which was?
The year I was born…
I think it’s been longer than that for me if we’re talking linear story campaigns, those things always suck.
Now a good dynamic campaign - like in Dark Crusade, Rise of Nations, or Ardennes Assault - those I can play for ages. They’re far too rare.
Young whippersnapper
Man, I love a good RTS campaigns. I loved the Kohan campaigns, the War Wind campaigns, Conquest’s campaign, etc etc.
I had a ton of fun with the Ashes of the Singularity campaign on release.
Damn, I never played War Winds. I had a demo thanks to a SSI box set, but the game was so tough. Everything had to be upgraded.
Wasn’t there a game set in Fantasy Japan that was like that? In order to build horse troops, you needed horses.
It’s been ages since I played it, but Battle Realms maybe?
Also War Wind still holds up, despite the limited resolution.
Yeah, probably battle realms. There is a resolution patch for it I think. I loaded up last year for a bit.
For some reason when I think of RTS campaigns I think of Age of Empires 2. Can’t remember which campaign it was, one of the early ones (not the William Wallace one) and from the depths of time the quote “Burgundians, here?” echoes out.
It was the first time I’d ever heard of ‘Burgundy’, and I wouldn’t really appreciate what/who they were until I started playing Europa Universalis 4 many, many years later. A few years after that, I read a great history book on forgotten kingdoms of Europe that informed me there have been, in fact, seven polities called ‘Burgundy’ across history.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
(Somewhat back on point, I’m not actually sure what my favourite RTS campaign has been. Potentially Warcraft 3? Or Dawn of War perhaps?)
I came to that after Starcraft, and I hated it.
Loved it.
I played around with this a bit last night with the user patch that is available. I’d have to spend more time with it and time with the original again to really say if it was worse or not. Wikipedia says the reception at the time was that it was more complicated, which considering the complaint leveled against EE3 was that it was too dumbed down, must have driven the Mad Doc folks crazy.
I played a 6 player game with 5 AI that was supposed to be 3v3, but I messed up something so it was a free for all. The region mechanic isn’t bad, but I think that RoN did it more elegantly. From what I could tell there was no attrition related to it. You could also capture an opponents city in a region not connected to yours, but the region doesn’t join your territory until your empire is adjacent to it.
The having to research techs in order to progress to a new epoch was a bit different. There are 12 techs you can research each epoch, and you have to research 6 before you can advance to the next epoch. I guess RoN does that as well though, right?
The construction of roads and bridges is something I don’t think I’ve seen in other rts games.
The picture in picture window is pretty nice. The only other place I can think of that being done is Planetary Annihilation, and I think EE2 does it better. In PA you have 1 window set to wherever (or 2 if you add a mod). With EE2 you have one window, but you can bookmark different locations so the pip window can quickly change to those locations. Maybe PA allows that, but I don’t remember it.
The Civ Manager screen and the War Planner screen are also something I don’t think I’ve seen in other rts games. I need to look into the Civ Manager window more, but the War planner one will let you diagram out plans with your allies. I think Zero-k might allow you to draw with flares, or maybe that is just with unit formations.
There is weather and seasons, but I had to turn it off because when a snowstorm would hit I could barely see anything on the map.
One thing I thought was nice is they allow to save unlimited versions of game settings. So instead of it just remembering what you did for the settings last time you can set up a certain game, save the settings into a file, and then load the settings again to play that game. They also apparently have a couple interesting game modes. One option that can be used with team games is called sole survivor, where once one team defeats the other it turns into a ffa game between the members of the winning team. There is something else called hot spots, where some location on the map will be marked, then players have to try and take that location with a city or something, and then it will mark another location, and the process repeats. There also is some team game mode where the match spans over multiple battles. There also is a game type called capitols, where you knock a player out if you take their capitol and hold it for a period of time. In the original EE if you played conquer the AI didn’t seem to quit until every last unit and building was dead. So having something different is nice. There also are Regicide, and King of the Hill modes.
The max population cap mechanic is a bit different in EE2. You set an overall pop cap for the game, and then it splits that up among the remaining players. It seems to handle pretty decent population sizes. The game I played last night had a 4000 cap.
I think it probably suffered from RoN + expansion coming out in 2003-4, and then AoE3 was out in 2005, and to me those both look better than EE2, and are more polished. It seems like they had some interesting ideas though.
The Dark Reign Expansion allowed for limited road building. You didn’t really build roads so much as explode a Terraforming device that created road terrain, which wheeled and walking units could move faster on.
I know, not the same thing, but you could terraform parts of the map so that resource gathering could go a bit faster. Too bad only the two expansion sides had it and not the base factions.
I can see where the complaints were coming from on Empire Earth 3. They really simplified it, and they went with a kind of cartoonish Settlers style graphics theme, which just reinforces the feeling. The performance even now feels clunky, and the pathfinding is pretty bad. Only 5 epochs compared to the earlier 15, epoch advancement is just filling worker slots in city centers to generate tech points. Dropped down to 2 resources, wealth and raw materials. That isn’t necessarily bad, but raw material site are infinite resources I think, so there is no worry about them running out. They also appear to have abandoned specific civilizations and just had regions.
I’ll play around with EE2 some more, but I doubt I’ll spend any more time on EE3.
I think they had a good idea when they streamlined EE3. The problem was that the previous two games had made people expect more, not less. I actually like the conquer-the-world campaign in EE3. The humour is often rather bad/forced, but there’s the core of a decent game, buried in there somewhere. I always found the factions rather problematic (“Western”, “Middle-Eastern” and “Far-Eastern” stereotypes), but the idea of simplifying things seemed fine to me (à la the original Age of Empires).
I remember that Mad Doc – not exactly purveyors of quality software, to be honest – scrubbed the game from their website within days of it being released (and widely panned). They produced one or two patches in rapid succession and then the game was dropped like a hot potato. I think if there’s one game that might have benefited from some refinement and maybe even an expansion, this was it.
Anyway, EE3 is decent enough to fool around in every once in a while.
I just got Northgard. I will have to check it out after I play my all time favorite RTS - Icewind Dale.
Yeah, I dont mind the simplification as much as the horrid path finding, but I can see where ee fans would be disappointed with how different it was. It is like how AoE2 fans didn’t really.like the changes with AoE3.
I noticed that a game called Mechs and Mercs :Black Talons is on sale on humble of less than 2 dollars. Thoughts?
Trying out Company of Heroes 2.
Am I missing something or does it not tell you any of the unit stats? CoH1 at least told you relative attack values.
Ugh though, grinding to unlock in-game abilities? You can see the early stages of cancer that eventually claimed Relic by the time Dawn of War 3 came around.
What, you mean the commanders, of the XP requirements in missions?