This may be true of the individual players but that is not how SM is structured. If there is a RTS element going on it is between factions...not individuals. Starmade is a game with a persistent universe and a bunch of players, not a one-off RTS battle between two individuals. It is a hybrid that is unlike traditional RTS games.
It's probably just me fuzzing over genre definitions, but what makes an RTS an RTS is fundamentally fighting over resources. Everything you do in an RTS can be seen in terms of resource gain/loss. This means that when someone has a monumental resource advantage it's no longer practical for them to lose.
When you make long-term persistent resources a thing where games last so long people aren't able to participate through the whole thing whoever invests the most resources will ultimately dominate. This makes tactical battles irrelevant to the RTS, because it's impossible to beat an army 10x your size. Like i said, MMO RTS experiments all result in so many strings attached to the RTS that there's effectively nothing left. Tactical combat can be salvaged to a point but that's not what makes something an RTS, and with these battles handled in OOS combat, which they will be after you've played enough to have multiple fleets around, the tactical combat is also lost.
What starmade and it's planned features really reminds me of is
: start in little ship, gradually work yourself up to larger more effective ships, get fleet, get bases, keep growing until you have aaaaall the money, and it's inheriting all of it's problems, while failing a lot of the strengths.
Tactical fleet combat is perfectly doable in this game, but nobody does it because
- It's too damn fiddly. Manually launching/retrieving fighters alone is extremely tedious through the command system, which is pretty much identical to how starmade's is set up. This is NOTHING compared to the headache of replenishing combat losses; buying new fighters, outfitting new fighters, reassigning fighters to carriers after almost every single fight is downright unbearable even with just a single carrier. Then there's boarding, cargo/ammo/fuel transfer between ships
- Big ships never die. If your ship is tanky enough to never lose shields, there's no loss in combat. Even in cases where fighters might be more suitable, constantly losing fighters will chew into your resources and stack more micromanagement on top of you.
- Combat is rarely profitable, and when it is you're better off doing it solo in a good ship. AI is too dumb ( and it's MUCH better than starmade's) to avoid engaging in fights it can't win or automatically withdraw.
- Poor combat ballance with tactical exploits. If you think swarmer spammers are bad you should see what an X3 missile frigate can do. These fuckers will singlehandedly annihilate enemy homesectors without ever taking damage, and you can make titans like this in starmade.
X3 however has a multitude of advantages over starmade. Manufacturing and resource gathering is a lot more involved, progression is appropriately slow making each step you take feel like a real accomplishment and OOS combat still has enough simulation to it that tactics still matter. Cargo capacity is much less ridiculous so transports and by extension trade is much more viable, and since the world is finite, doomsday aliens taking over systems is actually a threat.
Huge sandbox with faction warfare is dumb, unfunny garbage that sounds good on paper, but never works.
