Top Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time? 175
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "GameSpy is running a feature looking at the editors' picks for the top real-time strategy games of all time. Included on the list are such classics as StarCraft, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and Age of Empires. The article looks at each game's significance to the genre as a whole, as well as offering some reader feedback on the editors' choices. Why not grunt rush their server, have a look at their picks, and share some of your own RTS favorites here?"
Dune 2 (Score:0, Insightful)
Up until 4 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Total Annihilation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Although gamespy liked the graphics, I had a big problem with them. Yes, it was 3D, which made for some beautiful maps. However, the units, IMO, were plainer than plain. They were all boxey and ultimately had very little character (as contrasted to Starcraft, where eveything was quite distinct and enjoyable to look at, and listen to).
Then you've got this comment "You don't just order an attack -- you send in a WAVE of hundreds of units, a wall of steel death that will fill the screen with awesome-looking explosions for minutes on end. You can build a nuclear missile capable of destroying a screen full of units, but it's worthless to build just one: Typically, you send them over in batches of a dozen or more. Obscene? YES. That's Total Annihilation! Every game was non-stop action, carnage, and brutality at a level never seen before or since. ". While I am sure there was lots of strategy involved in competitive TA play, this statement belies that fact. Mass and attack has very little strategy to it. Weapons that destroy an entire screen full of units, that can be mass produced, is not much in the way of strategy. Its like asking a 12 year-old and a 40 year-old their favorite movie. One is going to say "Super death explosion 12" while the other is going to say "Mystic River".
Perhaps, I'll dust off TA and give it another try. Being a Blizzard fan, I never really got into it all that much.
However, I was a little disappointed not to see mention of one of the best RTS pre-cursors, Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War. That game had many of the elements that are in current games and did it back in the mid 80s.
Also, another game not mentioned was 7 Kingdoms or its sequel. While I could never really get into it, it did have a number of really interesting features that I would love to see in future games, such as spies that took on the enemies color and could be integrated into their force.
Total Annihilation... (Score:1, Insightful)
Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:5, Insightful)
Warcraft 1 lacked ease of use compared to Warcraft 2. Most notable point : No ability to right click movement. Thats right, everytime you wanted a group, which was limited to FOUR, you had to click 'M', and left click. Not only that you couldn't group units using the now standard Ctrl-# method, so juggling troops in the middle of a battle was a near impossibility. There was no "attack movement" either so strategies generally degraded into throwing armies at your opponent and then spending time telling each unit to engage the enemy over and over. Warcraft 1 was the equal of Warcraft 2 in an Alpha stage, a shoddy piece of crap which kept people playing because of the art and graphics. It didn't help that the only differences were their spells either, or the fact that all your building had to be connected to your town hall by ROADS... which had to be built (read : waste of money) INDIVIDUALLY (read : the computer will unfairly bum rush you).
To say every game before Warcraft 3 on the list is crap is ignorant. Dune 2 crap? Yeah, ignorant.
Battlezone, Battlezone, Battlezone (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I tend to get annoyed with the number of RTS games where you're winning wherever you go, mopping up every last unit of resistance and levelling the battlefield. Battlezone isn't like that - you're constantly battling to get out of the level alive and achieve the objectives before you get overpowered. That crucial difference leads to a very different mindset that I find more enjoyable in the long-term because you don't tend to end up with levels where you're hanging around for ages desperately trying to build up the army for the last final push, knowing you'll make it eventually just by storming the base and killing them all. You have to get it right just to live, and that's a victory in itself.
Superb game - if you can track it down, do.
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if I would have ra,ked it 1str, because the others listed in there are serious competition. but it's cool to see my best game ever as #1 ! For once things go my way, heh :) Some of you must know the feeling..
TA and extension packs (TA:CC, TA:BT) are the last games that I bought, and I still have them installed on my current computer, 2 generations later. I'm still playing it occasionnally, although not quite as much as I was in '97/98 !
Advance Wars? Um... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Starcraft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Rushes kinda killed the game, cause its a way for a decent player to discourage those that learn. Experts playing never even rush, cause if your opponent knows how to defend it, you are toast.
Re:Total Annihalation (Score:2, Insightful)
I ask because I'm a viciously good TA player and I don't think I've EVER seen a successful "mass rush" without thought behind it--as in scouting, diversionary attacks, and multiple fronts.
Sure the AI sucked. But for pure strategy/tactics, it's much better.
And as for Starcraft/Warcraft, I have yet to see a successful player who doesn't use a pre-memorized (And usually researched online) build order for the first five-ten minutes of the game at least. There is no strategy there, just speed.
Personally, I like TA and AoEII for the same reason--the early rush is hard but doable, there's no "build order" that's going to get you units fast enough to make a difference, and you actually have to think about your attacks.
I like TA better because it rewards truly long-term planning. In Warcraft/Starcraft, you knew you had to keep your units at the unit limit, or you were going to get just plain outnumbered--but if you hit the limit, you couldn't (by definition!) be outnumbered.
In addition, you had to balance your resource collection units against your combat units, which is really artificially limiting with the small unit counts you were allowed.
AoEII has this problem to a lesser extent, since a 200-unit (max) barrier is harder to hit than a 75-90 unit max.
But TA has a 500-unit max. And if you're playing a skilled opponent, you never had time to reach it, and you never knew exactly how your numbers compared to the enemies without scouting, feinting, and being very careful. THAT'S the depth I like.
Your mileage may vary, but TA was a great game in terms of raw strategy and helping take the mundane details off the hands of the player (allowing for actual sweeping strategies instead of incessant tactical clickfests).
Empire Earth made the list? (Score:3, Insightful)
They put out a half finished game and made you wait 6 months before it was playable.
The AI was laughable. It was so poor at resource management it cheated on every difficulty level, evey easy. It was totaly incapable of building an army, it would simply spam buildings and vills with the occasional military unit thrown it.
Nealry every age was hopelessly unbalanced, for a game that stressed how important counter units were, Persian cavarly would dominte everything on the battle field for 3 or 4 ages only to finaly be replaced by another unstoppable army.
Maybe they fixed it in 2.0 patch/Expansion pack but i never stuck around to find out. There were far better games out there, like ones that a person could stand to play.
To put EE on there and snub good games like Warcraft II or Stronghold Crusader or even Cossaks, is inexplicable.
Re:Total Annihalation (Score:2, Insightful)
TA had build orders too. It just wasn't popular enough for them to become common. any game like this, when faced with high levels of competition eventually optimize their strategies. TA does have less variety fo units. The only varibales for th euntis are range, damage, speed, and hitpoints. If it had the 20,000 players daily that Starcraft or Warcraft has it too would start having commonly used strategies. Pre-canned build orders still won't help much if you can;t get the timing down or have the manual dexserity to manage you units. TA made it very hard to micro manage because of the latency and the slow response from units.
Even at it's height, TA didn't have many "skilled" player because it didn't have that many players. Notice: cave dog went out of business. The sales were poor. It's well though of becaus eit has that "blow shit up" Quality a lot of us nerds enjoy.
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:2, Insightful)
There wasn't much of an in-game personality, I admit. *craft has always had a more detailed 'unit personality'... particularly when you start clicking on the same unit over and over again (FUNNY stuff in there).
But I was immediately hooked on it... the sheer scope of TA was great. And the control it gave you allowed you to manage that scope without too many headaches.
One of the great things TA allowed you to do: Order all the units of a factory out on a particular patrol route along the front line. When you've stocked up a sufficient supply of bodies, select them all (they can all be in the same control group, so this is trivial) and fling them at your enemy. Great fun. Lots of pretty explosions.
I think I'm going to have to re-install it Real Soon now. If only I could come by copies of CC and BT again.
Re:Warcraft 1 was not THAT great (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, not really. The only reason I picked up Warcraft I was because a friend gave me his copy. Warcraft I was a step BACKWARD compared to Dune 2 (which was developed by Westwood, Blizzard's rival during Warcraft II) all things considered.
At the time Dune 2 was FRIKIN AMAZING. THREE (relatively) distinctive sides, a constant threat which could f*** up your entire game (sandworm attacks were NOT alerted to the player, so you could lose an entire fleet of harvesters and not realize it) and unfair challenges kept players on their toes (on some of the harder levels it was common for the enemy to attack you so quickly you had to build troops and towers before building a refinery).
Now looking at Warcraft I, the game would often times give you starting units removing the initial game tension of the fear of being bumrushed (it still exists in RTS games these days, but most RTS games don't force you to fight off tanks/knights with infantry units). The problem was they didn't really improve the AI. It was fairly common to level half an enemy base with just 2 or 3 catapults and a dozen archers/spearmen since units weren't smart enough to defend buildings that were being attacked. To top it all off, the AI outside of the campaign was even worse. Normally you expect AI in skrimish games to "cheat" by removing whatever limitations the developers put on them during the campaign in exchange for their overly large bases. Instead, it was possible to go spend 20 minutes in a skrimish without attacking the enemy and be attacked only once or twice.
Try downloading Dune 2 (cracked copies of the game are fairly easy to find, finding a computer slow enough to run it is another thing) and then try Warcraft I. See which game is the superior one without considering their sequels (strange how it ended up though, Dune 2 sequels sucked while Warcraft I sequels rocked).
Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:3, Insightful)
The one problem I always had with TA was (besides the too many unit types... really, half would have been more than enough - it just makes the game too hard to get into) is that it really should have given a higher macro level of control with building. Most RTSs would benefit from this, really. I would have loved to have saved standard defense configs based around walls and turrets, and then just tell a worked to build one of those configs there and there and here, etc. The base building micromanagement just got a little too heavy at times, largely because of the destructiveness of certain weapons (though TA did make micro easier than most).
Great game, though. I need to give it another spin one of these days.