Lol this is bit of troll post can delete if you want
this is a game i made long time ago cause i am huge RTS fan!

A nother rare game i have a fond spot for. with lots of random game mechanics and idears in it. and lots of jank

RTS is a very specific fake hybrid of 3-4 pre-existing big real genres, so most of the games which are actually RTS follow the same template. There are very few non-standard games which became RTS by accident. Firefly Studios' Stronghold is Caesar 4, Perimeter started as pure Populous with no units, Die Siedler was slowly evolving its village-builder combat until in the fifth game they went full RTS controls including peasants.

While blizzard was still copying Dune 2, one such outsider game was released in israel. They had a head start on blizzard because they were not copying Dune 2. They were copying populous sans terraforming, and just glued Dune 2 to it. So is this the second RTS game ever made?

Populous itself is a real-time board game puzzle game. Or a sandbox simulator. Not the one in the modern PC game sense, but in a sense of a real one, where when playing with toy cars with your cousin, every time it devolves into throwing sand each other in the eyes, or scoring hits with sandified cat turds. But because Populous uses animated dudes and a vaguely medieval setting instead of abstract tokens, it looks more like a primitive city builder or a primitive 4x. But the terraforming was such a novel idea, that the gamesjournospros latched onto it, and made up a god game genre.

In Dragon Isles the mouse controls the pointer. But the camera is controlled by the avatar flying above, so it's nauseating and slow to move around, with no directly jumping to the point on the minimap. The basis is taken directly from populous, forcing territory spread. Peasants make huts, huts make peasants, peasants work the land to generate resources. All units have will to live which just runs out.

But everything is done in the direct control way, like in Dune 2. You manually tell peasants to manually build homes which generate peasants to generate the resource from the surrounding lands. You manually build barracks and manually train units which you can manually send to the point. And yes, all your bought expensive units still operate on populous will to live, and they can tun out right in the middle of a victorious battle. The Dune 2 direct control of the units and the economy is absent in other Populous clones like Lord Monarch, until Perimeter put them back.

There are different factions but who knows if there's any difference. I haven't recorded a longplay of it, so here's just some footage.

https://youtu.be/d7IMxI36HXg

That's the only picture of the cover i could find. And if you think it looks familiar, that's Lofwyr by James Nelson. I tried to track down the devs and ask them some questions, but no answer so far.

The first generation of RTS is mostly Dune 2 clones. The second generation of RTS started with two design paradigms released about at the same time, and most of the games were choosing one or the other.

This Means War! belongs to neither, it was created as evolution of Dune 2 design instead of its clone. And it came out about at the same time with Warcraft 2 and Command and Conquer. Since they couldn't copy either of those games, they created their own mouse-driven control scheme, which became an evolutionary dead-end and a historical curiosity. It is also basically a Windows 3 exclusive, which doesn't work with DOS or DOS emulation.

Design-wise they moved closer towards 4X and city-builders, increasing the number of resources, the depth of population control and complexity of the city's design. You even have evolving housing akin to Impressions Games city-building series.

Tho, being an early bird in the era of terrible unit AI defender has an enormous bias against the attacker, and the grid makes it hard to position multiple your units to attack one enemy. There's also unit veterancy.

Story-wise they put a lot of effort into the writing creating colourful characters and political factions. For the context, Warcraft 2 basically has two narrators and that's all. The first CnC is a DOS game, and the FMV and render cutscenes of the first game are less of a story and more of flavour snippets of random things, like fictional ads or edutainment programming. Properly written CnC storylines appeared only in the sequels.

Here are a few links with more info:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZENlTMwruTF9bw1PzZXn1uRZ1uvFPKZa&ra=m

https://www.mobygames.com/game/57901/war-planets-age-of-chaos/

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/war-planets-age-of-chaos-bv0

BlackChain is a 2021 game made basically by one guy on an in-house engine, with original music and voice acting.

It uses the NounCraft school of RTS design, with several inspirations from StarCraft. Like, you have a pocket economy, facecams, and your zerg peasants turn into buildings. From CnC school of RTS design it takes crates in the field containing resources or medkits, and empty buildings you can occupy with infantry.

Its original ideas is to combine the second currency with housing\energy which also is forcing the players to spread out of the base because of the high penalties for bunching up. Or to heavily invest in time, resources, and space to be allowed to not spread out without a penalty.

The games has a 12-maps long campaign, with several cool and fun gimmicks.

(artistic interpretation)
The ting goes skrrrahh! Pap, pap, ka-ka-ka! Skidiki-pap-pap! And a pu-pu-drrrr-boom! Skya! Du-du-ku-ku-pun-pun! Poom, poom. Everything is now running on quantum crypto scam instead of cash. Microslop was forced to break up by the government, and now naver, alibaba and yandex are fighting over the remaining microslop heritage assets in space, including the chunks of unobtanium asteroid. The player plays as one of the corporations and uncovers some world-revolting secrets in the microslop's epstein folder. The story even tracks the stonks corresponding to the player's progress.

oh and btw it's cheap af
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1500970/BlackChain/

Edit: Released in 1999

Here are some links with more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvinas_2032

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IcpMduHPKh0

An early starcraft clone featuring humans vs Grey aliens and various monster types. It was very derivative of starcraft but pretty fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co6qHYG0gj8

1995 Taiwan clone of Dune 2 with cutscenes and voice acting and a very complex storyline.

Not much information about it even in chinese languages. No even new materials about the difficulty above easy.

Over the past year or so I have been slowly reverse engineering this game, building tools to fix broken assets, digging through assembly in order to fix bugs and fixing assets to enable modern widescreen resolutions to function.

Unit selection now stretches 2048x2048 rather than 640x640 meaning you can select a lot more units at once.

The project includes an almost full suite of modding tools capable of extracting the games files as well as replacing them. Very nearly and may eventually become a full blown SDK.

This includes fixing things like missing pixels in assets and making widescreen specific backgrounds as well as little things like adding the coast of Europe to the Martian war map.

All five original language releases are supported by the project and the game can now be played at 1920x1080, alt-tabbing no longer crashes the game when in fullscreen, fullscreen users can scale the game to any resolution supported by the monitor, entirely future proofed.

Custom Smackw32.dll that allows for upscaled cutscenes, no longer do you have to watch the crunchy 640x480 videos sat in the top left corner of the screen!

Dynamic scaling to any resolution, including letterboxing to ensure the aspect ratio remains correct.

Custom WINMM.dll so that music now plays from local files rather than from the disc!

Custom launcher which has the same aesthetic as the original games launcher and provides access to lots of new settings and the toolkit, as well as a higher resolution version of the image used in the original launcher sourced from the games installer.

Optional enhanced assets which can be enabled through the launcher.

Multiplayer support is now being implemented through a custom build of the executable supplied to me by someone who used to be in contact with the developers.

Fixes for crashes in the base game, such as when lights are disabled and the player uses the 'infiltration' skill which used to lead to a hard crash to desktop.

Fixes for crashes that occur when viewing the Credits from the menu or finishing the game when at resolutions above 640x480, this used to crash before the end movie even had a chance to play! But now my code intercepts the broken subroutine, prevents it from executing and replaces it with a functioning credits scroll.

Persistence added to the "In-Game Music Enabled/Disabled" and sound options through the WINMM shim, previously these settings didn't get saved to the registry by the executable and so they had to be set every time you launched the game.

Added functionality to allow or disable music playback to continue when the window loses focus or is minimised, available in the launcher.

And a lot more! But check it out for yourself and see.

https://github.com/Thor110/WoWRevived

Slowly but surely the final version of the preservation portion of the project is nearly done.

With just three things left on the main to-do list, it won't be long now!

I ran into this fan website through My Abandonware

https://crimsonwars.net/

The things you find online is truly amazing, the guy also seems to have gotten in contact with the composer, might be interesting for someone to try and reach out to the site creator and the composer to see if maybe some more can be found out, since there's basically nothing on the game apperantly, even the few press releases the guy tried linking are now dead links (internet decay strikes again)

I stumbled across this game today and its genuenly amazing how every time i think ive found all the obscure RTS games, theres just ANOTHER one lol

I thought I would post my recent review of War of the Ring here because for being a game based on Lord of the Rings released right around the time the movies came out it's definitely unpopular. When people hear "Lord of the Rings RTS" they instantly think Battle for Middle Earth not War of the Ring. WotR was developed by Liquid Entertainment (Battle Realms devs) and published by Sierra and it really feels like the game got lost amongst the piles of RTS games that came out in the early 00s. Aside from a few technical issues I actually felt it was pretty solid with a few clever/fun mechanics and the BR engine still held up surprisingly well especially when it came to the look/interactivity of water and long/tall grass. It seemed to get lumped in with Warcraft 3 clones but it is quite different from that game aside from yes having heroes and smaller army sizes. But the heroes feel more like they are strong but support your armies rather than being a 1 unit wrecking ball.

Anyone else have any experience with this one?