This opening post is a love letter to Zero-K because it is one of my favorite games and it is critically underappreciated relative to its quality. If anyone is interested I will use later posts to dig into the nitty gritty of the game and specifically what is magical about it.
Zero-K is difficult to describe. It may be the best RTS, or unplayable, depending on your disposition. Zero-K is unapologetic for the steepness of its learning curve, its bottomless pit of complexity, simultaneously the most and least refined RTS. It’s basically Supreme Commander, but the developers have traded in the production value for perfected mechanics. It looks ugly. It plays beautifully.
The game is free on steam, its open source and developed by its own community of players for almost a decade. The result of RTS enthusiasts iterating on a core design for a very long time.
I’m torn about how to describe this game. There is a laundry list of superbly implemented features and innovations for the RTS genre, but the real story here is that all of these design decisions culminate in a cohesive experience that’s better than any other strategy game. Drawing line formations for your units is more than a quality of life feature, it transforms your engagements into an orchestration of jockeying for map control and positional advantage. Terra-forming likewise adds so much decision-space to the strategy. There are dozens of similar examples to this, one small expertly implemented feature after another adding to a growing resonance with the core mechanics. The possibilities become dizzying, so much is possible and viable as a strategy. And yet it remains extremely grounded, the better strategy and execution will win the match.
The quality of strategic interaction with your opponent is the best I’ve ever experienced in Zero-K. That’s what I’m really driving at so I’ll end this post here.
@meauxdal was telling me about this the other day and it sounds great. I never really played enough of the Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander branch of strategy games and they’ve always seemed interesting
It’s really interesting how Total Annihilation spawned a bunch of fangames trying to recreate that magic, and were never really satisfied by Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation. Like Tulpa it never really clicked with me so the pitch has always seemed strange to me, because I don’t see the aesthetic hook within it (it’s surely scale, scale, scale and a million moving pieces but it’s not romantically wrapped like Homeworld).
What is beautiful about Total Annihilation that inspires such love?
Total Annihilation is a beautiful game for sure. But, I think Zero-K makes it obsolete. It isn’t recapturing the magic so much as fulfilling the promise of potential that TA had.
You’re definitely on to something with the scale being a large draw. But I find that Zero-K is actually the exception within the Total Annihilation Flow Economy sub-genre. The average Zero-K 1v1 usually has less units than Starcraft 2 late game. The focus is instead on the quality of interaction, that there is no unit cap is only another avenue of potential strategy. You CAN make 500 units, but will it win? Maybe, or your opponent will make Area Damage weapons and counter your large swarm of units. This is in contrast to Planetary Annihilation or Ashes of the Singularity where more is always better. Zero-K’s late game branches into super units called Striders that resemble Gundams and have 3 or 4 super weapons with a giant life bar. Going for massive scale is just another tool in your belt, and is usually ignored for more effective options.
There’s 2 main points of focus. The 1st focus is providing enough options that you constantly need to be predicting your opponents response and scouting their next move. Basically providing the space to have an interesting mind game with your opponent. The 2nd is providing such an overkill level of control over your army that any execution problem can be resolved by the player learning to better command their units. Zero-K is constantly beckoning the player to become a virtuoso of unit command. It wants the idea in your mind to reach the screen with as little interference as possible. Granted, it’s still never easy. But the result is that generally, strategies that good players employ are more cerebral. The level of control reaches up to meet your ideal strategy, rather than your strategy needing to be compromised to fit the low level of precision that other RTS User Interface provides. This can most readily be seen if you spectate some 1v1 matches from the top players.
My thought process is all over the place because I think this game is cool as fuck and it’s exciting.
Placeholder for a longer post about how Total Annihilation is the only RTS that’s ever clicked for me and I’ve bounced off of nearly everything else
In any medium, do classics exist for which we cannot say the same? Great post. I’m not a rts head but would love to hear more about the new ones. Lots of fond memories of playing single player Age of Mythology with a friend and drawing our own maps. There’s a cool trick in that game’s editor where you can “move” buildings even into locations where they cannot be placed, and people came up with all sorts of interesting ways to smush models together into these elaborate franken-palaces.
Oh, but to answer your question. Uh… probably not, but maybe?. I haven’t met anyone in the community whose first RTS was Zero-K. Everyone is bad at this game though. I’m bad at this game. If you look at the gameplay and you think it looks like something fascinating to study while you fail at it, like dwarf fortress or Nethack, then you’ll have a good time with it probably.
Yeah, I’m not unfamiliar with bashing my head against a game/genre to figure out why I’m bad at it. I’ll probably give this a shot at some point.
Basically all I know about RTSs is from watching my friends play SC1 in Jr. High/Highschool at sleepovers and watching my roommate playing play SC2 ladder in college.
The upside is that you won’t have a ton of bad habits you’ve carried over from previous RTS games that need to be unlearned. If you can force yourself to use the hotkeys and just focus on having a solid economy, you can get competent very quickly.
The difficult part is that this RTS in particular doesn’t have any sugar coating arcade sound effects and shiny abilities. Also no narrative hook or thematic anchor point. Instead, it’s come for the hardcore strategy, stay for the hardcore strategy.
You can use a large drop ship to abduct the enemy Commander unit and fly him away to be killed. You can build gravity guns and terraform the ground into a ramp and have the gravity guns fire your units into the air and across the map into the enemy base. You can build a Nuclear Silo that when fired destroys 1/4 of the map. There is a flying bomber that only fires EMP blasts that disable units it hits, so you have time your bombing run just as your army makes contact with the enemy. There is an amphibious teleporter unit that can sneak through the ocean and create an portal to anywhere on the map for your army. The game allows for 16v16 multiplayer matches that get extremely silly. There is a late game meteor cannon that when fired will rain meteors onto the enemy base. These situations and units are as close as the game has to a hook.
Are there good resources to learn the units / simple RPS counters? There are an overwhelming number of units and factories!
Was watching some games on YouTube and it seems like factories are kind of like a mini-version of races in StarCraft, since you stick with your initial factory for so long. Is that true, or are there other considerations/reasons to build extra factories early?
Let’s talk about the 11 starting factories and how they serve as an expansion of distinct factions in RTS.
Starcraft is the gold standard of RTS. It has 3 factions, Terran, Zerg, Protoss: T Z P. This adds variety to the game because the different matchups play significantly differently. Each player can experience 9 different matchups from their perspective. So if you play all 3 factions, you’ll need to know the optimal way to play 9 different matchups. If you only play 1 faction, you only need to know the optimal way to play 3 different matchups. This is a big reason why players end up dedicated mainly to a single faction that is their “Main”. It’s easier to practice 3 matchups than 6 or 9. So everyone can experience diversity of play if they want it, but having to only know 3 matchups, you will still fall into a routine of how to play your Main once you’ve identified the opponent faction. You’re Terran against a Protoss? You’ll need siege tanks to beat their dragoons.
Zero-K has only 1 faction, but 11 starting factories:
You get 1 factory for free that constructs instantly at the start of a match. You don’t know what factory your opponent chose until you spot their first unit. They don’t know what you chose until they scout you or you reveal yourself. Each factory has about 11 or 10 units and plays about as differently as the Starcraft factions. 11 starting factory options for you and 11 possible factories for your opponent means there are 121 possible opening matchups. While not every factory is viable on every map, most of them are and the map pool makes it so that all starting factories are legitimately viable most of the time. Instead of mastering 3 matchups, Zero-K forces the player to accept that they can’t be prepared for what will happen, and must master versatility instead of specific matchups. Adapt to the current conditions or die.
This is the best of both worlds. Diversity of situations that’s baked into the core of the game. I’m still regularly confronted with situations I’ve never encountered before, and need to work out how to solve in real time. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” is a design philosophy here.
New factories are expensive enough that players can’t afford them until mid-game. You’ll be stuck with that opening decision for the first ~15 minutes of the game. Many 1v1 matches are over before a second factory is ever built. So you have to ask yourself some interesting questions before the match even starts. What factory best suits the terrain of this map? What factory will my opponent choose? How easily can my factory choice be countered by my opponent? How bad will it be if my opponent plops (building your first free factory) something completely unanticipated? As soon as the match loads, the possibilities are absolutely brimming. You never get a full grasp of how any fight is going to go, so the game stays thrilling and interesting as you try to always juggle more than you can handle.
Cool, it’s like the Chess960 of RTSes. Glad my observations were mostly correct. Helps a lot to compare it with StarCraft since that’s basically the only RTS I know (and even that, only via proxy).
I’m way more excited about a strategy game if I don’t have to memorize an opening book.