I’m seeing the usual bad takes about the RTS genre here that I feel should be addressed:

It’s disappointing when you see someone really trying something new in a struggling genre just to see people shit on it for not being the same.

An RTS game being more simplified compared to ‘the classics’ isn’t a new thing. Most RTSes developed over the last 15+ years have bragged about being simpler in some way than Starcraft/Age of Empires, and so far they’ve all been less popular than Starcraft or Age of Empires. Some have still been decently popular, like the Dawn of War/Company of Heroes line, but even those haven’t been more popular.

Two of the four most popular RTSes right now are more than twenty years old, which is really damning.

RTS has been a dying/dead genre for years. You’d think the APM-spam vets would recognize their genre need to change to attract more people.

The “APM spam” games are literally the most popular, and it’s not like most of the people playing are 300 APM professional Koreans: they’re more popular even among less skilled players. Plenty of people suck shit but still enjoy these games thanks to skill-based matchmaking, or they do skirmishes against the AI, or custom games, or campaigns or what have you.

Now, the RTS genre definitely does have problems and things that can be improved on, but there’s a difference between making a game easier to initially pick up versus making it simplified in general. Making it more simplified in general reduces depth and can make a game flat out less interesting, which is bad, not good.

The right way to go is to make RTSes easier to learn – learning a new way of base building/teching is always a pain in the ass in a new game – without simplifying it as a whole. And also to add new modes that will appeal to more casual players; SC2’s endless co-op mode did extremely well there, and it would’ve done even better if it had been there at the initial launch of the game, rather than added in the second expansion when most casual people had already written it off.