Can I convince any of you fine gentlemen to play some?
I have tons and tons, they fall from my beard and in to my lap at all hours of the day.
Recently got back in to Red Alert 3 thanks to a little prompting from Joose.
Action's fairly fast paced and focuses on special-abilities your units have paired up with churning out lots of things that kill other things, without any complicated research trees to worry about. I believe it's about £15 off steam at the moment.
Excellent addition to the game is being able to play the single-player cooperatively with another human, each of you working towards the same goal. It's very satisfying when your buddy swoops in and helps you save the day instead of a little computer-controlled player bumbling around in the corner.
Joose and I ran into the enemy base screaming at them whilst waving our helicopters in the air and firing a billion missiles at their fucking faces.
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I have reinstalled Age of Empires 3 and the expansions (sweepy version works over hamachi, using a special launcher).
Games last a lot longer than Red Alert 3, and there's a lot more strategy involved in picking research paths to follow, and resource gathering to manage (four resources, count 'em.) The game's a big improvement on previous versions with explodey physics for buildings and units, and the now obligatory experience-gain and leveling-up some others have pinched, allowing you to use special abilities and prettify your capital city.
Computer players are fairly intelligent and often keep a solid stream of nasties pouring into your base. Some games might fire off the odd tank-rush, but the AI in AOE tends to throw cavalry, riflemen and heavy bombards all at once, often resulting in panicked "OH SHIT" moments as you scramble your horse back to base to defend yourself.
Good for those that like building buildings and managing resources (ie. me.)
Typical Russian city, as scouted by my invincible hot-air-baloon unlock.
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C&C3: Tiberium wars never really caught me, sadly. It had tiberium fields, Kane, stompy robots and lasers.. But every single battle felt the same. You'd struggle to take land with your tiny units while trying to gain technology to build big nasty explodey things and then steamroller the enemy base.
Having said that, some of the units are spectacular; particularly the zippy little invisible stealth tanks, the alien carriers, and the massive GDI tank-killer. They're all pleasurable to use, but sort of get lost in the mess once you tell them all to attack-move.
Tech is similar to the two above titles mashed together. It has RA3's simplicity paired with AOE's sprawling technology options.
MAKE MORE DOODS.
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Rise of Nations was the last of its kind, blending quasi-3D units with an isometric map, allowing the game the freedom it needed to draw billions of trade routes between cities, both your own and those of your allies. This, to me, is one of the best base-building strategy games. You're encouraged to place cities around the map for two main reasons. Firstly, they expand your influence of the map, along with your line of sight (an optional victory condition, ie. control 50% of the map). Secondly, they allow you to gobble more resources per minute depending on what you build in them.
One city might be flush with farms to gain food, while another might be at a mountainside for mining puposes, enshrouded in a forest for your lumber needs. If you like managing lots of little bases then this is the perfect game (I notice Roman's asking for a building game). The skirmish setup allows you to put all sorts of rules in, including a 60 minute peace timer, if you want to build an empire before crushing it!
Possibly the best bit is advancing faster than everyone else.
Here you see rocket launchers pounding an fleet of wooden sailing ships.
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I'm not an expert on <b>Battleforge</b> as much as Joose is, so if you want an in depth explaination of the nooks and crannies of this game, he's your man. I didn't play it as much as I would've liked, mostly due to its fiendishly difficult missions. There's no base building at all in this game, you simply move around objective filled maps and capture points that give you 'mana' (or money, whatever) to spend on units.
Units are instantly called in from a deck of cards you have at the bottom of the screen, you can prepare this deck the same way you would in a fantasy style card game. Objectives are usually "Capture X" "Defend X" or "Kill X", but seeing as every single card you can play has a hard-counter (something that's really good against it) from the enemy, there's a fair amount of strategy required to pick the right ones. Often Joose and I steamrolled in with massive armies, only to have them picked to pieces in seconds.
Also, it's FREE. It's a microtransaction game, where you buy booster-packs for your deck of cards.
Good for strategists who hate base building.
Battles sometimes descend into gang-rape unless you plan them out.
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Universe at War is a weird one. I might be a little bias in saying this, but it's more or less a Starcraft clone with added shinies packed on. You have humans, nasty aliens, and future aliens all battling it out. There are also some spiritual aliens, but nobody likes them. Sprawling tech trees, very unique units and building styles on each sides, simple resource gathering and very heated combat.
Highlight of this game for me are the MASSIVE STOMPY ROBOTS pictured below. You call them out and affix all manner of weaponry to them, they are your mobile base and attack robots and they are hard as nails. Future aliens revolve around data, and as such can zip around the map at lightpseed through electricity pylons. Humans only appear in the singleplayer, religious aliens are weird and difficult to play as due to their shifting abilities that change on a click of a button, and their extremely wide range of units.
I bought it because it was £5 on steam at the time, not sure what it costs now, but if you want something a bit different, and REALLY like stompy robots, you can't go wrong.
Stomp, stomp, stomp. We are angry and red.
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I really don't need to say much about <b>DEFCON</b>. It's great. Go and buy it.
It's basically the screen from the NORAD base in Wargames. You engage in naval battles, air battles, and TACTICAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.
Battles can last 20 minutes to 24 hours depending on what time setting you choose, and much to mine and Joose's distress, you can reduce a continent's population to.. 0. Made by the same people as Uplink and Darwinia, indie gaming at its best.
Sorry, Africa.
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Dawn of War is a little like The Sims of the RTS world. The original game was great when it came out, and the first few expansions added quite a lot of fresh content when they were released, but as the series dragged on they got a little stale, sitting in the same old engine. Luckily they released a sequel soon after this, so all is well. There are expansions to add the imperial guard, necrons, tau, dark eldar and battle-nuns (or something).
Skirmishes are usually long, bloody, and sometimes quite difficult. The computer can sometimes bumble around and fail to get anywhere, and sometimes come hurtling over a hill with a massive rape-squad of tanks and heavy infantry. Commanders add a little extra spice to the already ability-rich list of troops under your command, acting as hero units for you to charge into battle with.
Difficulty often depends who you chose to play as. There are the traditional RTS space marines, whose tactics consist of making lots of guys and giving them guns, and backing them up with tanks. Orks are far more research heavy, and prefer to go numbers-heavy, making it a little difficult to figure out what group of 10 units is meant to be doing what. Eldar have big tech trees, tau have specialist units, and so on..
Indeed the game is sweepable, but you have to have all games installed to be able to access the different sides in multiplayer games (unless they figured out another work-around since Soulstorm was released).
You can add player decals to a folder, if you know how. Hail the Vladimirians!
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I played the <b>Dawn of War 2</b> demo when it first came out, and much to my dismay they managed to remove everything I find fun about playing skirmishes in RTS games. The game focuses entirely on unit tactics, giving you a single building from which to build your people, and a few research options to unlock the next tier of units.
Fortunately the game redeemed itself in my eyes by offering a really rather awesome co-op singleplayer campaign. You dart around dark, pretty, atmospheric maps shooting up nasties with your squad of space marines, capturing points, deading nasty bosses, and unlocking new weapons and armour sets.
You get the opportunity to use shrubberies, walls, oil barrels, and ruined buildings to hide behind (using the same sort of cover-system as company of heroes) which works nicely when you and a buddy are flanking an enemy base, setting up heavy rifles and sniper shots.
Good for those of who that want to focus on moving troops around.
Shada and I set up an attack, the big blue indicator shows where my BULLETS OF SMITEY DEATH will fall.
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Bit of a weird one, <b>Sins of a Solar Empire</b> is. If you like your games long and slow then this might be ideal. Games can last hours and hours, as you have a whole solar system to expand into, setting up resource gathering and military efforts around each planet, defending transport lines between each one, while questing to expand into enemy territory.
To make things worse there are pirates running around, wildly multipling and launching crazed attack against yourself and the computer. Left unchallenged these we-hate-everyone players can turn the tide of the war in either direction.
Unfortunately, the game's long long length can let it down, sometimes campaigns just get tiresome after you lose a key planet for the third time to a band of pirates - meaning you have to spend the next ten minutes taking it back, and another ten traveling between those planet. Maybe multiplayer might spice the game up a bit, but I can't imagine most people would want to sit and stare at spaceships for hours.. Oh.. Wait..
Spehs chips!
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Another space based RTS now.. <b>Homeworld 2</b> and by extension, the very similar but slightly more graphically dated Homeworld. It is big, and it is clever.
HW2 has plenty of improvements on its predecessor without losing the original charm the first game offered, ship building is streamlined by separating your mothership or carrier into bays, with to which you can assign factories. Want to churn out a fleet of billions of tiny fighters? Pimp your mothership out with frigate bays. Want to lord over everyone else with massive gunships with deathstar-style laser turrets, put a few capital ship factories in and off you go.
Most people see combat in homeworld 2 and gawk at the brightly coloured lined zipping around in an incomprehensible mess. Do not be alarmed. Once you've played a couple of games you'll be able to pick your guys out of the messiest of tangled lightshows and pop great holes in spaceships which explode in a rather pretty fashion.
3D RTS that's easy to pick up, possibly harder to master.
Good for those that always wanted to be an Imperial strategist making great fish-faced Admiral Ackbar exclaim.. "IT'S A TRAP!"
Bzzzooorrtt. The Singleplayer has some pretty cool unique ships in it, too.
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"Sure Homeworld is a cool spacey RTS with lots of big ships and explosions.." I hear you cry. "But it ain't no Star Wars!"
"Shut the fuck up and let me do my next piece then." I retort, shaking my fist in the air in a threatening manner.
<b>Empire at War</b> is a game of two sides. That is, a good side and a terrible side, which is probably not a good way to start off a review if I'm trying to get you to play it. In brief, there are shiny, pretty space battles, and really rather rubbish ground battles.
I wrote a lot more in my proper review.
http://www.5punk.co.uk/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=2266
Sending in a fleet of star destroyers to pummel B-Wings while your myriad of fighters and bombers duke it out with zippy X-Wings is undeniably fun. Maybe I just have a long attention span, but I don't even remember the space battles getting particularly boring, despite their repetitive nature. (Fly in, scout space, shoot station).
Land battles however are slow paced, focus entirely on moving your chosen squad of men into enemy territory along a linear path, taking control points along the way. Often you have to kill every last enemy for the victory timer to start. The only genuinely fun land battle was being at General (?) Veers testing grounds when he was demonstrating the AT-AT to Vader for the first time.
Space battles gooood. Land battles duuulll.
This.
