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.

If you have and thought it wasn't a huge breath of fresh air for the incredibly fucking tired RTS genre or otherwise just thought it wasn't *great* in another sense, then I don't know, insert a "you must be crazy!!!" quip here or something.

I wasn't so big on the campaign mode that all the reviewers jizzed their pants over, but to this day I enjoy playing a skirmish against an aggressive AI setting every now and then. I really liked the idea that they made outer-space fruitily beautiful, even if that isn't a terribly accurate portrayal of how things really are, and man does it perfect the sense of desolation. Just on presentation alone, the game was pretty damn amazing.

Then toss in the fact that it's also a really well-done game, and I don't see how you can't enjoy it. One problem I have with most RTSs (especially the newer ones like Warcraft 3 and Battle Realms) is that they feature small armies, thus reducing the sense that you're in a war. They try to compensate by giving most units multiple abilities, but the action is so hectic and units die so quickly that it's impossible to maximize the effectiveness of those abilities. And unless you're playing a Total War or Myth game, stuff like terrain and cover almost doesn't fucking matter at all. In Homeworld terrain obviously isn't a consideration, and you still have fairly small armies, but most of the ships are given large amounts of health, so they survive for quite a while in a pitched battle. This means that battles aren't reduced to you simply throwing units at the enemy and hoping you have more of them... you now have to use them effectively. In that sense it plays a lot like Sacrifice. Yet because the pace isn't quite as insane as WC3 (or Sacrifice, for that matter - I still have problems effectively targeting enemies with spells that), you CAN use your units far more effectively.

Cataclysm also alleviates one of Homeworld's major problems: the large lulls in between battles. It's got a time-compression feature that shuts off automatically whenever enemies approach any of your units. Plus the campaign has at least three difficulty settings, making it much more fun to play since you don't have to rely on The Only Imaginable Method Of Beating This Mission to survive. (My major reason for disliking Homeworld's campaign was that it's more trial-and-error than anything else.)

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 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?