Senor Barborito wrote:

curst wrote:

Senor Barborito wrote:

I'll say this much for Sacrifice: it's definitely VERY fucking original and draws more inspiration from nigh-lethal doses of illegal substances than any PC game in recent memory. It's really quite cool and enjoyable.

I'd go so far as to say it's the only RTS worth playing since the original C&C. I don't think it's on the level of PS:T, etc., but it's definitely a very good game.

--SB

I highlighted that sentence because it leads me to believe you have not yet played Homeworld.

Speaking of Total War and Myth, I'm a big fan of both series. I never played Myth 3 because of the disappointing things I heard about it, but Myth 1 was great fun and 2 wasn't bad. I like Medieval:Total War more than Shogun as a game because they refined it so well and the manual/tutorials actually bother to explain how to play, but I'm a sucker for Oriental flava, which probably allows me to overlook Shogun's problems easily. They may not fit the standard popular mold of RTS games, but I don't know what else you would call them.

I NEVER trust my build order/resource management to AI, from Civ to MOO, it never works out for me. This leads to my problem that the campaign takes just too damn long. WIth the total war game I usually beat the campaign once (a 30+ hour experience) then put it away. They did improve on the campaign feature from the totally broken Shogun though. One that pissed me off to NO end in Medieval though was the fact that whenever you wiped out a nation, that nation would ALWAYS come back to life in about 20 turns with several decent sized "enough to wipe out your police force" armies and screw up your game. No matter how many times you smacked a nation down, they'd ALWAYS come back. You were practically forced to reduce each computer player to a single province then just leave them alone rather than have 3 decent armies pop up in inside your territory down the road and rampage through your vunerable interior. What the hell kind of play is this is a total domination game? Double points for only having this feature for the computer, if YOUR nation got wiped out then it was game over.

I also remember hearing really good things about Sierra's Ground Control, but somehow I never got a chance to play it. A lot of people implied that it was Battlezone with a better sense of strategy, or maybe Dark Reign 2 with much less general suckage. Am I thinking of the right game and is it still worth checking out?

Myth was fucking incredible for it's presentation, story, and just the way you feel this constant sense of despair - like the world has been destroyed and every fight is almost a futile gesture just to get back at the bastards. BUT, after playing my roommate in college quite a bit over the college LAN, I didn't feel that it really stood up in terms of gameplay. Perhaps that's just me.

The other problem with Myth is that it was very much a quicksaver's game, which is something I hate - I crave the feeling that if I was doing this shit for real, I'd pull it off. In Myth if you go right instead of left at the wrong intersection you can kiss it goodbye and enjoy reloading your game. In C&C, once you established a base you could recover from nearly any error if you played it smart and maintained excellent defenses. That's good design because it gives the impression of coming back from near defeat to pull off an amazing victory. Key guideline here: THE SAVE GAME BUTTON SHOULD ONLY BE NEEDED BY PLAYERS GETTING UP TO GO TAKE A SHIT. IT SHOULD NEVER BE NEEDED BECAUSE YOUR GAME IS CONSTANTLY FUCKING KILLING THEM.