Check out demos for Men of War: Assault Squad and Company of Heroes as well. Dawn of War II might disappoint you if you don't like being limited to 4 squads at a time, but it's fun in its own right. Dawn of War (Dawn of War I, if you will), plays a lot more like Company of Heroes.Originally Posted by internetonsetadd
I find it ironical that Starcraft 2 has regressed towards stack of doom. Only they call it deathball instead. Apparently better pathfinding algorithm has exposed how shallow the game really is. Both Zerg and Protoss find it very hard to execute multi-pronged attacks. Their early units are not future proof, not particularly cost efficient, and late units (Collosus, Brood Lord) only work when protected units. It's very hard to split units quickly, and only Terrans do it against banelings and fungal growth. When you split them, they have a tendency to clump on the next attack order. And instead of providing good area weapons like siege tanks or reavers or high templars (to discourage clumped hordes), Blizzard has nerfed them.
Deathballs run amok. Like stacks of doom in TBS games, it culminates in one big battle and a steamroll afterwards. Comebacks are very hard due to a number of factors, including lack of cost efficient area denial units like siege tanks or lurkers used to be.
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
They've obviously recognized the problem with deathballs, which is why they're taking steps to address that in the expansion. On release, SC1 was basically broken balance-wise, so SC2 is in a much better state already, comparatively speaking. Making a balanced, competitive game is not a one-off thing, it's a continuous effort. I don't get your criticisms about non-future-proof units, especially in case of Protoss.
Anyway, massive unit groups are a late-game only issue, so there's still plenty of comebacks that can happen beforehand. I'm not sure about the current state of the metagame to be honest, but back when I was, "deathballs running amok" would've been an exaggeration.
Not future proof as in "not very useful in mid-late game, and has hard counters". That would be zerglings and zealots. Marines and marauders remain useful for the entire game. And because these units are hard countered, zerg and protoss players feel forced towards late game. You can't trade units in a cost-efficient manner when you have zerglings, zealots or stalkers. Losing a sentry is a pain due to high gas cost. Whereas Zerg were a swarming aggression race in SC1 and BW, they're a macro player in SC2 until they can tech up to at least infestors or mutalisks.
Could you elaborate what steps they're supposedly taking to address deathballs in HotS ? Because I'm not seeing it.
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
My guess is that he's talking about how they're introducing the Zerg version of the siege tank, or at least at one point they had announced a unit which served that particular purpose. I haven't kept up with HotS news because I've been generally unimpressed by SC2, and have sworn myself off of Blizzard thanks to that and Diablo 3 being a total piece of shit.
Which is a shame, as I'd really like to see how the story unfolds and actually play through it rather than just watch the cutscenes on youtube.
But I played SC mainly for its custom maps, and that went down the shitter with SC2. The map editor got super powerful, but then they locked all the maps away online rather than allowing you to download a copy, made only the "popular" maps immediately visible so all you see are DOTA clones and Tower Defense, and the only means of searching for a particular custom map is if you know the map's name or what esoteric set of tags they put it under(because Blizzard doesn't have a set list of tags so you'll see shit like "SuperAwesomeTD" as a tag instead of just "TD" or "Tower Defense"). Oh, and they got rid of the open game lists and replaced them with a matchmaking system based on what map you wanted to play, so even if you know the name of some obscure, but fun, map you have to hope that other people know it too or else you're never going to get to play it anyway. You can't just create a game with the name "Help test this map" and then know that at least someone is going to see the game and probably join it. Hell, they even got rid of fucking CHAT FFS. Oh, it's got an IM client in there, but no more general channels for setting up matches or anything like that. Nope, you're only supposed to talk to people on your friends list. Which if they're RealID friends, and Blizzard decides to arbitrarily opt you out of the RealID program(they did it to me), can be deleted from your list at random.
Fucking Blizzard... I've got more animosity towards them these days than I do my ex-girlfriends.
I have to admit - while I generally dislike Blizzard games and are skeptical about them, custom maps in Warcraft 3 were a lot of fun. And it's not just my opinion - a few mods were so popular they spawned new commercial games ! There were few things to dislike about War3 custom maps. They've butchered the goose that laid golden eggs. It was a craddle of innovation. All they had to do was to replicate it but nooo, they had to try monetizing it. Fun for its own sake is a sin !
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
I counted Stalkers and Roaches as early units as well, and massing them certainly was a viable mid-/late-game strategy (at some point in the metagame, anyway). I don't think I agree with Zealots being useless, they seem like a reasonable way to mineraldump. I barely played Protoss, though, so yeah. Cracklings aren't as good as I'd like them to be, so I can see that.
As for breaking up deathblobs, yeah, I meant the new units (or newly improved units, as it is with the Ultralisk, for instance).
@unruly: Chat channels were added a while ago, and for custom maps, they're releasing the Arcade alongside HotS, which seems to address your problems. You can check out its beta, it has some rather cool stuff on it already (the Bomberman clone was surprisingly well-made).
Zealots are extremely powerful and cost effective lategame as harrasment units, usually in combination with a warp prism (drop in 4 zealots, deploy and warp in a ton more). Fully upgraded, they can decimate a worker line or important buildings in seconds.
So it's taken them 3 years, by the time HotS comes out, to put something into the game that should have been there from Day One. It's not like they needed to "upgrade" Battle.Net into the shit that it currently is. All they had to do was update the matchmaking on the B.Net version that WC3 used and everything would have been fine and dandy. Maybe they could have added in the custom map matchmaking as an option for players who knew what maps they wanted to play, but other than that there was no real need to change anything about B.Net at all. It worked. It did its job. You don't fix what isn't broken when it comes to something like that.
Chat channels, custom games and private servers allow people to take care of themselves. They are the actors. Maybe ActivisionBlizzard doesn't want that ? It's current infrastructure handles people and manipulates them. Better control means more opportunities to squeeze money. At this point no one should claim ActivisionBlizzard is above that. Oh, and people are too stupid and easily confused to make use of these things anyway, so more people are left in. But do you want to play a so-called strategy game against someone who probably can't tie his shoelaces ?
Diablo3 is not PvE or PvP, it is PvAH. -- Tei
I've no idea how the original B.Net worked, but I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine that tech from '97 wouldn't necessarily work well enough these days. (And that's aside from the obvious legal reasons, but maybe that could be circumventable in a less drastic fashion than a rewrite)
btw, b0rsuk, if you want a match against someone who can tie his shoelaces, I'm up for it.
Last edited by pkt-zer0; 19-07-2012 at 12:47 PM.
Chat channels were in the public beta servers in 2010 in SC2 and were released January 2011. It wasn't 3 years.
I want something like Ground Control. I can't stand base building, or even RTS micro managing. More games like Close Combat or Combat Mission but in settings that aren't World War 2!
Dawn of War 2? Star Wars: Empire at War? World in Conflict?
Empire At War was rubbish.
Dawn of War was ok but didn't feel very strategy like, felt more like an RPG action squad based affair.
Due to hating their last game I've not tried World in Conflict, also the Cold War isn't exactly what I meant by not WW2.
Essentially I want a decent sized army, morale systems, plenty of depth and decently slow pacing.
Empire At War's a pretty good game, especially with a couple of mods that tweak scale and damage.
But what, you hated Ground Control 2?
I got mixed up with European Escalation there sorry, was thinking of RUSE which I didn't like.
I was under the impression World in Conflict was very multiplayer focused?
Nope, I've never really dabbled in the MP side of it, but WiC has a great singleplayer mode.
How about the old Warhammer RTT games: Dark Omen and Shadow of the Horned Rat? I rather liked them, despite their immense difficulty and the campaign being a slippery slope. Warhammer is also pretty damn cool as far as fantasy settings go.
I did love them and that's the exact kind of thing I'd be after (or scifi). Though I've always felt the Total War battle system owed a lot to Shadow of the Horned Rat.
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