Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Warzone 2100. Open source, I believe their goal was the ultimate real time strategy, and I believe they landed pretty close to that. You can design your own units, each with strengths and weaknesses that reward different strategies. The campaign was fun, rewarding, and had a fair bit of variety. There's even a few AI projects to make smarter teams of tanks (which allows MUCH more complexity than controlling an AI).

It had fog of war, 3D terrain and viewer, many kinds of units, and a nice UI for taking arbitrary groups of units and giving them 1 or more commands. Even some nice automation (at later levels) to avoid the tedium of telling a unit to repair itself, then putting it back in formation.

One somewhat unique feature is that in campaign mode (playing a computer, not a human) you can control time, so you never get overwhelmed with trying to control your units, but of course as your skills get better you can speed up time to not be bored.

If controlling tanks, infantry, and (at the later levels), planes/VTOLS sounds fun then give it a try. The 1st level of the campaign is a tutorial and you'll know pretty quick if you enjoy it.

Ah, sorry, just realized you named Warzone2100, well maybe someone else will find the suggestion useful.

Just to point out Warzone 2100 was a commercial game by “ Pumpkin Studios”, that had all the features you mentioned, and it was later open-sourved.

Indeed, I never played the original, but I believe a fair bit has been done since then.

BTW, it's easy to forget to include the cut scenes when building from source, which IMO do add to the game.

I spent many hours playing WZ2100 on Mplayer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer.com

Time controls are not that unique - you can have it even in Dawn of War 1 !

And even less unique in low budget / open source RTSes ?

Special mention to Achron with literal time travel as a game mechanic !

Heh, I believe I played Achron (chess like) on a C64, don't recall the time travel aspect. I never played Dawn of War 1. In any case I enjoy being able to control time from 1.5x faster than normal, all the way down to literally zero (paused) if you want.

One annoying thing (even if it's an intentional part of the game), when a unit dies, it doesn't tell you which unit. Most importantly if you are trying to level up your units, it doesn't tell you if it was a unit that gains experience (like all fighting units), or doesn't like a truck or repair unit.

Took me 5 minutes to track down the line of code and add a print statement.

No, you played ARCHON on a C64, as did I. The first time I ever played a new video game straight through to the next day. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark

Ha, amusing that moving the r two spaces is another game. Thanks for the correction.

No, this Achron (2011) Tutorial - Time Travel :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGmMenc1jCY

Seconding Warzone2100. I love how much research there is to do, and designing your own units is just great.

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