My last game yesterday evening before sleep was a loss after an 8-win streak... now I have to sit at work and think about how I can't wait to jump in again and fight some dudes.
Anyway, I have to live with it somehow.
How many games in a row did you win? I think it might be my record.
Hey,
Today I joined a game called "MEGA NOOB 1v1". I expected it to be a close match, but I got completely wrecked.
So I watched the replay and noticed that he was producing approximately twice as much metal and energy as I was.
For reference, see the image I uploaded. At that point, the game had only just started. I actually had more metal extractors than him (he started with a strange build order), but somehow he was already producing around 60% more metal and 100% more energy than me.
Do you have an explanation for this? Or was he using some kind of handicap setting to give himself an advantage?
Commanders, I am so pleased to announce the first ever official BAR LAN, hosted at the Left Click Lounge in Minneapolis!
If you are local to the wonderful state of Minnesota, or are just looking for another good excuse to visit the Land of 10,000 Lakes, then come on down to Dinky Town to play with your friends and foes alike!
There will be expanded lobbies, special events, and contributor interviews, all livestreamed via the official channels. Maybe even a surprise or two? Who knows! What is known is that this will be the most fun LAN this side of the galaxy!
321 14th Avenue Southeast #2, Minneapolis, MN, 55414, United States
Admission: 15$ USD, with discounted pricing via the Left Click Lounge Discord server.
coordinated by @AidanNaut
Just played a match 5 mins ago where some one in the lobby was able to force people to self d some of there units at random don't know how but a bunch of error checksum messages would pop up when it happened
Happens to half the lobby don't know if it was a player or spectator also could just be shitty severs
Just wanted to give you guys a heads up
https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=883d0e6a20d1741ba7ba2669a82ef8c1
Link for the replay if anyone wants to watch it
When I run a 3 vs 3 with one of the four easy setup maps (the greenish vertical north/south one with the unreachable by foot banks of metal spots and the two lakes .. forgot the name) and play experimental Legion, I see a few odd thing shappening:
Odd bugs :P
Been having a lot more Desync issues of late, either where it crashes me out or well simply put, desyncing where the other players don't move and I'm the only one who is.
Any solutions or any sort of update of late which caused this?
I lowkey suck absolute ass when it comes to 1v1 and to fighting AI alone just due to the macro. And I have always not really been able to get into 1v1s as ai or even players overall just absolutely dominate over me due to early game macro shitting on my extractors and preventing me from even advancing that far in due to lack of recourses.
But when it comes to lets say 4v4 or 8v8 I actually do some solid progress, managing to actually hold my own against other players even while on the frontline. I cant tell if this is a skill issue or not. I have learned so much from players either screaming at me or just outright being kind and civil people.
A longer Glitters, less wide, with 3 Front 3 Mid and 2 Players at the back. For all the ww1 turtle players
That is the question
(Disclaimer: this was heavily assisted by Claude.)
So my setup is:
In the screenshot, BAR is running through llvmpipe — Mesa's CPU software rasterizer — not the GPU. The GPU-accelerated path (Zink → Venus → MoltenVK) crashes on a specific, probably fixable feature gap. Framerate is unusable, but the engine loaded a map, spawned an AI, ran Lua widgets and rendered. Crashes on window resize (separate Mesa bug, workaround: don't resize). As you can see the UI widgets look messed up but they briefly showed correctly at the beginning.
I guess getting into a game at all is already progress, thanks to latest advances in the Venus driver?
Reproduction:
UTM 5.0.3 beta (stable 4.x lacks Venus):
brew install --cask utm@beta
Create a new VM (with virtualize, not emulate):
virtio-gpu-gl-pci, GPU Supported on, Vulkan = MoltenVK, Renderer Backend = DefaultInstall Debian 13 ARM64. Verify Venus loaded:
vulkaninfo --summary | grep -A2 "GPU0"
You want driverName = venus. If you only see llvmpipe, the UTM display settings are wrong.
Install FEX-Emu (the InstallFEX.py path doesn't work on Debian 13):
sudo apt install curl
curl -fsSL "https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xEDB98BFE8A2310DC9C4A376E76DBFEBEA206F5AC" \
| sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/fex.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/fex.gpg] https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/fex-emu/fex/ubuntu noble main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fex.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install fex-emu-armv8.4
FEXRootFSFetcher # pick Ubuntu_24_04
FEXBash -c "uname -m" # should print x86_64
Get BAR (extract — the AppImage's FUSE path doesn't work under FEX):
mkdir ~/bar && cd ~/bar
wget https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/BYAR-Chobby/releases/download/v1.2988.0/Beyond-All-Reason-1.2988.0.AppImage
chmod +x Beyond-All-Reason-1.2988.0.AppImage
./Beyond-All-Reason-1.2988.0.AppImage --appimage-extract
cd squashfs-root
Run through llvmpipe (the working path):
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 \
GALLIUM_DRIVER=llvmpipe \
MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=llvmpipe \
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa \
FEXInterpreter ./beyond-all-reason --no-sandbox
Host a skirmish vs AI, pick any map, don't resize the window.
The broken GPU path uses MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 instead — UTM's QEMU dies with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED: Vertex shader function could not be compiled into pipeline.
Existing issues that could use a boost to get the GPU working:
UTM ships MoltenVK without MVK_USE_METAL_PRIVATE_API=1**.** This single build flag would expose VkPhysicalDeviceFeatures::logicOp, which Zink complains about at startup. The flag exists because it disqualifies a binary from Mac App Store distribution — but UTM's GitHub build isn't App Store, so it could ship with the flag. MoltenVK README documents this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK#optionally-build-with-metal-private-api . UTM maintains its own MoltenVK fork at https://github.com/utmapp/MoltenVK . No existing UTM issue requests this; the closest is DXVK support #7575 (https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/7575), which hits the same root cause — logicOp: 0 blocks DXVK at D3D feature level 10+. Same fix unlocks both. I'll file a new issue and cross-link.
VK_EXT_custom_border_color is closed-as-not-planned on MoltenVK: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1987 . Metal genuinely doesn't expose this. MoltenVK doesn't seem interested. Can we make them change their mind? Another more realistic ask is Mesa/Zink degrading gracefully instead — Maintainer might be responsive to these reports at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues
Separate MoltenVK shader-compilation NULL deref at MVKCmdBindGraphicsPipeline::isTessellationPipeline() on the Zink path. I got a crash with this that should be fixed in MoltenVK.
Mesa/llvmpipe resize crash — SIGSEGV in _mesa_glapi_set_dispatch after SDL_WINDOWEVENT_SIZE_CHANGED, looks like a thread-safety bug.
That's it, I humbly hope this contributes somewhat to progress towards a Mac build :)
Thanks for such a great RTS game :)
I'm still trying to learn how to get macro-eco.. so i can hardly ever afford T3, and i never know what to do when they're coming at me.. and im usually stuck in T2/2.5 trying to figure out bigger eco-scales..
Is there someway for a person still in T2/2.5 to reliably take down tech 3? Or stop them long enough to get to Tech 3?
Like Cortex as the greatest example because of Jugg/Behemoth, how would a player stuck in tech 2.5 deal with a Jugg/Behemoth long enough to finally get to Tech 3 and swing back?
I am not new to RTS games but I am new to these supcom-like games. I usually play Cortex , I start with 2 metal > 3 energy > bot factory > 2 grunts > 1 constructor and go in from there . I can’t seem to defend myself very well and I could go about 12 minutes in then the AI overruns me . I have my command and construction turrets aid in constructions etc. I would like some advice on how to keep up unit products etc. I am also bad with balancing my metal /builder power
Thank you in advance
Hi everyone!
I'm Tim, CEO of the publisher Hooded Horse, currently in discussions with the BAR admin team about potential publishing. I wanted to come into the community and introduce myself. I think the BAR team did an amazing job of laying out the details of what we're discussing, so I'll stick to talking about Hooded Horse and our goals and hopes for the project. In doing so I'll try to answer a few things I've seen come up in discussion.
So first, a brief intro to who we are. Hooded Horse is an indie publisher exclusively for strategic and tactical games. It was sort of an outgrowth from me modding, I created a mod for a DLC for Warband, named VC Balance Mod (https://www.moddb.com/mods/vc-balance-mod). I'm terrible at naming things, and originally I thought I would just mod like 10 minor things that bothered me, then 13 versions later I was buried in endless changelogs and wondering where the 100s of hours went. Then a friend suggested I should found a publisher, I looked around and thought that sounds fun, and then we got started. We're now a little under 40 people, with our goal being to keep publishing the most interesting new strategy games (forever ideally).
And that of course brings us to Beyond All Reason. The game is amazing, the developers behind it are amazing, publishing it would be an absolute honor, and allowing it to reach a far larger playerbase would be exactly the sort of goal that motivated me to found Hooded Horse. So I'm very excited to introduce myself here!
One thing I saw come up in a few comments to the devs' post -- people wondering about whether bringing in a publisher would lead to 'seizing control' or destroying the community-driven project. I thought it might help to explain a bit about how things work from a commercial perspective.
So as the devs laid out in their post, the plan is a version that is sold on Steam that includes a singleplayer campaign, and a free version on the website for multiplayer that is fully cross compatible and offers the same functionality. Some people speculated that this plan wouldn't generate returns and the publisher would start locking multiplayer factions and units or such behind a paywall.
This one is easily answered by just saying -- we have no power to do anything like that and the contract protects the developer's right to maintain the free version. The legal discussions actually dragged on for months, with words being changed this way or that, with the devs expressing their commitment to the free version and ensuring absolutely nothing could threaten it no matter what happens, in the most ironclad way possible.
That having been said, it's also worth directly exploring the incentives and how all this works, because we also have no incentive to want that.
So the way to start understanding this is to ask, why would players buy the Steam version if the free version allows them to experience multiplayer anyway. And there's then discussion of the role of singleplayer campaigns and such. And fair enough, singleplayer is a draw. But there's something more fundamental here -- people buying on Steam generally aren't going to be engaging in a feature by feature cost vs value comparison on what they could accomplish for free. Anyone who wants to download one of our games could probably pirate it in a second, we don't use Denuvo or any of that crap.
People who buy a game do so because they like the idea of supporting the devs, like the support the game is getting, and don't mind what is ultimately a pretty reasonable price for something they are going to play for many hours.
In other words, people buy on Steam because they are being treated well, and feel good about treating the devs well in return, not because someone forces them to.
Maintaining a free version on the website is not in any way a threat to Steam sales. If people play the free version and enjoy it, awesome! If they end up one day deciding they want to support development and buy on Steam, that's awesome too. But even if I were the most greedy, conniving person imaginable, I'd also be smart enough to realize that I don't help that happen by plotting to lock multiplayer features away and trying to force people into buying. That's the kind of shortsighted behavior that costs a company big.
And anyway, I'm not especially focused on profit. By virtue of us being entirely private (and me owning just under 70% of the company, and having the other shareholders all be individuals and no institutions or anyone with expectations of me) -- we don't really face any financial pressure. I even wrote into our corporate bylaws that we can prioritize ethics and artistic integrity and such over profit, just so everyone who ever invested in us early on knows what to expect. The point of the company isn't maximizing money, the point is helping amazing devs and strategy games. It's nice to get good returns, give our staff nice raises and build out better capabilities to help devs better, but the point is the great games.
But again, even if I were maximizing for profit, I would play the long-game and do everything I can to treat players and developers right. What's pretty much the most profitable game company out there? Valve. And they got where they are by doing exactly that, taking care of players and offering opportunities to developers, doing the right thing. I believe there's a real moral and ethical commitment behind that by the Steam team, but in the end the best long-term way to build a company that does great is not to do a bunch of short-sighted stuff that attempts to milk players for money, but rather to take care of them as your highest commitment.
So that's the plan. A Steam release alongside a great free version on the website.
To be clear, the contract is express in stating that the funds we are giving the developer to help with development can be fully used to enhance the game as a whole, both the free and paid version, because they are essentially the same thing. Yes, part will go specifically to the singleplayer campaign, but plenty will be used for multiplayer as well, and the contract is clear the devs can fully use the funds in that way. Whatever is best for the game as a whole. Anyway, we never control devs in any of our publishing contracts, we never put in milestones or requirements, we only work with people we trust to make the right decisions themselves.
Now I have seen some people ask why the Steam version can't be free to play and then rely on in-game monetization. This is just a bad model for indie strategy games to be sustainable honestly. We've never published a free to play game, we're always a complete game to own for a reasonable price, because that's what works well for everyone. I don't want to be thinking about user acquisition values or such, we just want to focus on having good games and showing them to people.
I've also seen some people ask why the devs need us to get on Steam. Now, certainly, funding is a good benefit. But honestly at Hooded Horse we are mostly a publisher used by developers who would do fine self publishing and often they have all the funding they need. If you look at the games we've published, some already had 500,000 or more wishlists before they signed on for us to publish (Manor Lords, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era), they clearly could have self published just fine. Some were already released into Early Access and doing amazing before they brought us on to take over publishing (Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, Empires of the Undergrowth). And some were already released into version 1.0 and came out around 10 years ago and just brought us on because we enjoyed working together on the later game and they wanted us to help out with the earlier too (Battle Brothers, Darkwood). Mostly we sign devs because we all like each other and like working together, and think we would do an even better job together.
Now to be clear, we haven't finished the publishing discussions, so I'm still sort of hoping and getting excited but nothing finalized yet. But very much hoping. There's 3 of us over here at Hooded Horse who are absolutely insanely excited about this and have been working on things during this discussion process. Myself of course. Snow, my wife who is also our President and CFO, and Mandy (MandaloreGaming) our Chief Player Experience Officer -- we've been having these discussions and getting more and more excited, not the least because of how much we like everyone we've met from the BAR team -- the devs are truly amazing people.
Anyway, I'm incredibly excited about the chance to help BAR reach a wider audience. The game is wonderful, and so many new people out there are going to be thrilled to discover it. And I would feel honored to serve as publisher and play a small part in its amazing journey.
After reading Ptaq and Tim's comments I was left feeling optimistic about the future of bar, and to a certain extent still am. However, I am feeling increasingly skeptical, not because of the publishing agreement generally, but because of how the bar admins are communicating.
When I went to discord to find a link to the leaked documents, I was shut down hard with a half dozen people insisting there was nothing to see. Eventually I found the doc, and it makes sense why it's being hidden.
Before I list out my concerns, I'd like to first say that the majority of what PtaQ said is corroborated by the document. Hooded Horse is an excellent choice for a partner, and their interests are well aligned with the communities.
However, several things were clear
Edit: Based on comments from some devs, I don't believe this to be true anymore. It sounds like there was some initial confusion rather than dishonesty.
The deal will be signed even if it means the majority of contributors walk. There is a developer survey, so there's clearly some dialogue still happening, but language to the effect of "if anyone wants to still contribute" (one example of many) imply that it's very likely a significant number of other devs will walk. This is especially concerning considering how the legion devs recently left, for unknown reasons, and no information was ever released.
There is no profit cap. It isn't a nonprofit, and there are no protections from the new owners pocketing significant profit.
The only possible way to not be suspicious is if you've never been part of any business agreements, and believe the bar admins to be saints that hate money.
The solution is quite simple:
Embrace the open source ethos that made BAR great, and be more transparent. Large corporations have to hide information behind closed doors, but small projects like this don't benefit from so much secrecy.
Introduce a mechanism for legally capping profits. Maybe that means turning bar into a nonprofit. Maybe that's just some strict bylaws. I'm no lawyer, but something more substantive than "I pretty promise we will reinvest the money".
Create a plan to compensate new devs who make significant contributions, but don't want to be salaried. Say someone hopped on board and started contributing like crazy to make bar scalable. Maybe that person still has a job, and doesn't plan to continue contributing at that level forever. The bar admins should 1099 them and give them a payout. There should be a process to make sure this is all done fairly with clear terms. In addition to being fair, this will also greatly fix the disincentive problem, because then any contributors will know their time will be rewarded fairly, if it extends beyond sporadic commits.
A lot of speculation what everybody thinks, but besides the developer poll it could also be interesting to see what the community thinks.
My son likes to play the Minecraft Mod [Reign of Nether RTS](https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/reign-of-nether-rts-in-minecraft) against me. As a child I played the Command & Conquer games against my brother.
- in BAR there is some sort of Base Building?
- over the dev settings I can activate the German translation?
- are there recommended settings we should use staring to play against each other?
- is it possible to make the game harder for one of us? (I might lose all the time when my son learned the mechanics)
Edit: son lost the first match. He thought he could rush with air units. Now he wants to play against the AI
Besides the main purpose of defending against the other teams bombers and air / supplying ligut and heavy trans. What are some other ways air can support the battle / team. Id like to try playing air but it seems like you just pray ur teams front is better than the other teams. I’d like to offer some impact on the match.
I notice that Cortex has a very well-developed ethos for its relationship with AI based on its history with the All-Fathers. Oh the other hand, Armada’s use of AI and view of automation in general is notably glossed over. Doesn’t come up at all. With such a noted obsession toward all kinds of technological progress, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something I’m missing.
Or, to put it in shorter terms, how does one tackle these questions when you remove Cortex’s concern about moral agency?
Hey folks!
I'm a coordinator for a 20+ person LAN party on the UK south coast. We're thinking about scheduling BAR as our RTS for the next event.
We'd love any advice you can offer on overcoming the learning curve, as realistically we'll only play for about 2-3 hours. Are there any ways to make it easier and reliably fun for newbies who might never have played before, and don't have the opportunity to deep-dive into the game's mechanics? Any settings we can configure to keep it light and reduce noob frustration?
Thank you!