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I loved HoMM as a kid. These days, I find Dominions does every part of it better, but I still remember it fondly. I always liked II better than III. Mostly for aesthetic reasons, I guess- I will grudgingly admit III played better, and had more variety in towns and units, but the pre-rendered art is grotesque next to II's gorgeous hand-drawn sprite work. And the towns... So, III has more town types, but I feel like their theming is... narrower? Flatter? Like: Sorceress in II has a mix of fairies and other magical creatures, dwarves and elves, and druids. It gets all the fairytale stuff, generally. In III, this has been split into Rampart, which is just a "elves and allied wilderness beings" town, and Conflux, which is ELEMENTALS ELEMENTALS ELEMENTALS ELEMENTALS ELEMENTALS. Wizard has an eclectic mix of wizards, Greco-Roman giants, golems, giant birds, hobbits and... pigs. There is a sense that the mages, while they have solid options for mid and high-tier, have had to grab whatever is to hand to fill out the other half of their roster. They're wizards, they're not really prepared to fight a war- and they're particularly weak on foot soldiers. In III, the boars, birds and hobbits are out and the Tower is straightforwardly a "wizards and the poo poo they conjure" faction. In particular they lose the roc to the Stronghold, apparently on the basis that... the Stronghold is the "bare rock" faction? I don't know. Stronghold is the continuation of II's Barbarian, which was a mostly uncomplicated greenskins and wolves job, but had some neat touches- like the cyclopes, who lived in a giant glowing pyramid and shot paralytic laser beams from their eyes. The Stronghold's cyclops is just a brute, a sack of hit points that lives in a cave and throws stones, and its top unit is the behemoth, a fuzzy... thing that suggests nothing in particular. Stronghold is boring. The Warlock is probably the most hard done by, as their creatures get split four different ways and they have no clear descendent. While admittedly their line up is a grab bag in II it works as a sort of dark reflection of the Wizard- a collection of fierce beasts, animate statues and more traditionally evil-aligned fantasy races roped together by some dark magician. In III the centaur goes to the Rampart, because wild. The hydra goes to the Fortress, because swamp. The griffin goes to the Castle, because heraldry. The minotaur and the dragon go to the Dungeon, because cave. And, in the greatest crime of all, the Gargoyle is nowhere to be found. Rest in peace, stony-winged friend. And now, because this is an incoherent rant, I'm going to complain that broadening a theme weakened a faction. The Knight in II is just the "poor dumb human bastard" crew. Their basic infantry is the peasant, a hilariously lovely unit that excels only in dying. Where other factions get dragons, thunderbolt-throwing giants, phoenixes, the Knight's top-tier unit is... a guy who swords real good. And he swords real goddamn good, but he's still just some guy. There's not a single unit in the roster that's in anyway magical, mystical or mythical. In III the Castle dilutes this with griffins, magic-throwing monks, and angels. It is no longer distinct from the other factions in its mundanity. The Necropolis, you know, it's fine. I wish they'd have kept the mummy but it's hard to gently caress up the undead.
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Dec 18, 2019 11:22
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ninjewtsu posted:I spent a decent chunk of my childhood playing Star Wars: Force Commander and I'm willing to bet that game was trash tier but if someone could just confirm that for me I'd really appreciate it I remember this being one of the really early 3D strategy games where they really hadn't worked out how the camera was supposed to work yet.
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Feb 3, 2020 13:24
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mortons stork posted:Since you're liking TA so much I'm gonna go ahead and recommend you play Supreme Commander as well. As a spiritual successor, it is pretty much every good thing about TA improved upon, expanded upon, looks incredibly nice despite being over 10 years old at this point. And it has an active community who is still patching the thing in the form of Forged Alliance Forever. I'll make a qualified rec for Planetary Annihilation too. Same style of RTS, closer to TA than SupCom. Caveats: there is no singleplayer worth speaking of, you really need the TITANS expandalone, not the base game, and you'll need four extra brains to play effectively because strategy on spheres is hard, it turns out. Also you can smash planets into other planets and make them explode 
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Apr 26, 2020 23:54
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:I don't think SC has garrison structures, does it? Terran bunkers. e: I was going to ask if Sudden Strike had garrisonable neutral structures but apparently it and RA2 released on the exact same day (in Europe at least) KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 23:19 on May 26, 2020 |
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May 26, 2020 23:17
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Does that work for enemy or neutral ones tho? Ah, no, but that was what Milo and POTUS meant: you could garrison, but only in owned structures. As opposed to RA2 letting you do it with neutrals.
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May 26, 2020 23:26
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I can't imagine you've not played them, but I think Starcraft/Warcraft 3 are the big daddies of narrative driven RTS campaigns. Homeworld and Deserts of Kharak are also beloved, though they're not character-driven in any sense. And of course there are the Westwood games, which are famously campy nonsense- RA2's campaign is a blast. I'm just listing all the famous RTSes here. Less famous is... Battle Realms? I haven't thought about Battle Realms in years, but I definitely remember it having lots of cutscenes and characters and plot beats. I won't swear to it being good- I can't remember it well enough. Populous: The Beginning I adore, and plays most like Sacrifice, but I'm not going to claim that its SP campaign has any sort of narrative.
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Mar 20, 2021 13:30
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Seeing a lot of beams. That's cool. Beams are cool!!
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Jul 31, 2021 13:03
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victrix posted:This got no hits in steam general so I'll try here: Not heard of it but I like the idea so I'll check it out.
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Sep 6, 2021 14:32
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Not heard of it but I like the idea so I'll check it out. I have checked it out. It is VERY HoMM 3. And I mean clearly whoever owns the HoMM license is asleep at the C&D office because they are copying verbatim from that game. Map features, resource types, unit rosters- verbatim. Check this out:  So this is one of the town types, "Arcane". Let's take a gander at what I can recruit here. Seems like, hmm, Goblins, Gargoyles, Golems, Wizards, Djinni and Titans. Let's compare this to the roster for the Tower town in HoMM 3:  oh The HoMM 2 Wizard had less overlap with the Tower than this. Now, granted, I'm cheating a little here- you can choose to take "Ice Sculpters" instead of Golems and "Incarnations" (? not sure what these are supposed to be- they upgrade into "Liongods") instead of Titans, and in fairness they've gotten a little more creative with the unit abilities. And fair enough, sure, I'll pay $10 for a knockoff HoMM 3 with cute pixel monsters and support for modern resolutions. Why not. There's been some attempt to smooth out the rough edges in the franchise. You can see here the town construction UI is laid out as an upgrade tree, so you can see exactly what's on offer and how to get there. Hero development is similar. When you take a structure on the map that generates recruits for you, those recruits will pop out at the beginning of every week as a caravan that will path to the nearest town or hero. That's neat. Combat has had the largest overhaul. There's no more stacks or hexes or fine unit control; you plop your dudes down on the map in big blobs and watch as they crash into each other. They appear to have tried to solve the invincible ten thousand unit stack problem twice, which I'm not sure was entirely warranted. First is the unstacking thing, so your hundred goblin scrubs have to actually fight as one hundred scrubby goblins and not as a single giant swoleblin. The other measure is a limit on the maximum unit power- not units, normalised unit strength value- that you can field at once. And this is where I'm a little uncertain- it definitely ensures that you're always taking attrition, even small fights, but I feel like the unstacking would accomplish that anyway. And I find the scenarios it produces kind of weird and unsatisfying. So, you can lead with your weak units, watch them die unsupported and accomplish nothing, then send in the elites- or do it the other way round, watch the elites take more casualties than they really should, then reinforce with waves of fodder and hope they can carry it over the line. Or you could try split your stacks and field a little bit of everything, but the UI's not really set up to support that. And that's what's really annoying me here. So, at the start of every fight, the computer will pick a bunch of stuff from your army, I think entirely at random, and throw it into the field. Invariably- and I do mean invariably- it will a little over the power limit for the battle. Just a little over, a point or two. There will be a big button that says "SEND BACK TO RESERVES", which will pick a bunch of stuff at random and send them back to the reserves. Maybe it will be a little of everything. Maybe it will be half of these things and one of these. It's an adventure! When you press it, you will now be under your force limit, so you get a new button- "DEPLOY FROM RESERVES". This does exactly what you'd think, and there is a good chance that if you press it you will be over your force limit again. So you have to fix it manually, by splitting unit groups. You do this in two ways, as far as I can tell. You can shift-click on the group, in the deployment UI in the bottom left, and drag it to a new slot. This will move half the group. You can also ctrl-click and move one. Note: do not drag into a slot that is already occupied! That will move the entire stack, for some reason! So you keep halving the groups, shuffling units back and forth, trying to get just under that limit- which is measured in power points, remember, so every unit type has a different ratio of actual units to force limit. I would at this point like to note that there is nothing I can see that indicates that you can split groups like this. I worked it out through trial and error. It took me a dozen battles or so. Anyway. The battles are engaging enough, for all that you have very little control over them bar deployment and spell casting, and deployment is kind of a mess. There is some tactical nuance to be had in it. These guys are archers- better put something fast near them. These guys are healers- better hit them with berserk so they're not doing their thing. That sort of deal. Overall: fun little attempt to remake HoMM 3 and sand the edges off. Makes a decent fist of solving some of the franchise's problems, needs a UI pass.
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Sep 6, 2021 22:14
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Mordja posted:Retro Commander is even lower budget and seems something of a one-man's take on a Total Annihilation-like. Will give it a try some time. Having played a bunch of Planetary Annihilation recently, this just makes me want to play more Planetary Annihilation.
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Oct 3, 2021 14:30
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I merely wished to indicate that I had found the demo uncompelling, not start an edition war. 
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Oct 4, 2021 02:18
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Rynoto posted:Modded SupCom 1's MP is still alive and well and I still don't understand why more RTS didn't steal more ideas from it. Controlling hundreds of units is far more fun than small squad and being able to set a dozen factories to all produce units forever without worrying about efficiency is just such good design. Micro is boring, macro is exciting as you get to watch the pretty explosions more. When the AoE4 open beta was happening, I saw a feedback post from a guy, I think they were a Starcraft vet, who said that "houses should take longer to build so that missing your timing on them hurts more". Which made me realise that, like, at least some fraction of the RTS community is made up of people for whom the genre isn't defined just in very high level terms like "games where you give tasks to many little moving things in order to achieve some goal", but also by the hyperspecific contours of the gameplay of existing games. Things like limits on how many units you can select at once or needing to manually keep a production queue going are core parts of the gameplay loop they want and expect to receive from these games.
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Oct 30, 2022 21:08
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Probably of interest to someone in this thread: https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/board-game-vs-simulation-style-strategy-games A new episode of strategy game podcast Three Moves Ahead, this one on the topic of "the different design goals between a more "Board Gamey" strategy game like Civilization and the "Simulationist" breed exemplified by Europa Universalis". I'm posting it most because of its guest list: both Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civ 4, and Johan Andersson, who was for a very long time the head game dev guy at Paradox Interactive and designer on, at least the first and second iterations of Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and Victoria.
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Apr 24, 2023 00:46
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Captain Beans posted:wowzer that looks dope Yeah every time I see screenshots from that project I get hype as gently caress. Especially the Unreal_One posted:KKND vibes KKND was one of those games I only got to play a demo of as a kid and vibed with super hard. Someone make a new RTS featuring those bastard plasma tanks from Dark Reign next.
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Apr 26, 2023 01:57
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Perimeter owns
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Dec 21, 2023 19:06
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Northgard was fun but has always felt very... stiff, for lack of a better word. The gameplay doesn't have a lot of flex to it, everything's this clockwork mechanism ticking through some predictable timer, and there seemed to be little scope for any sort of extemporisation. You hit the buttons when the buttons say hit me and that's the game. Very unlike Populous: The Beginning, a game I've been replaying because it just had a Steam release. It has got to be one of the bounciest RTSes ever made. It's over-flowing with- I think the game design term is juice? In a genre that generally does not have much juice at all. Everything is squashy and imprecise and frantic. Half of everything you can do in that game knocks units flying. Units knock each other flying- every time one initiates combat it does it by shoving the other guy- down a slope (they roll!), off a cliff (there's fall damage), into water (units drown instantly). Fire warriors will blast people off their feet and then air juggle them?? It's complete and total chaos, and on paper the game seems like it should be an unplayable mess. There are (functionally speaking) only three unit types, you can't micro them (units will refuse to disengage from a fight, all move orders are attack-move), and the commander unit's active abilities are so ludicrously impactful that they can end an army or destroy a base in the space of seconds. But it's so much fun.
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Mar 11, 2024 14:28
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