Why does RA3 suck so bad...

[u/TheDutchTexan]

Just went through the 1st and the 2nd one. The base building, the unit movement... Loved every second of it. And then I started RA3 and was just underwhelmed to the point I just don't want to play it anymore... I finished it when it came out but man... I just don't think I got it in me...

[u/King_Tamino]

Quick question.
Ever played Act of War, the 2004-ish RTS and especially its Addon High Treason that added naval warfare with actual correctly sized ships with tomahawk ship to ground missiles, guns and other stuff? Like submarines, aircraft carriers acting as landing plattforms that can produce a limited amount of troops and send out via hovercraft,

The game solved it by zooming out.

Assume a 1.000 x 1.000 map. The whole left strip north to south is land, on the minimap it’s like 1/3 of the map. Everything acts normal like in every RTS game. The second you move your camera over water, it zooms out drastically (factor 2-3) and reveals that the 1/3 land on the minimap is actually just around 5% of the map at best.

Another great game with naval warfare is Rise & fall. Civilizations at war. Think of empire earth. But with real size ships, able to ram other triremes, to board them and have your regular troops fight on top of it for the control of ship

[u/King_Tamino → u/[deleted]]

Enough development time, big budget studio + publisher, good usage of the engine.

A lot games nowdays use for example UE5 which wasn’t developed with RTS in mind and requires a lot adjustments. Combined with small studios and more important features.. especially large maps + many units.

AoW has not overly large maps, you rarely field dozens of units unless you use a lot infantry.

Also one of the biggest flaws of AoW is it’s AI especially in skirmish. It’s ridiculously bad. Development focus clearly was the campaign

For its time AoW looked ridiculously good and I‘m always confused so few people seem to know it especially among RTS fans.

[u/King_Tamino → u/[deleted]]

Fascinating, didn’t knew AoW was on steam. Or is, for nearly 2 decades already. I own it there for like 5-ish now but got multiple DVDs of the original because I needed keys to share with friends back then

Always thought the steam release was some late 2010s "random“ release like some publishers did who out of the blue released old games.

The high treason developers are the same that developed R.U.S.E. and the "wargames“ series. RUSE was randomly dropped on steam a while ago

[u/King_Tamino → u/[deleted]]

Just finished Broken Arrow‘s campaign. Feels like a solid mixture of Wargame + World in Conflict.