RTS and Turn Based Strategy Sperging


Here is something interesting. It's an attempt at merging 4X/other RTS strategy gameplay with clicker games. It's supposed to be rather involved. Basically you have many different stocks/flows that influence each other, like your stocks grow and decay, things have to be in proper proportions to each other. Then, you click as a way of actively dealing with problems (like a shortage) when everything's screwed up. People say the demo is really good.
 
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I think that Stronghold, if it was going to go for an Asian setting as it did with its third installment, should have done Sengoku Jidai instead of the MONGOLS (horse nomads).

It would have been all too obvious to have Japanese castles in all their majesty.
 
I started playing Company of Heroes 2 on Hard. I think Hard.

It's HARD.

As a kid I spent a huge amount of my childhood playing RTS games, but I always played them on easier difficulties and was, frankly, a smoothbrain. It was more about buliding my base and parading my army around and i would have been happier with a city-builder, probably, if I was familiar with that genre back then (something like Anno).

With difficulty it's never smooth. It just goes from "I'm blowing this out of the water" to "FUCK FUCK FUCK" when you first up the difficulty. With COH2 I got to where I could quickly bottle the enemy up.

Well, you bump it to Hard and it's not just resources (though I'm sure it cheats, RTS games always do), it legitimately fights differently. It uses abilities, it uses combined arms, it places machine guns RIGHT ON THE CENTRAL OBJECTIVE WHERE I CAN'T DISLODGE IT and then pounds me with mortar fire when I try to dislodge the machine gun and it overruns me with flamethrowers and it breaks off fights to live another day.

It's like having an actual person now. So far in my attempts (playing Soviet vs Soviet to learn to cope, symmetrical unit rosters) what happens is I do somewhat okay, at some point get pushed off the middle point, then get suckered into an endless fruitless fight that will at some point end in a catastrophic crumpling of my defense and the killing of all my squads.

I finally took to heart the importance of hotkeys, too. It's not that it's mentally taxing or even that micro intensive, but you do need to save a bit of time when the AI actively moves around.
 
CoH AI much like DoW AI boils down to cheating. The enemy has additional resources at the start of the game and forces you into a shit position.
 
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WULULULULU said:
CoH AI much like DoW AI boils down to cheating. The enemy has additional resources at the start of the game and forces you into a shit position.
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I'm sure it does, pretty much all RTS games have to resort to giving the AI more troops, but I've seen genuine differences in how it fights too.

Have had the same experience with Cossacks II (which has gotten really good to me now). On Normal and Hard the AI doesn't really react at all, on Very Hard it can't really beat me but it can actively contest villages, maintain defensive lines, will overrun me if I don't actively fight it with full attention.
 
I said somewhere on this website that I dislike the emphasis on APM in RTS games.
I understand better now why it's a genre convention to have micro. What i realized is that I don't hate that games like Age of Empires II have micro as a big thing. It's that I don't like micro when it cheapens the historical theming of it.

Company of Heroes 2 is great with micro because the micro both adds a lot of action/excitement while making it feel more real (throwing grenades, repairing wire, repairing vehicles, all that kind of thing). Age of Empires II isn't, for me, because its micro is just bullshit (having your troops spazz out in very artificial, videogamey ways to avoid incoming fire). One makes the game both better and reinforces its setting, the other undermines its setting.
 
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