The level of control this game provides is so fucking incredible. It hurts my brain.
I like it because it almost seems like a fictional representation of a videogame in which people can come up with new, never-before-seen strategies on the fly, which is generally not possible in actual videogames because their ruleset is not flexible or esoteric enough
āTHE CIRCLE CATAPULT GAMBITā what
itās the promise of archon finally realized
3 Likes
So I dunno how useful this will be to the larger discussion ITT but I am getting strong Total Annihilation vibes from what Iām seeing/reading.
Let me start by saying that prior to TA Iād only ever played Age of Empires, and Iāve never played Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer or any of the big names. I probably spent more time reading the manual for Myth: The Fallen Lords then actually playing it.
Anyway, I do not know if TA truly did anything all that different from its contemporaries but I got into it deeply, and I loved that it did things like environmental hazards. Some maps had bodies of āwaterā that were actually acid! You could have an entire navy, constantly degrading for the entire length of a match. Some maps were entirely metal, and you could build metal harvesters anywhere. Geothermal vents, if found early on, were a huge boon compared to the solar collectors that were typical in the early to mid game.
Your commander unit was extremely powerful, and if its destruction wasnāt set to be a win-condition, it was sometimes a viable tactic to just roll your commander in during the early game to wreck your opponentās shit if you thought you had enough of an economy lead. On the flipside the game also made turtling pretty easy and this was usually my strategy, I damn near played the game like tower defense until I could build enough long-range artillery or nukes to try to destroy the enemy from afar (but this was generally much more viable on smaller maps).
The game was also the first encounter I ever had with DLC, as units were made available post-release. I still have those files sitting on a floppy disk thatās stuffed into a CD case that has a bunch of my old PC game CD-ROMs on it. Speaking of, great soundtrack on those discs
Since TA the only RTS Iāve ever gotten into at all is Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. Not sure what that says about my tastes. I was interested in that RTS Sega published years ago but never jumped on it because I realized Iād never play it against anyone on Xbox360 and my computer of the time wouldnāt have been able to run it. For a long time I wanted to play that Grey Goo game but again, probably just missed the boat. Right now the only thing I can think of thatās on my radar is Drone Swarm but I have no idea when that damn thingās going to come out.
7 Likes
Wow, I am really bad at multitasking. All the units and buildings and choices are very learnable for me, I think. Iām struggling with like basic RTS competency right now. Moving units around makes my econ go to shit and vice versa.
Whatās the best way to set a waypoint from a factory? My negligence always makes it so they form a giant ball somewhere on the map; Iād like if theyād at least form a line or an arc or something.
You can set a patrol path with P key to at least have your units be moving around from your factory waypoint. Itās not the worst thing to have some blobs of units that havenāt been integrated into your army yet, especially if they are in a semi useful position like guarding your base.
Get in the habit of whenever you finish a task, zoom out to assess the full scope of the battlefield before you decide what needs your attention next. Itās easy to get tunnel vision in this game. Remember that you donāt need to watch everything thatās happening. If some units die because you were managing your economy, thatās OK. The gain from managing the economy probably outweighs the benefit of micromanaging those few units.
When your first starting out, make simple plans. Win by using your army like a blunt instrument. Try setting your Cloakbot factory queue to 1 Glaive, 1 Ronin, 1 Reaver and put it on endless build mode. Then when a blob of units starts to form at the factory way point, send them into combat. Now you can spend less mental effort thinking about what units to build and focus instead on metal and energy. Make 1 fabricator build a giant queue of energy production so you donāt have to think about it anymore. Make another fabricator queue 10 Metal extractors so you donāt have to think about it for a while. I hope this helps a little. The real answer is to keep gaining familiarity and comfort with the systems until it feels less strenuous to execute your strategy.
Keep trying to always use a hotkey to perform an action. Build the muscle memory so that it becomes second nature.
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