Agreed.
I even loved it at first, until I played it multiplayer with a friend who is really good at RTS games and can click and give orders way faster than me. Aha! I thought, here’s a game in which he won’t have an advantage because it’s not about clicking on stuff fast.
No, it’s still about clicking on stuff fast. He kicked my ass so completely because he could do so much more than I could in the same amount of time.
I have the Kohan series in my library so I’ll be sure to check it out someday. In the meantime, I’m still sticking with WB3 since I found a way to defeat that overpowered boss. I didn’t realize that one of my builders could build garrison towers which have a fairly powerful lightning based attack by default so I surrounded mine enemy and built about five towers and just let them chip away at that shaman lizard bitch’s own garrison towers. It took a while but I did beat it. But the reason I didn’t think my builder could build garrison towers was because it’s a Will-o’-the-wisp. Who woulda thunk a Will-o’-the-wisp could build garrison towers? This is one of those games that has some depth (along with the ridiculousness) so if you dig deep enough you can probably find the way out of your predicament.
RPS? Rock Paper Scissors?
Ooops. :D
Anyone play this?
Noice! Another TA-successor!
But it’s still in Alpha+. Whatever that means.
Never played BAR because I’m scared off by the ward “Alpha” but I do have Zero-K in my Steam library. Hey, as Joni Mitchell once titled a song: “real good for free.”
Zero-K is crazy but it might have too many unit production buildings.
They all seem to be open source projects developed off the spring engine. I’m not sure if at some point there was a common ancestor for Zero-K and BAR (plus the others that exist), but they are somewhat similar from what I remember. I never played TA back in the olden days, so I don’t know how close they are to that. There are videos of people playing on youtube that will probably give a decent idea of what it is like.
Their common ancestry is Total Annihilation without a figment of a doubt. I have played Zero-K a little. The Big Bertha artillery canon is in it wholesale.
Watching pro players play this (the game’s going through a bit of a Renaissance), I don’t think this is very true. There might be a bit of a speed advantage, but it’s fairly minor - there just isn’t that much to click on in Kohan. It really is an RTS for the thinking person. That doesn’t mean you don’t need any speed, just that the ceiling is very low speed-wise. Most importantly, you don’t need to jump around from view to view just to be competitive. To me, this is the least appealing part of RTS games. The same is true for Tooth and Tail, which brilliantly constrains APM. I’d love to hear of similar RTS games, because I’m just not interested in games dominated by speed.
For Minecraft-style graphics, it had better have strategic zoom like SupCom.
I started replaying SupCom in the first time in almost a decade this past week. God, this game holds up. The crazy thing is I’m almost done with Forged Alliance and I finally remembered I could build experimental units! I’ve mainly been using strategic artillery to flatten the enemy.
And then I started doing research on any custom scenarios, and discovered FAF. Wow, I’m late to the party. Watching YouTube matches and it looks incredible. Love how they moded the game to allow for such massive battles. And watching these highly-rated players makes me realize just how I’ve been playing this game all wrong. So many new tactics to learn.
This was also a thrilling match, and this commentator is so damn good
Anyone looking at The Valiant? Looks like a kind of Crusader RTT. Reminded me a little of Myth from the videos.
I still occasionally play through the campaign on hard which is bonkers. If you aren’t ready for the map expansion…
Some of the commentary videos are nuts. Especially the big team vs team battles. There’s usually 1 or 2 commander deaths within the opening 15 minutes but the late game can go multiple ways:
Experimental unit clashes, nukes, strat bombers, artillery, tele-snipe…all of the above.
There was a match where one player completely wiped other and controlled the “entire map.” The losing player managed to somehow airlift his commander and drop him behind his opponents base where he set up a cloaking station and started building tactical missile silos. Sure enough he was able to scout the other players comm and blow him up with a tact missile strike.
I should try that. I love SupCom and then Forged Alliance, but I’ve only played compstomp with my friends, and multiplayer against random strangers sometimes when we wanted to be truly humbled.
But I’ve never tried the campaign.
The Forged Alliance campaign is only like…6 missions or something. But all of them are…epic. Actually most of them have a kind of brutal starting position at times, and you probably won’t be ready for when the map is expanded after clearing an objective because the threats increase like tenfold every time it happens.
Ironically though the last mission is by far the easiest. Spoilers: they give you all 3 commanders and a cyclops experimental to start with, plus fusion power.
Oh wow, yeah, the map expanding rings a bell, I must have tried the first mission in the Forged Alliance campaign, because I remember that happening. I was kicking ass, and then the map expanded and I got my ass kicked.
With Age of Empires games being remastered, and now Age of Mythology coming as well, I do wonder if I can get that desire to play through RTS games back again. It’s been a long time. Especially to play one that’s not also an RPG, like Warlords Battlecry games. Once you get used to the RPG mechanic and leveling up your hero between each map, it’s hard to go back to traditional RTS campaigns.
RPG elements on an RTS really do make a game feel more sticky, as you feel like you are making progress. Its one of the attractive features of Warlords Battlecry, but also in the Spellforce series.
On the Turn Based side, I think it’s what makes Blood Bowl so appealing, even if the game is not balanced.
The alternative to an RPG elemental is just the ability to unlock new units as a campaign progresses, but that’s a limited single player experience only.
As someone that also looked back at Supreme Commander recently for comp stomps, the Loud mod is very good. It fixes some late game stutter bugs, improves AI, and adds really good community units. The general wisdom seems to be FAF is the mod to do for pvp and LOUD for fighting AI.