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I downloaded the demo of Dawn of War. Im not a big fan of RTS as some may know. Close Combat being the only series that have done the system justice.

However I played the tutorial and actually had fun.BUT I will not be buying the game. IF there was no building and research involved I might have thought about it. However I can tell that in big scenarios it would become the usual click fest BUT I did have fun. The animations are superb. It also had a fantastic atmosphere.

Its a shame. I find with 3D games in general I have great problems trying to get a good view. I spend to much time fiddling around with the mouse and keys because of it. That adds to the chaos for me with RTS games. Aswell as trying ot upgrade this that and the other and fight and use the 3D control system I end up getting totally confused.

I would love just to WATCH someone else play the game. That for me would be far better than playing it. Taking in all the action that if I was playing I'd miss.

Anyway. If you can play 3D RTS games than this is a must. I wish I could and enjoy it. If I could it would be near the top of my collection.

I think RTS is a genre for the young! More so than shooters, if anything.... you need that combination of quick thinking and even quicker mouse clicking. I played a fair bit of Starcraft, and nobody has ever really done it better IMHO.

The only one I played last year was Kohan 2 which was recommended to me. Its actually pretty good (and got reviews to match, although it didn't sell well). The emphasis is very much on tactical play rather than resources/buildings/research.

In defence of the RTS genre (m'lud[:D]), not all are that fast-paced. The 'Command and Conquer' games are ludicrously fast but others, like 'Earth 2150', 'Rise of Nations' and the excellent 'Warrior Kings' games, run at a much more sedate pace ('Warrior Kings' is almost too slow!) that suits the more 'mature' gamer

Dawn of War is kind of special, you know...
It's WH40k - and it's so far the best looking representiation of the Warhammer/Warhammer 40k universums available (with "Dark Omen" close behind). It looks great (zooming in to the battle), it sounds great ("There is no such thing as innocence - there are only degrees of guilt") and... it absolutely lacks all the fun of small squad tactical game that original, tabletop Wh40k presents. [8|]

ORIGINAL: Koper

Dawn of War is kind of special, you know...
It's WH40k - and it's so far the best looking representiation of the Warhammer/Warhammer 40k universums available (with "Dark Omen" close behind). It looks great (zooming in to the battle), it sounds great ("There is no such thing as innocence - there are only degrees of guilt") and... it absolutely lacks all the fun of small squad tactical game that original, tabletop Wh40k presents. [8|]

I just dont think an RTS game can be as in depth and as tactical as a turn based wargame. Well an RTS game in their present format.

ORIGINAL: wodin

I just dont think an RTS game can be as in depth and as tactical as a turn based wargame. Well an RTS game in their present format.

It depends how widely you define "RTS". In the narrow sense, it came to be associated with a very particular type of game (Dune 2, Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, etc), although recently perhaps you would widen that to include games like Sudden Strike, Blitzkreig, Soldiers of WW2, etc.

I don't think you need turn-based, though. The Close Combat games and EYSA are real-time but have plenty of depth and tactical possibilities. HoI is "continuous" time, if not "real", as is HttR. And in a totally different style Full Spectrum Warrior is perhaps the most realistic squad level game to date.

"Dawn of War", with it's objective-based system and squad upgrades is just about the only recent RTS that has interested me at all. You picked a good one to try, it seems to have more in the way of tactics and an actual flow of battle than most others. If a wargamer asked me to recommend one, this is the one I'd choose to date above all others released in that over-saturated genre. With that said, I haven't touched it since the first week - it was fun, but doesn't scratch my wargaming itch.

Regards,

- Erik

There's two kinds of RTS (well more but...). Those where you build individual structures on the map. And those where you build cities. The enjoyability of Kohan was in the fact that the map never became crowded with grainmills and lumber yards and barracks etc.
How I loathe Rise of Nations where the map becomes wayyy tooo crowded and busy. Therein the confusion and mis-clicks start. Its all about time and whether your brain can set build ques at 2.4ghz while multitasking 180 individual sprites on a huge world map. Its easy enough to do but where the fun is I really don't know. I prefer strategy. Oh that's what the S stands for in RTS.

I feel its become embarassing to mention Close Combat Series and HTTR as an RTS. Those two games should never be mentioned in the same breath as any other RTS.

ORIGINAL: wodin

I feel its become embarassing to mention Close Combat Series and HTTR as an RTS. Those two games should never be mentioned in the same breath as any other RTS.

And yet they fit the prerequisites of being real-time strategy games. Just goes to show that the definition is broader than many will admit.

I do think there is a notch in the wargame sector for a turn -based game that has real time sections. No game has done this yet. This could be a great way to make war games more interesting to the general gamer without being linear click bunnys. I.e Your tank leader gets bogged. The tank is a Mark iv pointing in the wrong direction and is being targeted by a Sherman - can he make it into the ditch, the following tank? If so, is he wounded, etc. Then turn clicks on. Is he in the ditch? Can he get back to his tank? The Sherman has reversed ..maybe the main gun has malfunctioned.... Maybe it's CM with better AI and graphics and everything............

I used to play Star Craft very heavily back in the day. It wasn't my best game, but I was damn good at it so I kept doing it. It's still fun to beat human opponents and eventualy I went to a few SC contests in my area to win some hardware.

I will say this, there are a lot of strategies out ther that SHOULD have beaten me, but every time I played I just set up my units to attack in a certain order that caused my opponents to have to do the most mouse clicks and the most rapid movements in the least amount of time. There is only so much you can do in rts and this is a major problem with them. The best strategy you may want to do is often impossible to do properly because of all the flaws with rts.

In RTS every split second counts and can mean life or death. And you wonder why I prefer even simpler board games these days like Axis & Allies. At least I can plot all my damn moves I want without getting a damn heart attack!

P.S. If you mouse has even a 0.003% defect, good luck in rts!

I think the only RTS games I ever liked were the Cossacks and American Conquest series for a quickie 30 minute play session, and Sid Meier's Gettsburg and Antietam (which an SOB friend of mine "lost", still trying to find the Civil War collection again) and the follow on Waterloo: Napolean's Last Battle.

"Sid Meier's Gettsburg and Antietam (which an SOB friend of mine "lost", still trying to find the Civil War collection again) and the follow on Waterloo: Napolean's Last Battle."

Yeah those games where at a much slower pace and nothing like the RTS games out today.

Any game that stems from the Age of Empires stable of gameplay I cant stand.

Wodin, try 'Warrior Kings'. It's out on budget (£5 iirc) and is quite superb. It's a fantasy RTS that has all the usual components (base building, resource gathering etc.) but is played at a much more sedate pace than AoE. Unit formations and terrain play a very important role in combat and it never dissolves into a 'clickfest' - the game never runs fast enough for that[:)]

For a real kick and a change in the RTS genre, you guys gotta try S.A.C.R.I.F.I.C.E.

I never enjoyed an RTS game as much as that one. There's no resource gathering and no little buildings to build and no peasants. Just spirit/souls, see, when an enemy dies it leaves it's spirits, souls, the stronger it is the more souls it leaves behind, and if you can drive off the opponents "leader" (which can gather the souls by running through them), then you can summon your soul witch doctors to come gather the souls for you, they take them back to your magic shrine and do a dance around it like indians circling a wagon and then those souls are added to your force, with them you can create new units or stronger units.

It's a very funny game, but, the key to winning is stealing the other players souls. Eventually one side will greatly out number the other and then you can goto the opponents magic shrine and do a ritual dance by sacrificing one of your units, the stronger it is the harder it is for the opponent to break the ritual up, thus stopping you from destroying him. You never die until your magic shrine is destroyed, you turn into speedy the ghost and can go back to mana generators and regen your body and abilities back, then go back to war again. lol

Once you can knock your opponent out continously, that's how you gain the ability to destory his/her shrine, it takes a certain amount of time to regen back to physical form again, and then you just keep beating them down till their shine crumbles.

Now, the ai is sneaky, sometimes it will sneak a couple of units behind the lines and try to ritual dance your magic shrine while you are in the middle of a big battle, this can be deadly even if you are winning the battle, but, you can "teleport" back to your magic shrine if things get that bad, unless of course you got ghosted, then you have to get physical again. To prevent this from happening you can attach a unit to your magic shrine or magic mana nodes, a gold sort of chain comes out and grabs them and keeps them there until they die. There's all kinds of strategies in this game. And that's something you don't find much in RTS games.

The final chapter is the toughest one, because you have to face the evil in the game and it's dread reaper. Lemme tell yah, this reaper is unbelieveable, you can't kill it. You have to "outsmart it" and I'm not going to give away how that's done, incase some would like to try out sacrifice. I will tell you though, the dread reaper gets 1 minute to kill everyone of your units. hehe Then every 10 or 12 minutes the evil can summon it again.

I challenge anyone to defeat this game. I think I liked it so much because it was "hard" even for a single player game and an expert gamer like myself.

And the game has lots of replayability, there's 5 different gods and each chapter you get to pick a gods mission to do, if you win it, they give you one of their units per that chapter level (example you chose a fire god mission on chapter 3, he will give you a level 3 fire unit to use in chapter 4). Now, you can play out all 8 chapters with just one god or mix and match them, but, as you pick different gods, some gods no longer will give you missions. Chapter 1 they all will give you 3 basic units of their type. A melee, a ranged and a air unit.

The gods are pretty typical. The god of life (more humanlike units), the god of earth (rock based units, good artillery), the god of ice (stun units), the god of fire (love their level 1 units), and the god of death (think of necro when you play these units).

Ok, who's going to buy it and play it now? lol