Proving once again that sucking monumentally at something is no reason not to do it, I somehow keep on playing these. The thing is, I’ve been cycling through reinstalls of Starcraft, Age of Empires, Shogun Total War and Age of Empires II for a few years now. Oh, and Stronghold, which I thought was interesting but got old fast.
So, what are some good games you’d recommend? It doesn’t have to be purely RTS, Civilization-like stuff could work to.
How about good ol’ fashioned command and conquer?
EDIT: Alternatively, you could always try a good mod or two, to help spice things up. 
Originally Posted by Seraphim Ephyon
So, what are some good games you’d recommend? It doesn’t have to be purely RTS, Civilization-like stuff could work to.
Coincidently, Civilization’s 2, 3, & 4 come to mind. Perhaps they might interest you?
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War is a great game, solo at least. I didn’t play any online games . It has two expansions out with another on the way. There are multiple factions to play - I think by the third expansion they were up to Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Orks, Necron, and Tau. The Warhammer 40K universe (which I’m just getting into) has at least one other race lurking out there.
The game’s squad based. You can have up to several unites of footsoldiers (usually four or five) accompanied by a commander, of which various sorts, You can individually upgrade each soldier with weapons to carry, tailoring them to be anti-infantry, anti-armor, or whatnot. Vehicles operate on their own, not in squads. Other than filling up squads, control is much like most other RTS games. Each race plays a little bit differently, in my experience, much more so than SC (which only makes sense, since SC came out goddamn-how-many-years-ago?). Building construction’s normal, but for resources you capture nodes on the map (which can be recaptured by the enemy, but which you can fortify against that threat) instead of sending units out to gather.
So yeah, I’d recommend that one. As I understand it, Starcraft started out as a project for the 40k universe before whatever happened and it showed up as what it is, so the setting will sort of feel familiar in the way the races interact.
Have you tried FF12:Revenant Wings? If you liked the original it’s a neat game, though some of it is far too difficult for my tastes. -_- Then again, it’s my first RTS.
There is a Sim City game since you mentionned Civilization-like stuff. Also, I think Spore is scheduled to come out this year (ha!).
If you have Shogun, Medieval:TW has drained many an hour from my friends and when Rome:Total War came out, I couldn’t find a negative review to save my life. Even if I don’t like games based on Rome, it seems I’ll have to get that one.
Caesar II and III were good games but the battles were an afterthought, at least until your carefully planned city was burnt by barbarians. As long as we’re in Civ-builders I may mention the Settlers, the Anno and the Europa Universalis games. The last two are 50-50% civ-management and war.
C&C3 received good reviews so you could try that if you’re into the series.
Judging from the age of your games let me recommend a few oldies you may have missed: Rise of the Nations was good, Red Alert 2 (+expansion) resurrected the RA franchise from the grave, Total War 1/2 allowed you to begin with caveman technology and end up sending space robots against the opponent. The last one also reminds me a bit of the Age series. Cossacks was also a bit impressive when it came out cause you could employ many-many units on the field.
I suppose you’ve played these, but Dungeon Keeper 2 is a graphically amped up version of the original, where you invade a happy kingdom with your, ahem, evil minions. Total Annihilation is interesting even 11 years later; it was the first and only game to make me feel I was watching a futuristic war. Recycling the dead hulls of your units was a nice touch. The sequel is a refined taste, though if you like fantasy strategies you can give it a try. Lastly, the Lord of the Realms series.
I’m still a bit pissed that the price of the Half Life series was not ever seeing the two sequels to Birthright. Anyway.
edit: It doesn’t show I like strategies, hm?
I should have been more clear, those aren’t the ONLY games I’ve played, just the one’s I’ve done the most. I’ve already played through all the “Sim [Stuff]” and Civ games as well.
Yeah. Rome:TW was the one I heard the most about, and I’ll give Warhammer a try. I know about Spore as well, whenever the hell it comes out.
Frankly, I could never get into any C&C game other than Tiberan Sun. Never quite understood why.
Dawn of War + Expansions? They’re pretty fun, and there’s a new expansion coming out soonish. With playable Witch Hunters. Fuck yes.
Whoops, beaten by RPT. Whatever, just get it.
For a good '96 game by a now-extinct company, <a href = “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion_II”>Master of Orion II</a>
Cause they suck’s why 
RTS? Don’t know of any good ones other than SC but I heard anything Total War is good, and if you don’t mind TBS, any Romance of The Three Kingdoms games or any knockoffs are good. I think a new one just came out on PS3, which means it’s probably on every other console too. I forget what it’s called though.
I don’t trust anything Warhammer on PC, but I haven’t played most of it so you’re on your own there. It just seems like… no. Like the WC/SC novels. The idea is just stupid and I don’t really know why. But try it, it might surprise you.
Age of Mythology? I haven’t played it, but no one’s mentioned it yet and you played the first two age games so why not?
Nah, Warhammer 40K:Chaos Gate and WH:Dark Omen were good games. If fucking hard.
World in Conflict and Universe at War: Earth Assault both came out recently, and are both supposed to be very good. At the very least, any of the games mentioned previously should keep you busy untill Starcraft 2 comes out.
I suggest Romance of the Three Kingdoms as well. The latest one out is XI for the PS2, or PC if you can read Japanese or Chinese. It’s rather difficult to get into if you don’t know anything about the time period, but still a great game.
I highly suggest a Fire Emblem game if you want TBS. FE and FE: The Sacred Stones are for GBA, FE: Path of Radiance is for NGC, and FE: Radiant Dawn (Sequal to FE: PoR) is for Wii. They’re all great, even if no revives is a little harsh sometimes.
Also on the TBS side, Advance Wars. Great little game for GBA and NDS. Simple but deep.
I haven’t played many RTS games, but Settlers III and IV (though I couldn’t play the latter much without it crashing) are funny and cute. The cute may make it seem like it’ll be easy, but it’s actually pretty complex. Especially in the beginning you have to plan out carefully what you do, because just about everything you do is connected to something else and it may take time to find the resources you need for everything.
Example:
To create an army you need weapons and soldiers.
To get soldiers you just build a residence, then you get more people. To make these new people into warriors, you need a barrack and a weapon for each lil’ guy.
To make weapons, you need an armssmith, who in turn needs coal and iron bars to do his magic. You get iron bars from an iron foundry, who in turn needs coal and iron ore.
To get these resources, you need mines, so you have geologists searching over mountain areas to find where there is ore and coal to be mined. Once you have mines, the miners need food to keep working.
Food can be fish, which is the cheapest since you only need a fisherman’s hut, but it takes long and depends on luck. There’s also bread and ham. For these, you need a farm for crops, for food for the pigs and to make flour, and you need a water mill to get them something to drink and bake the bread from. A pig farm raises pigs that are then taken to a newly built slaughter house (are you groaning yet?), and a mill makes flour for the bakery.
There, food for the miners so they can gather resources to make weapons.
Also you have diggers who flatten the ground for the buildings, builders who build, and carriers who bring all the stuff around to their destinations. Also you need to have a woodcutter and a sawmill plus a stonecutter to make planks and building blocks. Phew! Hella fun!
I concur. People sometimes look at me funny when I suggest the game, but it’s pretty deep. A Combination of the original Master of Orion and Civilization.
Have you played Civ 4 with all the expansion packs?
Dawn of War + Winter Assualt + Dark Crusade is fun on the RTS side, and installs to be run without a CD.
Company of Heroes is by the same company and plays similarly, but it’s also pretty fun (even if you only get to play Yanks or Krauts).
I’ll toss something into left field, if you want to try something different you could try Vantage Master. It’s a free download from Nihon Falcom.
:victoly:
Sounds like Settlers, alright; I think Settlers 2 is freeware now. Its graphical style is less cartoony but when you’re a God, as in Settlers 3, you seem to have a different perspective. And that reminds me of Sacrifice, where you play a sorcerer doing missions for various gods and getting different spells and creatures according to your choices. I usually end up with Charnel. -Charnel, death is not the answer to everything! -Exactly, torture also has its merits. In the last stages the difficulty shoots up.
As for TBS, you also have the remake of Shining Force for the GBA/DS.
If you happen to have a rather nice box (dual core processor, 1-2 GB ram, nvidia 7 series video card) then Supreme Commander and especially it’s expansion (more like paid patch, unfortunately) Forged Alliance are pretty good. The game has support for absolutely gigantic battles with up to 1000 units per side. My favorite feature is the ability to zoom in and out from what amounts to a glorified minimap (whole map on screen, units rendered as 2d icons) to watching small groups of units fight it out or anywhere in between just by using the scroll wheel.
The game can be run on a lesser box, but less than 1 GB of ram will have issues on larger maps or with long games, single core processors tend to have to use unit caps of no more than 500, and it doesn’t support video cards below the 6 series and looks much, much better with a 7.
Do try Populous 3. It’s old enough to run fast even in low end computers, yet the graphics are so nice and pleasant. But beyond that, it adds some elements to RTS gaming which I’ve found in very few other games.
For starters, all the maps are spheres, instead of the good old tetragon of most games or the “cylinder” of Civilization. That adds a whole new level of challenge for erecting your defenses, since the enemy can just go the other way around the world to get you.
It’s got the simplest user interface I’ve ever seen on any strategy game. And a lot of things in this game make more sense than usual. For example, destroying buildings. In most games your units hit the exterior of buildings, you can’t even see them connecting their hits, and then the buildings catches fire out of the blue and finally blows up. In Populous, your guys actually enter the building, and start punching/kicking/pushing the walls and the structural frame, and you can see the building shaling and pieces of it falling down as it is vandalized. You can also see flying debris if something like a meteor hits a building, or when it’s torn and ripped apart by a quake, and nothing is as eye-cathing than seeing a tower spinning on its own axis as it tilts and falls on its side in a lake when you remove the ground beneath it with an erosion spell. If you still like seeing buildings on fire, though, go ahead and cast lightning on them. Or meteor shower. Or volcano, close to them, but this way they’ll burn too fast to be cool to watch.
It’s fully 3D, not just for graphics but for game mechanics as well. When a fight starts on a slope, sometimes a unit will lose balance and roll all the way down the hill (this causes damage). You can shape the world with spells such as earthquake, erosion, volcano, land bridge etc.
Here’s a video of a guy playing the first level of the single player campaign:
edit: and here’s a video of a guy using the earthquake spell a lot:
By the end of this video the guy casts volcano, one of the most impressive spells ever.