Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Re: Of Rocks and Scissors

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 05/14/2005, 11:21pm PDT

Mischief Maker wrote:

A long while back I was commenting on how what I liked about Total Annihilation's combat was that your units were firing actual projectiles across 3D terrain, so direct fire ruled when you had a clear view of the enemy while arcing artillery cound clobber an enemy behind a hill and so forth. That way it was perfectly intuitive what units were useful against what and under what circumstances. So much nicer than games where battles between units involved a generic attack animation and stat crunching.

That's the problem with these things: it's always some arbitrary stat that determines what's good against what, and is for the most part unintuitive. Infantry > cavalry > archers > is as advanced as it should get. But the AoE and EE games have to throw in 5 different types of each with totally different r/p/s properties and fuck if you can remember them all without a branch chart. To top it all off they have to give them all fruity historical names like Cuvvallegoonnerrs or whateverthefuck so you can't even tell what's cavalry or infantry just by the names.

That's one reason I love Starcraft. The stats were pretty much all right there for you to see and draw your own intuitive conclucsion about what worked on what. You knew marines and zerglings with their rapid, but low damage attack would fare poorly against heavily armored units, while the siege tank would punch through any armor but could be overwhelmed by smaller units. There was a tiny hidden stat about small, medium, and large units, but once you knew of it it was pretty easy to remember which was which.

Unfortunately the thread was hijacked by SB and used as an excuse to complain about how Koreans were kicking his ass at Starcraft despite him once being a champion quake player while veronica fucked umberto.

In that very same thread he also praised the original C&C as the only balanced and varied RTS ever made ~~and not just about who could build the most mammoth tanks~~, and that the ideal RTS would be two players just building massive impregnable bases with working gates and drawbridges or whatever. This perfectly describes Tiberian Sun, which was one of the worst RTS's ever made. The boy truly knows what he's talking about.