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Aww yes! I'm one of those people that tends to play all these games single-player or at best co-op, so keep that in mind... Warcraft III is in my opinion kind of a poor RTS due to the heavy focus on hero units. If you got ahead early you'd just keep getting ahead. That said, the map editor is the best thing ever. I spent over 6 years of my life making a custom single-player campaign for Warcraft III (https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/to-the-bitter-end.202289/page-21) which is generally highly regarded and which I'm very proud of. Several people have done 'Let's Plays' of it - here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6irRJchAOpM It's not really an RTS though, more a top-down action RPG. Which honestly Warcraft III is better suited for. Dawn of War 1 is my favourite from the Dawn of War series. The battles are huge and over-the-top, and there are so many clever mechanics (you can shoot AND move? You have both melee AND ranged attacks, with different attack values? You get resources by holding points, not by having peasants walk back and forth? Morale?) Dawn of War 2 was fun but just doesn't hold a candle to 1. Dawn of War 3 (except the trailer) does not exist. Dawn of War 1 has the best mods. I've contributed to the unofficial bugfix mods for Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, and I'm currently providing voice acting for some big mod that Thudmeiser is working on. I'm going to be the screamy voice of a Chaos Knight (Questor Traitoris), among other things! Starcraft II never really gelled with me. I didn't like the pace or the aesthetic. Have played it but it's shelved now and I don't see myself coming back to it. Command & Conquer never really grabbed me either. The whole idea with Tiberium terraforming earth was cool but it was just executed wonkily. Most of the Red Alert series were just more boring versions of Command & Conquer to me... But Red Alert 3 was amazing. In all honesty I bought it when it was on sale just becuase I'd found out it had Tim Curry in it. Turns out the whole thing was an insane gonzo game with psychic schoolgirls, combat bears, and awesome music. I just couldn't dislike it. You should give a mention to the Myth series by Bungie (I liked them before they were cool) - those are Tactical RTS building (ie, no base building, otherwise RTS) and were WAAAAY ahead of their time. Really impressive physics, weather effects etc. Tiny details made a huge difference - eg, a unit getting hit would usually 'flinch', which interrupts their attack, meaning that having two units ganging up on one made a big difference... as would having a really high 'flinch damage' threshold. Projectiles were modelled accurately and could result in misses and/or friendly fire. Units gained veterancy that improved them if you kept them alive. The single player had a great, bleak story and was told by a brilliant narrator. Lots of really great stuff. In the turn-based arena I'm overall pretty dire, but I love Master of Magic. The game is like the best combo of Civilization and Magic: The Gathering. It's also horribly unbalanced and buggy as poo poo, but since it's not competitive multiplayer I don't care. For those that don't know, there's an unofficial patch that fixes so much stuff it's not even funny: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=8411 I'm absolutely abysmal at Sword of the Stars. I love the concept of all these different races with different tech trees and completely different space navigation methods, but I get so creamed in it that I think I'm just approaching it completely wrong. Soul Reaver fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 01:03
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Mordja posted:Oh woah, Thudmeiser's still active? What's the mod? Apparently so. The mod is "Ultramarines mod: Courage and Honor" - see here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/ultramarines-courage-and-honour
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Sep 27, 2018 06:13
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I keep starting a write-up about Dawn of War and its expansions, but then end up deleting it when it becomes huge and I realize nobody wants to read a huge Autism-like breakdown of why I think it's so great. But I really do think it's great. It's full of so many brilliant design decisions that make it my most-played RTS. I'll try to just put some of my thoughts down as bulletpoints instead so I don't write too much. - Nine races, all playing differently - Great unit animations, including awesome sync-kills - Explosions/heavy hits actually throw units through the air, and not just when they're dead, meaning that disruption from artillery and the like both looks cool and actually disrupts enemy firing lines and formations. - Great sound effects for weapons, explosions and unit responses - Squad, Reinforcement and Morale systems encourage a type of 'attack-retreat' gameplay, while making unit wipes more difficult and ensuring you don't have to rebuild every dead soldier back at base, but still forcing you to give ground and retreat if you're getting overwhelmed. - Squad customization with weapon options etc adds easy on-the-fly flexibility to some squads/vehicles - Hero units that make a real difference but aren't the centrepoint for everything (looking at you, Warcraft 3) - Super units that actually feel super but again, don't feel unstoppable either - Most units can fire while moving(!) which makes the battles look and feel far more dynamic - and is actually strategically significant (eg, Seraphim are built for kiting using this. Tau Firewarriors main disadvantage at range is that they CAN'T shoot while moving) - Most infantry (and some vehicles) have both melee and ranged attacks, and it's actually a major part of the gameplay, since fighting in melee prevents you shooting. Jump troops can stop the enemy shooting, melee specialists will fire their guns as they charge into melee range, powerful ranged units will want some skirmishers near them to protect them etc - Resource mechanics that remove the need for babying worker units, and instead forces players to claim and protect various points of the map - this encourages early and constant battle to both claim and keep your resource points And lastly, it has a ton of awesome, awesome mods, including a bugfix mod that I contributed to and that I consider mandatory since it fixes so much stuff, and a whole bunch of awesome race and conversion mods. By the way, despite what people say, the last expansion (Soulstorm) is good. It's more balanced than any previous version of Dawn of War and despite having some bugs, it fixes a lot as well. Get all the expansions along with the bugfix mod for Soulstorm and you have the best version of the game you can get (though the original and the Dark Crusade campaigns are still a lot better from a story perspective).
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Jan 8, 2019 00:06
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Mordja posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J675BQaIuQs Gearbox, in my opinion, has recently had a rubbish track record and I don't really think they can be relied upon to create a quality product. On the other hand, Blackbird Interactive did a spectacular job recapturing the 'feel' of Homeworld in Deserts of Kharak. Whatever else might be said about that game, it really did feel like a good Homeworld prequel to me. So if anyone manages to pull off a sequel that feels right, it's probably these guys. That said: I really hope they won't have those goddamn salvage corvettes mechanics. I know everyone seems to love them but for me I feel like they turn what was meant to be a spectacular space battle simulator into an unbalanced-ship-stealing simulator instead. Soul Reaver fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 03:38
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Can someone explain the appeal of the C&C series to me? Is it that multiplayer is particularly fun? I've never been enamored of C&C in single player. The non-fighty bits are too slow, while fighty bits felt too fast (ie, units seem to be made of tissue paper) and too unit-spammy to me to actually rate as enjoyable. I liked the concept/setting (particularly Tiberian Sun) but never really seemed the enjoy the execution. The only one in the series I actually liked was Red Alert 3 and that's largely because of how ridiculous a lot of it was and the sheer amount of ham on display in the cinematics. I literally only bought the game because of Tim Curry.
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Sep 5, 2019 05:14
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Hah, I just reviewed the Unification Mod for Dawn of War - Soulstorm (basically the be-all uber-mod that combines bugfixing and allows you to easily use all the major race mods) and realized they've incorporated my armour pierce fix by default. I don't know if anyone really cares, but I'm going to talk about it anyway because I find the story behind that fix interesting. As I was doing some bugfix modding, I ran into some very odd values. Most of those weird values came from the first expansion for Dawn of War (Winter Assault), but the same values have been kept in every iteration of the game. The values were concerning 'armour penetration'. Dawn of War assigns different armour penetration values for attacks, depending on the armour type they're hitting, and they'll affect the damage of attacks and abilities accordingly. Normally, armour penetration ranges from 0-100 (0 will mean it does minimum damage, 100 means it'll do max) However, I ran into a number of values where armour penetration was over 100 - right up to 300, in fact. The game itself just rounds those numbers down to 100, but when I started thinking about it, I realized that the developers had almost certainly intended (but never properly tested/implemented) for those attacks to, in fact, do multiple times more damage to certain unit types than they were doing. Affected abilities/weapons were almost invariably ones that were surprisingly underwhelming in-game. For those that have played the game: do you notice how the Imperial Guard General's "Stafing Run" ability is really underwhelming? It sucks against buildings, it sucks against infantry (except knocking them over) and it has a long charge time. Tech wise it's comparable to the Eldar's Psionic Storm or the Force Commander's Orbital Strike, but it totally and utterly sucks in comparison. Thing is, according to the armour pierce values, it was supposed to do 300% as much damage to infantry than it does in the vanilla game. And when you test it with that, it actually feels like it suddenly makes sense: in much the same way that Orbital Strike can nuke buildings, Strafing Run can nuke troops that don't get out of its way (which they usually can if they're paying attention). It suddenly became a much more useful and interesting ability. The Tau Crisis suit's missile pod (which just pales in comparison to the mutually exclusive flamer option) is supposed to do a lot more damage to light/medium vehicles if you go by the buggy armour piercing value, giving it some utility. The Hellhound's flame cannon is supposed to burn down light buildings (like listening posts) much faster than it does, which makes sense from a fluff perspective and makes them better 'hit and run' units. The Eldar Harlequin's Riveblade should make them into commander-killing assassins, even moreso than they already are. Assuming they live long enough to get that close. I found it interesting that all this was likely intended, yet never really implemented. I find it shocking to what extent the creators of the game/expansions didn't understand their own engine, and how little they cared about correcting this sort of stuff over numerous iterations and patches. Thank god for community modding/bugfixing, I guess?
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Oct 24, 2019 23:16
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Dawn of War 2 also has the 'Last Stand' mode included, which is a very popular co-op vs AI survival mode. Though notably it's not an RTS since you don't build troops or gather resources, it's just hero-based. It also has no story. But it IS fun.
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Nov 12, 2019 21:29
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Oh yeah, the co-op question lets me talk about a classic old game series I like talking about : Myth: The Fallen Lords (and Myth 2: Soulblighter, and yes, even Myth 3: The Wolf Age). These games allow co-op multiplayer, with the host 'gifting' units to the other player. And it has a strong single-player campaign. So that's definitely an option. So, Myth... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PliayDCDvL4 Myth was made by Bungie before they became 'The Halo guys' and after they were the 'one of the only halfway decent Mac FPS game' guys. It's a real-time tactics game, more than real-time strategy - there's no unit production or resource management. You start every mission/game with a limited number of troops and unless there's some story event or something to give you reinforcements, what you see is what you get. Units don't heal naturally and resources are limited. For its time (and to some extent, even now) Myth has some really cool features. The game is in 3D (2D sprites for the characters in the first 2 games, but full 3D environments) and it has a really robust physics system. Arrows, javelins, thrown grenades, severed body parts... they can all be given velocity and trajectory. Terrain gets permanently altered by blood, explosions, debris, footprints in the snow etc. Arrows arc through the air and will only hit what they physically make contact with. This results in increased range if you're firing from high ground (and reduced range if firing up), the potential to take cover or micromanage some evasive action at long range... and the potential for friendly fire. The molotov cocktails used by dwarves are unpredictable but awesome/hilarious. They'll likely be one of the main causes of failing a mission, as well as one of the main causes of surviving. They don't always go off when they hit - sometimes they'll bounce once, then go off. Sometimes they might go out. Weather effects affect this too. I'll always remember one of my favourite missions, where you're supposed to hold a tactically strong position at a river against a massive horde of tough, slow-moving zombies. The heavy rain was causing my dwarves' grenades to go out one after the other, leading me to almost give up in despair... until one go through, blew up, detonated the one next to it, and set of a massive chain reaction that sent zombie bits raining down for some time afterward. The game's damage model includes 'flinching' - basically, most units, if injured, will flinch briefly, interrupting whatever they were doing - such as taking a swing with a weapon. This means that being surrounded - even by inferior units - is quickly deadly to your troops, since the constant hits will prevent them from completing an attack of their own and slow down any attempts to flee. Conversely, there are certain units (looking at you, Myth 2) that are powerful by virtue of being nearly 'flinch-proof', and are capable of ripping through troops even when surrounded. Units gain experience and get more effective (increased accuracy, typically) if you keep them alive - it's subtle but an experienced archer is definitely better than an inexperienced one. The single-player campaign has an engaging story, well-told by an evocative narrator. It gives the sense of a desperate war against an implacable foe. It doesn't over-explain, and instead gives the sense of a much larger world and story out there, of which we are only catching a small glimpse. It tells of the Legion, the last embattled defenders of humanity, and their battle against The Fallen Lords, who are leading an endless army of undead and monsters to wipe out civilization. The game controls can be a little challenging to get used to, the game in general is quite hard. There are never really any huge battles - it's mostly smaller skirmishes - and personally I am a little disappointed that most battles are decided by your ability to take out enemies at range (melee tends to only happen when things have gotten really bad) but I do still strongly recommend it. The modding community has further patched and graphically enhanced Myth 2, and even ported the entirely to Myth 1 into it. If you're interested, see https://projectmagma.net
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Nov 13, 2019 02:09
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Corbeau posted:Myth 3 (the weird off-brand one that still has some good qualities) I know it's different and kind of weird at times, but I actually liked Myth 3 a lot. The graphics/animations were really good, and while I know some people will think it's unnecessary, I actually really loved how the prequel 'wrapped up' the story the way it did by answering lingering questions and seeing how it set up events in the first two games - it makes a lot of sense for that to be case with the cyclical nature of the plot. The gameplay formula felt tight and well-executed. The only big letdowns for me were the terrible overcompressed pre-rendered cinematics, the 3D health/mana bars and the considerably less good (though by any measure, still decent) narrator. Even so, it gave me one of my most memorable gaming moments - a Trow Iron Warrior, surrounded by Heron Guard, who manages to swing his hammer. Ooof.
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Nov 14, 2019 00:33
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Pathos posted:Okay, after playing some Myth 2 again, is Myth 3 any good? I remember playing it way back when and being disappointed by it, but that might have been due to how buggy it was. Is it any good with fan patches, or should I stick with 1 and 2? My response to this one? Yes, I liked it a lot. There's a lot of unit variety - multiple types of Myrkridia, multiple types of Berskers, multiple types of Ghol, multiple types of Dwarves, multiple types of Trow etc The 3D models are smoothly animated. The storyline fills in a lot of gaps. Some people don't like it because, having been made a by a different studio, it feels a bit like fanfiction that was written specifically to explain the stuff that was supposed to remain mysterious - personally, I don't mind it at all, and I found the explanations welcome and satisfying, serving as a conclusion despite the game itself being a prequel. Don't read up on it if you can avoid it. It does seem a wee bit weird how technology hasn't really changed between Myth III and Myth I, but that's a minor gripe. Overall gameplay mechanics are vintage Myth, though it does lean a bit more on the unique playable hero units than some previous entries. It is at times also HARD AS BALLS. The difficulty curve goes all over the show. The difficulty of a mission tends to determined more by how hard it should be according to the story, rather than any sort of progression. Which personally I don't mind, but makes it a poor entry point to the series. No problem for veterans though. I personally didn't experience major bugs or stability problems when I played, but I might have just been lucky. The last patch released is available here: https://tain.totalcodex.net/items/show/myth-iii-1-3-1-patch-pc. I believe it has stability improvements.
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Nov 18, 2019 05:43
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kanonvandekempen posted:Since people were praising Dawn of War 2 earlier, I'm going to give a shout out to the Ultimate Apocalypse mod for Dawn of War. It has the questionable ambition of implementing as much tabletop elements as possible, and adds a few tech tiers to the game. Want to play imperial guard and have a choice of like 7 or 8 different baneblade class tanks to build, go ahead, or build one of the titans if you prefer. Titans really are too big for the engine, but the modders didn't give a poo poo and implemented them anyway, and it's glorious. I've found Ultimate Apocalypse rather janky (I think it actually made it impossible to have normal Dawn of War LAN games after I installed it because it modified some of the game's base files - but that might have been a long time ago) and the super units break balance all over the show, but from a spectacle point of view it's amazing. My favouite in Ultimate Apocalypse are the Necrons who are slow to get going but end up with insane super-monoliths, a mobile miniature sun, and teleporting murder turrets.
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Nov 18, 2019 22:43
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While I'm not a fan of 'new Blizzard', I was very happy with how old Blizzard approached balance and patching in multiplayer vs singleplayer in Warcraft 3. Namely, many of the multiplayer changes were ignored in the single player. They obviously did a QA on all the changes for both multiplayer and singleplayer so they wouldn't end up with a situation like the above. I respect that.
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Jan 20, 2020 00:45
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Mordja posted:So I hear the Warcraft 3 remake is out, if you're into that kind of thing. I felt like Warcraft III was the last good 'old blizzard' game to come out. I made a kickass custom single-player campaign for it too: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/to-the-bitter-end.202289/ The problem with this re-release is that it's siren call is making we want to get it and upgrade my campaign to work with it. But that would require me getting actual modelers, texture artists etc on board, since the far more complex models mean I can't just do some simple editing myself and still have it look ok. And I'd be tempted to voice-act it this time around, adding a whole massive new dimension of work to it. Plus I don't know if I can justify sinking the endless hours into this thing when I barely have time for my current projects... It hurts both to consider doing it and to consider leaving it be.
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Jan 29, 2020 04:48
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FanaticalMilk posted:I was never a crazy fan of the focus on heroes at the time. I'm interested to go back and see if I like it any more now. I tend to agree as far as RTS mechanics are concerned - in addition to the usual RTS problem where one side winning a battle already puts them at an advantage over the other side in terms of resources, they added hero Experience/levels to the mix. In Warcraft III, one side doing any significant damage to the other puts them significantly ahead because now their hero (or heroes) is considerably stronger than the opponents' - all the moreso if they actually managed to kill the enemy hero in the fight. Coming back from that is hard if it even happens once, since the only way past the early game of getting more Exp is to beat up the enemy - who is now stronger than ever. At least that's the impression I get from skirmish games, I don't really play/like multiplayer RTS except co-op with friends. My custom campaign though is not an RTS, it's a RPG/action game with a hero focus, and Warcraft III's hero-centric gameplay works well for that.
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Jan 29, 2020 21:53
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little munchkin posted:it's no worse than any other rts, with evenly skilled players the only way you're getting a significant xp advantage is by spending a lot of resources on units/items, which means you're going to be behind on tech. Not sure I agree there - XP can't be bought with the in-game resources, the only way to get it is to (a) kill things and (b) have your hero alive. And ironically, both are harder to do if the hero has less XP. That's in addition to - not instead of - the economic and time penalties that come from losing units (particularly heroes). It exacerbates the existing problem. And yes, don't give Activition/Blizzard money, they're a pack of avaricious liars.
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Feb 1, 2020 00:17
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