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Note, while this is in first-person, it is intended to help anyone struggling with similar problems about what to play nowadays.
It saddens me to say it, but like many before me, SC1 is hard to play after watching and playing so much SC2, I don't have the beta, but I'hve played it at friends, and what plagues me is two things.
The game itself is inacessible, since I cant play it when I want to, it gets hard to really get into SC2. Also, it lacks the soul of SC1, BUT this is probably because we're not used to it, what I like about SC1 is the whole metagame aspect with different strategies, builds etc, and SC2 isn't stabilized in that sense yet.
However, I can't go back to SC1, I keep getting conflicting hotkeys, I now routinely press 'E' for Probes, 'A' for Marines etc, and I'm having a hard time getting my eyes readjusted to the low resolutions and choppy unit movements.
So recently I started looking at other RTS games to tie me over, I used to play ALOT of Company of Heroes, ending up in the top 30 ranking of players using the British faction. Now I can't go back to playing CoH because I get so frustrated that I lack my former ability in it, and I have lost so much meta-game evolution.
Dawn of War 2 is to Company of Heroes what Wc3 is to SC, its the same game, with pretty effects and heroes that make the gameplay more about a blob of units rather than a map-wide strategy.
I have heard about Red Alert 3 being played alot online, and the same might be about to happend with C&C4, these games have a somewhat similar feel to them to Starcraft, in that its about building units, getting strategic control, getting more resources and then finally defeating your opponent.
I have virtually no experience regarding the Total Annihilation (Or was it Supreme Commander) series, so if anyone could tell me more about them that would be nice.
Does anyone have any other games that are still being played with good communities (obviously nothing close to Starcraft, but still fairly good)? What is so special about that game?
Tl;DR: SC2 made me tired of SC1, Recommend new RTS games to play.
 
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SupCom 2 sucks ass. SupCom 1 is basically 100% macro spam with little squares and 20 factories. Supcom 1 had a decent high level player community, but I think it's mostly dead at this point.
C&C3 Kane's Wrath is kinda decent in that it actually is pretty balanced, compared to say Dawn of War: Soulstorm.
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age of empires 2
EDIT: it has a lot of strats and unique tactics that you can do with different races. you can also improve your micro with a lot of units on the playfield and practice effective building orders and building placement.
Also, there's the great campaign you can finish and so on. Next best RTS series to Blizzard games
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Hong Kong20321 Posts
wow you sure ditched sc1 for sc2 real fast haha
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C&C4 is a stupid macro massing 1a-move game. There's barely any micro involved in that game as far as I could tell. To be fair, I never got too into it, but aside from being really pretty, it didn't really do that much for me. I played it just for nostalgia's sake, since I loved Red Alert and Red Alert 2 from way back in the day.
I haven't played RA3 or DoW2. I played the first DoW a bit, though, but I never got into it enough to really understand how the game works. RA3, though, had professional reviewers mentioning imbalances and whatnot from when the game shipped. That they picked up on such things so early on and even went so far as to mention them in a published video review turned me off immediately, even though I loved its prequel. DoW2 looked kind of fun, but in the end it sort of looked like simplified and cleaned up version of its predecessor. Also they took out the Tau who were my favorite race to play.
Supreme Commander is complete crap. I didn't even know a second one came out. Its spiritual predecessor, Total Annihilation, was novel and advanced for its time: it had cool newtonian weapon projectile trajectories, units could miss, shoot into terrain, etc. However, SupCom took everything TA was and just made it bigger, prettier, more epic and, in the end, boring. I guess if you get really good at it, it ends up becoming interesting and fast paced, but I don't know why you would bother.
I found myself just playing defensively and macro'ing off of 20 factories while waiting an hour for my super-duper artillery battery that can hit all the way across the map through fog to finish building, then just a-move all my units to the enemy base, then get frustrated at their dumbass pathing and movement behavior in large numbers. I dropped the game after a week.
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ya AoE2 isn't so bad, at least that was my impression when I tried it again for a while about a year ago. The only multiplayer experience I have with it was from a small LAN long ago, and we didn't really do much there.
But when I took a second look at it I figured that it HAS to be balanced decently (all the fractions are almost the same anyways) and it left quite some room for micro and build orders. It has a HP/dmg distribution that is similar to SC.
I don't know how it would pan out at higher levels, and I find the controls awful, but it still is quite fun to play for a while.
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Dune 2, if people are complaining that BW was hard to play they should try this.
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I don't think i will ever touch another RTS other than SC. I tried playing AoE back in the day but it just seemed so fuckin weird.
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i got a clue? how about we all admit that the NON-Blizzard (or NON-Starcraft, to be more precise) RTS world is horribly uninteresting?
its funny how people try their hands at inferior games just for the sake of doing something different.
RTS = Starcraft. its not like the FPS genre where you have a bunch of good games.
SC2, we'll see how it turns out...but ...you know..
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Armies of Exigo is like sc2 without macro mechanics. Made in 2004.
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My friend told me to get company of heroes. He raves about it, but I don't even have time for starcraft, never mind a whole new game.
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United States47024 Posts
On March 12 2010 02:02 intrudor wrote:
i got a clue? how about we all admit that the NON-Blizzard (or NON-Starcraft, to be more precise) RTS world is horribly uninteresting?
its funny how people try their hands at inferior games just for the sake of doing something different.
RTS = Starcraft. its not like the FPS genre where you have a bunch of good games.
SC2, we'll see how it turns out...but ...you know..
You do?
Maybe for casual games (RTS has those too--I'd never play RA3 competitively, but it's fun at LANs), but as far as competitive shooters go, I can't think of any that would pass up Q3 or CS1.6, at least in their respective subgenres.
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Dark Reign
TA Spring - http://springrts.com/
There was a somewhat recent RTS from some Russian company that had some interesting mechanics ... lots of beams and geometry stuff ... anyone remember the name?
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Total Annihilation >> Supreme Commander. Supreme Commander is supposed to be a "spiritual sequel" to TA, but it kinda fails since the way they went doing it screwed up micro, you just control big blobs of units and right-click them around.
I recommend either trying TA or an open source TA remake on a new engine, TA Spring. The remake is quite similar to TA, change of similar scope of SCBW -> SC2 maybe. Theres many different balance mods in Spring, but 1 is most popular by far (Balanced Annihilation).
Comparing the original TA and TA Spring, Spring has more players (~300 online on most days) and better UI (but you have to customise that UI at start a bit for best effect, you have to set building hotkeys yourself). Comparing the balance in them, original TA mostly has slower gameplay and nicer to micro air-units.
http://www.d-gun.com/ Total Annihilation info page (incl. full download)
http://springrts.com/ Main Spring site, its kinda messy though :/
http://springrts.com/wiki/GamesDownloads 1st link of those to install Spring
http://www.livestream.com/igrandy Randys channel runs his old TA Spring videos when hes not playing SC2
Im playing TA sping atm, I can give some pointers if you wanna try it out. Its fuckin complex game
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On March 12 2010 01:27 s.a.y wrote:
age of empires 2
EDIT: it has a lot of strats and unique tactics that you can do with different races. you can also improve your micro with a lot of units on the playfield and practice effective building orders and building placement.
Also, there's the great campaign you can finish and so on. Next best RTS series to Blizzard games
I second that. But I am not sure if thats what the OP was looking for. If you have a fews friends to play with over hamachi or LAN its awesome. But I am not sure if theres still an online community or even servers you can play on?
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I agree with all the other guys saying AoE2
You should also try Age of Mythology! Those were some great games as well.
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Im also kinda interested that is there any community for AoE2? It was the first RTS I ever played, though next to no multiplayer cause internet was expensive back then.
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I think Armies of Exigo deserves a mention. There were a handful good competitive player at european hours when I quit playing it a while ago. You could usually count on about 10 of them being online at any one time. Unless SC2 has stolen players from there, I can only assume they are still playing. Though not a commercial success, it has a lot going for it with many similarities to BW.
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On March 12 2010 02:45 FragKrag wrote:
I agree with all the other guys saying AoE2
You should also try Age of Mythology! Those were some great games as well.
Yeah age of mythology was very fun game with lots of strategies and unique stile of play. I think the community is still alive if you search on aom.heavengames.com and the were another site with rankings in it but i forgot the name. Age of empires 2 is also a good classic.
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Baa?21245 Posts
RA3 is a fun game, it's just not a good game.
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On March 12 2010 04:58 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
RA3 is a fun game, it's just not a good game.
True of pretty much every modern RTS. I think the OP will have fun with anything though, he dropped SC1 so fast and for such trivial reasons (without even having the beta) I doubt he was really into it in the first place.
I think the only good non-blizzard RTS I've played is Total Annihilation. C&C/Red Alert are fun to play single-player, everything else bored me too fast. The user base for all these games is way too small though.
Someone mentioned Dark Reign; very underrated game, but old and I doubt anyone still plays it.
@OP: I think you should try some other "strategy game" genres. It's better to play the best of RTS, turn-based strategy, world builder, etc. Rather than a bunch of really mediocre games who's only merit is trying to be similar to starcraft.
Oh yeah, I remember having some fun with mech commander too, but one particular game was a bit frustrating in that it was really hard to get more money.
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Kinda on the same topic, does anyone have any really good city building games? I loved all the SimCities so far
On topic: CoH is a GREAT rts game, very fun, very different feel.
R.U.S.E. is open beta on steam right now, it looks interesting. (currently downloading)
EDIT: Dark Reign was really good
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On March 12 2010 08:51 Nytefish wrote:Show nested quote +On March 12 2010 04:58 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
RA3 is a fun game, it's just not a good game. True of pretty much every modern RTS. I think the OP will have fun with anything though, he dropped SC1 so fast and for such trivial reasons (without even having the beta) I doubt he was really into it in the first place. I think the only good non-blizzard RTS I've played is Total Annihilation. C&C/Red Alert are fun to play single-player, everything else bored me too fast. The user base for all these games is way too small though. Someone mentioned Dark Reign; very underrated game, but old and I doubt anyone still plays it. @OP: I think you should try some other "strategy game" genres. It's better to play the best of RTS, turn-based strategy, world builder, etc. Rather than a bunch of really mediocre games who's only merit is trying to be similar to starcraft.
Actually, I played SC for 1 year, so it isnt lightly.
I'll actually probably try CoH again, its an awesoem game.
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One year is really nothing, unless you played a lot, but then you'd be around B- by now.
Don't take offence, there's nothing wrong with being more of a fan of starcraft rather than a hardcore gamer.
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Im under the impression its more of a puzzle game than traditional rts, and doesnt fit multiplayer playing at all.
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I actually prefer aoe2 to sc:bw. You can call me crazy now.
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On March 12 2010 10:44 JohannesH wrote:Im under the impression its more of a puzzle game than traditional rts, and doesnt fit multiplayer playing at all.
Perimiter an RTS. It's kinda fun multiplayer but not fantastic. It's really unique and definitely worth trying but not competitive RTS. The same goes with it's "semi" sequel, Maelstrom. Both recommeded to try out.
If you want something unique that IS a competitive RTS, try NetStorm. I've plugged it many times and even made a blog about it. It's amazing and equal to StarCraft in skill (I'm a C zerg).
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you can do ghetto gunships in supcom thats pretty micro intensive imo...
but yeah overall standard play its just like...20-25factory macro
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United States47024 Posts
On March 12 2010 08:51 Nytefish wrote:
I think the only good non-blizzard RTS I've played is Total Annihilation. C&C/Red Alert are fun to play single-player, everything else bored me too fast. The user base for all these games is way too small though.
The original Red Alert is actually RIDICULOUSLY mechanically demanding, due to no unit cap, and lategame where units build within seconds.
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