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Oh, also, not worth a full writeup but worth mentioning is Achron - a mostly mediocre RTS that had one very cleverly executed concept: the ability to send your units back in time. This could actually ripple throughout a game, so if you sent a bunch of units back in time to blow up a factory, the damage would propagate through the timestream up to and including retroactively destroying units that would have (and in fact originally did) come out of the factory in the future were it not to have been destroyed. I think I got the tenses on that right. An example can be found here. This further complicates the matter of cause and effect by having the mech destroy its own factory! Jossar fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Sep 28, 2018 |
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Sep 28, 2018 22:45
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Dandywalken posted:Mental Omega for Yuri's Revenge would be absolutely amazing if you could save your drat campaign mid mission. Last I played you couldn't. Good news everyone, as of 3.3.3, MO uses a version of Ares that lets you save again.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:00
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Mordja posted:Good news everyone, as of 3.3.3, MO uses a version of Ares that lets you save again. I just saw! This is definitely awesome news. Absolutely recommend this mod to anyone who was into RA2. It even has unique Coop missions!
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Sep 29, 2018 02:22
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Dandywalken posted:I just saw! This is definitely awesome news. Absolutely recommend this mod to anyone who was into RA2. It even has unique Coop missions! It's another prime example of the way mods, made by enthusiasts, over a long period of time can have more complexity than a commercial game can ever hope for, either due to budgets, time constraints, or the need to keep things simple so as to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. See also: Shockwave/Contra/Rise of the Reds for Zero Hour, or any one of the many sperg mods for Star Wars:EAW.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:26
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Jossar posted:Would it be worth importing my writeup of Age of Empires 2 here? That thread's probably going to get lost to history and since it's tangentially relevant i'd prefer if it lived on in some form in a more general thread. In either case, I might consider writing up some of the old Impressions Games city builders. I would definitely like to read that! Please do share.
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Sep 29, 2018 02:29
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As requested: Age of Empires II, Age of Kings is a Real Time Strategy game originally developed in 1999 by Ensemble Studios as the sequel to the highly successful Age of Empires. The primary difference that defines the sequel is that rather than being set at the beginning of civilization leading into the late classical period, instead it displays cultures from all over the world during the period corresponding to what in European terms would be the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. In both cases, the games focus on the clash between empires as defined by the successful creation and management of an empire's economy, and then translating that engine of productivity into a military engine of destruction that brings down an entire army on your foes. Or just building very pretty towns. This can be a very lovely game sometimes, and many have gotten lost in building up amazing works of architecture unaware that their opponent is about to send an army full of angry knights to beat the living tar out of them.    The game has itself been successful and received an Expansion pack: The Conquerors which added a number of new features and civilizations, including most notably several Mesoamerican ones. In addition, there has been an updated, high definition rerelease on Steam, improving the graphics and a number of game functions. In fact, three expansion packs have since been released: Forgotten Empires - A former fan expansion, and general all rounder in including more content in the game, Rise of the Rajas - An expansion pack primarily focusing on Indian and Southeast Asian empires, and African Kingdoms - which adds exactly what it says on the tin (as well as one or two Islamic and European empires that regularly interacted with Africa). This means that surprisingly for a 20 year old game, enthusiasm has never been higher among fans and new players alike. The game itself comes with a number of predefined scenarios which set things up for particular historical conflicts or a series of linked scenarios connected together in Campaigns. These tend to have things change on the fly more due to event triggers and are typically limited to single player only, and are thus usually considered to be their own distinct thing. There are also a ton of mods which can do anything from changing the map to fundamentally changing the game entirely. Look for things like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Tower Defense, and Castles Blood Automatic (more commonly referred to as CBA) if you really want to change the game around or Diplomacy if you just want a neat map but the rules unchanged. There's a lot more complication to pretty much everything here (there's a bunch of communities still playing the game via other networks besides Steam, Microsoft's considering releasing a Windows store edition, the soundtrack, the youtubers who show off the game mechanically and for fun, the historical research you can do just by looking up the IG encyclopedia, etc.) but AoEII is defined by such things. It's a game that can be detail oriented and micro heavy especially at top levels of play, but immensely satisfying to master. We have a discord here if anyone's interested, though things have kind of slowed down in the last little while. Jossar fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 05:12
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I'll do an effortpost for supreme commander if people are interested. That game still has a special place in my heart and no other game has replicated the sheer insane scale and style of that game.
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Sep 29, 2018 05:28
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Ein Sexmonster posted:I'll do an effortpost for supreme commander if people are interested. That game still has a special place in my heart and no other game has replicated the sheer insane scale and style of that game. I'd be interested! 
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Sep 29, 2018 11:49
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Ha, you thought you were getting a review of city builders, but it was me! Eador: Genesis! (I'll get to them soon enough though, but I was just reminded that I had this.)  Eador: Genesis is a turn-based fantasy themed 4X game produced by a single Russian developer, Alexey Bokulev, released back in 2009. Currently available on Steam and GoG. In it you play a Master competing with others to try to impose your dominance on a series of fragmented land shards (individual game maps) so that you can fuse them together into a singular stable world.  Eador can be something of an ogre of a game in terms of complexity, and therefore appropriately, has many layers. The first one pictured here is the Astral Plane, only seen in Campaign Mode. In Campaign Mode you do not have the entirety of the tech tree unlocked at once and part of your decision making process in choosing to attack a map is based on how tempting a particular set of technology unlocks (seen in the bottom right) you'll get is compared to how much of a pain in the butt that particular shard will be to conquer based on its size and the enemy Masters present. Also depicted here is astral currency (the blue stuff) which you can spend to bring outside resources you can bring into a map beyond its default state.  Once you enter a map you then proceed to the Province Map. Here is where the majority of the strategic layer of the game exists. You will be sending your units (Heroes, as indicated by that guy holding a sword, which lead armies of lesser units) out to conquer provinces to add additional resources to your burgeoning territory. Gold and crystals are the basic ones - the first for building stuff and the second for using magic and fueling rituals, but there are also strategic resources (the wood and plant in yellow boxes) that decrease the cost of units if you have access to them. Provinces have different terrain and populations - terrain is important both because it determines what the map will look like on the tactical layer but also determines the ratio of gold/crystals of the province and is usually an indicator of what the population looks like. Population is important because it determines the kind of units that the territory produces when it is initially invaded and can occasionally be co-opted for the purposes of hiring to act as defense in case someone else tries to take the province or it revolts. Yes, you can be a greedy tax baron who sucks the life out of their subjects in events, and some types of population are more on the edge about this than others. Or are just inherently rebellious. Sometimes entering a province can trigger random events which do all sorts of things. Sometimes nothing happens and if you don't want to go conquering a new province, or want to spend some time leveling up your dudes, or decrease the unrest in the province you can instead go exploring within a province to find dungeons/events or go and explore those dungeons. The final thing to note about the strategic layer is that buildings exist on it. These can be small, such as modifications to gold or population, or large, such as forts which mandate sieges to capture and can be used to make chokepoints on the map. Castles, the strongholds of the Masters on the map, are effectively larger fortresses, but they also do a lot more than that.  In fact, the Castles are such a big deal that they get Their Own Screen from which you spend gold to build upgrades ranging from the types of troops you have available (which when you buy you either place in garrison at the castle or in the army of a Hero, maximum 4 types of a particular tier of troop), to an armory to buy weapons and stuff for your hero (which can also be left in storage, as a rainy day supply cache for future turns), to magic shops that let your heroes cast spells (and all of these things have their own screens which I won't be covering here), to upgrades that increase the efficiency of your provinces or allow you to build more building in them. There is a separate button for performing rituals, which are mostly performed at the castle. One of the upgrades unlocks a whole new tier of troop upgrades of which there are something like 4 tiers total.  Speaking of troops! When your Heroes and Troops enter battle they do so on the Tactical Map. And if you thought we left complications behind on the strategic level so you could just get to some good old fashioned pummeling, you are dead wrong. Troops have actions points which are consumed for movement through terrain, attacking enemy units, or unique unit actions. All of that terrain on the map? Does something different! Plains are default, swamps slow movement and make it easier to be hit, forests slow movement but block arrows, mountains are unpassable, hills slow movement but only when moving from another type of terrain to the hills, troops on them have the high ground and are more difficult to hit and give an attack advantage. Stamina is tracked so dudes can literally just fall dead tired in the middle of a fight and do nothing unless something like a magic spell which restores stamina is cast. Weapons and armor for heroes can break so you may need to spend action points from a unit's turn trying to switch out armor. Ammunition is tracked, so you'd better hope your bow dudes make their shots count! Armor types are tracked separately, so things like skeletons may be nearly immune to arrow fire but be very vulnerable to just getting mulched with melee weapons. All attacks have a counter attack resolved afterwards, unless you kill the opponent from the force of the blow, or are fighting spear units which counterattack first. On top of all of these preexisting systems in the game, all of your units can level up, adding additional bonuses, some of which are entirely new skills. If you haven't gotten the point by now, this is both the selling point and the most terrifying factor of Eador: Genesis. It is supremely detailed so you can pull off some crazy stuff like conquering the map with harpies that you can only obtain by fulfilling X and Y conditions and syncing them up with skeletons your Wizard personally raised from the dead after killing people himself and because everyone's Evil they gain a morale bonus, but it's also really easy to get lost on all of the interlocking systems and just plain old get burned out. But it's only $6 so it's worth looking at, if only just to see all of it in action. Jossar fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Sep 29, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 14:25
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Eador is great. It's a big love letter to HOM&M and it's a great take on the genre. The astral campaign is cool, with a bit of CYOA approach to how you deal with opponents. The game does require some patience, though, with a fairly serene pace. Eador: Masters of the Broken World is essentially the same thing: a 3D remake rather than a sequel. Genesis runs a bit faster and is less buggy, but Masters add sort of global modifiers to scenarios, which are welcome in shaking things up and nudging towards more diverse builds.
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Sep 29, 2018 14:50
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I miss base building, resource collecting units, defense towers, walls, and all that jazz in my RTSes. Is there anything upcoming or otherwise that I might have overlooked in the past few years? Grey Goo came drat close but it leaned a bit too heavily in trying to be an e-sport above everything else, sure would be nice if devs made a game first and let it catch on to become an e-sport on its own.
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Sep 29, 2018 14:58
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Get into SC2 coop. It’s a lot of fun.
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Sep 29, 2018 15:48
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Deakul posted:I miss base building, resource collecting units, defense towers, walls, and all that jazz in my RTSes. Referencing a few posts above, what about Age of Empires II? The original game may be about 20 years old, but it got new expansions as recently as 2 years ago and got balance patches as recently as last week. Even if you're not good at all, there's a group of us that plays against the AI and our skills range from "pretty good" to "won't contribute to fight and may pass out drunk (again)": Jossar posted:We have a discord here if anyone's interested, though things have kind of slowed down in the last little while. I'm planning to be more active now that summer is over. I even took the plunge and played against actual human beans last night. (Lost two 1v1 games but then won with top score in a 3v3  )
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Sep 29, 2018 16:18
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Bogart posted:Get into SC2 coop. It’s a lot of fun. Seconding this, particularly because the commanders are actually pretty diverse in playstyles. You can even do some Footman Wars rally point attack-move poo poo, or a small squad of elite heroes, or whatever with the right commander.
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Sep 29, 2018 16:21
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Deakul posted:I miss base building, resource collecting units, defense towers, walls, and all that jazz in my RTSes. It's in EA and I haven't actually played it because it's in EA, but They Are Billions sounds like what you're looking for.
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Sep 29, 2018 17:36
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The Impressions City Builders (Note, this will only cover games released under the Impressions label, not Tilted Mill. If someone else wants to talk about Children of the Nile and/or Caesar IV, they're welcome to it.) In 1992, Impressions Games, a small company that over the last 3 years of its existence had produced a number of simulation games concerning soccer, finance, and military decided to create a city builder. It would be similar in nature to the 1989 classic SimCity, but based around the idea of the construction of an ideal Roman city rather than a modern one, and they called it Caesar. For that reason (and drawing on the company's previous experiences) it would also include a military component. Originally this was purely a matter of production and logistics, but Impressions simultaneously produced a quasi-RTS military simulation, which was incorporated into the game in a deluxe rerelease one year later. The original Caesar was regarded fairly well as sort of a SimCity plus, something to sink your teeth into if you liked the same gameplay but wanted more mechanics. Figuring that they could do better, Impressions released a sequel in 1995 with improved graphics, a module that fully integrated combat right from the start, and slightly more complex politics. This one was much more highly regarded, and only missed out on being considered the best strategy game of its year because it had to compete with the original Command & Conquer and Heroes of Might and Magic. However you will notice that I have not actually talked about mechanics up until this point. That is because while Impressions' experiences with city builders were defined by the first two Caesars, the first "modern" Impressions City Builder is Caesar III. So let's talk general mechanics: in most of the Impressions City Builders you are a governor/founder of a city tasked with building up an untamed plot of wilderness into a grand and mighty city emblematic of its civilization. This usually involves the construction of housing districts. Supporting these is an infrastructure net needed to produce and distribute basic supplies needed for subsistence living as well as general goods for your population, along with readily accessible sources of entertainment and cultural satisfaction (including religion). There is sometimes a related but expanded set of production chains specifically needed for an "elite" set of housing which is often needed to populate non-necessary functions such as the military and which pay more in taxes. Right taxes, because you will need to fund all this, often mandating taxes and trade. Why, of course your city does not exist in splendid isolationism, indeed it regularly interacts with other cities throughout the region either in terms of military aggression, trading, tributes/gifts, or just working together to deal with mutual problems.There is often a separate infrastructure net specifically designed to deal with your interactions with the outside world - producing trade goods as well as the goods necessary to support a military. Finally once you get to late stages of the game there is often a final supply network specifically designed for the production of large monuments. On top of all this, public functionaries are needed to maintain order, fire safety, and health throughout the city. Also sometimes natural disasters or other similarly themed elements will whack your city and you'll have to deal with that. The big change in Caesar III was that most of the buildings in this set of chains did not automatically parse resources from along the production chain but required walkers to go out and deliver everything/perform maintenance/do cultural studies themselves. This adds another layer of complexity in planning and there have been many times that a player was sent into a fit of swearing because the nobility accidentally drew too much food from a centralized granary and then half the workers in the common housing left the city in protest at starving, causing worker shortages that sent the entire town back to poverty until the player rebuilt everything along a more optimal workflow. However you do have help in the form of filters as most of these games come with a ton of filters and overlays so you can plot exactly what's being properly supplied and what needs more attention. Also the walkers will comment on the town's situation if you click on them. Sometimes these comments can even be pretty funny. Listed below are the individual games. The general gameplay on them remains as listed above, but there are often a lot of specific touches unique to each culture.  Caesar III, released in 1997, is the third iteration of the Rome themed city builders. Apart from the iterations listed above it plays similarly to most of its predecessors and doesn't try to get that fancy with the overall formula. It does have the interesting setup where during the campaign you can choose whether to try to play a military playstyle, or instead take a more peaceful approach at the cost of having to meet higher production targets. My comments here are short because I talked about the earlier versions so much, but I do consider it mostly on par with the others on this list.  Pharaoh and its expansion Cleopatra, released in 1999 and 2000 respectively, mark the first time the series tries to transition to a new culture. This is the first time when the games would start asking you to build large temples that were more than just necessary to satisfy religious requirements of the populace, as well as the production of huge wonders. Naval combat was introduced for the first time, and indeed the Nile itself would play a large role in determining the cycle on which you would provide food for your population. It can sometimes feel like the oddest of the bunch to come back to after having played the others, especially as it's in the transitional period where the team was trying to figure out what was sensible outside of Caesar and what should be included to make for specific cultural relevance. But still fun though, and especially here maybe you'd prefer it to the later games if you want the best of the old stylistic direction.  Zeus and its expansion Poseidon, released in 2000, took a lot of stuff from the previous two modern iterations and placed the games on an epic scale in ancient Greece. You don't just trade with outside cities, you have to have a trading post for each one of them and have a complex series of relationships of ally/enemy/colony and how they personally feel about you that month. You don't just have houses which are better off than the other ones and nominally form your upper class because it wouldn't be efficient to have luxury houses all over the place, you have a designated noble class which won't even settle down until you give them all the resources needed for the highest level of the basic houses. You don't just build some decent sized temples with add-on options or a number of small ones around the city, you build a giant marble-laden monster of a thing which you have to account for when maintaining your sheep population, and also Ares and his dragon are walking around on the streets. The city doesn't just get hit by a volcano erupting or earthquakes, a literal hydra pops out of the earth and tries to eat your playwrights as they wander off to the Olympics unless you get a hero to defeat it. Also you don't build a dedicated military, you build up the infrastructure to maintain that military and then the city draws from your population in order to conduct wars. I find it to be the best of the city builder games, although that's a matter of personal opinion.  Emperor, was released in 2004, and represents the final of the classic city builders, this time in ancient China. It has an element system for the buildings where you ruin the city's Feng Shui unless you place them right. The temples were toned down but now you can make sacrifices in order to get your industries blessed by the ancestors/gods/philosophers who will show up on the streets like heroes did in Zeus. There's a festival system to make your populace happy. Spying and sabotage plays more of a role in international relations. There's a point at which all the industries will switch around so you have to deal with the fact that your people will only want lacquerware instead of bronzeware, and iron/steel instead of bronze. Honestly, I never really liked Empire that much, but that's not because it's a bad game, just different. Some people will swear by it being the best game in the series, and it can definitely produce some of the prettiest cities which is why we're all here anyways. All of these games are available via GoG. Pharaoh and Zeus are $10, and Emperor and Caesar 3 are $6. Steam has all of them except Emperor. These games are primarily intended to be played single player... but multiplayer exists, at least for the last few. I will admit to knowing nothing meaningful about how it works although if people want to try it for Zeus I would not be amiss. Jossar fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Sep 4, 2021 |
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Sep 29, 2018 17:49
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I still love the Impression City builders and at least once a year go back to one and play it through. Zeus is probably my favorite, but its a close race. I love a lot of the new features in Emperor like food mixing and gates. Playing Caesar III or Pharaoh without some of the quality of life features added later (ROADBLOCKS) is a bit annoying at first. I'm trying Lethis - Path of Progress now, which is the first game in a long while that really captures the feel, but sadly its pretty shallow and only after 5 games I feel like I've done and seen everything.
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Sep 29, 2018 18:11
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pharaoh is the best of the bunch imo. it has roadblocks, btw. zeus has the distinction of having the most horribly garish ui i've ever seen in a game. no small feat.
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Sep 29, 2018 18:17
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Harveygod posted:Referencing a few posts above, what about Age of Empires II? The original game may be about 20 years old, but it got new expansions as recently as 2 years ago and got balance patches as recently as last week. I've played AOE2 to death and back... I don't think I can find any fun in it anymore. Thanks though. Mordja posted:It's in EA and I haven't actually played it because it's in EA, but They Are Billions sounds like what you're looking for. Yeah, I have it... it's way too survival centric for me though. I'll definitely check it out again whenever they get the campaign out.
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Sep 29, 2018 18:21
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The eador devs new game is supposed to go in ea this month. It’s about you being a wizard in a tower sending your forces around to gain the secrets of immortality.
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Sep 29, 2018 20:58
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Residential walls in Emperor ROTMK are absolutely fantastic, but Zeus had so much charm to it for some reason.
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Sep 29, 2018 21:03
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Was extremely hyped up by writing that post to play Eador again, so I opened it up and then *BAM*, immediately got clocked once I ran into enemy heroes on the lowest level difficulty setting, at which point they began conquering my provinces and everything spiraled into domain-wide revolts. It is the eternal truth of strategy games that I love them all with a burning passion only matched by my utter incompetence at any of them.
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Sep 30, 2018 14:49
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I tell you what, i'm having complicated strategy game feelings right now, so you get a review for a complicated game. Empire Earth So Age of Empires did really well when it came out. REALLY well. So most of the people who worked on it with Ensemble Studios wanted to continue the idea in one form or another. The majority of the dev team began work on the sequel Age of Empires II as listed in the previous review. But one of the guys on the dev team, Rick Goodman, thought that if they were going to make another game where you developed a civilization through a long period of human history, you might as well go all the way and include ALL of human history. So he took the Director of Operations (Dara-Lynn Pelechatz) and the two of them founded Stainless Steel Studios in 1999. The company worked on developing what it considered to be the ideal version of the original concept of the series and in 2001 produced Empire Earth.    For that reason, a lot of Empire Earth's core features are basically similar to Age of Empires. You still have the same process of developing an economic engine which eventually turns into a sprawling thing, used to fuel a military which can destroy your opponents. You still have unit triangles of some being more effective than others. You still have the game being divided into a primary skirmish mode and a number of historical campaigns dedicated to linked scenarios which are slightly more freeform in nature. The difference is in scale. Whereas the original Age of Empires went from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, and the sequel went from the Dark Ages until the Renaissance, Empire Earth covers the entirety of human history, from the beginning up until the near future. A grand total of 14 (or 15 if you play the expansion pack) ages. In general armies tend to feel bigger, even if sizes are roughly the same. Hero units exist in each age which can give a morale boost or heal troops. Stuff gets phased out after certain points because there's no point building archers when everyone has guns and tanks and planes and even ROBOTS by the end. It is ambitious to a degree only matched by Rise of Nations in telling the entirety of the story of human history, and RoN is very much a different kind of RTS. The game naturally comes with a number of civilizations, but these are more collections of bonuses, and with the included editor you can make your own civilization to stand the test of time based on your favorite strategy. Unfortunately it has a very big problem - in trying to go for "best AoE version of all time", Empire Earth heavily overreached itself. Several of the eras can sometimes feel like filler, just adding some moderate upgrades and a paint of coat without meaningfully changing strategy. A lot of its core presentation suffered: it looks kind of ugly compared to other games of its era, its soundtrack is uninspiring, if competent, and the voice acting (especially for the campaigns) has often been lambasted as downright silly. The average match takes hours, and even then you still will probably only be through the middle of the game epochs by the time everything comes to a close. The AI is known to cheat fairly heavily. And finally, it has been getting harder and harder to run on modern day systems primarily as a result of the 3D shaders bugging out.   All future iterations of the series were taken over by Mad Doc Software (now a subsidiary of Rockstar). They released an expansion pack, the Art of Conquest, that added some more supplemental stuff, unique techs for the civilizations (which you could nevertheless include in your own custom ones), a Space Age which introduced spaceships... but only for their own maps where they sort of functioned as a replacement for water navies, and 3 new campaigns where all of these things were prominently displayed. They also released Empire Earth II, a sequel that fixed some of the problems at the expense of losing a lot of the charm, and Empire Earth III, which was universally panned and has basically shut down any interest in further continuing/revitalizing the series. As mentioned in the Impressions review, I like bombast, and indeed Empire Earth used to be my favorite game. And indeed, Empire Earth was regarded well enough for its day. But even then there was disagreement as to whether it was a truly great game that just needed some patches or a serviceable enough AoE clone that was interesting for letting you see more of human history... But the complete version is available on GoG for $6, and often goes on sale for $2. If you have any interest in this sort of thing and don't mind monkeying around to get it to work on a modern computer in case it freaks out, the campaigns are interesting enough (or possibly hilarious enough) that it's still worth buying at that price. Go try it out, punch Robot not-Stalin in the face. Maybe try some multiplayer afterwards if you're willing to deal with the 3rd party client/version where all the cool kids still hang out. Epic may have indeed been too large a word after all, but you can see how Empire Earth tried to make it seem small by comparison. (Funny post-script: Rick Goodman was also involved with the development of the two city builders that came after Impressions Games handed those off to Tilted Mill. So somehow the entirety of his work product while still working in video game development has been at least tangentially related to most of the stuff I thought was worth making an effort post on so far.) Jossar fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 30, 2018 16:05
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I, too, really loved Empire Earth when it came out. The only thing that really irks me now about it is how blatantly the AI cheats. It literally doesn't have to collect resources at all, they're fed to it at a regular rate. I discovered this one map when I tried to "starve" an AI by killing all of its citizens collecting resources. That kind of soured me on the game after that. The campaign missions are still fun, though.
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Sep 30, 2018 16:50
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I also loved Empire Earth, and the space expansion is one of my top gaming disappointments of all time. It was likely child me getting hype over details myself and other GameFAQs posters made up, but I remember thinking that it was going to have multiple planets as in multiple normal maps connected via a space map, instead of what they released with seas-as-space.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:12
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Relax Or DIE posted:I also loved Empire Earth, and the space expansion is one of my top gaming disappointments of all time. Apparently Civilization 2: Test of Time did actually do this, having maps that were "up and down" relative to the main one. It probably makes more sense for a turn-based strategy than an RTS anyway due to how complicated it would be to manage everything.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:23
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EE was pretty cool though flawed when it first came but RoN took the concept and improved it massively. So really RoN is my go to for that type of age spanning rts.
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Sep 30, 2018 17:28
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I really want to do the mental omega campains, but my unrelenting shitiness at Westwood RTSes keeps me from enjoying them. 
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Sep 30, 2018 17:48
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The covert ops missions for original command and conquer were fun, but definitely hard. Also the dinosaur missions. The red alert “ant missions” were even better though.
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Sep 30, 2018 19:37
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Been playing a lot of StarCraft2 ladder since its free to play now. In my opinion it's the gold standard of the RTS genre, especially in terms of balance and responsiveness/tightness off the controls and how the game responds. I know it's not for everyone but I love how intense it is. I think more people should give it a shot and surprise themselves with how good you can get with a little practice. Always down to practice and learn Also Age of Empires 2 is still amazing and the older it gets the more impressive it becomes that they got so much right that hasn't been seen again since.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:00
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Sc2 is a great game for twitch rts game-play. It’s balanced, there is a lot of strategy and with good micro you can pull off some amazing clutch plays, But alas I’m not in high school anymore :/
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Sep 30, 2018 20:08
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I don't much like Starcraft; battles just felt to "fake" after playing TA and Relic games, and I never cared about its hardcore competitive scene. Different strokes.  Klaus88 posted:I really want to do the mental omega campains, but my unrelenting shitiness at Westwood RTSes keeps me from enjoying them.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:48
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This thread is bad as it makes me want to not actually play games, but instead just sit and write up descriptions of them. Sid Meier's Gettysburg In 1996, Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds (also known for doing a Let's Play of the video game version of the board game Twilight Struggle here), and Jeff Briggs all left the rapidly downsizing Microprose Inc. and founded Firaxis Games. Firaxis was founded on the notion that it was first and foremost a development shop: let other companies worry about selling the thing, it would produce the best quality product that it could. For its first game, the team decided it would make a wargame set in the American Civil War, specifically concerning the largest battle of the war, the three day battle of Gettysburg.   What we got was one of the best real time tactical strategy games ever made about Gettysburg, even to this day. The game practically drips with color and personality concerning its chosen time period and you can play as either the Confederacy or the Union, complete with appropriate commentary for setup, for the entirety of the battle or just a single scenario. The AI can be adjusted to match your skill level and can be fiendishly clever on some of the higher difficulty settings, and independent from that, it's behavior can be adjusted as a matter of stylistic preference while leaving the difficulty untouched. You can make decisions on whether or not to bring certain nonhistorical resources into play in a way that modifies victory points awarded at the end of a fight. You can alter the course of the Civil War! (Aside here - among my proudest moments in all of my years of gaming comes from a Union campaign ran where i'd followed the war historically up until Sickles' Folly, and then panicked, remembering how badly it had gone in real life. So I freed up everything the Union had available and threw it at the offensive, and while there were a number of times when individual units at the front broke or were shaken and had to be rallied, the line held. My heart was pounding as the timer hit zero, the game transitioned to the victory screen, and I heard the boys in blue give a series of hurrahs as the Battle Hymn of the Republic started playing.)   The actual mechanics are fairly simple: point and click for movement and attacking, with buttons on the interface defining particular formation orders for how a particular unit should line up. Units have morale (the bars next to the flag on the lower left), based on their veteran status and other factors determined before the fight starts. It decreases when units are in combat, taking losses, under artillery barrage, and can result in a unit breaking and running from the fight. Fortunately you have general units which can be deployed to particular parts of a fight to rally troops. It's your job to figure out how to leverage the pieces you have effectively on terrain and to counter opponent actions in order to seize/defend particular locations, which grant victory points if held at the end of a fight.  There's lots of supplemental stuff too: a scenario editor for modifying the game resulted in a lot of alternative battles that floated around the community back in the day. A replay screen allowing you to see just what went wrong or right from a slightly further perspective. The game was designed with robust multiplayer functionality, and surprisingly if you actually still own a copy then GameRanger provides a simple enough functionality for you to play. Unfortunately, the main problem with Sid Meier's Gettysburg is precisely that. The rights are still in flux and so there is no reliable way to acquire the game apart from abandonware (so if I left something out, it's probably because i'm forgetting things about the game from not having played it for so long). We can only hope that Firaxis finds a way to bring the game back before their (and SMG's) 25th anniversary.
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Oct 1, 2018 00:00
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Jossar posted:Apparently Civilization 2: Test of Time did actually do this, having maps that were "up and down" relative to the main one. It probably makes more sense for a turn-based strategy than an RTS anyway due to how complicated it would be to manage everything. Yeah, I played a lot of Civ: ToT as a kid. If I recall, you had 3 different scenarios that used the 'stacked' maps: Default Civ 2 with an Alpha Centauri map in case you want to end the game by grinding through an alien civ, a sci fi one that covered 3 planets and orbital platforms around the starting planet, and a fantasy one with land, ocean, sky, and underworld. I think only the fantasy one really worked, as the different civs would start in different areas and determined your access to units that could move between the different maps. The Alpha Centauri mode was just a slog tacked onto the end of the normal game, and the Sci-fi one was neat but snowballed even worse than normal Civ because whoever got to the 'upper' maps first and claimed territory had a huge advantage. It was actually pretty cool and honestly I should given it a revisit as an adult.
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Oct 1, 2018 00:09
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Rome 2 is the best TW game don't @ me.
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Oct 1, 2018 00:59
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Jossar posted:Unfortunately, the main problem with Sid Meier's Gettysburg is precisely that. The rights are still in flux and so there is no reliable way to acquire the game apart from abandonware (so if I left something out, it's probably because i'm forgetting things about the game from not having played it for so long). We can only hope that Firaxis finds a way to bring the game back before their (and SMG's) 25th anniversary. After listening to a ton of Three Moves Ahead, this is probably the biggest bummer from that podcast: they so obviously love this game and think it's a classic, and yet there's no legal way to own and play the drat thing.
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Oct 1, 2018 01:20
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Jossar posted:
There's a couple of games that are clones of this one set during Waterloo and Austerlitz.
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Oct 1, 2018 01:35
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Rise of Nations deserves a big effortpost. But I'm not the one to do those any more.  That game is still basically the best of that subgenre, along with AoE2 and Empire Earth 2
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Oct 1, 2018 01:37
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On the topic of Total Annihilation, I feel it needs to be mentioned that it had a soundtrack which can be summed up as 'Jeremy Soule at his most bombastic self' and it was baller when combined with massive battleships throwing plasma slugs across the map, or simply have a large convoy of mobile missile launchers firing simultaneously.
double nine fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Oct 1, 2018 |
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Oct 1, 2018 01:56
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Apoplexy posted:Rise of Nations deserves a big effortpost. But I'm not the one to do those any more. Alas, that's probably the only one of the three I can't effortpost as reliably on. I played a bit of it, but nowhere near as much of the others and i'm probably going to get fixated on dumb things like how it has an Armageddon Counter that ends the world if the players fire off too many nukes.
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Oct 1, 2018 02:00
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