RTS, together with 3D shooters, belonged to the list of genres where many said it's impossible to produce good games on mobile phones. So far, these sceptics have always been proven wrong, with Fortnite and PUBG being the two titles that showed that 3D shooters can be done well for mobile devices.
A recent high-level tournament game – you can easily watch replays of top players in the app.
So, what does make Rivals a good game?
Some key reasons are:- It's optimized for the mobile screen, e.g. making the hard choice to limit the map size to a single screen & use discreet hex fields to make command entry simpler and more precise. And the fast pace (games take 8 minutes max, often below 3 minutes) makes it suitable to be played in a varied range of everyday situations.
- Micro management is reasonably varied and non-trivial to execute.
- Whilst command giving is limited to hexes, you can pretty precisely select your units and give the right pathing commands.
- You can swiftly change units' positions to make them fight against the right enemy units, optimizing damage dealt vs taken.
- Stacking units is possible, but not trivial. And depending on the unit, it can be very beneficial.
- It's very useful to be able to issue significantly more than 100 precise commands per minute (known as APM to RTS players), even though it's not necessary in each situation.
- Multi-tasking is non-trivial. Yes, it's possible to keep a tab your usually 3-6 units, your harvester, and your opponent's units and movements. But it's not easy, and even top players make mistakes due to reacting a bit too late, or forgetting about a unit on the rim of the map for a couple seconds.
- Decision making has multiple layers.
- You need to decide on your deck and openings.
- You need to react and adapt to what the opponent does. Countering their units.
- You benefit from reading your opponent – what units do they have in their deck beyond those you've seen? What is their game plan?
- You need to decide when it's worth contesting a "nuke" (the game revolves around up to 3 nukes that each kill half of your opponent's base, and destroying it is the goal of the game)
- If you want to contest a nuke, you need to decide how and what the best way is. Suiciding a unit at exactly the right time? Blocking all hexes in a pad? Blocking the path for your opponent? Or just fair & square fighting and killing opponent units?
- You need to have your economy in mind. Do you build 0, 1 or 2 harvesters? When? When do you rebuild them when lost? When do you deliberately play cheaper, weaker units to save a bit for expensive units or a tech switch?
- It has fair game modes. While the main matchmaking queue means you can meet players with higher or lower "unit levels", tournaments and training matches with friends can be played at exactly fair levels.
- It has a great replay functionality. Not only does this allow you to review your losses to improve, but you can also share replays with your friends, and even watch replays of the top players to be inspired and entertained.
Rivals is about Nod & GDI troops fighting over control of a nuclear silo.
How does Rivals compare against classic desktop RTS?
StarCraft: Broodwar is the gold standard of RTS all-time, and basically the cradle of eSports. It is still played competitively today, more than 20 years after it was introduced. Some people might prefer WarCraft 3, Age of Empires 2, or even some title of the C&C series over it – but everybody should agree to it being an incredibly challenging, competitive and well-balanced RTS.
With the much smaller maps, of course decision making and micro management in StarCraft: Broodwar are much more challenging. Even with 400 APM and 20 years experience, no one plays StarCraft 1 perfectly, not even remotely. Whereas it's fathomable that near-perfect Rivals play could be possible.
But as someone who played more than 15,000 games of StarCraft: Broodwar (both back from 1998 to 2004, and again after StarCraft: Remastered was released), I'd still say the variety of play, and the skill ceiling, of Rivals is very high, and I enjoy it much more than many badly balanced RTS where micro management often played a small role, and decision making was often not very deep.
Hence, I believe that many StarCraft: Broodwar players would enjoy Rivals, and should give it a try. A plethora of Korean players in Rivals, and even some former famous StarCraft players such as HayprO being active in the top100, might be anecdotal evidence for that.
It's a F2P game with some P2W mechanics – do I have to pay money to compete?
I will write a longer article on this matter. But the short answer is: "Yes and no".
Reasons that there is no need to some money:
Reasons that there is no need to some money:
- Many of the top100 players even in the open ladder are players who never invested any money.
- Tournaments (of which there are some already) are played on equal footing, i.e. only your skill matters.
- Even outside of equal-level tournaments, there's reasonable unit level caps for the open matchmaking (depending on your league) and especially the weekly events where the cap is even lower.
- Unlocking all units takes about 2 months, and even after a week you have a deck that is competitive in tournaments.
- In comparison to other F2P games, the free rewards are pretty good. If you an hour every day, you can max out the pretty generous free rewards that allow you reasonably quick progression. Within 1.5 months, you can get your units to L9, which is barely competitive up to the top100.
- If you're a top player, you can earn even decent amounts of the "premium ingame currency", further accelerating your progress significantly.
Reasons why you might want to spend some money:
- Beyond the free rewards, the most efficient way to spend the "premium ingame currency" is an activity where you need to spend about $/€1 per day if you play reasonable amounts. This accelerates your progress significantly. and it's not prohibitively expensive.
- You might chose chose to pay money to accelerate progression even further. The game is free, and there are ways for whales to spend thousands – but of course the viability of the business model also depends on normal fans like me to spend some money.
A video on the matter on what to do if you do not want to spend money
Isn't it frustrating to play against players with higher levelled (i.e. better) units?
It can be, but I believe it also depends on your mindset. A player I know (hi Nhiyla!) often has the negative view:
- Losing vs higher levels? Tilt! Annoyance!
- Winning vs higher levels? Wasn't my skill, was just they being so bad.
I tend to take the opposite view.
- Losing vs higher levels? Due to the "challenge match" system, it can even accelerate my progress. And if I lose, I can blame it on the levels.
- Winning vs higher levels? Incredibly rewarding. "I showed 'em"
So I cannot promise you that you won't be annoyed, but at least I'm not nearly as much annoyed by it as I would have expected.
Plus, except if you're really good (thus boosting your matchmaking rank quickly), you will not play that many games against higher levels. Many games will be very fair, especially as a level difference of 1-2 can be outplayed if you're the better player.
Ok, you've got me interested. Where can I learn more?
- You can download Rivals in the Android App Store and the Apple App Store
- Use the Rivals reddit to follow the community and ask your questions
- Join the official Reddit discord; many of the good players hang out and often answer tons of questions
- There's some good YouTube channels, such as Captain Benzie and Excoundrel
- You can also find Rivals on Twitch
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