Rush, Boom, Turtle: Naval Gazing
In which Tom Chick looks to the seas and wonders whether that's any kind of place for an RTS to be
4/16/2008 2:55 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 3
There's still the difficult question of how to build into an RTS a real naval game rather than an RTS abstraction of it. Naval combat involves a certain degree of high-tech cat-and-mouse, or the stately brutal spectacle of massive ships trading broadsides. The
High Treason expansion for the underappreciated
Act of War presented a thoroughly modern naval subgame, complete with maps that featured large swathes of empty sea (much to the detriment of the framerate). But for a real taste of realistic naval combat, look to the stars; the sci-fi RTS
Sins of a Solar Empire takes a lot of its cues from modern naval combat.
Upcoming naval stuff in
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 looks intriguing. Based on the first round of press coverage, it seems that many units in
Red Alert 3 will be amphibious, built to fight on land and water. Furthermore, bases can be built on water. There will be resources at sea to give players a reason to hit the waves, however, it's worth noting that EALA's last sea-faring RTS was
Battle for Middle Earth II. That game's highly touted naval subgame turned out to be little more than a way for the developer to showcase fancy water effects. Middle Earth as imagined by EALA tried to borrow the dynamic of
Age of Empires III, but it wasn't seaworthy. Let's hope they've got their sea legs under them for
Red Alert 3.
UNIT OF THE WEEK
Naturally, you'd think the Unit of the Week would be a boat of some sort. A-ha, wrong! Well, at least, you would have been wrong if I'd gone with my initial idea. I had chosen the Giant Squid from
Red Alert 2, but then I loaded up the game to grab a screenshot. Ugh. Older RTSes don't hold up very well, almost solely for interface reasons. This is especially true of older Westwood RTSes, which already had an aggressive disregard for good interfaces.
So while struggling to get out a few Giant Squids-- great idea, guys, but flavor can only get you so far -- I decided the Unit of the Week was going to be the ship that has most revolutionized the naval subgame: the transport in
Rise of Nations, which starts as a Transport Barge, upgrades to a Transport Galleon, and finally becomes a Transport Freighter. You never have to build them. You never have to load them or unload them. They simply call themselves into existence as needed. Beautiful!
Admire this half-dozen of the little fellows.
So congratulations, Transport Freighter. You may not be as sexy as the other Units of the Week. In fact, taken out of context, you're dull and frail, arguably the least exciting unit in the entire game. But in the annals of RTS history, you're the ship that really made waves.
