Damn that Tom Chick. Have you SEEN what he said about Deus Ex?
I seem to recall that he’s actually playing it now.
I simply can’t get into the campaign.
It’s like a high school melodrama set up by D&D geeks.
The missions are tedious. “Hey, how do we kill 40 minutes? Oh I know, let’s send them running around a maze.”
The graphics simply do not suit the subject matter. Yes, I like the style, unfortunately it completely contrasts with the “dark” nature of the game.
The style of the game itself makes the campaign completely implausible, as you deal with “massive” invasion forces of… 9 enemy units. Be careful, or that army might take over the world.
I’ve almost finished the night elf campaign and dear God, am I ever sick of this already. They repeated every single mistake from the original. I haven’t tried the bonus campaign, but it had better contain some fucking tower d or something interesting, or I’m going to hold this disappointment against you, wumpus.
Capture the flag is something I’ve never seen before in any RTS. If that doesn’t do it for you originality-wise, I don’t know what will. I guess the Diablo clone bonus Orc campaign might.
I haven’t gotten that far. As I said, I’m just reaching the end of the Night Elf campaign.
So far, it’s been the same-old, same-old drudgery.
The Capture the Flag thing is similar to Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology’s King of the Hill. A wonder in the center of the map must be held for a certain amount of time. Taking out the opposition and controlling that center point results in the timer shifting to your team. The timer also gets shorter as the Wonder is captured multiple times IIRC.
It’s the best way to play with an odd number of players IMO. So while this WC3 Xpack mode is a little different, it’s not exactly groundbreaking.
–Dave
So while this WC3 Xpack mode is a little different, it’s not exactly groundbreaking.
Except in this mission you only control the heroes. The construction and control of all the other units is strictly by the AI. Plus the widget in the center actually has to move between the bases. So it’s basically completely different, but don’t let that stop you from making the comparison.
There are a lot of user mods on battle.net similar to this, where you have to master the ebb and flow of the AI army battles with your heroes. But I’m not aware of any commercial games that use this particular design.
Warcraft 3 is a ‘dark’ game?
Don’t let those fancy CG screeners fool ya, this is a pure toon animated take on the Tolkien-stylized fantasy creation animated with extreme outlandish prejudice.
It’s goofy, and the fact that it attempts earnestness is what makes it so rich! (maybe I am some closet D&D geek, the kind that never rolled the obscenely numbered dice and reached potential…we’re the most dangerous bunch out there!)
I’ll admit i haven’t played it but a couple hours but it isn’t grabbing my interest near as much as i would have expected. For some reason my thoughts keep returning to Flight Sim 2004’s dynamic clouds… and flying through them in a Piper Cub… -_-. I played the beta pretty heavy so i knew everything thats coming and there aren’t many suprises. I also just find the NE race boring and can’t stand them honestly :) so having to play through them as the first campaign is suck. Maybe ill just skip battle.net and go straight to spell editing… hmm spell and skill editing…
Bleh and im so pissed about how suck i am with the P-39N in the campaign; i was cleaning up with the lowly 109E and B-239 for chrissake. And then that damn ChessGenius for my Axim has beaten me every frikin time. I haven’t got time to worry about wtf Maiev is going to do. Maybe if we get some hot NE girl on girl later on my interest will rise.
Capture the Flag is when you take a flag and drag it back to your base.
King of the Hill is when you take a point and hold it. You certainly don’t move the wonder in Age of Empires. AOE didn’t innovate that one either; it was Myth, I think. Along with steal the bacon and some other things. I don’t remember ever playing it in AOE so it must not have been much fun in that. Heaps of it in Myth though.
It’s not a multiplayer mode in TFT, anyway. Multiplayer is the standard 1v1/2v2/3v3/4v4/FFA that it’s always been.
Speaking of which, if you don’t like that part of the game you’re not going to like some 80% of what a Blizzard RTS is about. If you don’t “get” Blizzard-style RTS multiplayer, it’s obviously going to seem weak strategically compared to something like Kohan. A friend of mine who never liked Starcraft but finally got it with WC3 used this analogy to describe it: It’s like Tetris, except you control the rate and type of peices that come out.
That probably makes no sense, so I’ll try to explain it. You essentially have a whole bunch of limited-use units, all of which do a certain thing but only that thing. All of these units have strong counters as well, moreso than something like Age of King’s counter system, because of the limited usage of the units. The goal, beyond establishing a flow of these units that surpasses the other player, is to compose a force based on having the right units at the right time to counter the other player’s.
How is it like tetris? Well suppose your opponents army forms a big pile of blocks that has a hole that needs one of those T shaped peices, or that s-block, or that really long block will do in a pinch. If you don’t have those peices, you are going to just make a big mess for yourself. If you do have those peices, you then have to use them correctly.
So it essentially becomes less a game of grand strategy, like kohan, or a game of tactics like medieval or myth, and more of a game where you try and find a hole in your opponents army and exploit it by sending out units specifically designed to destroy units of that type. A diagram that showed unit weaknesses and strengths in Brood War, for example, would be complicated as hell. Warcraft 3, even more so than Starcraft, really required you to focus on how these units were used as well, because the counters often depended on specific usage. It was rather weak, however, in the overall breadth of the units available, at least compared to Brood War.
To that effect TFT is leaps and bounds ahead of WC3 proper. Multiplayer games of that turned into games of “build as many spellcasters as possible.” They have a direct (and easy) counter in this one. Two, actually, since the expansion adds a decidedly cool magic/anti-magic system in there as well. In TFT there are usually two or more counters for every one unit, meaning it’s tougher to anticipate the type of counter you’re going to be faced with. Heroes themselves are part of the whole counter system, and the addition of neutral heroes adds another wildcard in there. The pace of the game is such that you’ll rarely stradle all the ends of the upper tech tree, meaning you have to make a choice from the beginning as to what units you’re going for. All of the additional units and such really add to the balance- flying spellcasters, anti-magic units, the like. Every race gets new defensive structures or upgrades, and units get new skills like the troll berserkers. It really adds a lot to the balance.
Whether you understand why these are good changes, they are good changes. In my estimation, the expansion has easily doubled the amount of multiplayer content, and that’s not hyperbole. I’d say it’s a better multiplayer game than Brood War. If you haven’t liked Blizzard multiplayer before, try thinking of it from the Tetris angle, that may help. It may not be to your tastes, but that’s not really a fault of the game itself.
Phew, that was pretty long for a post on a forum I mostly lurk on. Though Blizzard strategy games seem much maligned here, so I guess I felt compelled to speak.
Though Blizzard strategy games seem much maligned here, so I guess I felt compelled to speak.
Blizzard’s King of the Hill. There are a lot of people trying to knock them down.
Blizzard is also the bearer of the flag proclaiming them best RTS developer and many are trying to capture what they have.
I am not sure I or others malign them so much as we think they are stagnant where even practical RTS changes and innovations are concerned and sorta enjoy other titles better. To get that across someone may say for instance, “Fuck Warcraft III, it sucks and so does wumpus.” That may seem like a crude and/or insipid way of making a point, but there are layers upon layers of reasoning hidden in there. The wumpus sucks part really doesn’t add much and most likely detracts from the purity and truth in “Fuck WC3, it sucks.”, but it is always fun to throw in. Just yesterday, I told my wife, “Damn, I hate our shitty Congress, it sucks and so does wumpus.” Then we both chuckled and watched some more Paradise Hotel.
Was there any point to that post? And the count keeps climbing…
DITTO
RTS’s are overrated.
Though I’ve liked Starcraft when I’ve played it.
I played the beta pretty heavy so i knew everything thats coming and there aren’t many suprises.
Me too, that’s why I was suprised how much I liked the expansion. Keep playing at least through the Elf campaign and the Orc bonus campaign. I’m not a particular fan of Blizzard’s cinematics, but I must say, the ending movie for Frozen Throne was pretty kick ass. And dark, just the way Jakub likes it.
I also just find the NE race boring and can’t stand them honestly
Really? I think NE’s are so much more interesting now. The mountain giant is a great unit (love taunt, which forces your opponent to micromanage his units), as is the warden, arguably the most interesting race specific hero (the blink ability is rather unique). I don’t know if you noticed, but they increased MG default armor by +2, so I typically get at least one level of armor upgrade plus the damage resistance upgrade as soon as I can. They’re incredibly tough to kill once you do that. I also think the faerie dragons are underrated, but only because so few people actually build casters now. That mana flare ability really crushes casters.
Entangle also interrupts focus spells now, which is nice.
Multiplayer games of that turned into games of “build as many spellcasters as possible.”
Only because caster damage was indistinguishable from archer (piercing) damage in WC3 classic. That means they were formidable ranged units PLUS they had major spell effects. That’s why level 3 melee units were useless. Once they had slow, faery fire, etc cast on them and 10-12 casters are focussing fire on them one by one-- they didn’t last long. In FT, casters do “magic” damage which hardly puts a dent in any melee unit. You’ll absolutely clean up against casters with only hero protection, which is the way it always should have been. It was just a bizarre, unanticipated side effect of the design, I’m sure.
I remember seeing the mass caster strategy for the first time on battle.net, laughing at it-- “ALL YOU BUILT IS CASTERS? OMG LOL!”-- then the laugher abruptly stopped as the massed sorceresses + hero slaughtered my force of grunts and headhunters. This wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone until someone tried it. Of course, once a strategy like this emerges, the darwinism of battle.net ensures that it spreads like wildfire. The more people you have beating on your game, the quicker weird little edge conditions like this will emerge. The great thing about Blizzard is that they actually pay attention to what goes on in multiplayer games-- and that’s how you make “fun” a science instead of developer intuition guesswork.
So it essentially becomes less a game of grand strategy, like kohan, or a game of tactics like medieval or myth, and more of a game where you try and find a hole in your opponents army and exploit it by sending out units specifically designed to destroy units of that type.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Sure, there are strategies which can really screw you if you don’t build the right things. The classic example is going all air as NE using chimera / druid of the talon. In that case you better pray you’ve built a ton of anti-air units, or you attack his base early, otherwise you’re absoutely fucked once he gets ramped up.
But on the other hand, WC3 isn’t a game of “hard counters” as SelfishGene calls it. That’s more like the Age of… series where one unit absolutely DEMOLISHES another unit and renders it completely ineffective. Other than the air/ground paradigm mentioned above, this simply isn’t true in WC3, which was designed to enforce mixed armies above everything else. What they wanted to avoid was the massing of a single type of unit; an army with casters, ranged, and melee should crush an army made up of melee only. All the individual units are useful against each other; the important thing is that they have complementary positive effects on each other that make them greater as a whole rather than individually.
And it absolutely does work that way; I’ve gone mass melee/rush and gotten stomped for this very reason. The first rush-- and bear in mind, WC3 has some very effective anti-rush design elements-- does some damage but doesn’t kill him off. In the meantime, while we build up for the second wave, he techs to tier 2 and casters, which are inexpensive to build. By the time we get there, he has massed a number of casters plus a few melee units (and probably 1 or 2 towers if he realizes we’re coming back). Assuming his ally isn’t a jackass and has been building stuff, it’s common to get crushed by this mixed force of casters/melee acting as the base defense.
Another interesting thing Blizzard has done is make siege much easier to get. For example, as NE you can get the catapult as a tier 1 unit (!) as soon as you build the hunter’s hall, which is a required building for any NE teching anyway. It’s still 4 food, but damn, that’s quick.
OK, wumpus, so you agree that WC3 classic degenerated into a mind-numbing casterpalooza and you don’t think that sucked?
As for Frozen Throne, once I got past the NE campaign and the first half of the Blood Elf… it was good. The multiplayer is looking great, but Orcs remain extremely susceptible to caster abuse, since Blizzard still hasn’t given them a dispel worth a damn.
It took a long time to figure out that it was a casterpalooza, but yes, once that became standard for every player, I couldn’t go back to WC3 vanilla.
The tauren spiritwalkers have dispel as their 2nd ability, just like priests.
The most interesting dispel related change is the complete removal of wands of negation from the game. This makes sense, once you remove the mass casters incentive (piercing damage). Otherwise casters would be completely useless instead of merely helpful like they are now.
Speaking of old-school WC3 and casterpalooza. You know what used to really suck? When you went all-necro as undead, then fought someone who bought 2 wands of negation before the first big battle. Note that each wand comes with two uses. Here’s how that went:
Summon 10 skels from dead bodies on the battlefield.
(one click to dispel them all instantly)
Summon 10 skels from dead bodies on the battlefield.
(one click to dispel them all instantly)
Repeat ad nauseam until there are no more bodies on the battlefield to raise, then you’re dead.
On the other hand, wands probably seemed like a good idea when casters were so all-powerful.
Never had a problem with that type of thing happening. There should be ways to smack down players that try and go all of one type to win. If they want to try an swarm of one type then get hammered for doing it thats their problem.