The Headquarters is the first building you create and must be protected at all costs. Like any good RTS, your first job is to acquire resources and then start turning these into structures that will eventually form your first base. As you rift into a new zone you will send foliage, fauna to the afterlife in the most spectacular fashion: think the Terminator time jump but a little more messy. This game works so well due to a number of clever design decisions by the team at Exor Studios. However, in this game the only unit you take direct control over is Mr Rigs and therefore some veteran strategy fans might be getting a little worried at this point but let me set you at ease. The creation of units that the player can then command is seen by many as a fundamental part of any RTS and indeed it is in the conventional sense. The term ‘real-time strategy’ was actually coined by Brett Sperry in the promotion of Dune 2 way back in the early 1990s. It seems to me that the team at Exor Studios have been paying attention to these lessons when designing their own offering. The latter title also showed how a clever UI could make commanding hundreds of units a breeze. It also had a huge mech that acted as a mobile HQ and this same idea carried on in Supreme Commander. In 1997 Total Annihilation was released and it gained a huge following due to the wonderful unit design and flashy explosions proving that visuals could enhance an already well-trodden formula. Then defend your new digs against enemy attacks and eventually decimate your opposition with a larger or superior force. The basic premise has always been the same gather resources from the environment while establishing some sort of base or settlement. Over the years we have seen many variations of this genre, from the Command and Conquer series, Age of Empires and Starcraft to name a few. This was absolutely fine of course as the magic of RTS games is how they play: as Dune 2 so effectively illustrated. Real time strategy games have been around since the dark ages of gaming, back when a few well-placed pixels were considered the height of graphical wizardry.
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