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#143 WHY THE ALT. CIV. SECTION DESERVES YOUR ATTENTION (PT. 1) Ron Hiler wants to convince you that the playing field for TBS games has not been forgotten, but simply had a chance of venue. #142 MEMO TO FIRAXIS: NOW THAT CTPII IS OUT Raingoon is back with a message to Firaxis: what to do and what not to in CivIII. #141 CIVILIZATION II ATE MY HAMSTER It's no laughing matter -- Lazarus & The Gimp talk about the continuous return to CivII. #140 A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP Heardie familiarizes us to a new "Civ"-inspired game entitled Guns, Germs and Steel: Tools of Conquest. #139 YOUR CITIES AND YOU Our first "celebrity" column, Activision's St. Swithin, talks about -- what else? -- CTPII. COLUMN ARCHIVE

It might seem strange of me to be posting of the growth of real-time strategy games on a Civ forum, if not strange of me to be posting a column period. But I suppose the very fact that I am posting this helps to affirm my stance: that real-time strategy games have far more worth than many of you might believe.

When real-time strategy games first debued in 1994, they were seen as a new and vital breed... a mixture of the old, methodical, and plain turn-based with the action-packed and graphically strong action games. WarCraft, soon the leader in that genre, epitomized it.

In WarCraft, you were given a small base and a few peons. Using the peons, you gathered resources by easy clicking-methods, trained new peons, built new structures, trained soldiers, researched the then few technologies, and sent your small armies of clear superiority-inferiority levels into battle. It was primitive, but there were many leaps ahead found in that game... the graphics, for example, were notable, giving a new life to the strategy genre that had long been flooded by bland world maps and statistic screens. In anothre improvement over Turn-based games, WarCraft possessed, by it's limited, mission-based system, a story-line, allowing the player to actually have sense of why he was fighting this war.

It was an admirable start... the rising genre soaring to new heights... unfortunately, it almost crashed and burned.

The vitality of the genre was crushed within months as a slew of WarCraft and Command & Conquer clones reached shelves, adding little, if even reaching the standard of the two earlier games. This was the low-point of RTS games... the genre filled with mediocrity, while turn-based games took advantage of graphical niceness and ways to compensate for the previous quiet, methodical nature of turn-based games.

But then, in 1997, the genre was re-born. The games: Age of Empires and StarCraft.

Yet to consider the two games the new parents to a revitalized genre would be incorrect. Rather, they were the distant cousins, the heirs to a series of mediocre games, whose offspring were ever distant from each other.

StarCraft took the route of WarCraft, seemingly attempting to hold on to the old game's tradition of action, story, and graphical niceity. In this, it did rather well.

Surely even the fervant Turn-based strategy fan can admit that StarCraft possessed an interesting story-line perpetuated by their mission-system and many excellently done cinematic sequences. It also possessed graphics refined and improved such that they surpassed those of TBS games. Those are not debatable.

But where the issue arises is in the final ingredient of the Craft series... the action... to the TBS fan, action is a plus, but when it turns into who can click the fastest, the TBS fan turns away. In many ways, despite StarCraft's various micromanagement situations where careful deployment of such and such unit can counter many of anothre, it is a game of quick action. I will not now debate the pluses of such a system in relation to actual battles and thinking processes; that is for anothre article. Instead, I'll end that comment on a simple fact: StarCraft possessed much action where one rarely had a second to himself.

But action was not simply the only flaw of StarCraft to the TBS fan; starcraft possessed no economy.

And thus, to remedy this, Age of Empires was born.

Age of Empires took the basics of the genre founded by WarCraft and sent it into a new direction... one ever closer to that of the Turn-based but holding onto the tenets of action, graphics, and story... well at least the first two.

To look at the technology tree of Age of Empires is to look at an attempt at turn-based games. Economic technologies that procure more resources, make your villagers move faster, have them build structures more quickly, and so on; military technologies that give your soldiers more armour, more attack, allow them to count only as half as much in housing...

In all truth, AoE was seen as growing closer to TBS... however, in actual gameplay, it seemed little else but a diversion of the old Craft method. The player now had four resources to worry about, economic technologies, far more units, which had counters that weren't neccessarily more expensive, and so on, but his mission was the same... train units to procure resources to build structures to train soldiers to destroy your enemy who is doing the same thing.

I know right now is a bad time to end this column, but I feel there is little else for me to say. I will follow this up with a true opinion article concerning the worth of real-time strategy games, this being just a background article. Thus, on a rather anti-climatic note, I'll say good bye. And thank you.

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