OT: Warcraft 3???

[El_Phil]

What you want then is the Vulcan my friend, ahh a multi-barrelled rapid fire big bertha... Truly a wonderous sight. (Energy producion allowing, results may vary, picture for demonstration purposes only and your home is at risk if you don't keep up repayments )

[Ragnarok-X]

Hey Saber Cherry, coming over from the Dom2 boards ? Could you go into detail ? I dont really get your post, Warcraft 3 is most probably the most balanced strategygame produced, apart from games where factions have the same units.I could image several ways for each race to defeat another race, their are no unique-über-units.

[Alneyan]

TA rules them all indeed, though one game does beat it: TA Core Contigency. What, had you expected me to say *anything* beat TA except TA itself?

Warlords Battlecry was a very nice game too: has anyone played the sequel? (WBIII, oddly enough) It is almost on topic too: WIII and WBIII are only one letter apart, after all.

[Saber Cherry]

Ragnarok-X said:
Hey Saber Cherry, coming over from the Dom2 boards ? Could you go into detail ? I dont really get your post, Warcraft 3 is most probably the most balanced strategygame produced, apart from games where factions have the same units.I could image several ways for each race to defeat another race, their are no unique-über-units.

I didn't play a whole lot of Warcraft 3. A friend of mine bought it, and quickly grew disappointed with it. I was surprised that Blizzard would produce a worse RTS after 3 consecutive generations of better RTS's, so next time I visited him, I played it for several hours. We share virtually all the same opinions on games, but occasionally we disagree (I like Kohan, he doesn't; he likes Earthbound and Jedi Knight 2, I don't. But that's about it.). So, I was hoping that when I played WC3, it would be extremely fun, and have subtleties that he had been unable master, making him unjustifiably frustrated.

I started the Orc campaign, and went through the first couple "toy" missions. Once the real missions began, I started to realize that static defense were utterly useless, and using a single-unit-type mass (saving on unnecessary buildings and upgrades) was highly effective. Furthermore, the missions are not strategy missions, but puzzle missions. In Total Annihilation, Kohan, or Warlords Battlecry, there are a huge variety of ways you can decide to win a campaign mission... whereas in WC3 (much more than Starcraft), it felt like there was a "key" that you had to figure out, because all other approaches would fail. In that regard, it was very similar to Command and Conquer, Incubation, and Megaman boss battles. I found those fun at the time, but nowadays I think they're boring.

As for the "No", "Low", and "High" upkeep system... I've never seen such a terribly dumbed-down, contrived mechanism in any game, ever. It just screams at me, "This was added to make the game accessible to people who haven't started Math yet!"

I no longer had any desire to play the game after a few hours, so I stopped. Thus, I don't have enough knowledge to do a formal review of the game, but from what my friend has told me, it doesn't get any better (he toughed it out for maybe 12 hours, and gave me a full run-down). He likes TA for the same reasons I do, and I found the same flaws in WC3 that he had already told me he had found. Thus, I expect that the ones he told me about, but I did not play long enough to find, I would have found had I played as long as he did.

Maybe the "One effective unit per side" was poorly phrased. "One effective unit per side per game" might be more accurate... or "One effective unit per campaign mission." But I have not played nearly as much as you, so maybe Blizzard has progressed from WC2's "Bloodlusted ogres beat everything" to cases where multiple types of units are quite useful?