Be Excellent To Each Other

Or, of course, Real-time Stratagy games.

I think they're my favourite genre, but since StarCraft 2 things seem to have dried up a bit.

Are there any shiny new ones that I've not heard about?

This is the worst thread title ever and is totally misleading thanks to the subtitle.

New ones? Just play DOWII and COH until the end of time.

Or until they release sequels.

I loved Civ 2 back in the day, but apart from that I've only really played Total Annihilation and DEFCON.

-EDIT- ignore me, Civ 2 is TBS.

DoW2 was very good, but I preferred the first one. Not only was it more tactical, but you had far more units under your command.

In case anyone is thinking about it - C&C4 is shit.

Console-wise I've played Halo Wars and Brutal Legend. They're both ok, but not great.

Yeah, without wanting to start the obvious, I do think that RTS games are far more suited to a PC. You need the extra buttons, for starters.

You need to play SC2 online more! It never gets old!

It does. It's paper scissors rock, and it's about fast hands rather than tactics.

DoW3 is in-bound.

I've been playing some TBS and RTS on the iPad lately. C&C:Red Alert works pretty well on it.

DoW2?!? How did I miss that?

Anyway. I picked up for £0.25 an interesting little RTS recently called Perimeter. Diverting for a while, but I still prefer Homeworld 2 for my RTS jollies.

Everything past Red Alert was crap. Red Alert 2 was ok, ish. But the old-school gathering of a single resource and pumping out best-tank was just too boring for me to care about anymore Especially as in RA you could micro your ltitle tanks for OPTIMUM effectiveness and use a hoard of light tanks to take out larger tanks.

I'm suprised about your DOW1 thoughts though. DOW1 strides the gap between COH and C&C style games. It's mostly about resource gathering and just churning out unit and then flooding the enemy with them. Though, saying that, I didn't play it all that much on MP so I have no idea if what units you churn out matter? They definately mattered in DOW2. Especially so with the small unit count. I always felt panicky playing that game, as everytime you lose a unit then you've lost a sizable part of your force. And the map-control aspect introduced in COH was such a brilliant idea. I got a mega-boner the first time I played COH. It was pretty much Close Combat 3D, which is exactly what I'd been after for many, many years.

ps: ORKZ RULE.
pps: Have you tried the last stand mode in DOW2?



PPPS:I own supreme commander 2, but have yet to bother playing it. I think that's because I walked in on someone playing SC1 once, and he'd been playing the same game for around 5 hours and still hadn't finished some mammoth thing. Should I care enough to install and play it? It only cost me £2.

I have no idea what you mean by this.

he wasn't aware that there was a sequel to Dawn of War.

You just don't like it because you're not good at it.

Zackly.

Having now looked at it on the internet, it looks not as good as DoW1.

It's better.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/15620/

Try the demo.
The singleplayer and multiplayer are readically different though. So bare that in mind if you care about multiplayer.

The Wii U will be home to a new Pikmin game.

It's a better RPG, but a worse RTS because of it.

Is Homeworld 2 on GOG?

[edit]No, rubbish

Is it copy protected, and is there a no disc hack available? I could make a [back up copy - ed] for you.

downloaded starfront:collission on the iphone.. not really played it yet though

Ooh! Ooh! Not new, but who plays AI War? I've been waiting for an excuse to get into that properly.

Homeworld Cataclysm is probably my fave RTS to date. So atmospheric that one, gripping plot and scary sound!

Company of Heroes runs it a very close second.

I really didn't take to Starcraft II at all. Hurrah! I get to play intergalactic twats in space. No, wait.

I had a dig at it myself after finishing the single-player campaign - viewtopic.php?p=464510#p464510

I'm hoping the Zerg and Protoss instalments are better.

Is it safe to assume you've played every RTS up to Starcraft 2?

I didn't like DoW2 either BTW, I want to build fucking bases, dammit!

Pretty much - certainly all the well-known ones.

The multiplayer doesn't suffer from the RPGness of the campaign.

Plus, it looks fucking ace.



HOMEWORLD 1 IS BEST.
(I never played Homeworld 2 for more than 2 missions, so what do I know? I bought it for £1.50 from gamestation at uni)

Maybe you're in the wrong genre then?

I see RTS games as the wary bit with the wee men. Obvious some people see it as the buildy bit. They're all insane, clearly.

It's both, innit?

You should totally have a go at Homeworld 2, Pod. It holds up quite well today (although it isn't as scary as the first one).
There's also Homeworld: Cataclysm which is Homeworld 1.5, if you haven't played that.

I left my disc (along with all the disc'd games I had) in Manchester at a friend's house when I moved 3 years ago

I played a pirated version of Cataclysm that I downloaded from Kazaa. Back in the day when a game could be done in a 300mb zip file. I liked it. I can't remember if I liked it more than the original though. The modable mothership and different fighting ships were nice. But it was basically more of the same. (Pete claims it has a story. How would I know? I skip all of those )

Do you play non-RT S games? e.g. Have you ever lpayed any of the stuff Paradox Interactive churn out? It's great! Europa Universillas, Victoria, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings etc. They've been my favourite developers for many years now. Those games can really suck up your time. And they're mostly 'psuedo' TBS. They're technically real time, but you pause so often and for so long that it's basically TBS but with a fast forward button.

The last RTS game I bought, I think, was Phillip Hegemony or something. It was pretty good and I'm impressed by the few guys that made it. I'll definately check out their next game. If I were to describe it in a word I'd use "stressful". It's the kind of game where _everyone_ is against you. When growing your empire, you need to make sure you grow in a certain way as to expose the least 'perimeter' to your (many,many) enemies, otherwise you'll just be worn down as you won't have enough troops to defend anything. I think they fixed that though by adding in some rudimentary diplomatic options to their 'gold' edition, which I think I get free for buying the last one. Who knows1?


PS:
I champion both Troy wahtsisface and Tom Chickhttp://www.quartertothree.com as the best RTS (or strategy in general) writers. Mainly because they both talked positively about Close Combat and Rise of Nations. (Which are some of the best rts games ever. NO ARGUMENTS WILL BE HAD). Infact I think Tom Chick used to always use it as an example when he talked about various RTS features. So that means they're probably correct about everything else, right? The QT3 forums are a good place to browse. Lots of clever wordies and games developers on there.

edit: Looks like QT3 has turned into some 'general news' site and features more people than just Tom's tri-yearly post? CONFUSING.

Pft, I didn't click on this thread for so long due to the subtitle.

Count me as one of the people who was much more fond of DoW2 than the original.

But it isn't really a traqditional RTS. Due to the lack of units, it's a wee bit more like Cannon Fodder - The RPG (but with the ability to resurrect fallen fodder)

Although I'm lead to believe the latest expansion pack takes it back more towards the originals style.

I hate to be a bore, but the multiplayer unit counts as roughly similiar to COH....

I played the original campaign co-op (I was about 1/4 of the way through a solo game when I started coop). That only gave me _two_ units to control! It's not as easy as you'd think..

I will have to dig CoH out again....

Fucking Homeworld 2 is awesome, and someone needs to get off their asses and make another space battle sim.