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On January 04 2009 05:52 ManWithCheese wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2009 05:41 JudgeMathis wrote:
Warcraft 3 is the closes thing to Starcraft. Where Warcraft lacks, it makes up for. Yes, you can't macro that much. But, to replace that a Warcraft 3 player has to think about where the player is creeping, if he has an expansion. You can't really sit here, and say "SHIT BECAUSE WC3 MACRO IS LIMITED, SHIT SUCKS."
Btw, Wc2 was very imbalanced. Everyone plays Orc. -_-; Also, the fan base is the real reason why some RTS succeed or not. Balance was simple and great in warcraft 2. If you take 2 players of high apm and equal skill and throw them into a large scale battle the human player will win, while you can bloodlust all your ogres it doesn't do any good when half of them couldn't attack till others died meanwhile the human player is spamming heal on his front line, the orc would then try to counteract this by increasing how big the front line is. Shame more people didn't buy the battle.net edition as it was a blast to play.
Play on that private Wc2 server, and you'll find out that Human's get owned. Bloodlust is too strong.
edit:
Regardless it's a pretty fun game.
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one of the biggest reason tha tI palyed more SC then Age o fEmpire 2 was because of Battle net.
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i know cnc games fail because the devs half-assedly try to cater to two audiences: the mystical casual gamer, and the hardcore.
games are destined to fail much harder when u cater in ANY way to a casual audience. Was bw catered to casual/hardcores? i dun think so, I think they just wanted to make a good game, and they weren't bogged down with thinking about, "how will this be competitive for n00bs and pr0s?" Should we add in/ remove features to make it more accessible?
nope, they just made a kickass game, and it turned out good. Nowadays, devs are being pussies, and dumbing down RTS for these mythical casual gamer creatures that will suck either way. They dumbed down pingpong some with larger diameter of balls, they dumbed down tennis with slower balls at the aussie open (ok, these are exaggerations but there is truth in them), you can see this pattern of dumbing shit down for the casual human being everywhere. that is why RTS will continue to suck, SC2 may be the game to break the trend, but with shit like MBS/automining and things to cater to the casual, you can bet it won't have the same exact magic as bw. -.-
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On January 04 2009 08:12 avilo wrote:
i know cnc games fail because the devs half-assedly try to cater to two audiences: the mystical casual gamer, and the hardcore.
games are destined to fail much harder when u cater in ANY way to a casual audience. Was bw catered to casual/hardcores? i dun think so, I think they just wanted to make a good game, and they weren't bogged down with thinking about, "how will this be competitive for n00bs and pr0s?" Should we add in/ remove features to make it more accessible?
nope, they just made a kickass game, and it turned out good. Nowadays, devs are being pussies, and dumbing down RTS for these mythical casual gamer creatures that will suck either way. They dumbed down pingpong some with larger diameter of balls, they dumbed down tennis with slower balls at the aussie open (ok, these are exaggerations but there is truth in them), you can see this pattern of dumbing shit down for the casual human being everywhere. that is why RTS will continue to suck, SC2 may be the game to break the trend, but with shit like MBS/automining and things to cater to the casual, you can bet it won't have the same exact magic as bw. -.-
Any RTS that Blizzard comes up with is easy to learn, hard to master. =D
edit: The reason why I say this is because anyone can play SC, Wc3, and have fun. But, both games have pros and noobs. 
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Casual gamers aren't mystical at all, just ask nintendo. Pokemon and Wii fit is ranks #2 and #3 on the Japanese sales chart.... (or zomg n00b games) Though it is open to debate about the casual crowd exists for RTS, I think spending some time on B-net without filters would probably show more than enough BGH and stacked cannon defense to show where they are.... Of course, it is another question whether to cater to them, but they sure are money. No matter how hardcore TL.net are, people are still gonna get one game like the dumbest mom that bought random games from the store as a gift.
It is actually not easy to make a good game for the casuals, just ask those that wished that they had nintendo profits and the set of design requirements is completely different from what most of TL cares about.
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On January 04 2009 05:52 ManWithCheese wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2009 05:41 JudgeMathis wrote:
Warcraft 3 is the closes thing to Starcraft. Where Warcraft lacks, it makes up for. Yes, you can't macro that much. But, to replace that a Warcraft 3 player has to think about where the player is creeping, if he has an expansion. You can't really sit here, and say "SHIT BECAUSE WC3 MACRO IS LIMITED, SHIT SUCKS."
Btw, Wc2 was very imbalanced. Everyone plays Orc. -_-; Also, the fan base is the real reason why some RTS succeed or not. Balance was simple and great in warcraft 2. If you take 2 players of high apm and equal skill and throw them into a large scale battle the human player will win, while you can bloodlust all your ogres it doesn't do any good when half of them couldn't attack till others died meanwhile the human player is spamming heal on his front line, the orc would then try to counteract this by increasing how big the front line is. Shame more people didn't buy the battle.net edition as it was a blast to play.
naw , orc was still stronger
people didn't buy battle net edition because starcraft was a far superior game
also blizzard were too lazy to implement important UI upgrades like unit queueing
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I'm a long time lurker and I was hard core WC3 player. I recently started plying Supreme Commander (Forged alliance) and It’s actually not a bad game but there are lots of things that will keep it from becoming as popular as SC and WC3. I'll compare SupCom VS mostly WC3 and what I think the strengths and weaknesses are.
Learning the basics:
WC3 is easy to jump right into (as with most Blizzard games). SupCom has a steeper learning curve when first starting out. First time you play all the building & units look very similar, making it confusing and hard to find your engineers within the sea of other similar looking units (yes I know there is a little “E” when zoomed out but it’s so damn small I feel like I need reading glasses when playing). It also doesn’t help that after the first five minutes you can have hundreds of units on the map. The icons also seem smaller and less intuitive then WC3, maybe it’s just me but WC3 & SC seemed much easier to get past the total noob stage (thou I'm still noob at SC).
Zoom feature:
As neat as the zoom feature is in SupCom I believe the fixed camera is actually a better compromise for RTS games. It’s obvious Blizzard took a lot of time to scale the units in such a way that you can still see the details in them, not look like ants and show enough of the battle field that you can still see the entire fight (most of the time). In SupCom the entire battlefield is so huge you spend a lot of time looking at ants issuing attack move commands. I rarely stay zoomed in long enough to actually watch the pretty explosions. Watching aircraft is also nearly impossible in SupCom (except gunships) because by the time you zoom in close enough to start to see details they fly off screen (there is a camera track but you don't have time to use that in game). It dose make the aircraft seem more realistic but who cares, it's a video game right? Bottom line, I don't like looking at ants so I prefer the WC3 SC fixed camera. Yes I know you can zoom in WC3 but it's never used in game and is basically for a cinematic effect & cut scenes only. The only time I think I have ever use the zoom feature in WC3 was to see my ground units when there was a sea of air units above.
Micro:
Compared to WC3, SupCom has almost none. After the first few minutes you don’t give a dam about any single unit (except for the commander). In WC3 every unit is still important throughout the entire game. SupCom is mostly attack move, mass retreat, send units to raid. High AMP is not a requirement in Supcom, A person with 60 APM could still be a very strong player. So much of Supcom is gaining map control and then ramping up your economy until it’s an unstoppable juggernaut. Don't get me wrong, there is micro in SupCom but it's very different then WC3. For example you need to use the commander very effectively early on and some types of units can't hit moving targets very well, so by constantly moving your opening scouts you can effectively kite more powerful units. But once both players are streaming hundreds of units it's probably not an efficient use of time to just micro a few units.
Macro:
SupCom is basically all about Macro. Create a better economy and attack move your way to victory. You don’t give a damn about a single unit (except for the commander). You almost never see micro to save a single unit. Units for the most part don’t have spells, no dark swam, no blizzard, none of that stuff. You're not trying to pull off surrounds, Zeppelin drops, polymorph, ensnare, invisibility, no staff micro tricks ETC. In SupCom you build a super economy and flood your opponent with units. You can even set your building to auto build and they will churn out units to infinity as long you have the resources, which by the way never run out.
Victory conditions:
WC3/SC it’s destroy every building, in SupCom it’s destroy the Commander period... There are other victory conditions but this is the most popular. I personally like SupCom win conditions, reminds of chess. And like chess it creates some very tactical situations. You also can't just hide your commander in your base forever, early on you must use the commander because he is equal to about 20 tier one tanks. Later on you need to keep the commander on the run so he dose not get sniped or you can hide him somewhere like under the ocean . I like SupCom's balancing act between risk and reward but I can also see how this may not appeal to everyone.
Anti-slippery slope:
Most RTS have some kind of anti-slippery slope mechanism. Chess is a game that has NO anti-slippery slope, for example if you loose your queen early on it's nearly impossible to make a comeback against a good opponent. In WC3 the anti-slippery slope is "upkeep". Keeping a huge army will cost you more gold in an attempt to give your opponent a small economic boots and get back in the game. SupCom's anti-slippery slope is if you launch a huge attack and lose all your units in or near your opponents base he will reclaim all the mass and get a nice economic boost. SupCom is the only RTS I know of that has this kind of anti-slippery slope mechanism.
Epic games:
I like epic games, in WC3 usually the most epic games are FFA. One game I lost everything but a moonwell, few wisp and my hero, somehow I managed to hide & rebuild and take out the 3 remaining players. In SupCom you can get into truly epic standoff with walls, incredible amounts of towers and units (500 unit cap for each player). Luckily in SupCom there are also "super" weapons that eventually force victory, but they take a ridiculous amount of time to build (they have to). This also means games can last for hours. Where in WC3, rarely dose a game go over thirty minutes. What's the right balance for a RTS?
Economics & resources:
What's the best economic model? In WC3 you have wood and gold, SC you have crystals and gas. In SupCom you have mass and energy. Some RTS's have even more then two resources. The key difference in SupCom you can never deplete the resources. You can also never bank all the resources. You have to build buildings to increase your mass and energy storage. In WC3 you can bank gold and wood forever but will almost certainly lose if you don't spend your resources immediately. The only exception is to stay in low upkeep and bank a little gold while teching up. I don't know which model I prefer, probably limited resources if I had to choose.
Macro VS Micro:
What's the optimum amount of time a player should spend on each task? In WC3 Blizzard decided controlling the army was the most entertaining aspect of the game. In WC3 I would say only about 5-10% of APM is spent on base management. Every battle you really have to mange each unit and keeping your heroes safe is paramount, loosing a hero is often GG. In SC no one unit is as important and it seems players have to spend a lot more time managing their economy, maybe as much at 50% of their AMP or more? In SupCom at long as you keep your commander safe you can just throw the rest of the units at your opponent with attack move commands.
How much "strategy" should be in a RTS:
If Chess & Go are 100% strategy. I would say WC3 is 30% strategy and SupCom is maybe 50%. Yes unit choice is important but execution is even more important. With proper micro units that should lose will actually win. For example in WC3 archers should not stand a chance against ghouls in equal food. But with proper micro (FF, hide & retreat) they can usually win by a wide margin. This means there are certain cookie cutter strategies that will work on almost everything. But then again it is "real time" so certain units should lose if used poorly. I guess that falls under hard counters VS soft counters. WC3 is mostly soft counters.
Creeps (NPC) or not?
Creeping in WC3 means attacking computer controlled units to gain gold and experience. Personally I hate it and it's one of my grips with WC3. I prefer the SC / Supcom with no creeps
Should a single miss-click lose the game?
In WC3 clicking on a town portal (TP) one millisecond too late will lose you the game. This can be very frustrating. Should a RTS be decided by a single miss click?
Well as you can see there are a tons of factors a game designer must take into account. I've just scratched the surface and I'm sure you can come up with many. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
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http://spring.clan-sy.com/
This is a free open source 3d rts engine originally created by a group of Total Annihilation modders.
The Balanced Annihilation mod is honestly as challenging and as fun an experience as brood war for me. It's also a very interesting glimpse at what rts can be, with its extremely powerful UI supplemented by user-creatable "widgets", and continuous direct and indirect input from players with regards to new new maps, balancing gameplay, and graphics.
The community is very small, but there is a very healthy competitive segment, and 1v1 ladders and tournaments are held frequently.
Please check it out, but be aware that the learning curve is very steep, though if you've had any experience with online TA, you'll pick up the basics quickly.
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Most other RTS's fail because they aren't balanced and they don't have Battle.net. C&C Generals was a tight game I used to play, but its matchmaking was god-awful...
Basically, if you can get your game a battle.net-caliber matchmaking system then it will be semi-successful.
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I really do not understand why people think balance is inherent in successful games.
I point to the examples of pretty much every fighting game ever except Guilty Gear and Street Fighter 4
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On January 05 2009 15:05 hideo wrote:http://spring.clan-sy.com/This is a free open source 3d rts engine originally created by a group of Total Annihilation modders. The Balanced Annihilation mod is honestly as challenging and as fun an experience as brood war for me. It's also a very interesting glimpse at what rts can be, with its extremely powerful UI supplemented by user-creatable "widgets", and continuous direct and indirect input from players with regards to new new maps, balancing gameplay, and graphics. The community is very small, but there is a very healthy competitive segment, and 1v1 ladders and tournaments are held frequently. Please check it out, but be aware that the learning curve is very steep, though if you've had any experience with online TA, you'll pick up the basics quickly.
my main gripe with TA is too many units
if you can build 100 different units whats the bet 95 of them will never be used?
im guessing this product is the same . with user added units etc?
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On January 05 2009 12:20 lowlypawn wrote:
Should a single miss-click lose the game?
In WC3 clicking on a town portal (TP) one millisecond too late will lose you the game. This can be very frustrating. Should a RTS be decided by a single miss click?
Well as you can see there are a tons of factors a game designer must take into account. I've just scratched the surface and I'm sure you can come up with many. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
Wouldn´t that be like the same thing like losing your commander due to misplacing him, or the enemy get a lucky sniper or whatever? Risk and reward...
Topic:
I kind of like that in SC, or WC3 games dont take forever to finish, they are easy to learn hard to master (like most of sports around: anyone can kick a ball with your foot or run as fast as they can.. ) and i dunno, i like the feeling of total control when i play a game of sc or wc3, can´t explain it, but it feels good.
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starcraft is the perfect rts or the closer one to perfection
by a stroke of luck of course
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On January 04 2009 05:52 ManWithCheese wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2009 05:41 JudgeMathis wrote:
Warcraft 3 is the closes thing to Starcraft. Where Warcraft lacks, it makes up for. Yes, you can't macro that much. But, to replace that a Warcraft 3 player has to think about where the player is creeping, if he has an expansion. You can't really sit here, and say "SHIT BECAUSE WC3 MACRO IS LIMITED, SHIT SUCKS."
Btw, Wc2 was very imbalanced. Everyone plays Orc. -_-; Also, the fan base is the real reason why some RTS succeed or not. Balance was simple and great in warcraft 2. If you take 2 players of high apm and equal skill and throw them into a large scale battle the human player will win, while you can bloodlust all your ogres it doesn't do any good when half of them couldn't attack till others died meanwhile the human player is spamming heal on his front line, the orc would then try to counteract this by increasing how big the front line is. Shame more people didn't buy the battle.net edition as it was a blast to play.
that is simply so wrong, orc is a lot better than human in WC2, if you''ve played it at a competitive level you'd know that you never encounter a human player unless its someone just fucking around.
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On January 05 2009 21:17 Pingvinen wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2009 12:20 lowlypawn wrote:
Should a single miss-click lose the game?
In WC3 clicking on a town portal (TP) one millisecond too late will lose you the game. This can be very frustrating. Should a RTS be decided by a single miss click?
Well as you can see there are a tons of factors a game designer must take into account. I've just scratched the surface and I'm sure you can come up with many. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
Wouldn´t that be like the same thing like losing your commander due to misplacing him, or the enemy get a lucky sniper or whatever? Risk and reward... Topic: I kind of like that in SC, or WC3 games dont take forever to finish, they are easy to learn hard to master (like most of sports around: anyone can kick a ball with your foot or run as fast as they can.. ) and i dunno, i like the feeling of total control when i play a game of sc or wc3, can´t explain it, but it feels good.
The reason that Starcraft (and WC3 I suppose) feel like that is because after a certain stage, you just can control everything that much more directly. Especially with hotkeys and everything. In many other RTSs, units are fairly laggy and don't follow your orders exactly. For example, Age of Empires II, although being an excellent game (<3 cavalry archers) is lacking in that you don't have attack move. This means that if you want a unit to attack another unit, you have to right click on it. This may seem simpler, but since you cannot A-move, if you have one army attacking another (this is especially problematic with archers) you end up focus firing on one unit before attacking the others. All of these things mean that you feel disconnected from the game.
Control is important. MOAR HOTKEYS
btw nethack wins because of this
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On January 05 2009 19:35 PobTheCad wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2009 15:05 hideo wrote:http://spring.clan-sy.com/This is a free open source 3d rts engine originally created by a group of Total Annihilation modders. The Balanced Annihilation mod is honestly as challenging and as fun an experience as brood war for me. It's also a very interesting glimpse at what rts can be, with its extremely powerful UI supplemented by user-creatable "widgets", and continuous direct and indirect input from players with regards to new new maps, balancing gameplay, and graphics. The community is very small, but there is a very healthy competitive segment, and 1v1 ladders and tournaments are held frequently. Please check it out, but be aware that the learning curve is very steep, though if you've had any experience with online TA, you'll pick up the basics quickly. my main gripe with TA is too many units if you can build 100 different units whats the bet 95 of them will never be used? im guessing this product is the same . with user added units etc?
This is one of the primary focuses of several of the TA-oriented mods (which are the most popular), making every unit useful and serve a role. Better players learn to make effective use of more units, and it is part of the learning curve. There are more tactical aspects to the game than with starcraft, for example the role of radar/stealth/jamming on top of LOS, naval, subamrine, amphibious units, different types of aircraft such as transports, and varying complexity of terrain, so I really think the large unit count is warranted. The thing is maps favour some unit categories over others, and some play styles favour some unit categories over others. For example, on smaller maps, any kind of early air is heavily disadvantageous and cheap, high mobility units and rush/micro oriented gameplay is favoured over resource-expensive higher tech tier units. Some island maps might favour air or sea starts equally, while others might be biased towards amphibious unit crawls; really depends on map, personal preference and skill.
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I played DoW for a while (all of 1.2) and while I loved the game, Relic's support (or lack thereof) was what killed it for me.
They made a great game with immense potential but then:
- They made huge, monolithic patches with dozens of massive balance changes which swung the balance too far the other way (hello Fire Prism, Defiler)
- They didn't listen to the top players in the community who cautioned against the above (e.g. fixing Defiler targeting bug will make it too powerful)
- They focused entirely on getting their expansions out to make more money at the cost of any kind of long term balance, since adding a race per expansion is guaranteed to destroy any balance you had previously
- Their cryptic system of putting unit types (such as Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Vehicle) into further, invisible armour categories (High, Med, Low) and then having each weapon type with an invisible and not-always-intuitive level of effectiveness against each subcategory made it incredibly painful to work out what "countered" what.
I mean, the unit text reads "Strong vs Infantry", but then through trial and error you find that in fact it's only good vs Infantry Med, not Infantry High. Now you have to find out what units are Infantry High, which again is not exposed.
C&C3 is a game I enjoyed immensely, but whenever I played it it just felt so shallow. I mean, here's a typical game. I use my standard build for this map, because there isn't really any other viable one. My opponent is making tanks that are strong against tanks and vulnerable to tanks. I don't care - I was always making tanks myself regardless because even things that counter tanks (rocket infantry) don't really counter tanks. Come on man, you gotta build tanks.
Now I have enough money to tech so I do. He can't see my tech because you don't put down buildings until they've completed. Even if he guesses I'm teching and masses for a push, it doesn't matter because units move so slow relative to sight range and build times, I can just retreat, spam base defences and defend, so it doesn't really matter what he does. Now one of us has a lot more units than the other, makes his army into a wide line and a-moves into enemy base. GG.
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What people have to consider when thinking about warcraft 3 as an RTS is that it is not a pure RTS - an rpg element was added because it fitted more with the atmosphere of the game, with heroes leading a small contingent of troops.
That said I think blizzard needed to get in touch with the community more, and its the main reason why the starcraft community is so split (normal, UMS, fastest, BGH, Hunters). In warcraft 3 there were news announcements before you entered chat, which sometimes mentioned pro players and tournaments like BWI and blizzcon - this is how I learned about the pro gamers such as ShowTime and Grubby in late 2005, and this may have contributed to why wc3 was only split three times - normal, UMS and team games (since theres a ladder for team games and its so different to 1v1 team players never even try solo since team games are easier and wins in this matchup are worth the same as solo wins on your profile, also its arguable that dota split the community more but its so different it might as well be a full on mod)
I mean, imagine when you never visited forums such as teamliquid or gosugamers, and only played on battle.net for starcraft. Why would you stick to 1v1? Especially if other game types are less punishing and more relaxing.
IMO with AMM and automated tournaments in warcraft 3 a lot more people played the normal competitive gametype, and I think the key to success in starcraft 2 is for battle.net 2.0 to fully accomodate the needs of competitive gameplay and I think its the key to success, and lack of support to the community for many other games seems to be the main reason why many games have failed, where starcraft and warcraft 3 have not.
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There are a lot of different sub-communities in WC3 too:
- 1on1
- RT
- AT
- various UMS (not specific)
- DotA
(- Tower Defense)
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EPT
