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Comment by wheelerof4te | Hacker News Reader

Would I need a fairly powerful machine to run this? I can run Starcraft 2, is that enough?

I've toyed with Total Annihilation, but the graphics were too old, even for Brood War fan such as myself.

I always liked the Total Annihilation graphics and think they passed the test of time quite well for a game that's 25 years old. A lot of the maps were downright pretty (especially when I modded them ;-) and the top down perspective was a better "3D" than isometric (or much of the low poly full 3D of the time). The lasers and build nanobots and explosions were a bit cheesy I guess...

Yes, I like the terrain. But the unit designs really show their age.

Tbf the unit designs (those solar panels!) were pretty weird at the time, looks like this has a similarly odd-looking ships and factories and the same penchant for big coloured panels on everything

Looks like the big advantage of this is that the unit AI is supposed to be quite clever rather than really stupid at how it carries out the tasks you give it...

They are bragging about having a challenging AI.

We will see, I've just downloaded the game. Hopefully, the AI is better than Blizzard's 98's Brood War brain-dead computer :)

Projects like these tend to attract AI programmers, compare SC1's native AI with what Brood War API users came up with :

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swar...

Speaking of which, you might be in luck, this just happened this weekend, and in my on-and-off experience with Spring games, I don't remember seeing AI exhibition matches very often compared to regular human competitions :

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1981220857

http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36943

P.S.: Don't confuse unit AI (that even players have direct access to) with general AI.

Note that the parent poster was referring to unit AI, not enemy AI. Units can do a lot more with a single command compared to something like StarCraft and StarCraft II, which forces you to do much more heavy micro (because your units will pretty much walk in a straight line to their goal, not attack unless they're A-walking, and then stand in a single place without moving as they attack). APM is not as important a factor in TA-heritage games, and many Spring games go to great lengths to reduce APM as much as possible, by doing things like automating "dancing".

I didn't have direct experience with the AI on ZeroK, but if it uses some variation of BarbarianAI that is available on BAR (cousin project mentioned in other posts here) it's as impressive as being a decent benchmark for beating a human that has a borderline decent grasp on the game (which makes it an actually good challenge).

According to the Steam page:

    Processor: 2.0 GHz dual core CPU with SSE (Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent)
    Memory: 4 GB RAM
    Graphics: 512 MB graphics card with OpenGL 3 support (GeForce 8800 or equivalent)
    Storage: 6 GB available space

I would guess that you can run this game.

It basically came out a few years before SC2, being even less graphically demanding. (At which point my own PC with a GeForce 4 which, for comparison to today, had either 0.064 or 0.128 Go of VRAM, would struggle to run it.) Some graphic improvements have happened since then of course, and the requirements are now somewhat higher.

Now the issue is that it doesn't have the unit caps that SC2 does, and the number of players (now up to 16vs16 in a normal game, sometimes even 32vs32, while in 2009 8vs8 would have been the max), map sizes, and number of units (typically up to ~0.5k in 2006 compared to topping up at ~5k-10k today) only kept growing.

So if you want to play big team games, and have a much worse CPU than the average player, you might not have the best time in the endgame.

Are there any popular 4vs4 games?

I will first start versus AI, then take it from there. Not really a competitive player anymore. Playing Brood War kinda makes you dislike multiplayer RTS after a while, haha.

You might have to advertise for them in chat / forums.

All games : http://zero-k.info/Battles

All games with 8 players (though not only 4vs4) : http://zero-k.info/Battles?Title=&Map=&PlayersFrom=8&Players...

If you can run SC2 you prolly can run ZK. It does uses nearly all of the 4 Gb specified in the minimal requirements, though. But if you are at minimal specs, don't think about engaging into the popular 16vs16 battles.

A fair bit above them, only graphics are a problem.

Intel i5 11th gen, Intel Iris UHD graphics, 16GB RAM.

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