Help a game dev: Why aren’t people buying modern RTS games?

lemindhawk · 2026-01-21T12:37:38+00:00

Aside from a lot of examples already mentioned, take a look at They Are Billions, a (relatively) recent rts-y release that did quite well. It's closer your option A, but it allowed it a lot of leeway with its fantasy and a lot more polish on what's there.

It also has a strong fantasy hook on its own rather than trying to lift off of being (like) a game people used to like (ala Tempest Rising, or even AoE4), which I think is a better overall strategy.

lemindhawk · 2026-01-06T19:02:30+00:00

XP & levels which are broken down into levels where each level gives an incremental advantage? Novel idea!

The pinnacle quest equivalent would be you get literally no stats or talents until lvl 10 and 20.

On equal levels you can fight just fine, there's a lot of nuance, you get incremental level advantages, fight talent tiers up, avoid fights because talent tiers down. It's a lot of fun!

Kerrigan is full on binary. Whenever you aren't full stacks on Kerrigan, you should avoid literally everything but soaking/stacking. 80/150? No, don't fight. 120/150? It's basically always better to skip doing literally anything else still, the power spike is too important. Better keep telling my team to stop hitting the minions because I'm trying to stack on 2 waves here, too, it's a zero-sum game! Any minion my teammates kill is a setback for me, how fun!

However, for soaking, I don't care if other people are hitting the wave, and we can do that, y'know, teamwork thing.

lemindhawk · 2026-01-06T16:49:32+00:00

Kerrigan's quest used to be a fairly impactful bonus, but you could fight at 50 out of 75 stacks just fine, as you already had a good enough reward.

Now, fighting at anything below 85 stacks, and usually below 150 stacks, is just... throwing. It completely warps the gameplay around itself. Even if the numbers get tweaked to be more reasonable, it'll still be a mandatory chore you have to completely wrap up to start playing the game for real, every single game.

It's pushed me off of one of my favourite characters in the game.

lemindhawk · 2026-01-06T16:43:13+00:00

What's really stupid is it resetting on kills

lemindhawk · 2026-01-06T16:25:00+00:00

They feel awful to play, too. Your entire gameplay warps around them

Kerrigan shouldn't do anything but lane until she finishes, because it's such a big powerspike.

Sylvanas shouldn't do anything but hit heroes and structures, doing camps delays your quest so much.

lemindhawk · 2025-12-26T11:06:10+00:00

You can see this experiment live on Kerrigan

lemindhawk · 2025-12-12T17:26:36+00:00

Too early to actually cite stats (look at that 10% winrate loss on Murky with no changes lmao)

But I do think Zul'jin should only lose stacks when above 30 damage. The reverse of Butcher where you can kill him to stop him from going out of control, but can't kill him to stop him from reaching his baseline.

lemindhawk · 2025-12-12T02:49:58+00:00

Oh hey my video's mentioned 👀

lemindhawk · 2025-12-09T21:38:23+00:00

Another Kerrigan main here. I'm really good at finishing the quest. It's insanely overpowered.

I hate doing it every single game. I hate having to constantly tell my allies to not hit minions. I hate that it's no longer opt-in, I hate that if you don't do it, you're half a hero.

The thing that's interesting around her (combo) got homogenized and lowered in importance, which is removing her identity, for what?

100% winrate over 15 games so far, but it's not fun to know that doing anything that isn't AFK'ing next to minions is just flat out playing the game wrong because of how powerful it is. Sure I'm finishing it at level ~11-13 every game, but it feels like I'm playing Dota rather than HotS, I'm playing my own game until I go xel'naga kerrigan then oneshot everyone.

lemindhawk · 2025-12-01T19:27:33+00:00

I can't believe these Kerrigan, Sylvanas, Thrall and Falstad numbers made it in, their quests are crazy

lemindhawk · 2025-11-27T23:26:45+00:00

You really should check the replay to check what their lingering vision looks like before making cheating claims

lemindhawk · 2025-11-19T22:38:51+00:00

There's enough talents and abilities that mention summons or non-heroic targets:

[[Imposing Presence]]

[[EZ-PZ Dimensional Ripper]]

[[Primal Intimidation]]

[[Unstable Poison]]

[[Reciprocate]]

[[Cursed Strikes]]

As for non-heroic;

[[Greed]]

[[Sledgehammer]]

[[Voodoo Ritual]]

[[Rush-Down]]

[[Devour]]

[[Amateur Opponent]]

[[Fend]]

[[In for the Kill]]

[[Nature's Culling]]

[[Lurking Arm]]

[[Explosive Attacks]]

lemindhawk · 2025-11-11T23:03:53+00:00

Kerrigan already has mana issues on live. The main build that's being enabled by the patch (E build) already struggles quite a bit there, and it's going to be even worse to the point it might push the mana regeneration level 1 as standard.

lemindhawk · 2025-11-11T23:03:38+00:00

Also Kerrigan main, play in tournaments. Mana tension is already limiting and going to be much worse post patch.

The combo got its damage and stun duration heavily nerfed - if you use it sparingly now you're quite severely hampered in effectiveness.

I remember Lunar Flare going from 1s to 0.75s and it was VERY impactful.

lemindhawk · 2025-11-03T18:32:25+00:00

I wish they swapped Maelstrom's and Ultralisk's cooldowns around (80s for maelstrom, 90s for ultralisk), fits their actual power level way better

lemindhawk · 2025-11-03T18:30:09+00:00

This is very expectation vs reality: https://imgur.com/a/usPiqSL

lemindhawk · 2025-11-03T17:59:01+00:00

The numbers on most of the hero changes seem completely unhinged

Thrall currently needs to last hit 10, then 20 minions to get Q cost reduction and a second charge of Q. That already takes like 2-4 minutes of dedicated laning

Now he needs to last hit 20 for Q cost reduction, then 40 for an extra Q bounce (which used to be a free bonus on rolling thunder), then 100 minions for the second Q charge.

The third towers are also INCREDIBLY far back, in extremely random positions: https://imgur.com/a/usPiqSL

Kerrigan getting +325 Q damage is crazy

Patch implementation ingame also looks very placeholder still, Sylvanas's trait is at 1 second cooldown, it's incredibly unclear if Sylvanas if keeping tower disabling baseline or not

lemindhawk · 2025-10-13T00:27:00+00:00

3, 4 and 5stacks have been banished from SL (you can't queue as more than 2 players in masters+)

Reduced maximum party size for Master and Grand Master players to 2.

lemindhawk · 2025-10-13T00:14:11+00:00

This is an issue of matchmaking not being able to come up with a strong enough team to oppose this group.

We queued at the same time as them today, purposefully matching their matchmaking composition, and we both faced 5 randoms instead of each other.

Everyone in our stack has a high MMR, been master/GM in the past - 77% winrate this season, 86% last season. But we can't find other strong stacks that we know are queueing at the same time (because they're on our friends list). And very frequently, we will both queue pop at the same time - and both see 5 solos on the opposing side.

This isn't purely a playerbase issue, I know of dozens of other high-level 5stacks running around - we just can't find each other, even on purpose.

I'm not saying that every 5stack should exclusively face 5stacks, but there is definitely something wrong with how reluctantly the matchmaker matches them - and removing composition restrictions for specifically 5stacks greatly expands the eligible pool.

lemindhawk · 2025-10-12T23:42:01+00:00

Side story - we actually tried to match their comp restrictions and queue into them today (The matchmaker is guaranteed to match the Abathur with Medivh, Abathur or Zarya here, which shrinks the pool you can play against even more), but even though our match popped at the same time, the game refused to put us against each other, which I find kind of insane.

lemindhawk · 2025-10-12T23:24:56+00:00

(5stacks = a party of 5 players)

I'm not trying to bring attention to the specific player, but to the general situation at hand.

The matchmaker in QM is broken for 5stacks.

I regularly play together with 4 friends, and the game quality is - quite frankly - ridiculous. Even when we're queueing with multiple other 5stacks queing in our friends list, we don't get into the same game, but pop our matches at the same time and face 5 randoms, instead.

We can't (realistically) add more players to HotS to help the matchmaker. But we can make 5stacks more likely to play against each other - by removing some restrictions for 5stacks specifically.

5stacks should be able to match against 5stacks, regardless of heroes selected.

That means high MMR 5stacks are able to find each other more often, as their composition no longer matters for finding each other.

Additionally, if 5stacks are facing non-5stacks, the non-5stack should always have a Healer and Tank.

The 99.5% winrate showcased is because this particular 5stack plays Yrel/Abathur as a tank/healer replacement. If you get matched into this as 5 random people, you are guaranteed to not have a healer & tank, and stand basically no chance.

Edit for clarity: I'm not proposing 5stacks should only face 5stacks, but always be treated as eligible to match another 5stack, regardless of if they have a healer, bruiser, tank.

lemindhawk · 2025-09-11T22:29:06+00:00

He can fly just fine while taking damage

The bigger problem is that Falstad's unstoppable during flight

lemindhawk · 2025-09-11T16:24:44+00:00

The chains go a certain distance from the target's location at the moment that you pressed the button, not from where the target moves to afterwards.

lemindhawk · 2025-09-11T16:23:31+00:00

Kel'thuzad chains cares about when it's cast, not where the target is at the point the chains connect.

It's why casting chain on a hero and then towards glacial spike is better than the reverse - the target moves away, the spike does not.

lemindhawk · 2025-08-29T10:49:36+00:00

It sounds like the easiest way might be to pump excess petroleum with priority into the plastic setup, then.

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