What is Reddit's opinion of
Zero-K?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
76 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Don't forget the Spring engine and its flagship, ZeroK. Or, for the traditionalists, Balanced Annihilation.
Pretty much all games on the engine are in the Total Annihilation tradition, which is of course a definitive plus. The original was at least 10 years ahead of its time, and still shines in comparison to new stuff.
>My advice ? Got friends who play Overwatch or any other generic overhyped hero shooter? Buy an extra copy for them to team up in Ballistic Overkill or any other interesting multiplayer Linux game that needs to growth... Even free games like Fistful of frags can make the difference
I could do that or I can get them to play Zero-K instead which is DRM Free, Free Software and Gratis. Zero-K just got an alternate music track.
For open source games check out to games on Spring RTS and especially Zero-K. Ignore the fact that graphics is lacking - gameplay-wise they're great. Open source games generally don't have a lot of artists work on them.
If you want something unique check Planetary Annihilation: Titans. You might find a lot of negative reviews around, but almost all of them induced by how developers handled financial side of project as well as early access. Game itself is feature complete now, really fun to play and have huge community crafted expansion. Though it's unlike any other RTS ever created you might like or dislike it: playing on 3D maps is not what everyone can handle. Since you can grab it on sale for $10 it's totally worth it.
Actually this game is spiritual successor of Total Annihilation, but if you want newer games it's Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and Spring engine games: Balanced Annihilation, Zero-K
Spring RTS is open source and completely free so you can try those games. BA is like TA (and PA) and it's have "traditional" gameplay while Zero-K have lot more of different features and it's still in active development.
If you want to try "classic" RTS games, there are great free ones. Zero-K comes to mind!
For space RTS, I'd recommend something like Sins of a Solar Empire, and things like Star Ruler.
Try Istrolid. It's an RTS where you get to design your units (spaceships) from scratch. It's aimed to be a competitive game and has a decent amount of players for an indie game so getting a multiplayer match is easy. It doesn't have matchmaking yet, but it should be coming at some point.
Oh, and the game is free. Not F2P, but actually free.
There's also another great free RTS called Zero-K. Gameplay is very deep and just superb in general. So great in fact that I stopped playing Starcraft II for that game. The slight downsides are a relatively small community (hard to find 1v1 opponents) and a very old-fashioned lobby.
/r/Pas__ used http://zero-k.info/ as an example.. so let's check that out.. They are at 1.2.8.11 (Sounds like that is after a 1.0 "release" version) and YET... "This release brings new UI features, further sea balance tweaks, and a lot of bugfixes." is this not what people are arguing with Uber about? Where is the moral outrage that they are making these kinds of changes and improvements after a release? Honestly people need to chill and get out and have some fun. I felt zero-k look toyish and PA looks rad.. but again.. just my thoughts..
The Free and Open-Source game "Zero-K", which is running on the Spring engine and is extremely heavily based on Total Annihilation has Planet Wars, which is pretty much what Boneyards once was. It looks like the Dutch Empire is currently doing rather well.
Why not any of the Spring-based TA derivatives? They all play a fair bit like TA, are free and use a modern engine.
There's XTA, which is TA-like (uses TA content), BA, which is a little more hardcore/pro-mode, and a cluster of excellent new games that create completely new gameplay and units but play in a vaguely TA-ish style:
Zero-K (http://zero-K.info) which breaks down the TA tiers and instead of sporting 2 levels of kbots/vehicles/planes on 2 factions, instead just gives you one faction with one level (no advanced stuff) and 10 different starting factories to open with.
Or there's EvolutionRTS (http://www.evolutionrts.info/) which is far more stylistically consistent and simple since it's a one-man project, but still has sexy TA-style gameplay on a modern engine,
Fans of SupCom1 are also advised to try Zero-K a Spring-engine opensource RTS that follows SupCom/TA-style gameplay (the Spring engine is designed for TA-like games, and Zero-K is the more user-friendly of the two major games on the platform, the other being Balanced Annihilation, which, while simpler, has a nastier skill-curve and relies more on the old pirate TA content).
Take a look at Zero-K. It is completely free, and plays similar to games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. In my opinion, the game has the best command interface of any RTS I've ever played.
This is fantastic news. TA is a great game, and I've always sad that so few RTS games learned lessons from it. Infinite queuing, simple resource extraction, continuous resource flows (you spend money on construction per-tick, not upfront), and units that can fire while moving.
Be warned, though, there are a lot of exploitable gameplay bugs that became part of the multiplayer online meta. You can trick bombers into dropping far more bombs than they should, and fighters can do some impossible manoevers, for example. Many land units require insane micro to be effective. This stuff is fun, but is a bit out of scale for a game that boasts such high unit-counts.
Fans of the genre should also try the open-source descendents of TA that are available on SpringRTS:
https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation which is close to TA and still uses ripped TA models, but has an impressive project to replace all the models with original work
http://zero-k.info/ which is more of a spiritual successor - it changes enough to feel like a sequel than the same game (where BA is mostly a heavy balance-tweak of TA).
To be fair not sure why other guys call Paradox Games and CIV as RTS. :)
If you have beefy hardware (64-bit, 8GB+ RAM, discrete GPU) and stable internet connection (2Mb/s) you might want to check Planetary Annihilation. It's Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander like game with fast gameplay. If you don't have powerful hardware, but like games of this kind check check Spring RTS games like Balanced Annihilation or Zero K.
Also as far as I know 0 A.D. should be playable already. And if you don't mind old games then you might check Seven Kingdoms (7kaa in repositories). It's old game from 1997, but have quite unique gameplay you might like.
If you're looking for a free multiplayer RTS then there's Zero-K, somewhat similar to TA/supcom. It has a small but active following, is in active delopment, receives constant balance tweaks and is open source. Lots of fun too.
However, the single player part is rather limited, so it's only really for those who enjoy multiplayer teamgames/1v1.
> How is this game funded? Surely a lot of effort has gone into making this, but it is free, so where is the funding coming from?
You are right that a lot of work was put into Zero-K. As this is an open-source project, all of that work was done by volunteers on their free time. The only funding Zero-K requires is for server costs, and accepts donations here.
> Also, why is this game so unknown? From what I see it looks like a great classic RTS that can stand up on its own in the modern day.
The primary reason the game is unknown is because it has not been marketed aggressively. There are plans to do more marketing in the future, but not yet. Zero-K in its current state would scare away a lot of new players. While the actual game is in a pretty good state, the non-game aspects of Zero-K require much more polishing, including:
- Installation (Steam integration should help here)
- Lobby Interface
- Matchmaking
- Replays
- Settings
TLDR: Zero-K is not well known because it is in the game's best interest not to be well-known...yet.
Zero-K a game in the Total Annihilation sub-genre with more of a focus on unit diversity and tactical options. It started off with focused on multiplayer balance but in recent years we've added some strong AI opponents and we're in the process of releasing the campaign (I'm a developer).
Istrolid is a a quick space game that may be better classified as a tactics game. Its core mechanic is that you have to make your own ship designs from a list of parts. It also has a multiplayer focus and from what I've seen there isn't just a small set of viable designs.
Loria is a Warcraft-esque game, I don't know if it has multiplayer or not. What I've seen of it looks quite polished and it seems to have a focus on dungeon delving campaign missions.
Could you please remove Spring RTS from the strategy section? It hasn't been a game in a long time, in fact it's since been developed into a proper RTS game engine. It doesn't include any base playable content anymore.
I would recommend adding one or more of it's most developed games instead, Like Evolution RTS on Steam or Zero-K soon to be on Steam
any one that says zero k is bad hasn't played it for long and if you're talking about language settings check out the wiki ,zero k is complex but very easy when you learn hotkeys go here for wiki http://zero-k.info/
Yup. For more info you can check out an old terraform video tutorial or take a look at the Terraform wiki article. If you're too lazy to grasp terraforming you could also just spam precision bombers (Ravens) and order them to attack underwater targets or kindly ask your opponent to resign (which they should've done anyway 10 minutes before the game ended).
It's a meme, so the unit had no option but to be called that. In general don't take it seriously, everybody's just lobbing around ;)
Don't bother with Steam, use Itch.io instead. There are no barriers and free promotion. Me and the Zero-K team did an Itch.io release and the player base on average went up 2 times on weekdays.
So it was always designed as an Engine / assets architecture, probably to avoid copyright issues. Most people play with one of the newer mods -- probably the biggest I know of is Zero-K, which has 22 people online as of this post, according to the website. So no, it's not particularly many people, but I think you can find people to play with. (I've not tried its online multiplayer, because of version incompatibility issues related to not wanting to upgrade my base system...)
Ok, it's a total thread hijack and genre curve-ball but I haven't pimped it out to anyone in a while and I also wonder if it would be interesting to an academic:
Zero-K, an open source RTS that started out as a total annihilation remake, and grew to something much more, it feels like a very unique game to me. The sheer number of overlapping and disparate systems and a focus on more proceedural mechanics makes it feel a strange sandbox/RTS hybrid. It also has by far the best unit automation options I've ever seen as a player.
I dunno, it just feels like an interesting game to study. An open source community built RTS that is actually really good and has done great work in adding automation systems that are genuinely useful even at high level play.
The community is... Interesting, too. I haven't played in a while, so maybe that cleaned up though (if you used to play dota you'll be fine :P) It's the only multiplayer RTS I've ever seen pull off 16v16 team fights moderately well.
There used to be a Gundam RTS game based on the years during the One Year War and a bit after I think. It's literally called Gundam RTS. It is run on the Spring engine; free source. If you can get it to work, it's completely free if you can find the latest version.
The Dev that was working on it suddenly closed up shop for some reason saying something along the lines of, "I will return." but that was pretty much at least a year ago. Who knows now? I heard that the game played very well. It's similar to Zero-K in concept and gameplay. All of it is completely free.
Game is available to play on http://zero-k.info/ . For Steam release "when it's ready" would probably be the best answer as it depends upon work from people other then me, we want to make getting in the game as simple as possible for new users, current lobby is more tailored towards experienced users. 1 or 2 months from now perhaps.
Big robots blowing each other up with futuristic weaponry. Online multiplayer-centric with singleplayer campaign currently in the works. If you're still interested check out steam page I posted in other comments or get the game directly here: http://zero-k.info/
I would recommend checking out Zero-K. It's a descendant of TA through many years of modding, and while much has changed, you should get that undeniable TA feel. The understanding of scale is there, the 3D height mechanics, the physics, the unit variety. Admittedly it has many rough/unpolished spots, as all the artwork and coding are done by hobbyists for free, but it has a solid little community that keeps games running around the clock, and has done so for years.
Example game cast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q5lLiFSMdA
Its' a freakishly elaborate OSS RTS. It's not really designed for LAN, so you'll need access to the wider internet to play.
The game has a crazy wide variety of units, so it's fun to fart around in. For co-op play it includes a Tower Defense mode called Chickens. Play that on easy.
My favourite strategic games would be the types that follow Total Annihilation. Supreme Commander tried to emulate it but it wasn't as good. The most polished game of its ilk would have to be Zero K.
Haha I wasn't even critizising the title, mostly explaining it since your commentary gave me the impression that you have no idea how metal works on that map. To give a better idea about the map: Most places that are actually on the duck give very good metal income, so usually one mex is enough there. But on low ground metal is a bit harder to come by. Here's a link to the Duck metalmap. Brighter = more metal. Darker = less metal.
A similar map would be Trololo where the metal map is actually used to draw silly things over the face. Trololo metalmap.
> Does it have matchmaking and a busy multiplayer scene?
Matchmaking yes. Whether MP is "busy" depends on your definition of the word. The official replay page shows 17 games longer than 3 minutes for the last hour. Most of them with 2 players, one with 12. Before the Steam launch most players were from Europe, so activity was highest during European evenings or so. Not sure if that changed since then.
I see you already posted on the dedicated feedback thread in the ZK forum. There Orfelius, a 5 year old 2000+ elo player had trouble completing the mission as well. Perhaps ask DeinFreund, who completed the mission in the past ~~with a teammate~~ for help. Godde posted a replay of him and a teammate beating it on Brutal, consider checking it out.
That's ~~two different~~ a very high elo player~~s~~ beating brutal only with a teammate. So maybe give that a chance. Or try reducing game speed, as that allows you to micromanage everything a bit more, just like a second player would.
I wonder if unit balance changes also affect mission difficulty over time.
Zero-K has physics. There's a trailer showing some and here's a list of more things that exist:
- Ballistic projectiles, fast units can evade slow projectiles, units can't shoot through each other, terrain height affects ranges, some weapon have inaccuracy, area of effect, etc.
- Unit and building explosions affect their environment, deforming terrain and damaging nearby units - certain units and buildings more than others (there's a flying suicidal bomb that relies on damaging enemy units with its own shrapnel, or a singularity reactor for energy production that sucks nearby units in when destroyed).
- Some weapons rely solely on impulse, one defensive turret is used to push enemies away, for examle down a cliff, or to pull aircraft from the sky. Building crawling bombs and throwing them at your enemy is a valid strategy too.
- Radar is blocked by terrain.
Keep in mind though that this is still a game, don't expect the simulation to be flawless.
Zero-K http://zero-k.info/ - Free and open source, inspired by TA, development mostly for multiplayer. Check out /r/zerok for casts done by /u/Shadowfury333.
It might not be as active as you are looking for though. Usually there's around a dozen people playing (and many more idling), on evenings this number jumps to ~50, weekends probably 100+.
Starcraft? It's a descendant of Total Annihilation, as spring engine games generally are.
Most importantly, you have, from a strategic POV:
- One Commander per player
- Continuous economy: Metal and energy
- Maps that require you to spread out to get your metal
- Controlling the battlefield after the battle is crucial, as there's lots of metal in wrecks.
The exact unit balance and rock/paper/scissors relationships are less obvious because they've been tuned and re-tuned ad nauseam, but you can trace back a lot of stuff to the original TA. The Slasher, for example, is the ARM Samson.
It gets played in all of 1v1, FFA and team vs team. It's balanced very well for all of them. If you want something more traditional, play Balanced Annihilation. It even still uses the original models... which is one of the reasons ZeroK got developed, to finally get rid of all the IP that noone actively minded was being used and distributed, but still, better get rid of it.
Side note: The two other descendants of TA are Supreme Commander (from the original game designer) and Planetary Annihilation.
Free, open source and created for multiplayer.
It has quite a few hefty features (see feature trailer) and a powerful UI, so it might not be the easiest to learn, but should still be simple enough if you played RTS games before.
Zero-K fits all of the criteria you've described in the thread. Totally free, well developed multiplayer, and an active competitive 1vs1 community with top players listed on home page. Regular tournaments.
Greenlight page gives a good summary and some videos/screens: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=247032802
Or here's the download page if you want to jump right in, like I said, totally free no microtransactions or anything: http://zero-k.info/Wiki/Download
This isn't really a "has new features", this is "has announced they want to add new features". So the title is pretty far off.
Do not buy the game in its current state. There is very little in terms of balance/strategy, the economy's pacing is all screwed up, and the game runs shockingly slowly even on a very new machine. By the end of a match, you're going to be looking at 5 frames per second on the best of overclocked machines.
If you want to play an actually-good game that can be run on something other than a supercomputer, check out zero-k, an open source Total Annihilation style game. It is amazingly good, well balanced, and has a persistent unlock system between games that gives you more "variety" to your units without actually giving you outright "more power".
Zero-K. Free/opensource RTS in the style of Total Annihilation. The variety of play is obscene, since unlike TA they've torn out the factions and tiers of units and instead offered you like a dozen opening factories (each with about 9 units) to choose from.
For RTS buffs, there's a pile of other games on the same TA-like SpringRTS engine worth checking out... sadly they're mostly multiplayer-oriented and have dead server-browsers.
Oolite is quite good, but it needs some investment to find the right expansion packs, and it can be a little bit difficult in the early game (it gets better as you equip your ship; seriously, take the easy start). For both issues, ask on the Oolite forum or try your luck on the subreddit.
I haven't tried Warzone2100 in a long time, but as far as RTS go, I think Zero-K (inspired from Total annihilation) should be considered first. It gained some momentum since it came on Steam, and the recent addition of matchmaking with automatic handicap (if you choose that options) makes it a bit easier to find opponents. Or else you can dive in the 'lobster pot' (16vs16 battles) any time. Also, the campaign is very well done, it offers challenges and teach you about the game bits by bits.
We do this all the time, I am really confused whats wrong with that? We are a group of gamers playing a game together. In Anir's clan, mumble clan, this happens all the time. It's normal for people to be in spec and in game in voice chat but I can also tell you they don't cheat. I've been in that clan almost a year and it was habit for people to play together in voice (spec and player) and not cheat.
However, I would actually love to see this game not have "spec-all" ability in a LIVE manner in game. I think it opens up too many issues. Delay by at least 20 seconds for some measure of safty imo.
In my post "http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/33465" I explain I am going to make a clan with the expressed intention of bringing outsiders to ZeroK. I am in the habit of sharing my screen as I play on Discord and then if people like what they see inviting them to play the game itself. Nightroad is an example of someone we were able to bring to the game.
No reference, its based off a height map of Death Valley, NV.
Here is the height map I used: http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7301
Apparently the image I'm using was originally made for an Open Source RTS game.
If you're into Total Annihilation, been various remakes and derivatives of it - the Supreme Commander games, Planetary Annihilation, and various open-source SpringRTS titles that are also derived from TA gameplay - http://Zero-K.info is a fun multiplayer-oriented take on the TA-style of gameplay.
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There will be a 2v2 tournament at 19:00 UTC on the coming Saturday, February 23rd. Click here to see the tournament thread: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/27799
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any one that says zero k is bad hasn't played it for long and if you're talking about language settings check out the wiki ,zero k is complex but very easy when you learn hotkeys go here for wiki http://zero-k.info/ if you dont like zero k there is no reason to diss it
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There will be a 3v3 tournament at 16:00 UTC on the coming Saturday, January 26th. See the tournament thread here: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/27650,
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It's a RTS comparable to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander 1. If you were disappointed by Planetary Annihilation or just want more than it had to offer, give Zero-K a try. Lots of different units, each with different play styles, singleplayer, coop, a defend your base swarm mode, good graphics and performance, active community, casual and competitive multiplayer, also on steam if you like it, I could go on.
Check it out!
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The issues with the AI from the last engine update attempt have been resolved. This time, instead of applying the latest update, we're asking players to test the beta branch. Be sure to report any issues and post if you test so we can judge the effectiveness of the beta branch approach.
In other news, _Shaman is coordinating players to nominate Zero-K for the “Most Fun with a Machine” Steam award and nominations close in two days. See this thread for more information: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/27434
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I don't know how the latest revision works, but it used to be a metagame where factions attack planets. The attacking and defending factions would send players and an attack was resolved in a regular RTS game. Each planet represents a map and each attack would require one ingame battle. Winners would get influence points (so more than one attack was usually required to conquer a planet). Battles were usually 1v1 to 3v3 in size. If an unowned planet was attacked, then both enemy factions had a chance to send defenders.
Each round and through combat players/clans/factions would get resources to construct buildings on planets in the metagame galaxy. By the way, this is how a galaxy looks like. (at the time of writing the metagame didn't start yet). The galaxy map used to advance by one turn for each battle played. Galaxy map buildings would have no effect on the actual battles (though sometimes they used to be visible in the actual maps and could be destroyed there to give an attacker objectives to destroy even if they would probably lose a battle). Buildings would include garrisons/defenses, shipyards for galaxy-map bomber- or dropship construction (the first destroys buildings, the latter increased influence gain for attacks) and others.
Earlier versions of Planetwars used to have semi persistent ingame maps and starting units based on the metagame, but that was quickly deemed imbalanced/no fun or things like that. I haven't tried that version, but that seems understandable.
For more info check out Zero-K's wiki article on PlanetWars. Though chances are it's not up to date.
Maybe it's worth to take a look at the replay list. Probably has the information you're looking for.
Some years ago, before Steam you had to wait a few minutes or hours on a game, depending on the time of day and the game type and size you were looking for. Usually there was one big team (8 to 16 players) room/game running for half the day or more. Smaller games were usually 1v1s or coop vs AI or chicken waves, of which there was probably at at least one running for 90% of the time. No idea how long the current matchmaking takes.
Jump into the pot to get cooked! I'd say it stuck because you used to spend most of your time trying to get people to actually join a game (= jump into the pot). And because commanders and other units were grilled. A lot.
More reading material. (ignore wubrior - it never existed!)
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Ladder play has been so popular that we've decided to run a short 1v1 tournament this weekend, just to get into the swing of things. The format is single elimination within pools stratified by rank. Everyone should be able to sign up and have a decent chance within their pool.
Sign up in this forum thread: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/25212. You can log into the Zero-K forum via Steam if you have an account through Steam on the multiplayer server.
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A metal extractor on a very high yield metal spot. For example a metal spot with a base output of 6 when all other spots only have a base of 1-2 metal. They have larger circles than others. There's a setting to display metal values as numbers below metal spots. That should help identify them.
Terra has one north, one east, one south and one west.
Titan has them near the center. Three east, three west.
Tabula has them in a vertical line in the center. Two north of the river, two south.
(you can usually see them as a larger grey texture than other spots on the map picture if you look closely)
Most of that will be the campaign, every mission uses a different map. There's also a set of 25 default maps for matchmaker, every map with a gold star here http://zero-k.info/Maps .
The game itself is about a 350mb download IIRC
If you're big on the TA style RTSes, I fully recommend Zero-K, it's a remarkably well made game with some unfortunately rough around the edges UX and graphics.
They've really polished the TA formula to a gorgeous sheen and have even implemented some pretty innovative AI and control schemes to help manage massive armies without it degenerating into blob wars. Also in-built terraforming, physics based knockback and all that other procedural goodness.
I used this guide. http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Optimized_Graphics_Linux
I did it on both the host and a i386 chroot to build the packages. I couldn't figure out how to do cross compilation.
IT and Political are actually my stronger suits. I was planning to sell Zero-K action figures, but they aren't designed yet and the market isn't built yet. There is always room to design something else.
IT is by far my strongest suit, but the market seems shaky in the local bench work. I saw some places close down with in the past five years. The places that seem open seem to have a very awkward business model. One of my business consultants say to focus on programming for people online first because I can get clients from anywhere.
I'll suggest a Spring RTS engine ( https://springrts.com/ ) game called Zero-k ( http://zero-k.info/ ) they originated from a modding community for Total Annihilation with gameplay similar to Supreme commander and Total Anihilation.
the best thing about this game is a strong territorial contest and strategic focus forcing constant engagement. Rewarding both micro and macro, terrain is important so you have to make a choice of fortifying position or move to disadvantageous ground for resource. A powerful UI tool set that allow you to carry out your will and last but not least Free.
The worst thing about this game is that the graphic is Meh, no single player campaign, Small community, Hellish learning curve.
If you really want a strategic experience then give it a try. If you can't stand the ugly graphic or the lack of single player just give it a miss.
I know Spring games aren't a drop-in replacement for original TA, but some of them are pretty good! I played a bit of Zero-K and found it to be a pretty solid nod to TA. It also has a fair number of people playing online last I looked, so finding a match (balance notwithstanding) isn't improbable.
Check this out if you like RTS games http://zero-k.info/ its with small yet friendly community. Open source works on both linux and windows. To be honest you will be surprised what random people can make without any corporation support.
Free and open-source RTS Zero-K, one of various games ruining on the Spring engine, is host to many competing AI designs. Furthermore, developing an AI for Zero-K directly contributes to the game, as it's open source and anyone can make use of your AI if you share it.
AIs can be developed for the Spring engine in general as well, but they're actually used significantly with Zero-K.
Because ZK has far more unit types than StarCraft, and a considerably more "physical" model, more generalized solutions may be required. To me, that makes these AIs more interesting than those for StarCraft, where everything is tweaked for specific unit strengths.
Another decent one that's lacking in polish is http://zero-k.info Sounds more like it was some crazy legitimately far-left socialistic stuff. Omega Pirate really does an excellent teacher and got in her space.
~ Stuart98
^^Info ^^| [^^Subreddit](/r/User_Simulator)
I'm not playing any RTS 1v1 either. At least not against human opponents. It's understandable for me that many players just don't like playing alone. Allies can add a lot of fun, action and most important diversity to games. Different players allow you to experience new and interesting strategies not only when you play against them but also when you play along with them. That's a pretty big deal.
Just wanting to share this: there's 52 recorded Zero-K games with 12+ players in the last seven days, one of them a 70 minute long 6v6v6v6 and another one a 38 minute long 10v11 (one player left early so 10v10). It's definitely possible to play with friends.
The tournament lasted six hours and a couple minutes. All casts can be found here! (spoilers)
If anybody feels like watching the replays on their own, they are all listed in this post of the game's official forum (less spoilers, but requires game lobby/engine)
If you like games that are almost 100% macro, check out Zero-K. The units have smart-AI that will dodge attacks and attack while moving intelligently, so you "can" micro, but you don't have to. Much of the game is about finding the right balance between offense and defense, figuring out when to attack and when to consolidate or build up economy. It's also important to hold the battlefield after a fight, because units leave wreckage behind that can be reclaimed for a healthy fraction of the unit's build cost.
Also open source and free. Also it has a tower-defense alternate-game-mode. If you try it, the tutorial is really helpful, and play a few co-op versus AI games to get used to how the game plays because it is very different from starcraft.
Zero-K is quite a fun RTS. It's somewhat similar to SupCom and Total Annihilation, but is open source and completely free to play. Playerbase is small, but passionate. There's also an ELO-based ladder for both 1v1 and team games.
I actually updated my nvidia drivers again, did a full clean uninstall and a clean install and now everything works
I played my first game today of PA! It was incredibly. Is it supposed to be very newbie friendly? I would suggest the PA guys take some notes from Zero-K , a SprintRTS mod!
I gotta toss my vote in for Zero-K. It's a free RTS that runs on Linux and Windows (may be possible to compile for OS X, but I don't know too much about that), and the included "Chickens" mod is a blast to play!
Also, Linux is free, and Linux is awesome. Well, time may not be free, but seriously, Linux is worth switching over to, especially with a Steam port on the horizon.
Depends on what 'massive scale MMORTS' means, it could just be connected nodes, with a map on each node, and a battle would have people connect there. Basically a 'fancy lobby' where there is a 'state' of the global game that depends on individual separate battles.
That said, that is a fun thing to do. The CA game(now Zero-k) on springrts used to do those,(edit: they still do) maybe they still do, you could take a few units with you, or buy buildings to be permanent on a planet. Back then at least, i think they made it maybe a little too slow to get credits for it, you could hardly experiment with it.
Balanced Annihilation mod was supposed to be a clone. The only thing they tweaked was the balance of the game so every unit was useful and no one strateguy dominated all others.
If you want better graphics, that was what Complete Annihilation was, now rebranded Zero-k.
If you are willing to spend time playing a fucking classic with her, D2, some of the mods out there make it a dam good play, and the only keyboard actions you would want are to open inventories, which you can click since you aren't usually in a rush to sell shit =P.
Also many RTS' if you are not looking to play competitively you can run completely with the mouse, no hotkeys required. Been playing this a lot recently, it is a free remake of pretty much the most influential RTS ever imo, good old Total Annihilation. If you decide to play hit me a Reddit mail and I can show you some of the basics. =D
Its not that complicated. Just download and install Zero-K itself from its site. http://zero-k.info/Wiki/Download
It will download and configurre everything you need to play automagically.
If you want to play other Spring games, in Zero-K lobby go to settings and disable "limited mode" and restart it.
There exists an RTS where you CAN do this!!! http://zero-k.info/
You can have two people on one side. One person can do the building and what not, the other person can FPS a unit. Now, that's not the best way to play, it's better to have one person build and the other person micro 5-10 units in attacks/raids, but you can FPS one unit if you so choose.
It just doesn't have the SimCity elements...
But there is also an RTS that has SimCity elements!! It's called Enemy Nations. Much more complicated to play, hard to find / install, and it takes a true tekky to set it up for LAN. But f**king awesome, imho.
Zero-K is probably the best mod available for this engine. Not enough players though, everyone plays Balanced Annihilation instead. Zero-K has the best graphics and most interesting evolution of gameplay in my opinion =)
It even has Chicken Defense, which is Tower Defence, but with TA units!
Previous submissions all about >1yr ago.
Used to like CA(now named zero-k) most, but now been too long ago to tell. Unfortunately the gameplay changes so much :/ also, earlier two factions that don't fit very nicely stylistically have been joined.. Why :/.. And i don't like the 'slowbeam' unit it's behavior is completely unexpected, as it looks like the morty and it just doesn't seem to look right. Edit: meant to submit in r/linux_games, ah well.
Zero-K. Its my favourite game based on the TA Spring engine. Graphics are great and the gameplay is pretty deep too. Widgets/UI is miles ahead of any RTS out there! What Supreme Commander should've been!