Protoss For a Day

1up had a man on the ground at the announcement of StarCraft II to a legion of South Korean fans. James Mielke also had the chance to sit down with the developers of the game for a one-on-one hands-on with everything they're willing to share so far. Includes video with some new footage of the title. From the article: "Dustin Browder admitted that the Black Hole attack was something that would have to be nerfed immediately, as both he and Sigaty laughed at the sight of my entire fleet taking a nosedive in one fell swoop. As I stated earlier, there's still a lot of balancing that needs to go into the game, and this play session was one way for the developers to see what things need it the most. After all, Blizzard has been working on this game for two years already, and we were the first fresh eyes to see the game in a long time, so things that the dev team may now take for granted, are still a surprise to new players. Whether the Black Hole will be nerfed to absorb a limited number of ships, or do a specific amount of damage, or powered-down in some other way hasn't been decided, but the tide of battle will undoubtedly require slightly more skillful play than simply producing a Mothership and hitting 'Black Hole' on the enemy."

Re:I love it. I won't buy it.

[Udderdude]

Blizzard has always gone for lower-end PCs for their games. One of the main reasons WoW is so popular is it doesn't have very taxing system requirements. I'm sure they will continue the trend to Starcraft II.

Some suggestions

[donscarletti]

If they were to make it so that I could pause the game, scroll around the map, and give orders, I would probably really enjoy the game. I love RTS when they can accommodate my quirks.

If you want true task isolation together with realtime action, try a Total War game. You can either get the latest Medievil II iteration or the now-cheap Rome, Medievil or Shogun varients. The campaign, with building, recruitment and deployment are turnbased while battles are realtime. In these realtime battles, not only can you move the camera and give orders while paused, you can only have one battle and there is no base to worry about when that happens. Furthermore units are grouped into formations of 40-200 soldiers depending on type so you've only got a very finite amount to worry about (up to 20 formations and not always that many). Plus pinning an enemy flank with a couple of phalanxes then breaking them with a charge by heavy cavalry from the side makes you feel like a big man nomatter how many times you do it, but that's beside the point. Also beside the point is that its one of the only games where battle organisation counts for far more than base building, citys have limited productivity and so you've gotta make what you can produce count and the units are grouped and simulated in a way that you CAN do clever things with them such as ambushes, flanking, hit and run, encirclement and use weapons of fear and they work a lot better than a blunt charge with superior numbers.

If you wanna stick strictly in the genre though, try Supreme Commander which allows you to pan, zoom and give orders when it is paused, queue up orders, edit order queues, automate some tasks (like construction, rebuilding and air transportation) or even split your screen and point half of it at your base to give a wakeup call when something explodes in it. Its pseudo precursor Total Annihilation is similar but doesn't need the same computational grunt as SupCom.

Anyway, I hope you try either of those games, I believe they accommodate your quirks well and they are great games to boot. Another thing to consider is that both games also allow you to change the speed of time in single player battles which could help you no end.

Re:You love it... You should buy it.

[zippthorne]

You should try Battlezone II. The AI was pretty terrible, but certain of its limitations actually encouraged you to jump out of the top-down command and into a tank to command some of the battle at the front.