Starcraft Broodwar?

[Julius Seeker]

Would anyone be interesting in playing a tows reunion, maybe a few rounds sometime in the next month or so? Maybe even a tournament if we can get enough interested?

If you no longer have the game (like myself) then borrow it or even rebuy since it is really cheap now (20 bucks or less).

[Julius Seeker]

Come on, Eric? BL? Don? Oracle? Just like the good old days....... 10 years ago =P

[SineSwiper]

Heh, I don't even know where my copy is. If anything, I would want to play the RPG type thingy map that I made. (Well, I didn't make it, but I updated it to use Brood Wars characters.) You could do some really neat shit with the map editor.

[Don]

Problem with most of the RPG stuff all have tricks to them and once you figured it out, it's not much. For example if you look at the Aeons of Strife or whatever those are called for Warcraft 3, if you play as someone who can mana drain fast you can hold off 4 guys by yourself in a 4vs4 while your other 3 players mop up the AI.

[Tessian]

In my opinion, RTS games have come Very far since Brood Wars and after playing games like War in Conflict, Dawn of War, and Company of Heros, I can't go back to the old format that StarCraft is known for.

[Eric]

Watching the Koreans do insane shit can actually be entertaining.

However for a normal or average gamer like you or me, that game has not aged well.

[Julius Seeker]

Maybe I am just tied up with the old style RTS games, I can see myself really enjoying a game of Broodwar still..... but I have tried playing Warcraft 3 online, and I just found it very uninteresting. I have not played, or even heard, of those games that Tessian mentioned: but I am listening =)

[Don]

At the 'insane Korean' level the game becomes an action game because your success is really dependent on how fast you can click your mouse. That's not strategy.

Too much of Blizzard's strategy game becomes all about memorizing openings. As always the lack of a meaningful defense outside of gimmicks (using buildings as defensive structures is not how they're meant to be used) pretty much prevent any semblance of strategy.

[SineSwiper]

In my opinion, RTS games have come Very far since Brood Wars and after playing games like War in Conflict, Dawn of War, and Company of Heros, I can't go back to the old format that StarCraft is known for.

I actually haven't really played any RTSs since Starcraft. Is micromanagement any better? That was the big killer with SC.

Hell, I remember playing a 4 player SC game on slow speed, and it was great because we could keep up with all of the different things to do.

[Tessian]

Company of Heroes is a great place to look at where RTS's are at now. Gameplay emphasizes control of resource zones around the map as opposed to hiding inside a base (you still have a base, but it's now purely for building an army and upgrading). That's the biggest change I can think of... but really it isn't so much micromanaged anymore... most games just don't give you too many units to worry about at once.

[Don]

I think the first RTS that finds a way to punish focus fire will be the first RTS that's actually strategic. I mean, if you ever think about how war is supposed to go, focus fire is simply a myth. You don't see 10 tanks all point their gun at the same tank because that way it kills one tank really fast, because it just doesn't work.

For example, take ROTK 11, which is a turn-based game so you'd think the usual surround & kill strategy works even better since there is no time limit, but the game actively punishes the surround & kill strategy if you don't think about it. Let's say you're up against Zhang Liao's unit, who possess the special ability Majesty, which is possibly the nastiest special in the game (unit who get hit by it basically cannot use their specials). So you surround him and try to kill him, but when it's his turn he'll use Cyclone tactics, which hits every unit in melee range and inflicting the Majesty effect. Now most of your army has their specials disabled and is basically just a sitting duck and the opponent only has lost one unit (granted it's one very powerful unit). If you're smart you'd immediately retreat behind your fortification and hope that will buy you enough time for you to get your specials back as opposed to continue fighting for certain doom.

Also, all units in the game can use explosive traps, which is basically a large AE effect that must be targetted on one of your own unit (and it hammers that unit very hard) and hits all units in range indiscriminately. If you just blindly surround & kill a unit, that just induces the opponent to explosive trap the dying unit, since it is surrounded mostly by enemy units and about to die anyway, you will most likely come out worse. So a lot of the game is about how to spread your units out and ensure your ZoC denies the enemies of a chance to use an explosive trap that will hit mostly your units, which means you see a lot of 1 vs 1 even when there are 15 units on each side in a battlefield.

[SineSwiper]

I tend to agree. Focus fire is pretty unrealistic and it's almost a definition of a RTS. There is no sense that actions have strategic consequences, except when you move your entire army away from base or something. But, when you're fighting against another army, you don't feel that sense of vunerability with having a bunch of units in one spot.

Enemies that do AoE damage tends to equalize that effect, but again, the focus fire will negate a single unit from causing that much damage (if any).

[Don]

Well focused fire is worse when you talk about ranged units because they don't cluster any more than usual even when focused on one unit.

The easiest way to fix this I think would be either have a unit under attack does less damage, or a unit that is not actively being attacked do more damage. If you always focus fire first you should lose to someone who is letting autotarget doing the work. There will obviously still be cases where a particularly dangerous unit that warrants taking out first despite the penalty for ignoring other units.