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| I find it unbelievable that you're judging the game... by Cainen 05/30/2007, 4:51am PDT | ||||
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while not knowing how it plays out against a human. You're spamming units against the AI, which admittedly was incredibly weak; who cares? That AI couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag because it doesn't play properly. Find a human to play and watch him counter your spamming with intelligent placement of defenses, scouting, and flanking you with a counter. Can't find a human to play? Download a third-party AI; I've played a decent amount of the game and still get floored by a few at their max if they're given any quarter. The units lack personality; since when did an RTS need this? Furthermore, it's YOUR fault for not understanding how the units work; there are several more roles to fill in TA and each unit fills at least one. Several units, such as the missile towers and artillery batteries, fullfill far more than one role.
FABIO wrote: Oh wait. You're still doing that in TA; ever stop to think about how you're going to acquire resources if your enemy has every metal spot you don't? The resources are limited so the players will place a value on their units and not just fling them blindly into suicide meatgrinders. Did you ever notice that your units leave behind wreckage? Probably. Did you notice that the wreckage gives behind about 80% of the metal that it took to build your unit? More than likely not; this is to prevent you from spamming units constantly because you're handing the enemy resources, which they ARE going to reclaim if they're anywhere near competent. Like Red Alert 2, Total Annihilation technically has a bunch of different units you could come up with a bunch of different tactics for. In fact it may have close to Starcraft levels of tactical options. Close? It beats Starcraft's sorry ass into the ground when it comes to that; there are far more factors to take into account when planning anything in TA than there are in Starcraft. My mindgames apparently blow yours out of the water, so I wouldn't expect you to understand. But like Red Alert 2, 90% of it matters dick and the most effective option by far is unit spamming and rushing. No. LLTs are your friend; the most commonly spammed unit, the Flash, gets stopped by a grand total of three LLTs and sixteen Dragon's Teeth when the Teeth are placed around the LLT. The LLT can shoot over them, but the Flash can't, therefore the Flashes are stopped in hordes; the rush gets dropped instantly because the Flashes can't do anything but walk right into the LLTs thanks to the Teeth and the wreckage of previous Flashes. You have an income rate and your goal is to spend resources faster than you make them. The game might as well scream at you for not having multiple factories pumping out units non-stop. Pump out all the units you want and do whatever with them; resources are limitless. Your economy will blow up before you're able to do anything if you try that against anything competent and metal makers blow up nicely, so say bye to metal maker farms and all the energy it took to build them. Turtle and you'll get blown up because the opponent will grab what you don't. Like Emperor: Battle for Dune, and every Age of Empires/Empire Earth/Rise of Nations game ever made, there's a bunch of sneaky shit you could technically pull off, but that would distract you from constantly clicking on all your factories to mass produce more units, and that means you lose. What the fuck are you smoking? Queue hundreds of units in advance in your factories; holding Shift accomplishes this. I hate to break it to you, but your grasp on this game is tenuous at best. I would beat the living piss out of you if you tried anything like this; you would be sitting in your base spamming and nanostalling while I'm creeping up on your base, having scouted it and found out what you were building in masses. Now on the topic of shift clicking; shift-clicking, which queues anything you care to do, makes micromanagement almost a thing of the past. Queue hundreds of units for one factory in twenty clicks rather than a hundred so you don't have to worry, set their rally point just behind the frontlines of the battlefield and you can forget about that factory for an hour. Queue construction unit orders so you don't have to spend time managing them and can spend more time managing your assault force. Setting up patrol routes using the shift system is intelligent; it lets you keep up-to-date on information while at the same time producing more units that are available at any time. Starcraft only had about 9 units per side, but they were so well thought out that you didn't need any more. I agree with this statement. You'll only use about a third of the available stuff in TA there's so many redundant units. Wrong again. What, did you play an hour of the game? There isn't a unit that's exactly the same as another unit or completely supersedes another unit. The Flak Cannon, while it is a better anti-air unit than the missile launcher, is much more expensive than missile launchers and lacks the ability to shoot ground units. The Pyro is the only unit that even comes close to obsoleting another unit; it builds almost as fast as an AK does with a bit of help and deals more damage than the AK. However, the AK costs a whole lot less than the Pyro and doesn't explode violently. Meanwhile TA gave you "medium tank #3, halfway between light and medium tank, slightly heavier than heavy tank". Idiot. The riot tank, which was the only medium tank added to the game at any point, acted completely different than any other tank; it had decent speed, completely worthless armor, and a huge but short range gun(for its level, anyways). It was also cheap for the kind of assault capabilities it had; however, it would never form the core of an assault force unless you were fighting infantry or Flashes exclusively. It looks like shit Turn the resolution up to around 1280x800 and scale the build menus appropriately. Now keep in mind that this game came out BEFORE StarCraft. The interface is awkward. Crtl + number to hotkey unit groups, then alt + number to select them instead of just hitting the number? It might not sound like much but it's annoying as hell when you're trying to toggle through units during a fight (which you shouldn't really bother with because your factories need more clicking). A minor, but valid nitpick; however, the interface is much better than StarCraft's when it comes to functionality. You can do more with the options presented to you in that interface than you can with StarCraft's, especially when coupled with shift-clicking. And I've already addressed the fact that you don't understand how to queue and set a patrol route/rally point. The system of moving projectiles vs. generic instant attack animation deserves special mention. If there's one thing I miss from the original C&C days, it's definately the fact that the game assumes my units have no concept of leading their targets, and having them constantly miss a moving vehicle unless I step in and tell them to force fire on the spot it'll be at by the time my amazingly slow missile gets there. I hate to break it to you, but real-life artillery isn't that accurate; why should the game's balance be raped because you're an idiot who doesn't understand that the equivalent of a V2 rocket can't be aimed at a fast moving unit, let alone anything that fires a slow-moving projectile? They're meant for things other than that, such as nailing slow-moving units, massive swarms of weak units, or cracking buildings. Try playing it at a higher level and with something that can think, kthx. |
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