Stormgate Is a Very StarCraft-y RTS Made By Ex-StarCraft Developers

ign.com:

Is that brimstone I smell? It seems like the forces of the underworld are a bit upset we didn't get any StarCraft news at BlizzCon this year. But Frost Giant, where many veterans of Blizzard's now-defunct RTS team have banded together, is giving us the closest thing we'll probably ever get to a StarCraft 3 with Stormgate. And over the last few months, I've gotten up-close and personal with its second major faction: The Infernal Host. These are the bad boys of the upcoming RTS, and if you were a Zerg main in StarCraft, I think they'll make you feel right at home. That home might be covered in spikes and actively on fire, but I'm not here to judge.

Much like StarCraft's Zerg or Warcraft 3's Undead, the Infernal Host is Stormgate's spread-corruption-across-the-map faction, with a new mechanic called Shroud that swirls in a radius around your main base building and defensive towers. Unlike the Zerg and Undead, you don't have to build on Shroud. You can plop structures down anywhere you want. But Infernal units standing on it will slowly fill up a secondary health bar – what the devs are currently just calling "white health" – that makes them extra tanky. This is a great natural deterrent to early harassment, since even your workers get access to it. White health begins to degrade when you're not standing on Shroud, though.

This encouraged me to build up a huge critical mass of troops on my Shroud, then send them in all at once while they were at their beefiest. Little groups of units don't necessarily do well deploying to far corners of the map where they can't top up. Though, of course, you can always set up forward outposts if you need a little more juice. These wave tactics are encouraged by other Infernal mechanics, too.