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On January 03 2009 14:40 lwstupidus wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2009 13:07 Entertaining wrote:
they fail just like FPS games fail, while you play them your comparing them to the best. when i play fps most of the time i think to myself, "i could be playing halo3 right now". while playing rts like supreme commander i think "i could be cutting my wrists right now" lol jk, id rather play STARCRAFT Aside from the game selling well, Halo 3 was a horrible failure, so really bad comparison. Show nested quote +The reason is that FPS doesn't need to be balanced in the same way an RTS does. Starcraft (and Warcraft 3) are the only games that still after 5 million hours of analyzing every little detail, no race is better than the other and no super-own-all strategy exist. You must be unfamiliar with Orc. Show nested quote +which WC3 has pretty much proven to be boring as fuck. There needs to be a healthy amount of tactics and strategy, people need to be able to be creative, I think this is the fatal flaw of most online games. And you must be unfamiliar with WC3 completely, which has infinitely more strategy at all levels of play, whereas in SC, the player who masses more units through macro at B or below is just going to win with A click.
1. It's not about how good Halo 3 is, he's making a point and you can understand it. Don't nitpick at every individual detail.
2. You have NOT read the Strategy section have you? Even though this is an extreme example, according to you massing pure lings will win against BCs. lawls
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On January 03 2009 15:45 anotak wrote:
Total Annihilation: Ass networking support. Badly balanced units. Both races have 200+ units. Guess what, about 5 are ACTUALLY USEFUL.
Not to mention the 2000 units released by the community....
Horrible game , terrible slowdown when too many units on screen.
I have no idea why gamespy put it above starcraft in their 'best RTS games ever' feature a few years back.
The main reasons RTS games fail now is because of poor programming and graphics.You can't see what you are controlling most of the time or it's just a choppy mess.
There were plenty of great RTS games in the 90s - War2 (still superior to War3) , SC , Lords of The Realm 2 (3 was horrible) , Stronghold (the 3D versions were terrible), AOE was well respected for it's time.All these games were 2d.It's extremely hard to make an awesome 3D RTS , 3D can limit the number of units on screen (causing slowdowns) , make things harder to see , understand or control and have issues with camera angles etc.Also more prone to crashing.
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I realize this is an Starcraft forum, but I don't think simply dismissing via "lol they play TA" is really an explanation how it failed.
TA followed a different design path that give it an extremely loyal fan base. For that I would not call it a failure, just one that didn't cater to this market. Sure, the graphics looked like stacks of cardboard boxes, the plot is less interesting than white noise and units come out lego thrown in a blender, the engine did allow combat at an scale unseen before, and the game allows all the land-air strategy people would want to try and constant combat. I do wonder if it is a game where winning plays second fiddle to doing something that player wants. The players wanted massed fighter swarms, huge nukes, shoot anywhere artillery and every other trick and the game gave it to them. (in some sense, if might be a sandbox with guns, which is a mindset alien to TL but could possibly find support in the fastest/bgh community)
The TA community threw in probably as much effort as the SC community, if not more, in support of the game, and to me that is not a sign of failure. One does not get an entire community built engine (TA spring) and ludicrous number of unit and mods without passion.
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I think Dawn of War was the only game with some sort of *chance* to get competetive.
Then Relic did not patch it fast enough.
Then Relic put out the first Addon and ruined everything that made Dawn of War interesting.
Then Relic put out more Addons and it did not get any better.
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On January 03 2009 16:24 SWPIGWANG wrote:
Comment About macro-thingys: Almost all the games listed here are micro games. There is no talk of games like Rise of Nations, or even more crazy european econ RTS (aka simcity with troops) like settlers or seven kingdoms, or even Age of Empire series.....
Where are the macro-strategy supporters on this forum??? When someone said that Starcraft had the most macro strategy, I felt dizzy~~~~
Though to be frank, I don't think any of those macro strategy games ever came close in market penetration or audience to micro ones. I guess build orders complicated enough to fill a book just lacks mass market appeal....
The problem with these types of games is what I call "Settlers syndrome". Settlers syndrome is when you have a game with a really complicated economy with tons of resources and resource buildings that need combining in various ways, and it's fun to play around and figure it out at first, but once you figure out how to build it up efficiently, you end up doing the exact same thing every game (barring the effects of any harassment - non-existent in Settlers, but possible in RoN or the like), which becomes boring and repetitive. Basically, going through a build-order isn't interesting unto itself, so games which have very long build orders aren't interesting either, even if you can remember them. This is obviously much worse in games where you can't really rush or harass effectively than in games where you can.
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its been said here already but: any game site could be asking the same about their game(s).
Lets not forget that starcraft has people constantly making new and fairly balanced pro maps (remember when you began with bgh or fastest? without the maps we have sc would be seen as any other massing rts); constant patches that are STILL being done after the game's release, and the dedicated channels/shows/pros in korea which enthused the majority of us to commit to the game and scene (I know it did for me anyhow).
I say other rts games could be as big competitively if they were as nurtured as sc...
though I dont believe that 100%...but I think it could be true for some games...though not wc3, that game's jank.
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On January 03 2009 16:22 Lysdexia wrote:
A lot of posts in this thread have been about balance and how Starcraft is 'more balanced' than every other rts out there. I think it's more that the way the game is played mitigates the importance of balance.
Most other rts games, whether it's due to their slower pace, some design flaw, or the developer's attempt to give the game more casual appeal, have lower mechanical requirements. BW demands a great deal of speed, accuracy and multitasking from the players before strategy even really becomes an issue, which makes it a lot harder to get easy wins by abusing small imbalances.
Maybe with perfect or near perfect mechanics from both players, Starcraft is unplayable. It's possible that terran has some uber strat against protoss or that with perfect micro 4 pool is always insta-win. These problems will never come up for us because no game is just one players strategy against another's with an even starting point, but they will come up for games with lower execution requirements.
I'm inclined to agree. I don't think StarCraft's balance is what makes it such a great game...in fact, as some have wisely pointed out, even if you take the latest patched version and play it on the old "standard" maps, the game is still unbalanced. It was the maps which sparked balance, and in order for there to be enough depth in a game to encourage that kind of community balancing, you need a lot of the things mentioned in this thread. I think the big one for me is a streamlined UI - for any game to have success, you need a simple UI that is quick to learn but is impossible to master. For example, CoD4 (the latest, most successful FPS in a while) is pretty as hell (I could literally watch someone play all day), but if it didn't have its streamlined UI, no one would play it. Ultimately, for me, the UI determines whether the game will work or not.
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I'm starting to feel this is turning into another WC3 vs SC thread... and that's because those two are almost the only two successful rts games that have made it.
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I think one big big (if not biggest) factor ist the community. If you look at SC:BW, it's the community which partly made the game better (Maps, Tools etc).
All other RTS, except maybe WC3 which I don't know shit about I never played it online cause the single player already was too gay for me _personally_, lack a mature and active community which can actually patch the game theirself.
If you look at FPS, it's also the games being successful where most effort was and still is put in by the community, look at all the antihack tools, mods and shit in CS, Q3, UT. I for for myself wouldn't consider any of the Halo titles a success but i might be biased cause i hate console FPS. It's just too inaccurate in my oppinion.
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another reason why sc and wc3 are so good which isnt posted in this thread is the hotkeys. for the most part, hotkeys are easy to remember and close together for the most part(there are exceptions like the probe)
games like CNC uses F1-12 to macro, which is incredibly frustrating and stupid
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On January 03 2009 14:31 SWPIGWANG wrote:
DoW: Impossible balance model and impossible to statistically understand due to having a ton of races, 7+ armor classes and weapon classes, tons of unique modifiers involving interaction just about every two unit. Memorizing all the semi-hidden interactions as opposed to easy to understand concepts becomes more important than intuitive generalized ones. Immense complexity also means bugs and impossible balance issues that could not be resolved easily, let alone make all races internally balanced and deep..
How is having weapon classes and unique modifiers going to make LESS of a pro scene? thats exactly what you want, mechanics that to a noob they can sort of pick up without understanding "oh wow grey knights seem to be awesome against these banshees for some reason". While the pro player understand why this is and what other units they are good against.
The main problem with DOW is that it doesn't have the control of starcraft, alot of the skill from starcraft comes from beign able to control individual untis, and do things such as hold position ect to break the engine. DOW has a hideious Artificail (un)Inteligence in dealing with the movement of squauds. There can be almost 20% luck in a fight, depending on how many of your units bug in a massive fight, or get stuck behind others, and as you have no manual control you can't change this. So it basicly becomes a massive a-attack game as you can't really micro the actual movement of your sqauds at all, all the micro comes from the spells. Also the animations they do also detracts from the mciro, where a chaos sorceror will be in the middle of a killing animation on a space marine, meaning when his unit of khorne beserkers are told to move back to avoid fire, he'll stay there and finish his animation.
Also the maps released with the game are awefull, they just encourage sitting in your base and teching straight to your best units, the control points should be in the middle, and you should constantly be fighting for them. Also the whole suepr untis ruin the game. The many races also breaks the game, it means that rather than having multiple counters to an enemy build, you just have to stick to one or two builds, due to the randomness of what your facing, adn with 2 enemies the combination of thier untis are so limitless that you just want the best anti infantry anti tank balance of an army as possible. Also the whole seperate unti cap for veichles and untis is stupid, it means that you build your army as anti-infantry, just taking into account the exact number of anti veichle you need against all armies.
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I just know why StarCraft became big for me.
It was easy to burn and there were a lot of cd keys on the net. =D
Of course I have bought it legitimately since then but it was like a free trial that a ton of people had access to.
I wasn't willing to pay money for games when I was younger I guess.
**Also, TL-net wasn't the first forum that I was dedicated to when it came to StarCraft. I actually forgot how I came to this forum. But the forum that really brought me into the StarCraft community was Team Areola. Man.. I wanted to join that clan so much back then lol. It was when I first started playing normal maps and leaving the money map thing.
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I had a lot of fun playing AoE3 with Skew / Artosis / Gentho.
the community was nice
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One big thing that I really like about Starcraft is that all three races feel completely different from each other and yet they are quite balanced. No other RTS game comes even close to having at least 3 different races without upsetting the balance.
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On January 03 2009 20:37 rob3dj wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2009 14:31 SWPIGWANG wrote:
DoW: Impossible balance model and impossible to statistically understand due to having a ton of races, 7+ armor classes and weapon classes, tons of unique modifiers involving interaction just about every two unit. Memorizing all the semi-hidden interactions as opposed to easy to understand concepts becomes more important than intuitive generalized ones. Immense complexity also means bugs and impossible balance issues that could not be resolved easily, let alone make all races internally balanced and deep.. How is having weapon classes and unique modifiers going to make LESS of a pro scene? thats exactly what you want, mechanics that to a noob they can sort of pick up without understanding "oh wow grey knights seem to be awesome against these banshees for some reason". While the pro player understand why this is and what other units they are good against.
It's pretty simple... if you have a ton of different damage and armor types, it is much harder to figure how much damage you are going to do in a battle versus an army of varying composition. The number of permutations is huge. It might not even be readily apparent the optimal way to micro your stuff. Warcraft 3 has 4 damage types, and I can't even keep track of those. In Dawn of War it is next to impossible to tell how much damage your units are doing. The Baneblade has a main gun that does an insane amount of damage, and then two small machine guns that also do a rather substantial amount of damage. But the "damage" icon says "200-300" (or something like that), but it doesn't specify whether that is the main gun, a composite of all the guns, or what. And the guns probably don't even do the same type of damage... then you have squads which can have like 5-6 different weapon types (the Space Marines anyways... including melee ones), and it's just out of hand.
I think a huge part of why Starcraft is so successful is because it is really transparent... you know what your units are capable of because the damage system is easy to comprehend. And even if you can't, units die very quickly so even if you don't know the specifics you can figure out what works against what pretty quickly. More importantly, it is almost always readily apparent why you lost a battle, or the game. Transparency also lets you react to what your opponent is doing to minimize any edge they might gain from it. And you can try to maximize your own.
Playing Warcraft 3, one of the things I noticed is often times I finish a game and don't have a clue what I could have done better other than "micro better." Transparency is good.
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"Playing Warcraft 3, one of the things I noticed is often times I finish a game and don't have a clue what I could have done better other than "micro better." Transparency is good."
Yes, that's very true. Mostly because of all the random factors.
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Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever played NetStorm? I thought that the concept was quite fun and unique, although I haven't played it in a while. It was made around the same time as Starcraft. Apparently it still has a community around.
http://www.netstormhq.com/download.php?list.10
Download of the full version of the game if you want to try it
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I'll talk about AoE/AoC
First flaw is the lack of control of units. The computer AI is pretty stupid, the unit formation is very annoying in microing. Also it lacks pace (even in fast game mode)
Second flaw is the resources system (Map design). The resrouces are spreaded everywhere and there are simply too much resources. You can trade for different resrouces so it is quite hard to run out resources. There are less strategic sites/chokes around the map which makes battle boring.
The races are also pretty similar and they play generally in the same way.
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On January 03 2009 22:00 zer0das wrote:
It's pretty simple... if you have a ton of different damage and armor types, it is much harder to figure how much damage you are going to do in a battle versus an army of varying composition. The number of permutations is huge. It might not even be readily apparent the optimal way to micro your stuff. Warcraft 3 has 4 damage types, and I can't even keep track of those. In Dawn of War it is next to impossible to tell how much damage your units are doing.
I think a huge part of why Starcraft is so successful is because it is really transparent... you know what your units are capable of because the damage system is easy to comprehend. And even if you can't, units die very quickly so even if you don't know the specifics you can figure out what works against what pretty quickly. More importantly, it is almost always readily apparent why you lost a battle, or the game. Transparency also lets you react to what your opponent is doing to minimize any edge they might gain from it. And you can try to maximize your own.
doesn't starcraft have 4 damage types too though?
splash , normal , concussive and explosive
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Supreme Commander has been mentioned a couple times in this thread, so I'll expound on that a little bit.
Long story short, I was one of the top 5 players-- in fact, I'd argue that at one point I was the strongest online player, having consistently beaten the #1 and #2 ladder ranked players. My name was _PINK, if there are any other former SupCom players hanging around here. Obviously, this doesn't mean a hell of a lot, as I've been playing Starcraft for about a month now and can only barely scratch D+ on ICCUP.
The problem with the game wasn't necessarily that it was too slow (though, it was that), the problem was simply poor design from the ground up. Huge overlaps in unit roles meant that the vast majority of the units were not used- and poor faction design included small differences between specific equivalent units (most of the tech tree was basically identical between factions) for NO APPARENT REASON. Balance patching was basically nonexistent, and the existing barely-tolerable balance between the factions (in the expansion, anyways- the original is now completely broken) is the result of nothing short of a fluke.
Basically, it seemed that the entire game was designed haphazardly, as if, every once in a while, the design team thought "hey, this would be cool, let's make this idea work somehow" instead of sticking to an actual workable plan.
An ENFORCED lag of 500ms didn't help, nor did the incredibly badly thought-out super-unit given to each player at the beginning of the game.
The basic gameplay wasn't thought out at all, much less the matchups, micro, etcetera.
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EPT
