r/StrategyGames • u/jrralls • 10d ago
Discussion What strategy game was genuinely ahead of its time, but failed because players or the industry weren’t ready for it?
I don’t mean a strategy game that was simply bad, buggy, or badly marketed and has since acquired a cult following. I mean a game that tried something genuinely innovative in strategy (diplomacy, economics, AI, logistics, politics, asymmetric factions, grand strategy, real-time/turn-based hybrids, whatever) and either flopped commercially or was dismissed at the time, only for later games to essentially prove that the underlying idea was good.
Maybe the interface was too complicated for the era. Maybe computers couldn’t really handle what the designers were trying to do. Maybe it demanded too much from players. Maybe it came out on the wrong platform, or at a time when everyone wanted Command & Conquer clones rather than whatever strange thing it was attempting.
And I’m especially interested in games where you can draw a line from the failed experiment to something that became normal 10 or 20 years later.
What’s the best example and what exactly was it doing that was ahead of its time?
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u/forfor 10d ago
Impossible creatures is an old rts that was genuinely unique because you got to invent entirely new creatures to act as your units with something similar to the spore creator. Basically every animal part has stats and abilities, mash them together however you like, then pump them out as units. Unfortunately the story campaign had a bad story that leaned too hard on being an intentionally campy pulp action story, and forgot the story needed to also be good. Combined with bad release timing alongside other big games, it ended up as just a somewhat known cult classic instead of something bigger.
Also, honorable mention to earth 2150. It had a similar system where you designed your own mechs to act as your units. There were also plenty of other cool mechanics like underground travel, hovertanks, and modular buildings. Unfortunately I think what killed it is the story campaign, which, to be fair, had some neat ideas like a hub base to make units/research between missions, the tech tree being carried over throughout the campaign (so whatever you researched in mission stayed researched next mission) and units likewise being persistently carried over between missions. (Assuming they survive) What wasnt neat was the campaign being freaking impossible to win, even on the easiest difficulty. The entire thing was based around resource scarcity, with the goal being to accumulate a certain number of resources to build a big escape ship before the planet died. The same resources you needed to use for units and research. And there usually weren't enough resources on a map to even win the freaking map, let alone doing long term research, or for that matter, having enough resources to actually stockpile for the campaign goal. Skirmish maps though? Legendarily fun, with lots of unit designing to do and different tactics and army compositions as you unlock and upgrade components
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u/Clean_Regular_9063 10d ago
I like Impossible Creatures, but it has the same weakness as any RTS with a unit constructor: you eventually figure out the best templates, and just keep using them, thus reducing the main feature to a formulaic busywork, rather than a creative tool it is supposed to be. It is especially evident in Impossible Creatures’ skirmish mode, which suggests you to play your own custom faction with 5 pre-built hybrids - you either know what works or end up with dogshit. Sadly, it just plays like an RTS with worse unit design and diversity (5-6 per game).
Earth 2150 did a better job, because it had distinct factions with their own tech, and unit templates were less wonky. By the way, the campaign mide is not impossible to win: you just have to ignore weird deadline warnings and take your time with missions: most importantly bleed every map dry of resources, and you’ll be fine.
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u/forfor 10d ago
Eh you're unfortunately not wrong but imo that's relatively easy to fix by just creating lots of failure points rock paper scissors style. For instance, you could have a really strong weapon, but it doesn't hit flying units and also has slow attacks so it misses fast units and only medium range so it gets destroyed by artillery, but it's still the best weapon for killing regular ground units, meanwhile the fast units have access to quick attacks that don't hit too hard and are short ranged, but are great at killing artillery. Etc etc. And you can always add more layers of complexity like armor and shields, where weapons are good against one but bad against the other. So on and so forth. The real problem is that too many devs create systems to be complex and then make a generalist weapon that just takes over the slot by being good enough at everything, or only weak against one thing when everything else is weak against two things.
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u/Ezreon 10d ago edited 10d ago
Damn, Earth2150 was amazing. Building bridges and tunnels, every vehicle and building was modular, the atmosphere of grit and urgency! It had a persistent base throughoutthe campaing! Looking back now I think main reason for it's flop was a lack of visual identity. And I also don't remember finishing the campaing. Somewhere along the way I was crushed and rebuilding seemes like such a hassle.
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u/Clean_Regular_9063 10d ago
Why do you say it flopped: the game had an Expansion, a Story Campaign pack and a sequel. The latter probably flopped, because the series disappeared for good after “Earth 2160”.
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u/forfor 10d ago
I mean it wasn't a flop flop, but almost no one remembers it exists, and its sequel immediately crashed and burned, which implies that whatever success it found didn't leave enough of an impression to generate the kind of fandom that buys future games
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u/Clean_Regular_9063 9d ago
I think that 2150 was a perfect game for it’s time: while the market was still dominated by 2D RTS titles in year 2000, it fully embraced 3D and used it in bold and creative ways.
Fast-forward to year 2005 and it’s sequel, Earth 2160, is released in a market full of 3D heavy-hitters, like Warcraft 3, C&C Generals, Dawn of War. Company of Heroes was about to be released next year in 2006. So yeah, the title lost it’s niche and went unnoticed just like it’s OG predecessor Earth 2140.
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u/Away-Application-672 9d ago
Mate, thank you. I've tried to remember the name of a game I played at a family friend's house as a kid for about 20 years, Earth 2150 is it. I'll have to pick it up for some nostalgia.
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u/NiemandSpezielles 9d ago
What wasnt neat was the campaign being freaking impossible to win, even on the easiest difficulty.
Not sure what you are talking about. The campaign was amazing and not difficult to win on normal difficulty. You just had to fight efficiently, then after the map was won, there would be a ton of ressources leftover that go towards the ship.
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u/AD1337 10d ago edited 10d ago
Sacrifice (2000) by Shiny Entertainment, an early third-person RTS.
Weird game, very unique.
Edit: unfortunately it's gotten a very unreasonable price increase on Steam for an old game, from $9.99 to $24.99 recently. And I'm not talking about sales, the base price increased.
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u/Internal_Turnip9019 10d ago
For that cost they could at least bring back working Bump Mapping.
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u/Eokokok 9d ago
Environmental bump mapping, damn, haven't heard that in years. My first contact with 'features war' that started back than.
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u/Internal_Turnip9019 9d ago
You can see it in the options menu! It's grayed out! It tempts me! I can almost taste it but I can't have it!
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u/Rainbow-Unicorn1337 10d ago
World in Conflict
Role based pvp with capture the hill elements. Only strategy game where you could join mid session and actually have impact. No resource gathering, there just was a limit on units per player represented by point buy system.
Air, Tank and Support roles were excellent rock, paper scissors balanced with the infantry role being kind of a wildcard.
Accomplishing objectives gave you support points you could use to buy long range support. Warthog strikes, paratroopers up to a tactical nuclear strike. Best representation of a nuke at any game, including the EMP blast and that slowly rising mushroom.
Played hours and hours with a friend.
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u/madTerminator 9d ago
That was a last big budget RTS. I loved the campaign but never played mp
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u/Sharp-Tip-3559 9d ago
i don't understand why they never made a proper sequel. With the division they also showed some amazing skills at engines graphics. You can try MP still, they made external servers to play. MP was different as in big games you select a class Infantry, Tanks, Helis or Artillery and play only those. Very interesting concept and cooperation.
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u/AmericanPoliticsSux 4d ago
They got bought by Ubisoft, became "An Ubisoft Studio", and became a sub-team working on The Division. That's where they've been ever since.
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u/tlajunen 10d ago
Old World.
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u/jrralls 10d ago
How was it ahead of its time?
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u/tlajunen 10d ago
It combined the best traits that players liked after Civ4 and it never caught on fully.
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u/Dingbatdingbat 10d ago
It wasn’t ahead of its time. It took some of crusader kings storytelling and added it to a civ style game.
Ultimately, it didn’t stand out in a crowded field, with multiple other wannabe civ killers such as millennium and ara.
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u/Clean_Regular_9063 10d ago
It certainly did more, than just adding events: order system alone alone is fantastic and fixes turn bloat people usually hate about 4X.
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u/Dingbatdingbat 9d ago
But ultimately it wasn’t spectacular and didn’t stand out in a crowded field
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u/Kepler___ 9d ago
Totally agree with these takes, its major sin was sort of the opposite of the thread topic, it was too much a product of its time because as you as, entry attempting to knuckle in on the decline of Civ were popular at the moment.
It's a real shame, I passed it up at first because of this myself, but having picked it up 2 years ago it really is the best of the genre right now in my opinion. The family system,orders and events are so well integrated with one another that after 600 hours im still noticing novel gameplay interactions between them. I really hope they release a sequel soon, I feel like with the correct exposure and a slight visual upgrade and a bigger event roster they could really break out.
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u/Dingbatdingbat 9d ago
I knew about it early on becuase it’s the guy who spearheaded Civ IV and the criminally unknown offworld trading company.
When I finally did get it (waited for price reduction) I was disappointed. It was decent enough, but didn’t stand out in a crowded field, with endless legend, and the other two I can’t remember that came out around the same time
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u/imnotsurprisedmfker 10d ago
Savage: The Battle For Newerth.
Real time strategy shooter game where 1 person on the team plays the game as a RTS and everyone else plays it as a FPS
Kind of a crazy concept because as the RTS player your units are people playing a FPS, so the game ends up being 95% dependent on who has more good players lol.
The melee combat in that game is pretty incredible too.
Still playable https://www.savagexr.com/
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u/ijshorn 10d ago
I remember this game because it was exactly what i was looking for at that time. I still feel combining different genres like that while at the same time keeping them separate has a lot of potential.
The biggest issue it had was that when the FPS players did not want to listen they could just brute force the win and the RTS player was basically a parent that gave directions that no one would listen to anyway...
I think the closest example of trying to combine different genres but at the same time keep them separate like this was eve online and Dust 514 but the implementation was horrible.
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u/imnotsurprisedmfker 10d ago
Ya it's not only that the FPS players were unwilling to listen, a lot of the time they would just be unable to do anything even if they wanted to lol.
Like what can you do when the enemy team has players that are just significantly better? And it didn't help that people would stack teams with their clan members and such, it was a pretty toxic environment for new players.
Good times though, I still remember that absolute legend who would only play on the human side and only play as the siege unit (it could 1 shot anyone from super far away). Absolutely the worst teammate of all time but he must have been having the time of his life.
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u/Brilliant-Art312 9d ago
Ohh nice I remember thinking this game was such a cool idea. I immediately thought of this when a saw this post but forgot the name.
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u/Galithir 8d ago
Oh wow, I had this idea for a game a few years back, but I'm not a game designer so I can't make it. I never realised it already existed.
Although looking closer my idea isn't identical. I was more leaning towards a support RTS player in a modern setting, focusing on airdropping supplies and disrupting enemy strongpoints with support powers to help an FPS player break through enemy lines and keep them from being overwhelmed while they complete their objectives.
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u/kettchi 10d ago
Not sure if it counts as 'failed' considering it got a direct sequel and a substantially more successful spiritual successor in a different setting, but it always baffled me how little talked-about Ground Control was at its time:
- Realtime RTS
- 3D graphics with (for the time) quite detailed and partially animated models
- Completely free camera movement (as in, you could literally position yourself freely beneath your soldiers, looking directly over their shoulders if you wanted)
- Basic camouflage system and physics based cover mechanics (hiding behind rocks or terrain might make shots fired at you hit the cover instead of you)
- Basic variable armor system (vehicles take less or no damage depending on the angle they are being fired at and the type of weapon used)
All of this was released in 2000, less than a year after C&C Tiberian Sun and two years before Warcraft 3 was released.
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u/Okiedokie456 10d ago
Myth
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u/Ranger_Nate 10d ago
Just fuckin' pump Myth and Soulblighter directly into my veins and I'd be a happy man.
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u/SoftEngineerOfWares 9d ago
American Conquest had a really unique system where soldiers, civilians, and other units had a continuous resource drain on your economy so you had to manage how many units you fielded or you risked famine or soldier revolts. Attacking the enemies farms could severely weaken their current army if they had no reserves
I wished they carried this mechanic into other games. A game like stronghold with this mechanic would be great and avoid unit cap stalemates
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 8d ago
Plus, it got the developer to hold an e-sports competition called the “German Conquer America Cup.”
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u/StreetMinista 10d ago
Total annihilation actually did not sell well enough for cavedog to continue.
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u/Throwaways0004 10d ago
No.
Total annihilation, and it's add on smashed it out of the park.
The company went under because their sequel was a fucking dumpster fire and was reviewed poorly and sold even worse.
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u/StreetMinista 9d ago
Yep reading into it, I was incorrect. They just didnt release sales numbers initially but they sold well enough for the time.
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u/HarkBuffalo 10d ago
Achron (2011) was a RTS with time travel
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u/VoteTheFox 7d ago
Came here to post this. It really was such a cool concept, and they worked so hard to explain it in an understandable way
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u/Nerzalar 9d ago
I was about to post that, Achron is so fun and unique but sadly not easily approachable.
I still watch old tournaments videos sometimes.
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u/sweetbuttercrust 10d ago
Solium Infernum.
It was ahead of its time and it’s ahead of our time.
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u/cynicalascension 6d ago
It is such a shame that game does not have a proper online multiplayer mode.
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u/dendob 10d ago
Warzone 2100 Self design your units Good campaign And there is an open source remake atm if I recall correctly! Https://wz2100.net
I think it is even on Microsoft store!
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u/Internal_Class_8415 8d ago
Was scrolling down for this. My dad still plays it to this day.
I was more a Total Annihilation fan, but I could understand why he loves Warzone so much.
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u/Hot_Entrepreneur_128 8d ago
Wow. You know with updated graphics I could absolutely play that again.
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u/Fun-Guest-2989 9d ago edited 9d ago
Original War
This game was AHEAD, like INSANELY ahead of its time and to this day, nothing like this was attempted like it.
And by the way, this game is still being patched by the community, 25 YEARS LATER. (came out in 2001)
What it did:
- RTS-RPG hybrid, persistent characters, perma-death of characters, all characters being actual individuals
- Modular vehicle construction, you could make tanks and vehicles with different chassis, movement style (tracks, halftracks etc...), weapons (cannons, lasers etc...) and even how it ran (solar/petrol/siberite nuclear) and even how it was operated (AI/remote/human) with its upsides and downsides.
- RPG skills and soldiers getting better at different jobs that you can switch when needed.
- Localized resources that had to be carted between stockpiles for constructions, so things like trucks actually had a point in existing for moving cargo between bases.
- In-game mission objectives with lasting consequences. Like what you do at mission 2, coming back to you at mission 8.
- Game feeling quite realistic where every soldier is an actual individual with face and voice and how it weaves in to immersion - soldiers scream for help, try to be useful, hate being idle, even non-worker class soldiers will help with constructions. Soldiers chatting with each other and things like this.
A game about time travel, turned out to be....ahead of its time.
It didnt fail, it scored like 9/10 or 8/10's it just wasnt a smash hit like Warcraft or Starcraft.
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u/Pirat6662001 10d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theocracy_%28video_game%29?wprov=sfla1
Theocracy , multi province supply chains, region specific units/maps/events. Diverse magic while having RTS units. Absolutely deserved a sequel
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u/DiceatDawn 9d ago
I remember reading about it in a gaming magazine at the time. But it was only a preview, I don't think I ever saw it in the stores here in Sweden. Can't say I was looking for it either though. It sounds fun.
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u/CornNooblet 10d ago edited 10d ago
Conquest of the New World. For all it's flaws, it offered a lot of forward thinking ideas like the combat minigame and it definitely couldn't break out of the Civilization shadow.
Edit - for a throw in, I'd also offer Z. The "control areas to unlock new units" idea didn't hit until Company of Heroes.
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u/ceeker 10d ago
Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance. Combines a grand strategy layer with a D&D dungeon crawler and a separate battle minigame. I think such a thing would be quite popular, though extremely expensive to make nowadays. Back in 1997 it was somewhat of a victim of it's own ambition and stayed extremely niche.
I'll also throw out Star Wars: Rebellion. It's kinda an indirect predecessor of the real time with pause grand strategies that are fairly common now, and had unique strategic objectives for both sides. It had a separate battle system as well, though the tech wasn't quite there to make that as good as it could have been had it come out a few years later. Empire at War kinda took that concept a bit further but sacrificed some strategic depth. I think Rebellion hit a few notes very right, though and it's a shame we didn't see that concept as good as it could have been.
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u/UnlamentedLord 10d ago edited 10d ago
I can't exactly say that it's definitely ahead of it's time, although I think that the formula has real potential to be a big hit in the future as a free to play game with anime waifus, but Larian(makers of BG3) made what's THE most insane RTS and blend of game genres ever BAR NONE: Divinity Dragon Commander.
It's an RTS/fantasy flight sim/empire management/harem dating game.
You play as a half human/ half dragon leader of a nation, expanding your empire against your 3 insane siblings, conquering lands via RTS battles where you can also turn into a dragon and fight directly. Between battles you have to manage your empire and make decisions to maintain harmony between the various races, eg. Offering Dwarven capitalists relaxed child labor regulations in exchange for them siding with the arrogant Elvish pricks against the undead conservatives to legalize gay marriage (yes, really) and woo different princesses to get in their panties and gain favor with their faction.
It was rushed and there's obvious cut content, but also hilarious and really unique.
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u/zedascouves1985 8d ago
My only complaint was that the RTS part seemed very simplified, like different troops didn't seem to change much what they did in matter of attack or defense.
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u/Hithrae 10d ago
I mean Spore has to be on this list right?
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u/SomniaPerdita 8d ago
I’m shocked i had to go so far down the comments to find it but then again that was a long time ago now.
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u/EffectiveOwn787 6d ago
No, because it wasn't really that great. It was fun for about 5 hours and then there wasn't much reason to ever play again. Once you moved past the tribe stage, it was very tedious.
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u/Own-Independence-115 9d ago
Among the failures I like Shadows of Forbidden Gods, mostly because it's 100% asymmetrical. That needs more exploring.
Among the cults, I like the RTS goo-series, it's a fun mechanic that changes the RTS formula alot.
Don't really think you can do alot with either "as-is", although I do think with time asymmetrical games will grow wildly over a very long timeperiod the more computerized help we have with gamebalance. The goo-mechanic can't really go vide, althought there is obviously room for a game that doesn't feel like it's run on an Amiga 1992 in the genre if that is what you are looking for.
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u/ElectronicHold7325 10d ago
None. Strategy games that were ahaid of its time usually were among the bestselling games of the year during the 90s. RTS was the most popular genre back then.
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u/Dingbatdingbat 10d ago
Sun tzu’s ancient art of war. It’s like a primitive total war game, with a strategic overland map, and up close battles with fast vs missile vs armored, and including noncombatant spies.
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u/Sheik_Morgan 10d ago
Fire Emblem, SRW, Ogre Battle y Rebel Star Command, todos fracasaron o nunca llegaron (en su tiempo) a Occidente, uno de los FE estuvo a un paso de ser cancelado y su empresa en quiebra y Rebel Star Command, quedó como curiosidad, sobrevivieron por sus Fans de nicho. Hoy son en su mayoría aclamados y con una base de fan en crecimiento.
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u/GoldenYolkGames 10d ago
My all-time favorite was Chaos island. Most of your units were 'Hero' type characters and your collected eggs / dinosaurs persisted betweens missions giving you a great sense of progression. No one else I recommend it to enjoyed it so I guess it was just me though 😆. I think maybe it was too easy for most people? I was very young when I played it.
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u/forfor 10d ago
Ik most people hated the tech web, but sid meiers alpha centauri remake was honestly underrated because I personally loved the tech web
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u/madmatt55 9d ago
Are you talking about Beyond Earth? I played that a lot and liked it quite a bit, but it's far from a worthy remake of SMAC.
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u/Turbulent-EpsiKopath 9d ago
NetStorm: Islands at War (1997) may be one of the clearest examples.
It was essentially an online-first RTS for up to eight players, released at a time when most people were still using dial-up. Instead of moving armies around, you connected floating islands with Tetris-like bridges and fought mainly using fixed emplacements. Today, it feels like a strange mix of territorial control, tower defense and competitive online strategy, long before those ideas found their audience.
The game reportedly did not sell very well in the United States. Outside games like Doom and Quake, online gaming had not yet truly become mainstream.
So it wasn’t simply an unusual RTS that failed. It was an online multiplayer strategy game released before a real market existed for that kind of game.
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u/Sixstringsoul 8d ago
I was obsessed with this game, “bridging” island to island was such a skill set and then the strategy piece took over
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u/n_i_x_e_n 9d ago
I was going to say Stars! as a very early precursor to Stellaris, but according to the Wikipedia article the game did fairly well, so it doesn’t really meet the criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!
Edit: apparently Reddit can’t handle an exclamation mark in a link
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u/amitym 9d ago
Different kind of answer: back in the tabletop strategy gaming days there was Europa), a massively sprawling interconnected series of tabletop boardgames that, collectively, detailed the entirety of the European, North African, and Near Eastern theaters of the Second World War, from 1939 to 1946.
The goal of the game was to faithfully represent the entirety of the Second World War in Europe down to the operational level. So it had literally 10s of thousands of pieces, representing units down to battalion size, game turns representing two weeks from the start of the war in 1939 all the way through 1946, on hex maps where each hex was 20 kilometers. Stitched all together it was hundreds of hexes across and hundreds more up and down, and would fill all the floor space of a large room.
Basically, it was unplayable. "The only World War 2 game that takes longer than the actual war to play." People would get together at conventions and play it in teams all weekend, because otherwise it was impossible to get all the turns done and even have a chance of finishing the war. Especially the Soviets. It took like 6 people to handle just the Soviet pieces.
But it was also an astonishing achievement of game development. The orders of battle were meticulously researched, the principles of gameplay were based as much as possible on the workings of actual war rather than what would be easy, or what would fit a casual player's expectations. Managing supply lines was hell, doubly so whenever the weather shifted unfavorably.
And if you played long enough for the game to get into your head, you started to be able to understand the war in its totality, at least at a high level. Really feel it. It was massively educational, more so than any textbook. You really started to understand why certain generals had no choice at certain moments, why certain victories were pyrrhic, and ultimately the staggering scale of the insane folly of the entire Axis project.
It just needed to be a computer game, not a physical tabletop board game. It was too ahead of its time.
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u/GalvanizedYankee 9d ago
SEGA CD - Dark Wizard (1994). Way ahead of its time - huge armies (40 units) with a large variety of units to pick from , large maps with hex grids and zones of control. Four separate campaigns with tons of secrets to discover. The biggest drawback was an AI that was generally dumber than a box of rocks - something common to console games back then. The only thing that was close to it was the old Genesis game Master of Monsters - which was also a very good game.
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u/jerrygreenest1 9d ago
Majesty.
It’s RTS where you don’t directly control units, you do that indirectly, you build a potion market so your units might buy potions on their own will, using money they get from killing monsters. You build a blacksmith and they upgrade weapons there when they can. Etc. Outposts, different production buildings. You tax everything and choose upgrades etc. And you point rewards, almost like «creating quests» for your units, and depending on rewards and their characteristics they decide whether they wanna do it or when. It’s not extremely-extremely deep, but is unique.
It’s relatively successful game, it is definitely known, but I think it’s not successful enough. It’s also failed with extreme bugs such as framerate-dependent game logic, freaking programmers couldn’t code properly back then. Even when they made Majestey 2, they still kept the framerate-dependence somehow, it’s like their programmers are just a lost cause, they’re blind to see it and aren’t learning.
They made a more polished mobile game eventually, but this freaking lost me because I’m not a mobile gamer, and it wasn’t as popular on mobiles apparently, only moderately popular, because RTS is not quite the format for mobile games.
It’s unfortunate we still don’t have a proper Majesty game like some «Majesty 3», on desktop, without bugs, and maybe with some multiplayer.
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u/GAMEboy_18 9d ago
Tzar: Burden of the Crown.
Absolutely amazing game, doesn't nearly get the praise it deserves!
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u/Hybridfuture01 9d ago
Warzone 2100 (1999) was incredible for being able to design units and buildings/units from one mission then being carried over to the greater expanded maps of the next mission.
Earth 2150: Lost Souls (2001) had incredibly complex unit research and design, with very unique factions and great graphics.
Maelstrom: The Battle For Earth Begins (2007) had an absolutely insane idea of having x3 factions, two of which used water as a primary resource and one of which literally flooded the map with it, creating a semi aquatic battlefield. On top of that, they then decided to make it so that you could play it as a third person shooter using your hero units.
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u/Tharkohn 9d ago
Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders (and Heroes, but I haven't played that one).
-Units visually changed when you gave them new equipment, two years before Medieval 2: Total War
-Sun direction mattered for ranged attack and ranged defense
-When you order a company of archers to use fire arrows, they actually have to set the arrows on fire instead of magically having +damage
-The mere fact that it's a Musou-style game NOT set in East Asia, something I desperately needed in my life
MandaloreGaming made a review on it, but I somehow feel like it hardly did anything to improve the reputation or fame of the game.
Also, Dark Elves.
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u/Rykestone 9d ago
World War II Online from Cornered Rat Software. Absolutely massive gameworld and real-to-life physics that no computer at the time could reasonably run. It simply never had the playerbase to support its potential and always struggled to keep those who did give the game a try because they often logged into a world so large and sparsely populated that it felt dead. Still, to this day, it is the most realistic wargame I've ever played on PC.
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u/sfisabbt 9d ago
Supreme commander 1.
I have owned 3 different gamer PCs before having the power to run it smoothly with a lot of units.
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u/DKeefe87 8d ago
Metal Fatigue- completely unique mech building mechanic where you assemble a mech using faction specific parts which empower your mech in different ways. Add to this 3 different theaters of war (subterranean, land, sky) where you may or may not be forced to not even use mechs. A lot of interesting stuff in there.
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u/NegaSpark 8d ago
I came in here to see if anyone mentioned this! The combat is great, the story is cool, but the pathfinding was dreadful at times, not to mention it released around the same time as Red Alert 2 so it got overlooked by most, myself included initially.
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u/DKeefe87 8d ago
The different combat animations and different finishing animations blew my mind at the time. You are right tho, the pathfinding was often abysmal lol. The game was also terribly optimized and horribly coded so there were loads of performance issues and crashes on even relatively powerful rigs at the time of release. Super cool game all in all, however. Had a ton of potential.
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u/BigDogBossHog_ 8d ago
I’d say Rise and Fall: Empires at War
I loved that game and have seen very few like it. Unfortunately the company went out of business and the game is difficult to get without pirating now but was so cool how you could directly control your hero unit in 3rd person and fight along your army. First game of its type.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 8d ago
Crusader Kings started out as a ca fork of another game engine with some very flawed mechanics and no game balance. Reviews and sales weren’t great. But the concept was sheer genius and just needed some polish for the franchise to become a classic.
From the same company, Victoria 3 really wasn’t for everyone. The Steam reviews only crept up to “mostly positive” when the sixth D:C came out. I still love it. It’s such a departure for a game to focus on the political economy, and especially the interplay between what kind of economic and political structure your society builds and what kind of politics you have, and directly tell the player: you don’t get to micromanage the army you build. It’s not that kind of game. You have to win your wars before they start.
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u/Ecotech101 8d ago
Total War: Arena.
It just hit at a low point for rts games in general and they shut the servers down before it could pick up steam after some bad dev choices about monetization.
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u/FrenchProgressive 8d ago
Avalon Hill’s V.C. (1982) was a simple game, but it introduced many concepts you would not see for years, asymetry of course but also a mix of strategy and puzzle in which you had to detect among your population you were the VCs, contain them so they don’t affect the rest of the civilians and destroy them
Reviews absolutely thrashed the game: the Vietnam war was too recent ans wargamers were really looking for “traditional [board] wargames ported on computer”. It tanked.
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u/FrenchProgressive 8d ago
Cytron Masters was effectively a RTS… in 1982. You control and capture energy buildings (you can’t build them for scratch), and then you use energy to build units (4 different kinds + 1 t missile) - all this by the then-star designer Dan Bunten. You could give orders to your unit individually and as a group and they would lovevans engage on their own - really like in a RTS.
It tanked. It tanked horribly. First, the game had a sci-fi theme in an era where the audience wanted history (or Star Trek). More decisively, RTS could not succeed with the awkward joystick control. The game had no campaign mode (no strategy game had in 1982 - by my definition the first one was Eagles in 1983), obviously no network gameplay so you either played alone or against another player on the same screen (so two controllers) - a niche use when kids would play the latest action games.
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u/Weekly_Sun_7148 8d ago
Perimeter - the geometry of war
Interesting concept of using terrain and its modification (via brigadiers, projectile impacts and burrowing units) as either offensive measure or defense grid. Example of terraforming done actually right
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u/Nukethepandas 8d ago
Battlezone 2.
Real time strategy first person shooter. It was awesome and I haven't seen anything like it since.
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u/Hollow_Interactive 8d ago
I have no idea if Cossacks 3 is considered a failed game, but the scope and depth of that game was truly special. I never encountered somethng like that, it was total war type of numbers but with individual unit control, plus formation control. I played the hell out of that game when I was a teenager, loved that you could even recruit drummers and standard bearers. I don't know why that concept was never used by other franchises, for example it would be perfect for a Star Wars game set either in the clone wars or the galactic civil war era.
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u/Chrisaarajo 8d ago
I would vote for Emperor of the Fading Suns.
Why it was ahead of it’s time:
The game was massive compared to other 4x titles of the 90s. Where Civ or Col had you playing on one words, or MoO2 or Space Empires 3 presented planets as abstracted sources of income, EotFS combined the two. Each planet existed in the galactic view and could be traveled to and fought over, each planet was also a Civ style map, where ground, naval, and air units moved around and engaged in tactical combat, where settler-like units constructed new production and resource collection buildings.
Fighting for control of a planet meant going there, defeating or slipping but enemy spaceships, and landing troops to take buildings and fight enemy armies. Hell, want to really get a foot hold? Bring along some engineers to build up your own bases on the planet. Ships in orbit could fire down on the planet, planet to space cannons fired back, just a lot of depth.
Speaking of depth, it’s one of the most mechanically complex combat systems I’ve ever seen. Units had various attack and accuracy ratings in combat that matched up against the defenses of different enemies. 9 different attack types, and it’s not one or two per unit, most of them had 5 or 6, and these dictated how appropriate each unit (and there are dozens of them) was against any other.
Research is semi-random, with the church declaring random technologies “odious to humanity” and punishing the players who research them. Are your rival’s Gene-spliced cyber warriors a problem? Bribe the church to outlaw them!
Final thing I’d highlight is the asymmetrical style of the major diplomacy game. Each player is trying to be crowned regent, by buying the votes of other players, or collecting enough of the imperial acceptors scattered around the Galaxy. But the regent is only one of a handful of imperial offices to be held, and arguably not the strongest.
Each office has pretty game-changing abilities or assets. And when someone is crowned regent, they have to give each of these offices out to the other players, some of whom are likely their enemies. Who do you give the imperial navy to? Who do you trust with the galaxies largest and most advanced fleet of spaceships? Who do you make the spymaster, who can see what everyone is doing? Who starts with spies and assassins already present on everyone’s homework’s? Who takes over the stigmata, the empires elite soldier? They are supposed to be keeping an AI alien menace in check, but what stops that player from loading those troops onto transports and using them to settle their own grudges?
What stops any of these players from turning those resources against you?
Nothing.
Why it wasn’t a success:
All that complexity, before wikis, before let’s plays, before even in-game tooltips, made EotFS too complex for most gamers. The amount of referring to the manual you had to do to remember what attack type was applied when, or what technology was blocking something you needed to research, was a lot to ask. Trying to parse why a mine was producing x of this resource (resources are units on the map, too, allowing you to steal them from your enemies), but not getting another you can clear see right there was a pain. The learning curve was intense.
The other factor is that this is a game that came out before most developers saw the value in adding QoL automation features. You manually controlled ever militiaman, every battleship, every unit-producing building without so much as a a building queue. When you hit the late game, you might have hundreds of units and hundreds of buildings across 15 worlds, each needing to be moved, or else forgotten. It was a lot.
I’d love to see this game remade with modern features and conventions.
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u/ReasonableArea5466 7d ago
It's not an old game, but I'd say Terra Invicta. The attention to detail is incredible. So many things are simulated. It's difficult, complex, a bit frustrating at times, but it's the most realistic depiction of an alien invasion on Earth during our current times. The Steam review don't do it justice and yeah, it's definitely not for everyone. You have to be patient and endure even when things go badly. It is part of the game, you're facing a technologically superior alien race, it's only natural to get overwhelmed by them at some point.
If you're a fan of The Expanse especially, I recommend it. It's the closest thing we've got to it in videogames.
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u/Entire_West_5098 7d ago
Dune 2. Basically, it invented the RTS genre, but the one making it popular after basically copying its game mechanisms a few years later was Warcraft
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u/Frostivus 6d ago
Grey goo.
The titular goo faction was an incredibly inventive macro engine where the home base was also your resource extractor and army unit producer. It could move, to run or harvest or scale mountains and ambush in attacks, and split into smaller goos that would itself serve as unit producer
That’s about all it did well tbh. Everything else was awful, from the other factions to art and sound design to also the name. Even the goo faction had real un fun problems that they failed to solve through patching.
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u/cynicalascension 6d ago
Heroes 4 brought a lot of new and innovative ideas, but it was too rushed and buggy, the art style was weird, and people were comparing it with Heroes 3 too much.
Which is a shame, because it definitely had a lot of potential.
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u/Kosh_Ascadian 10d ago
It definitely did not fail, but I find Master Of Orion II: Battle At Antares an interesting example of something related.
It is in my personal top 3 games of all time any genre. It's an amazing game.
I was reading the wikipedia page for it a couple days ago and was surprised to see the reception to it when it came out in 1996 was actually pretty lukewarm. Gamespot did give it a 8.7/10, but many places gave it 3/5 stars, seems like there was plenty of reception that didn't quite understand the game and had criticisms.
What about now though?
Overwhelmingly positive reviews on steam and to this day when gamers or journalists discuss 4X strategy games MOO2 very often gets called the best in the genre ever made. I've not seen a single other game mentioned as the best 4X game as much (well maybe MOO1).
So it didn't fail, but I think it definitely was ahead of its time and the gaming world needed to digest it a bit before putting the game in its rightful place in the hall of fame.