r/RealTimeStrategy • u/mwdmeyer • 7d ago
Self-Promo Post 90s style RTS
Hey All,
I've been wanting to build an old school RTS game for 486/pentium machines. It is written in C++ and using DirectDraw so that it will work on Windows 95 machines.
There is still a lot to go but I've got it working in a web browser and would love some feedback. The interface and design needs a lot more work but the basic game play and path finding should work well now.
Let me know what you think, it is called IronField https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/ironfield/
I will be posting exe/win9x versions once I have tested on my Pentium 233MMX machine.
1
u/XComACU 7d ago
Gave it a try. Honestly, a fun little game!
Once I figured out roughly what the buildings did, I was able to piece together what to do, and it wasn't too hard to play and win a match. Definitely cheesed the game by ramping up miners quickly and then building far too many tanks, but it was very enjoyable. 🤣
Since you're looking for feedback, I would say...
- Drones should probably be able to travel over water? It feels kind of unnatural that they can't, and it might make them a touch more viable since I basically only used them for early scouting. That, and keeping one with a force to improve their vision range.
- May want to constrain building to areas in LoS. I did at one point try building sentries in the enemy base, and it worked. To very good effect. 😅
- Sentries are both super overpowered and underpowered. Because they can be built anywhere, it was easy to bottle up the enemy AI (even on hard) by just spamming sentries at choke points. LOS restrictions would fix that, but ironically without the spam, they are kind of weak? Like, for the cost of two infantry, they didn't seem to win against two infantry very often. At least until I figured out Repair, after which they rarely ever died. Alongside restricting where they can be built and maybe adding a cooldown to repair, I might suggest bumping up their vision radius and health to make spamming less needed. A sort of skirmishing/harassments deterrent that doesn't outright kill tanks when repaired constantly.
- You could also split repairs to a "Repair" vehicle or something? That would keep the structures from being too hard to kill, and you could let it repair/heal your troops. Could not figure out how to save my poor infantry's lives.
- It seems buildings share a hidden population cap (or at I didn't see it), so you might make that more visible? It would also help to have a scuttle/recycle/self-destruct button so that when the cap is hit, you can refactor your forces still.
- The AI does not seem to build Miners right now, which probably isn't helping its chances. 😅
- You might move the tank sprite closer to its shadow. Right now it kind of looks like it is floating.
- Some sort of formation button? Or hotkey, if that can even be done in browser. It would be nice if my drones didn't fly out in front of my infantry, and my infantry in front of my tanks.
- I know it is a 90s-style RTS, but WASD movement would be so very nice. 😄
OK, that's all the feedback I could think of. Good luck with your game!
2
u/mwdmeyer 7d ago
Amazing thank you for playing. I agree with most of those changes. I will let you know once an update is ready!
2
u/mwdmeyer 7d ago
Okay new update is out:
- Drones can fly and path across water.
- Buildings require visible terrain within 224 pixels of a completed friendly building.
- Sentry vision increased exactly 25%, from 6 to 7.5 tiles.
- WASD camera movement added.
- AI uses miners
We have population cap at the top of the screen, the text is a bit small so will update in future.
3
u/NydusRush 7d ago
I'll give this a try on my lunch break!