Warzone 2100

[OvermindDL1]

Warzone 2100 was a Real-Time Strategy game that came out about the same time BZ2 did, had a lot more patches (that did a lot more then just fix bugs and balance even, some were mini-expansions in their own right).

About a half-decade ago the source was open-sourced (sans a few things like the sound engine, which the community promptly wrote a replacement for) and the community kept developing it. Only thing not released were the videos (although the codec had long since been reverse-engineered). A couple of years ago the videos were officially released so they could be legally downloaded thus making the open-source version of Warzone 2100 complete, single player and all. To this day it is still getting upgraded for newer systems, getting balanced and stabilized and so forth and still has a vibrant modding community due to the ease of modding the engine.

The game itself uses a standard tech tree with researching to unlock the various parts of it. in the stock game there is about 250 research 'nodes', which if you were to research them all in multiplayer you would become about god incarnate in the game, after about six hours, consequently you follow a path based on your play style, but it is all quite well balanced. The buildings are pretty stock, build oil derricks on oil nodes, they generate resources akin to how BZ2's extractors do. Your main command base that supplies your radar (you can still 'function' without it, but not very well as every building other then derricks requires this to already be built), this is the only building you start with as well. Various factories for land/cyborg/air units, research buildings, etc... The units are quite unique in this game compared to others. When you research you research various bodies, weapon, and mobility styles. You design your units in a designer choosing a body, hardpoint, and mobility style. The body supplies armor and power in various mixtures. The mobility style can be anything from wheels to tracks to hovercraft to aircraft (VTOL's). The hardpoint is where you put on the weapons or other things, weapons being everything from basic projectile weaponry to rockets of various forms to beams-of-death later on, and other non-weapon hardpoints are things from scanners, repair, command-craft (which enhance the targeting accuracy of units it controls *vastly*).

The SinglePlayer storyline basically says that their was a nuclear war on earth (which as you find out later on was not caused by what you think it was) and you one of the commanders of one of the 'settlements' of humans remaining and your group found and reactivated one of the old military command posts and you start working back up in the sundered world. Not a bad story actually, and the way it introduced new technologies is actually pretty fun.

Well worth a play through SinglePlayer, and multiplayer is always fun, and multiplayer allows you to start at various tech levels so if you want a high-end-tech match from the get-go you can and so forth.

The mods for it abound by tremendous amounts. The more popular ones remove a lot of comparatively worthless technologies, add new unique ones, and just rebalance it all. The more unique ones do more odd things of course. And map-making in the game is almost trivially easy so there is a whole host of maps as well.

http://wz2100.net/

[SkyNET]

This game is pretty much about one-upping the other guy technologically. One of the few games where I like the research system.

[OvermindDL1]

Heh, yeah, I know.

P1: Hah, fear my hovercraft, the river will not protect you now!
P2: Taste my VTOLs!
P1: Oh now try to get through my new anti-air death defenses!
P2: Taste my new multi-rocket ICBMs!
P1: Screw that! "INCOMING, LASER, SATELLITE, STRIKE"
P2: Boom went my defenses, but while you did that, taste my army of dragon bodies!
P1: Oh my, many of them seem to be joining my forces, now how did that happen?
...etc...

[SkyNET]

The game got pretty ridiculous by the time 1.10 came out

Then there were the 1.11-1.12 community patches, not balanced but neat. I stopped playing around then, and I couldn't get the new community version working on this comp.

[OvermindDL1]

The open-source version works on just about anything now, should give it a try.