Submarine Titans

Submarine Titans is a classic RTS. It is different than traditional RTS in the fact that your units are able to sit at one of five elevation levels and you are population capped by your own resources. I picked this game up for $5 in 2001 and fell instantly in love. The visuals are really nice (for the time), the music is rocking, and it always feels great blowing up submarines. The game comes with 3 factions, the White Sharks, Black Octopi, and the Silicons. There are no good guys per se in the story so playing as any faction is a treat. The White Sharks and Black Octopi are rival factions that hate each other. The White Sharks have very traditional subs, lots of armor, lots of torpedoes. The Black Octopi went for the sci-fi route and equiped laser on most everything. The Silicons are an alien species that happen to crash on the planet during their interstellar travel. They wish to collect enough resources to get off our planet and go home. The game plays very similar to other RTS of the era except there are no hero classes and no population limit out of the box (you can cap it in skirmish). The game has 4 resources. Metal is used in almost every thing you do. Corium is an element brought by the aliens and allows for some of the more exotic units. Gold is used for research. Air is required for buildings. Managing these resources isn't extensive, however, unlike traditional RTS where your resources are deducted when you click build unit, Submarine Titans allows you to build anything regardless of available resources. That means you can quickly need more mats than you are bringing in and all your production will come to a hault. The Silicons use different resources and play unique compared to the human factions. They share the need for Corium, but also require Energy for research and Silicon for everything. Structure building is unique since they do not have a builder unit like the human factions. I ran out of space so get the game for a $1 and have a lot of fun

I played the demo version a lot in childhood until I could have the full one. I still remember the activation code haha. This is an old school RTS with very interesting mechanics and poor explored even today: build (and war) on the ocean floor. Unfortunately there is still no adaptation for wide or ultrawide resolutions, but you can have fun without problems.

I loved this game as a child but playing it now shows some serious flaws. The UI is too small and the controls are quite janky. Battles end up being a case of who runs out of resources first.

maybe i am not being fair because i have not put hours into this game and have only played the tutorial and it is possible this game might grow on me but my first impressions are not great, i consider myself an RTS guy and have played most of them so know my way around these type of games but i just find this game tedious and confusing, for example have to tell a resource gatherer how to do it's job is a bit annoying, also it doesn't feel intuitive to me? like it hasn't employed many of the standards of many RTS games that came before. if you want one of these type of games then get supreme commander or total annihilation instead. and please understand that i am not saying it's a bad game or anything but not easy to get into, so if you are very patient and have time to burn( i do not ) then by all means get this game!

I remember reading about this game in gaming publications back in the early 2000s and I was always intrigued by its premise. Unfortunately, I just didn't have the means to play it since, even at the time, it seemed like a pretty niche title that nobody in my social circle owned or even had a copy of. Now having finally tried it after all those years, I can tell that it could easily become one of my all-time favorites had I played it as a kid. The game has a very immersive, ominous atmosphere that makes my imagination run wild. Sure you can tell that it's old judging by its graphics, but you can't beat that 2D aesthetic that's unique to RTS games from that time. The sprite work is teeming with detail. There are plenty of random corals, air bubbles, and underwater fauna strewn across each map, while every ship and building is rendered in great detail and spiced up with fancy animations. It's just great to look at and the atmosphere is further enhanced with appropriately muffled, underwater sound effects and ambient soundtrack. Gameplay-wise it's not too dissimilar from other RTS of the time, like Starcraft or Command & Conquer. There are some incidental differences when it comes to technology tree and unit balancing or design, but at face value, Submarine Titans plays very similarly to its more famous counterparts, with its base-building, objective-based missions, and three distinct factions to play as. Ergo, if you've ever enjoyed any of those other real-time strategy games that I mentioned, you'll probably have a blast playing this one. The game's one standout feature is its strategic depth. Quite literally, because other than moving your units across a 2D plain, you can also position them vertically at different underwater altitudes, thus providing an additional layer to tactical maneuvers or map traversal. The only thing that I found a bit underwhelming was the story, which is rather minimalistic and lacks any distinct characters like in Starcraft, for example.