"All war is deception"

Showing posts with label dawn of war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dawn of war. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Individual Units or Squads or a Combo of Both?

In most older RTS games, you can only produce one unit at a time. The first "definitive" RTS game, Dune 2, had infantry as squads, but they weren't true squad units, because they were just a sprite/image of a squad, each sub-unit was not semi-independent.


Some newer RTS games let's you produce units as squads, such as C&C3 and Dawn of War. These squads when you select one unit in a squad, you select all the other units in the squad, they act as one unit with many sub-units. Each sub-unit had their own health and their own firing and were semi-independent.


Some have combinations of both. Starcraft has reactors where you can produce multiple marines at once. Of course, selecting multiple units make them in a sort of a squad. But that's not the default, of course, just that selected units sort of act like a squad. Carriers makes interceptors, so a carrier is basically like a squad unit.


I would like more squad units in more RTS games. But Blizzard RTS games are not known for squad units. If Frost Giant will stick to the individual unit philosophy, and have things like reactors and carriers to augment units, my preference is to normalize making batches of individual units from the very beginning. In a real war, (lower level) units come in batches, 10 at once, 20 at once, or whatever, not just a single soldier you train every so often. So instead of just training one marine in the beginning of the game and then cycle to the next marine, 10 will pop out the first training class. It will normalize massive firefights in the beginning like a real war, instead of a battle, to me, at least.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Looking At Extremes: Many Factions (6+) Strategy Games and Balancing

Games with more than 6 factions, actual factions instead of AoE style where there is like only one unique unit, feel very sandboxy. This may appeal to some.

Total War: Warhammer has many factions and they do them well, in my opinion. But then it is a slower paced game of amassing huge armies in formation.

Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium, while more of a turn based strategy game with a auto real time battle component, has many factions as well. Balanced? It really depends on the map because each faction depends on entirely different resources, units, and game mechanics and playstyles.

Their Dominions series is more of the same but a bit more dynamic Illwinter's balancing strategy is every unit has at least one severe weakness in some other faction, not necessarily all factions.

Dawn of War series has about 9 factions with all the expansions. Most units feel tanky enough that they aren't bulldozed immediately. Not sure if that is good balancing, but I love the variety. 

I have not played Warlords Battlecry which is supposed to have many factions up to around 16. So I cannot give input there.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

First Impressions: Dawn of War II Retribution

I have played DoW I and II, but haven't loaded up my copy of Retribution yet. I am so glad for the additional factions included as DLC: Imperial Guard, Chaos Marine, Tyranid, Ork, and Eldar.



I started with the Eldar on Normal Mode and played through the first mission. It looks pretty cool. Individual Eldar hero units seem more overpowered than normal Spae Marine ones, or I could just be confusing the long ago plays.

The Ork boss was easier to handle this time, but it was because of the couple Shuriken units I got and distanced them away.

Also, the Orks were Pirate-themed. Which I found campy. I also was wishing for more Space Marine variants, but maybe that's just for multiplayer mode? I haven't checked the game enough to see an actual skirmish mode on there.

Usually, when starting to play RTSes, I either start with the Tutorial, Campaign, or Skirmish to test out all the unit combinations. Since I didn't find a skirmish mode, if it is in there, I did not experiment with unit combinations.

I still miss the base building of the first here, but that was a bit alleviated by the capturable Webways in the game. The Webways allowed units to reinforce my squads with Guardian units and Shurikens.

I did enjoy the first mission, but it wasn't too compelling for me to continue to the next one without a break.

My recent purchase of Company of Honor reminds me a lot of the gameplay of the Dawn of War 2: the focus on squads and cover system. I will cover Company of Honor games in a later post.

Do you want to try out the game? Support Faction Calculus by buying Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II Retribution - PC on Amazon!