So I recently bought and played the indie retro game Loria. It is a love letter to the RTS games of yesteryear. It seems to draw the most inspiration from WarCraft II and WarCraft III in terms of basic mechanics and aesthetics.

The experience made me wish there was a similar retro clone of StarCraft. Sound confusing? Let me explain: StarCraft, even remastered, still suffers from the technical limitations of 1998. That most pertinent to the community is that it really doesn't support modding. Sure, there are tons of amazing mods that hack the executable and use other workarounds, but ideally modders shouldn't have to use workarounds like that.

From a game mechanics perspective, a mod-friendly engine would allow for more innovation on the RTS formula, and not just in terms of adding new units. For example, the forgettable SC clone Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis had three resources, only two of which were used by any one race in an asymmetrical design move, and a unique resource for each race. Something like that could dramatically alter gameplay.

I had thought that OpenBW would be the holy grail of SC modding since it wouldn't have all those hardcoded limitations, but the OpenBW project hasn't shown activity in two years. I think it is safe to say that it is dead and that remastered killed it.

On vaguely related note, I feel that the SC lore is more detrimental than helpful. I actually liked the Confederacy, Conclave, and Overmind as storytelling tools, so them all being killed off in SC1 in favor of Mengsk, Kerry and Duran didn't endear me.

What do you think?

There was the game They Are Billions that reminded me a bit of Starcraft. Would be cool to have a real RTS on that engine.

There's also Factorio that shares similarities with Starcraft, but it's not quite an RTS.

you can check Rusted Warfare with WarRust mod

this game is more like TA, esp. this top down view on unit. But still its nice.