RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1177991663[/unixtime]]
Um... yes they are.
No really, they weren't.
Doing a smoke and mirrors run down of random stuff they do is meaningless. They all could have been called "magic wall walkers that just sorta sit there in the sky" and all those traits wouldn't have changed.
Flying around fast, moving in different patterns and ways, and yeah you know GOING ON BOMBING RUNS (and cool strafing runs and dog fights) isn't JUST cool its DIFFERENT to the ways ground units behave, which makes for different reasons to have them over ground units and different ways and reasons to use them.
RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1177991663[/unixtime]]
I severely doubt that TA air units were anywhere near as interesting or varied.
Oddly TA did have quiet a range, something like five or six per faction and they managed to simultaneously cover the same categories and roles but in DIFFERENT and exciting ways. Certainly Supreme commander continues that (and a bit extra).
Supreme uses what, 1 base scout, 1 base fighter, 1 basic bomber, 1 basic carrier, 1 skirmisher, 1 torpedo bomber, 1 advanced fighter, one advanced bomber, one advanced carrier and maybe an advanced skirmisher, AND two factions have giant flying leviathan thingies.
And accross three factions they all manage to be just a bit different and interesting, with a few special abilities thrown in that DON'T require mindless clicking to activate.
The problem with air units like that is that you have very little micro control over them. They just sort of go on bombing runs and do their thing and that's it.
In an RTS micro control is generally bad, Star Craft is the great grand daddy example of THAT old chestnut.
But despite that TA air units were safely under your control, none of the sit on air pads, or fly around all unclickable and bomb arbitrary points like an orbital strike power the way some games did it. You could select them and que any combination of any order in the game on them.
You could take a fleet of aircraft and throw it in a big lump right at the enemy base and that would be OK, but if you wanted to you could que a travel route around major defenses, come in back, que a bunch of targets starting with AA defenses, and then priority targets like commanders, factories or ground/sea defenses (to cover your other forces arrival). And the smooth interface and queing let you do all that in moments in ways that Star Craft NEVER could even if you sat on top of your units and directed their every action personally in real time.
Bu that's actually part of the skill of the game and further distinguishes units. See you've got to play a balance of things. Special ability units are generally "better" than base combat units, but the drawback is that you've got to activate the ability to do anything.
No, that is not skill, its sucky game design.
Why the heck do I have to be there for my protoss wizard dude to zap an incoming horde of zerglings (who don't so much need their boss to activate their "bite shit" power)?
Regardless of that what effect does it have on the game? It means that for some players, and against any simple rush from a player with similar reflexes let me suggest ALL players, may as well not have any powers that require arbitrarily complex and time consuming activation.
So it's a challenge to your multitasking capabilities.
Controlling up to 1000 units of land, sea, and air craft with an easy interface and qued orders to time an effective attack on a similarly complex force while keeping my production rates on track for future attacks and dealing with who knows what multiple fronts of battle is a challenge to my multitasking abilities.
Having to select each "wizard" character individually activate their separate abilities on separate targets then run back through as each cooldown timer clicks off and do it again is a challenge to my
sanity.
Also all good players used the hotkeys, not actually clicking a menu icon.
That STILL required individual selection of the unit, a timed key press followed by clicking the target. ANY manual activation of abilities is massively problematic.
And don't talk to me about hotkeys, TA was KING of hot keys...
Like I said, micro management like that is a BAD thing, I may as well not have 5 guys with lightning storm if I need to do that because something that DOESN'T need to do that, like zerglings, will eat them before I can do it. And I'm not exactly alone in that.
Depends on how fast zooming takes. If it's a slow zoom out, you're wasting time waiting for it to zoom in and out. If it happens fast, it's easy to get disoriented.
Seriously, flex finger out, flex finger in, its smooth, its easy, its fast, it'll be taught in GUI classes starting yesterday.
Its also pretty much the one feature of Supreme that impressed me as an actual real advance on TA.
But with the stasis that RTS's have been in since TA what with them working off the Blizzard model of "tiny incremental advances other people did first spread over years of time with arbitrary feature loss at the same or faster rate" just being TA with zooming and new factions is good enough.
Well you should alreay know where the target is on the minimap, that's not even a big issue.
Knowing its there and finding the right spot to move the cursor to are really rather different things when examined closely.
If you did it right you didn't have to scroll much, and anyway your scrolling was done wtih the arrow keys.
So? You scrolled, you wasted time, thats a game winning resource AND something that you'd rather not be wasting anyway (though if you're playing star craft you mustn't value it highly).
Oddly enough for all the applauding you give to TA, I have heard very little of any balance in the game.
Oh, balance, I could talk about that. And its great, heck I'd swear talking about resource models touches on TA's far superior balance, but, well, it wins out so massively just on INTERFACE alone (which is a massive deal in RTS) that frankly I didn't think I'd need to even go there...
Star craft was fundamentally flawed in BALANCE terms starting from its poor resource and production model, running through unpleasant interractions of its clunky interface with a "some guys gotta click" balance elements and gameplay in general, its combined arms stuff was a shallow joke, and rolling on to the infamous zerg rush issues.
TA's resource/production model is just plain beautiful, the recycling tacked on to it was a nice addition as well, the interface has a minimal impact on unit, factional or general gameplay balance, no suckers powers or tactics were based off having to BE there, and/or in three other places at the same, and rushes in TA were cool because they were not only more than the be all and end all of game play they were also a viable strategy that could readily be survived by even BOTH sides to see FURTHER strategies and game play proceed.
That sorta stuff just didn't happen in star craft. Whether the rush was early game or late, one big encounter would tip the economic scales forever, and thats even playing on maps with piles of additional resources because no one ever played on maps the designers intended for less than twice as many players as you actually had.
TA if I remember right was the game where they came up with a new unit every week or something like that. I can't see that being balanced at all.
Units generally came in PAIRS, one for each faction. ARM got a mobile anti nuke? CORE got either the same sorta thing or something else cool but non vital.
What WASN'T so great for balance was the at the time utterly fantastical support for MODDING the game and introducing third party units.
But that was still both revolutionary and totally cool, its not like you HAD to play TA with star wars units if you didn't want to...
