A New Strategy Genre Grows Up: Survival Chaos, my New Favorite Game
I’ve had an obsession recently with a mod for Warcraft 3. It’s called Survival Chaos. I want to talk about it because it’s part of a genre of strategy games that hasn’t had a big success yet, and this feels like a big evolution, maybe even a breakthrough. It’s rare to see a new video game genre emerge like this, and nobody ever writes about this while it’s happening. The history of Auto Chess, the other recent genre to come out of Warcraft 3, is almost completely lost. (I was able to find a very similar map called “Pokemon Defense” from 2010, but that’s about it…)
I am not sure if the genre has a good name yet since it’s never been big. In StarCraft 2 it’s called “Tug Of War” so I’ll go with that. The basic idea is to make a RTS where you don’t control your units. You just build buildings, the buildings automatically make units, and you watch the units fight automatically. You mostly make decisions about the macro: When to invest in your economy, what units you should invest in, what upgrades you should get. Before we go any further though, let’s just watch a video of someone playing the game:
Probably Dance 