Beyond Protocol (open beta)

Under development by keen-as-mustard indy developer Dark Sky Entertainment and currently still in beta, Beyond Protocol is an attempt at a MMORTS (Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy) game. Players can design and build up their units and forces and sally forth to conquer territory. Instead of roleplaying a character, you roleplay an army; and guilds of players can cooperatively manage large interstellar empires. The focus seems to be on running a huge empire along the lines of the 4X strategy genre, with lots of detail and complexity.

This is definitely a game developed by hard core gamers for hard core gamers. Its very dry, nerdily obsessive with its spreadsheet minutae and quite clearly aiming for a niche market who cares for the Devil in the details. Casual players will be lucky to struggle through an hour of this before their eyes glaze over and they pass out from boredom. The lack of any art style makes this game very hard to stare at for more than a few days; and what appears to be a complete lack of backstory to give even a vague sense of context makes immersion very difficult, unless you're already familiar with this sort of thing. Still, I've barely scratched the surface here, so this description is hardly doing it justice. Most MMO's are nightmares to put together and often take years to develop, even for huge developers. There's also a high attrition rate in the market.

For all I know, there's probably another few months or years of development still to go. I'll keep checking in on this one. Stay tuned.

Conquest: Frontier Wars (2001)

The interesting thing here is how all the maps in the game are connected to each other by wormholes, so they actually form part of a greater whole. Also, Conquest makes use of supply lines, which are essential to keep your current units functional on the front line.

Despite being set in space, this is a strictly isometric 2D game. It does use 3D geometry, so you can zoom in to catch all the details or out to take in the spectacle of huge space fleets that can fill entire screens. The maps in the single player demo were very much like standard RTS maps set in space: small localised areas of out space with a few planets, asteroid fields and nebulas scattered through them like the expansion points in a regular earthbound RTS game. Conquest uses all the elements and items found in the standard 4X strategy game and translates them directly into the RTS format. Its not too shabby at all, but it suffered from a lack of popularity.

There's a sequel in the works: Conquest 2: The Vyrium Uprising.

Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis (2002)

Dune (1992)

Dune 2000 (1998)

Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001)

Westwood got into the 3D RTS in a big way with a spectacular looking sequel to their Dune series, developed by Intelligent Games. This sumptuous little epic received the full bells and whistle treatment for its time, including a huge slab of cut scenes populated by a pantheon of minor celebs and big dollops of gorgeous design work. For example, Whatzisname who plays Star Trek's Worf is the new Atriedes Duke. Actually he's really wasted as a Klingon and RTSC recommends he take a few cracks at Shakespeare or at least some fresh sequels to Action Jackson. Swags of multiplayer features and an involved plot using three major races and five "minor races" you can ally with to get additional units, techs and plot twists from. In order to see all five hundred hours of cut scenes you have to work your way through the game.

All this was compounded by the sheer weight of all the graphical gimmickry, which - for its time - seriously lagged the game and impeded quick access to commands and map navigation - although with the newer graphic cards such as ATI's Radeon, this isn't so much of an issue, but many older PC's will choke on this.

Several years earlier to its release this game structure would have been okay. There's an interesting single player mission structure to Emperor, but despite all the plot and cut scenes every mission is little more than a simple base build and slaughter all enemies routine. Even the story driven StarCraft twigged to this problem back in '98 and made use of different types of map missions. After playing quite a few games over the years and seeing the technology develop and evolve, Emperor: Battle for Dune was a distinct letdown. Play it if you're into Dune or after a visual treat, but its still only one for the kiddies.

Halo Wars (in development)

A real time strategy game based on the Halo first person shooter series, by Ensemble Studios, makers of the Age of Empires series. Thus far, its an announcement and some promotional material. This is exclusively for the X-Box 360 and won't be covered by RTSC.

Hægemonia: Legions of Iron (2002)

A 3D space strategy title by Hungarian outfit Digital Reality that possibly offers more entertainment for your (old) graphics card than you. Hægemonia has a rather novel way of presenting the solar system as a single map where planets are practically close enough to touch and you can select and issue commands to worlds as easily as the spaceships flying between them. This diagrammatic approach works rather well (reminds me of Starglider II's compact little star system) and is really quite unique. Hægemonia's game structure is a more refined form of turn based 4X strategy games. And indeed, Digital Reality was responsible for Imperium Galactica II, an ambitious attempt to translate the 4X strategy genre directly into a real time strategy game. This is a far more successful result than IG2.

Emphasis is on the big picture. This is strategy at a solar system level and there's little or no tactical micromanagement of individual shipping. You can build up planets and moons bases for manufacturing, R&D, and assign heroic leaders and admirals to improve their performance. Spaceships are selected either as squadrons of small fighters or as big, heroic capital craft. Apart from a few behavioural settings, there's little or no hands on dog fighting. The capital ships are Hegemonia's main selling point. For such a big picture game, there's a staggering amount of graphical gimmickry - but none of that freewheeling, outer-space-is-big feel you find in a game like Homeworld. Space in Hegemonia is cluttered and small, although very, very lush. The space backdrops are so filled with space dust, asteroids, coloured clouds, lens flares, funky exhaust effects, planets and exotic particle effects that you'd swear you'd hyperspaced into a Flash Gordon comic strip by mistake. Now if they had only added boarding parties fighting it out on the wings with funny swords... Its interesting, and worth a look.

There's an expansion that improves the whole deal: The Solon Heritage (2003).

Impossible Creatures (2002)

This is a game for the kids, starting off with a basic, family safe structure you've seen a dozen times over since WarCraft. However, Impossible Creatures' offers gamers a rather nifty premise: you create your units from scratch by combining the DNA of various different animals together.

Metal Fatigue (2000)

At last an RTS that actually promises to push the genre forward. This is a nanotechnologoically themed, surreal hard SF based title from Russian developer K-D Lab and published by CodeMasters. In terms of concept, its right up there with the sort of thing you might expect from a science fiction author like Greg Egan or maybe an Iain M. Banks. It takes a few goes to work out quite what its up to, but the overall effect is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, it all but disappeared here in Australia, so unless there's a bargain basement copy floating around in a bin somewhere, I won't be able to get more into it.

There's an add-on in the works: Perimeter: Emperor's Testament. There was even talk of a sequel, but Perimeter 2 has been put on hold.

Star Wars: Empire at War (2006)

The Imperial Empire gets pretty much anything it likes, and has a bottomless budget for building massive war fleets and armies. While it has trouble finding the Rebel Alliance it can blow away entire planets with the Death Star. In return, the Rebel underdogs can hide all manner of spies, pirates and chicanery on Imperial worlds, looting funds and equipment and rallying them on secret bases. This game seems to tell the Star Wars story quite nicely with its own game structure, although something tells me Imperial players could easily drive Rebel players around the bend by spamming the Death Star and just blowing away every planet in the game...

As you can imagine, the John Williams soundtrack, electric razor TIE fighter sounds and laser bolt sound effects dominate. The spaceships and large models seem curiously under-detailed and blocky for this day and age, despite having some serious texturing close up. It looks a little primitive under the fresh layer of graphic card shaders and effects (some of which are actually quite sophisticated). You can do a fair bit in the global strategy; and I found it quite appealing. But the actual hands on fighting left a bit to be desired.

The giant AT-AT Imperial Walkers look big and actually walk and turn properly, and of course, nothing beats a formation of Star Destroyers pulverizing all before them. The Millenium Falcon dances and dodges smartly past all gunfire - almost to the point where you can single-handedly win a battle with it (just leave it to its own devices for half an hour!) But the cinematic camera has a tendency to generate action packed, shaky wobble cam shots of empty asteroids or a passing lizard rather than focus on the battle at hand. Empire at War is okay, but you'd have to be a fan I think to get the full value out of this one.

Submarine Titans (2000)

Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency (1997)

Supreme Commander (2007)

Universe at War: Earth Assault (2008)

This one's definitely pitched at the kids, and based more on the structure of a StarCraft clone than a C&C clone. Universe at War stars the usual three way conflict: humanoid Masari; a clean cut, psychic Protoss/anime/elves-in-space group called the Novus, and a clunky bunch of over-armoured, spiky, parasitic, crayfish styled military autocrats known as the Hierarchy. That's as close as it gets, though, because there's a rich vein of kitsch running through here. Universe at War might have a gritty grey-and-brown battle scene of US marines bravely defending the earth against tripods, but this invasion of earth looks and sounds like a high-end Saturday morning cartoon. The Hierarchy is an old fashioned flying saucer invasion crossed with the recent Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds; and abduct cows, eat houses and zap enemies whilst headbanging to some really ancient WWF cock rock.

But the really big problem in this game is that big red signature walker unit for the Hierarchy. This big red walking base fills your screen and stomps its way across anywhere to pretty much annihilate any opposition the moment it's built. Either the demo's really making things easy to get the kids in or there's a serious, serious hole in game balance here. One side basically gets a God level unit right from the start and the absence of any multiplayer demo makes the whole package feel just a little dodgy. As far as I know the other sides don't get this sort of thing.

The camera is locked into a fixed angle and at a fixed zoom, and while everything is 3D, it felt to me like a 2D game. I'd argueUniverse at War would be better served and have more charm using an older retro-styled 2D style. Playing through the demo brought back memories of old, epic Japanese shoot-'em-up arcade scrollers (from old developers like Toaplan or Irem) with lots of splashy weapons effects and closing end-game rock'n'roll riffs. Still, it feels more polished over Petroglyph's previous effort, Empire at War. For example, Empire's auto-cinematic feature is present, and a little more evolved this time around, but it still sticks together a clumsy string of randomly picked camera angles. Nothing's come close to Dawn of War's player driven camera; a player is far more effective at this sort of thing than an AI.

Alas, after Supreme Commander, Universe at War feels small and silly, with all its efforts going into noise, colour and graphics. If it was a film, it'd be a genre flick. Its fun for a while, and if you're unfamiliar with RTS it'll amuse stomping your giant base-bot around, but that's an awful lot hard disk space for the privilege. The demo alone is 1.2 gigabytes in size. The Supreme Commander end-game units are definitely better. Wait for this in the bargain bin.

War Front: Turning Point (2007)

Z: Steel Soldiers (2001)