrain, had large maps, correct scale of troops, accurate weapon preformance...

Planetary annihilation has huge scales if you use more planets

I don't know if anyone mentioned, but there was an old tactical rts-esque game called Myth that was more like that, only the scale of the battles themselves were small. But the approach to the units is like you were wondering

Yeah. It is self-evident problem. You just need to suspend your disbelief over that and you will have a good time. Scale is the least of your problems when it comes to playing RTS. Especially modern RTS which seem all to be just inferior copies of what was before.

dislike for that shitty AI graphic

Great video, you can tell there was a lot of thought and planning behind it.

I think Steel Division : Normandy 44 nailed their scale for what story they proposed

Wargame Red Dragon

The problem here seems to be your expectations of the RTS genre. I wonder if it's of video games in general. Realism is at best a tertiary objective; aligning with players' expectations and intuitions is more important and realism can contribute to that, but the game's ability to be played is much more so. This is true across all genres of game; a "gritty" FPS differs tonally from a "fantastical" one, but in both the player's agency as a single fighter with a gun is of epic import to the events of the world as a whole in either.

In a perfect world we'd all be playing WW2 Online and the chain of command would be just that.

Supreme Commander had scale.

On the other hand with respect to the first person game perspective, we have storylines with protagonists who could single-handedly change the course of history... In reality it's much more difficult in comparison. Well, dropping nuclear ammunition on an enemy seems like a cheap shot though and doesn't really make up for an epic heroic storyline. Real life heroes like Audie Murphy and Desmond Doss are extreme examples of what someone could possibly achieve in war. I'm not discounting their efforts, but they by themselves were still part of a greater theatre of war that was by far a collective effort of many.

rts is just chess with slightly more details... ever seen a king taller then a literal castle tower????

Any fictional war game/movie has a scale problem. Can you imagine having to march/maneuver for hours or days before you can get into a skirmish? It is like the meme with RPGs where a 5 hour "walk" is done in 5 seconds, and a 5 minute "combat" takes a 15 minutes session.

Good video! Glad to see you did one on Supreme Commander. I found your channel through the "RTS has a SCALE problem" video, and I felt it glossed over SupCom (IMO, the best example of massive scale in an RTS). Plus, the Cavedog video barely mentioned SupCom, despite it literally being Chris Taylor's attempt to create a spiritual successor (and arguably the game which re-introduced Annihilation-style RTS gameplay to modern audiences). When I saw there were quite a few BAR videos on the channel, I was honestly a little worried you hadn't even played SupCom. 😅 Not that you had to play it, but as good RTS channels are few and far between, finding a good up-and-coming channel only to learn they never played my favorite RTS would have kinda sucked... so I am glad you played it. 😆 So, for fond memories of SupCom, nothing beats the time me and some friends were messing around in Sandbox on Betrayal Ocean and we launched roughly 1000 Seraphim Experimental Nukes each, which exploded in a glorious fireball that was so intense the monitor inverted the colors to black and my old laptop at the time caught fire. Great times! 🤣 Oh, and there was a time where I predicted an enemy sneaking into my base from underwater while my forces were occupied, so I tracked him with a sonar, predicted his path, and the minute hit head popped out of the water three Tac missiles smacked him in the face. 😂 As for memories of SupCom 2....it had a lot of problems. 😅 A few would be the cartoony graphics aesthetic/artstyle (ironically, the same thing preventing me from really clicking with BAR), the disrespect to the factions and lore (sudden evil Brackman, unit names like "wedoboth"), the somehow less-detailed and degraded cinematics, the awful writing and characters, the neutered experimental units, the poor research tree implementation, the limited unit selection, the lack of scale between units (a symptom of the research tree), the horrible changes to economy and construction, and the overall weakened strategy as the game was effectively "dumbed down." Though, arguably the worst thing SupCom 2 did was try to implement FlowField pathfinding before it was ready. It made the units feel floaty and lacking in weight, it made certain units (like air) less responsive, and worst of all it required that the game be significantly smaller. Like, there is a reason they no longer stated map sizes, and it's because they bumped unit sizes significantly compared to those map sizes in order to reduce overhead from the taxing flowfield pathing. We're talking 3-5x bigger, making maps feel 3-5x smaller... in a game which had "massive scale" as a chief selling point. As someone who liked bigger maps....it was the biggest nail in the coffin for me. 😮‍💨

Ultimate Generals: Civil War is the closest I have gotten. Especially modded. Absolute huge battles over historic battlefields. Often starting in pieces of the map until the final confrontation opens up the entire map (or the key part). Ultimate generals is for many what allows one to play waterloo and not sharpe's waterloo.

7:55 Wargame is a bit like that

Love the video! Thank you! I too have genuinely been interested as to who the actors/actresses of of the first few games are and what they've gone on to become.. I might be able to help you with a few more tidbits of information.. Regarding Tanya, Joe Kucan was asked about Lynne Litteer's performance in an interview several years ago (link attached below, the 13 minute mark). He mentioned that she was a (and I don't fully understand what he says here) 'Circ' (Surc/Cirque/Surq????) performer.. (Circus Performer?). It may be spelled differently according to his pronunciation.. I hope this helps! Other than that piece of information there is nothing out there that I can find! He also says that it was her first onscreen performance so that it makes sense that career is probably based in a different line of work! kzbin.info/www/bejne/fWTKpoOGeNGBfdE Keep up the great work!

This video is interesting when it comes to comparing rts games to battles in scale, but practically the conclusions are pointless, telling a smaller story in an rts where you don't lead an empire but instead a single castle isn't going to be as interesting for most players. I guess there is manor lord doing well right now but it's just an indie game. You got cossacks where you can lead much larger armies, but it becomes unwieldy. Realism isn't really what games are looking for when it comes to exciting games.

I think most every RTS I play, much like Company of Heroes as used in the video, has many men in a "squad" be the smallest unit and not just one guy. Its super common yet everyone keeps commenting to point it out like no one has noticed...

I think this is why Warcraft 3 always felt more immersive

8:18 maybe you are thinking of battle for middle earth

The only time I have thought about the scale issue was in Halo Wars. I didn't really think it through at the time, but a frustration with it is probably what culminated in me conquering all of the map except the enemy base, building up to my unit cap, placing them all strategically, and then having all units close in at the same time. Right now I am playing Songs of Syx, which I know can have batles with units in the tens of thousands. I haven't gotten my domestic population high enough to have engagements of such scale yet though.

Maybe American Conquest or Cossacks ?

total war benchmarking and ugen implementation plus coh features and levelimg of areas. also they need to add guerrilla, advance (full commit) or recon operation. and depending to that the scale changes for the player attempting the move.

that AI avatar on the screen is incredibly ugly lmao

homeworld

you dont need a story to match the exact ammount of units in a conflict because you arent matching how the battle was fought

8:05 despite being a casual RTS, Halo Wars somehow did this with squadrons of about 5 or more marines or grunts as a single unit

in rise of nations infantry consist of three soldiers, while cavalry/tanks/aircraft are single units

That's why I bounced off of the Age of Empires. Very popular game but you can only build 75 units? I preferred the Settlers IV, an old RTS where you have a limit of 10000 units on the map divided by the number of players, or Total War series with thousands of units in a single battle.

I wish Supreme Commander wasn't hobbled by its inability to make full use of multi-core processing.

HALO 3: ODST was the last game I preordered because when I went to get my copy at EB Games the day it launched I saw plenty of copies still available at 5pm, something unthinkable only 2 years earlier when HALO 3 was released.

Warcraft 3's unit cap absolutely pissed me off, depending on the type of unit you could barely amass a big might battle and what was even more annoying was the amount of gold grabbed was lowered...wtf.

Have you heard of Warno? Or the Total War series? I prefer those to trad RTS.

Great video, to be honest looking at the title and thumbnail I thought you were going to talk about those missions in Command and Conquer where you go inside a building or underground facility that is as big as a map with multiple villages. Similar sort of things happened in Age of Empires II where in some missions a city would be represented by a few buildings and others (like the siege of Jerusalem or Constantinople) had a good chunk of the map taken up by them (in fact the latter appears twice in AoE II, once in the Barbarossa campaign where it's fairly compact and again in the Atilla campaign where it's much more fleshed out).

wargame does large scale rts really well. you don't have individual units but rather units between 10-15 men or multiple vehicles.

Just found this channel. Speedruned sub button. Just a question - are you familiar with polish RTS series Earth 2140/2150/2160? They have some great feauters as modular units and dynamic campaign in 2150. Really worth checking out and I'm cursious about your opinion, especially about 2150

8:28 world in conflict did this as well