real time strategy games have always intimidated me because they always seem very hectic. with that in mind does anyone have recommendations for a good entry point into the genre for me? something that's relatively slow paced so i can learn how it all works
@typhlosion Stellaris probably? Any player can just pause the game at any time to focus on issuing orders and stuff
There's also the Creeper World series which is... well, unique, to say the least. might not be a great entry point to the genre (because it eschews a bunch of genre conventions) but it's neat and good and easy to get into as a beginner
-F
@Felthry @typhlosion as much as I love Stellaris, it somehow manages to be extremely hectic even while paused. part of this is bad ux decisions (there's a lot of pop-up events that will steal focus from the menus you were trying to use when they happened), part of it's maybe the way I play (trying to optimize too many things, maxing out # of research vessels --> maxing out scientists calling home to say "drop everything and check out this weird rock I found")
@typhlosion that said… yeah if you play stellaris normally it can be laid back, especially at the beginning. pause is on space bar; it's normal to pause every time there's a decision to make or stuff to read (and there's a lot of narrative text to read), you don't need to micromanage individual units in war (just tell which fleets to go to which systems), you don't need to manually build new workers and assign them to mine crystals or whatever.
@typhlosion there's also the free & open-source Widelands, which is a slightly cartoony RTS that focuses almost exclusively on economy and supply chains; the basic action is to set roads & drop points so workers will automatically form human bucket chains to pass supplies around.
there is combat and territory, but no soldier-level control; you build towers that house up to N soldiers that fight everything within X radius (with soldiers' gear & training being economic outputs)
@typhlosion note that these are the only RTS games we've played so. Biased sample.
But that also means we haven't played any that *aren't* beginner friendly so hey maybe they all are
-F