Seems like forever since Ea announced the last patch. Looks like alot of the cheaper tactics are going to be harder to do (rangers long shot is now level 2 ability, horn of gondor a level 3 skill.) The other news from Ea, is that an expansion has been announced. I think it’s called Rise of the Witchking.
I want to see what changes they’ve done for goblins and mordor. Since the elephant things have been bugged since 1.03, and shelob and goblin king are a bit pricy imo.
Everyone raved about this game, and then I played the demo, and then I realized that RTSes are all derivative, and dead to me. I guess somehow between the hundreds of hours of Dune 2, C&C, and Total Annihilation and now my gaming mind changed. Strange how you can like a genre at one point and just not like it at all the next.
YMMV.
No offense to anyone who likes RTSes. It’s not you, it’s me!
Maybe you burnt yourself out by only buying Westwood/EA RTS games, the most derivative rts games there are. The differences between each successive C&C game have been very minor with little or no UI tweaks or gameplay advances, just updates in graphics. Its the EA way.
Right now I’m in a burn out period with strategy games. I have galciv2,civ4, rome, Rol and Ron, and no desire to play any of them. If I hear more good news about the other sides in Bfme2, then I’ll probably start playing it again.
[ahnold]It’s tha derivitator! All others must deriv from it![/ahnold]
And that’s totally true about EA/Westwood. Try Rise of Legends or Dawn of War, even Rome: Total War (though I don’t really count that as an RTS personally).
Ok, first note this is only my opinion and I’m certainly not trying to prove “RTSes suck man!”. But for clarification, here’s why I think every one I’ve played is derivative. The latest one’s Ive played, by the way, were Act of War, which was fun but the same, and BFMEII (demo only).
Bascially I see the formula as thus:
You build a base area. Sometimes this is to produce your units, sometimes it’s to produce resources, often it’s both. In any event you want defense of this base to be more or less automated at least against a first wave of attack because you will be busy elsewhere. Almost always all defensive units have a “defense radius” where they will automatically attack when a unit approaches. So attackign is simply a matter of finding out this radius and then destroying the defenses appropriately with massed units.
You build your infrastructure in order to get better units and defensive structures.
You pick some mass units and some specialized units. You have them staged somewhere. If you are really fast and ambidextrous you have a two pronged, at most, strategy with maybe a diversion and then an attack.
More or less you mass select your units and tell them to group attack a high value target. Usually it goes defensive structures that are destroying you, hard to rebuild/expensive target, then infrastructure that makes it hard to rebuild. As your attackers get whittled down you send in a second wave that you mass select.
Other strategies are the early rush and the turtle. The turtle usually leads to at least interesting gameplay.
That’s the forumula I’ve always seen. The inherent problem I see with RTS games is that you lack the time to really develop a good tactical strategy and it always devolves to a mass battle with MAYBE you selecting an expensive unit and using its special ability.
Act of War had this problem. Lots of fantastic ideas, but it’s really hard with so many things going on and so many units to use all those special abilities and special things.
I don’t buy that it’s a simulation of a real commander’s time, either, because you don’t have to tell every unit under your command to go here, do this, attack this, use this special weapon, etc.
I just see the formula as the same every time. Call me jaded. :)
I when people say that turn based games are better than RTS games they don’t mean exactly that the model is better. I think what happens is that developers put together a game that would be interesting and tactical in turn based, but make it real time instead. A game with far fewer units and little to no base building or resource gathering would work in a RTS game.
Regarding Total War, that’s the exact opposite of most RTSes like BFMEII and kin. That’s a tactical resolution to a strategic setup. Most battles there, as in real life, are decided by operational actions before they happen. You can pull off a win with inferior units and number sometimes, but not very often.
IGN has the skinny on the expansion. Holiday release date. Adds one new faction. Concentrates on the rise of evil before the events of the trilogy or something. Some enhancements to War of the Ring mode. Some cool new additions to Create-a-hero, maybe Tom will start using them now! It doesn’t sound so much like a “super awesome hero that breaks balance but everyone has one” sort of thing. Like it scales in cost according to how you make them.
All new Troll class for heroes, that’ll be cool.
but really… I hope there’s more. But most of all, I WANT THE FORTRESS TO ACTUALLY BE A BIG POWERFUL THING OF AWESOMENESS.
From reading the description about the Motw, it looks like Ea is going to turn them into the side that you want their heros out. Knights have more health then the rohirrim now, but they do more damage then knights. Gandalf is now 5000 resource cost, but from the description it looks like he’s going to become a one man army.
The main issues I have with the patch changes is that most are very unintuitive.
Why do rohirrim do splash damage? They fight with spears.Do they impale them 3 at a time?
Why are the armor values for rohirrim all over the place? No longer is the armor system pretty simle to remember.
Why do knights deal less damage than basic Gondor soldiers? Aren´t knights supposed to be better fighters?
Why does Eomer´s spear have a big AOE? Is there a little grenade attached to the tip, or does he throw the spear through several people?
Why does Faramir´s wounding arrow only deal extra damage to heroes on foot? And why Cavalry type damage?
Why does Theoden, the most used MoTW hero get a big buff?
Why does Eowyn, one of the least used heroes in the game get nerfed by increasing her price so much? She has the same health now as boromir, deals ~twice his damage, but has less useful abilities and costs twice as much.
