The real-time strategy genre has been attempting a new wave for a while now. Many have stepped up to the plate, inspired by the pillars of the '90s and early '00s, but success stories have been fewer and farther between. For Uncapped Games, its targeted vector of success with Battle Aces doesn't just involve rekindling the old flames; the studio wants to streamline the competitive RTS into a focused blue jet of unit-building, army managing goodness.
I played a new preview build of Battle Aces that spotlights some new units and its two-player co-op vs. AI mode. If you missed PC Gamer's first hands-on with the RTS, here's the elevator pitch: Battle Aces is a real-time strategy game with significantly less friction when it comes to both technical execution and build options. Workers form on their own, bases pop up at the nearest expansion slot, and you have some basic tech options and a "deck" of eight units to build that you bring into each match.
This 10-minute, hyper-focused, semi-automated team-up feels like a concentrated dose of RTS in its raw form. It's like a blitz variant of StarCraft 2. Per former SC2 multiplayer lead David Kim, now senior game director for Uncapped, Battle Aces extends out from his time on Blizzard's RTS franchise.
"Around the time we started development on Heart of the Swarm, I've had this thought of, 'why do we have to continue to put so much pressure on RTS players to have to master these basic, I guess, execution elements before they can experience the core fun?'" Kim said.
The learning arc of StarCraft, as both Kim and many other players will attest to, is not just learning to properly manage your Blink Stalkers or perfect timings. Micro-execution mattered; getting a worker out, expanding, and handling the less-glamorous aspects of small army management could make or break a big match.
Kim prototyped a successor RTS at Blizzard, but it was canceled, and ever since he was looking for opportunities—"both within Blizzard as well as elsewhere"—to make it happen. While the allure of a StarCraft 3 might have made him stay put, ultimately he left to make Battle Aces. "At the end of the day, Uncapped Games was the best place because it had the right people that we could attract the right amount of freedom to explore this exact game, focus on the fun first, rather than things like business-first, or anything like this."
At first, I was a little wary of the concept. I don't pretend to be a StarCraft pro or anything, but I grew up treasuring my Battle Chest, staying up late to watch broadcasts from Korea, and played in a few tournament brackets. To me, worker automation sounded wonderful, but I was less enthused about sanding down the tech and build options to an 8-unit deck.
For my first few matches I tested out the new unit options, which put some "Big" units in the early-game mix with the knight. There are several tech level upgrades players can make throughout the game, which gradually unlock the full use of their deck. While tier one units can be built from the jump, you'll need to invest resources to get to tier three, where some really powerful and potentially harder-to-counter units await.
My knights were powerful, but cost more than some of the cheaper tier 1 options. Units are defined by a quick short-hand in Battle Aces that helps you eyeball balance: "Splash" unit types can wipe out "Small" ones, for instance, and "Anti-Big" does just what the label suggests. Micromanaging my knights to whittle down waves of smaller units, picking off the weaklings while making sure to not get surrounded, gave me some of that classic RTS feeling. Picking which units to tech into over time, and how to use them, became much more important.
Kim brings up a scenario where a player focuses on the Katbus, a heavy airship that can seriously put out some damage if the opposing player doesn't have a good counter. "Even in that scenario, I can still do stuff, right?" said Kim. "Like, it's not game over, because I can try to do something in tier one, I could try to do something in tier two, etc. It's not so simple in that, 'as long as you get the Katbus, you win.'"
Essentially, a player could take out the Katbus rusher before they ever get to unlock their win condition. That's where the deckbuilding aspect, similar to Hearthstone or Clash Royale, starts to show up and the broader picture comes into focus. Thinking about your composition, tech build-up, and having answers to potential counters becomes a mind game before the match even starts. In some ways, I wonder if that means the action and reaction of Battle Aces will have to happen between matches, like sideboarding, rather than inside matches, where a player could try to pivot an early build order into a different route.
But Battle Aces is certainly built to play fast. There's a 10-minute timer, and few of my co-op vs. AI matches got close to the limit. Combat feels breezy compared to the potential slugfests of a long StarCraft match.
With new unit additions, skin options, and the battle pass-esque Warpaths shown off, the question of microtransactions came up. Kim says Uncapped wants to do a standard free path and premium path, and that players had noted that new units for the next beta phase were locked into the premium track.
"Our response was, I mean, you do want to try that too, among other things," said Kim. "But we want to try various things and then make the right call eventually. But for now our focus is really on testing the functionality of features, etc. of the tests, and we do want to worry about MTX after we have kinda decided on what the most fun version of Battle Pass, of Warpath, of contracts, etc., is first."
That answer doesn't assuage any concerns of units being locked to a premium battle pass, but the hope is that Uncapped Games is listening to what its community wants. There's certainly an expressed hunger out there for RTS games, but recently sequels and spiritual successors (Homeworld 3, Stormgate) have struggled to appeal to more than a small handful of players. Battle Aces seems to be trying to iterate, a dangerous prospect compared to a safe revival like Age of Mythology: Retold, which has held onto a healthy number of players.
But Kim seems determined to explore the possibility space of RTS. When I asked him why he chose to stick with real-time strategy, he noted the fantasy of the commander, versus the fantasy of the hero: being the guy in the chair, rather than the hero on the ground. But I also liked this:
"For me it's very personal, because [real-time strategy] is my favorite genre of all time, and I just can't accept the fact that players, or I guess developers even, take the stance of 'the end-all peak of RTS is StarCraft 2 and nothing can ever be better than StarCraft,'" said Kim.
It's hard to think that we've reached the end of what's possible in this space, and Battle Aces is trying to prove there's still more room to explore. Maybe by lessening the mechanical burden, rearranging where we make our strategic decisions, and finding new ways for us to slam our death-ball blobs together, Kim and Uncapped will tap into something special in the process.
