What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, a turtle strategy should, essentially, never be the best thing to do because if it was the best thing to do everyone would do it, and if everyone turtled there would be no interaction between players.

If you want to play an RTS-like game where you just build and defend, then play Creeper World.

[Cespenar]

On the other hand, most strategy games have become (or rather have been from the start) so high-octane events that you have to not only dabble but master several layers of its gameplay just to even be able to spare a few neurons to anything that could be called as "strategy".

In that sense, I understand the need for a slower kind of RTS gameplay, if such a thing even exists.

[GloatingSwine]

Well RTS games have pretty much gone....

But the old RTS games where turtling behind defences mostly went away because it generally only worked because the AI in those games was dumb as rocks and would throw exactly the same amount of force at the player over and over again, so if you could survive one wave you could survive infinity waves.

Creeper World, as mentioned, is the one which gets around that by leaning into it. The "enemy" is just a process. Purple goo that slowly fills the map obeying fluid physics with all the quirks being around the map itself, the tools you get, and different ways the goo can be propagated.

[warty goblin]

On the other hand, most strategy games have become (or rather have been from the start) so high-octane events that you have to not only dabble but master several layers of its gameplay just to even be able to spare a few neurons to anything that could be called as "strategy".

In that sense, I understand the need for a slower kind of RTS gameplay, if such a thing even exists.

I think slower paced, more less twitch tactics focused strategy games require a fair amount of space, both geographic and temporal. This certainly did exist in games like the various Supreme Commanders and Sins of a Solar Empire, but these are alas as dead as the rest of the RTS at this point. Probably deader, because they're more focused on logistics and large scale strategies of maneuver than they are timing your active abilities just right, or other highly flashy things that make for good Twitch streams or esports.

Honestly I'm kinda shocked that Age of Empires has gotten the revival it has, and has another game coming out. I would have bet that sort of detail oriented, borderline simulationesque game was truly dead and buried.

[Resileaf]

I'd say the popularity of turtling comes almost entirely from Blizzard, who made a lot of centerpiece story missions in their RTSs base defense missions. And those missions feel good to play.
Rarely translates to good PvP strategy though. Aggressive skirmishing or early attacks before the other player has had time to settle themselves are basically the only things that work.

[Sermil]

I'd say the popularity of turtling comes almost entirely from Blizzard, who made a lot of centerpiece story missions in their RTSs base defense missions. And those missions feel good to play.
Rarely translates to good PvP strategy though. Aggressive skirmishing or early attacks before the other player has had time to settle themselves are basically the only things that work.

Battle for Middle-Earth had an awesome Minas Tirith level and a pretty great Helm's Deep level, both of which were turtle levels if you were playing the Good campaign. Turtling can be fun if you are playing against the computer, in a level designed around it, but it's almost always asymmetric and thus usually not good for PvP.

[Anteros]

The thing is, even if you want to play defensively and build up your defenses, being aggressive and having more resources is only going to allow you to make more defenses than you would otherwise have. If you want to make turtling viable then you have to somehow punish aggression. It's possible, but it's hard to do without making it unfun. Especially since even the most turtley defense will eventually have to go on the offensive to win.

Even with games all about base defense like They are Billions, you're still better off expanding as much as possible and using those resources to build defense.

I suppose you could make rts games with asymmetric goals, so one player has to defend and another attack, but it hasn't really been done successfully as far as I know.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Relic's RTSs are turtle unfriendly to an unusual degree, since the map is literally the economy. The cover system and generally high fidelity terrain in Company of Heroes makes defensive play at a tactical level very powerful (and the British gun emplacements even more so) but strategically you still need to be on the offensive to win.

I think this is basically inevitable in games where victory is "destroy all the enemy stuff" since you can't do that by holding position. If there's only finite resources on the map, I suppose you can force a win through attrition as the enemy rund their resources dry attacking your fixed defenses. I don't think this can in general be a viable strategy in a balanced game, since that would require attacking to generally cost the attacker more than the defender, and then everybody just sits behind their defenses all game waiting for the other person to screw up and attack.

Sorry to keep coming back to Halo Wars 2, but it's the only RTS I really know.

In HW 2, turtling is a pretty viable strategy in multiplayer at least¹. If you can leverage your base defenses, closer 'spawn zones', and/or just plain outmaneuvering your opponent via tactics or army composition, and crush their attacking forces, then you're in a prime position to counterattack. It most likely won't be a serious threat to their main base or even their secondary, but the more chaos you sow while they're weak the costlier it will be for them to rebuild. Turtle back up once their army's in a threatening state again, and repeat until one player pushes far enough ahead in the war of attrition to defeat the other or a major stroke of genius/luck turns the tide enough to overwhelm the opposition.

1. The campaign missions are designed to collectively showcase all the major tactics and strategies; some objectives require turtling up, some require aggressively pushing forward, some require maintaining control of the map, etc., and quite a few let you choose your own strategy, but I'd be lying if I said turtling was always an option in the campaign.

[Cespenar]

Yeah, I was mostly referring to multiplayer in my example. Against AIs, turtling always (mostly) worked as far back as I can remember, at least in "classic" RTSes.

I suppose you could make rts games with asymmetric goals, so one player has to defend and another attack, but it hasn't really been done successfully as far as I know.

There were game types in some Total Wars(?) or Stronghold, I guess, where one could play as the besieger and the other the besieged. But they aren't played that commonly, I think.

[Man_Over_Game]

Well RTS games have pretty much gone....

But the old RTS games where turtling behind defences mostly went away because it generally only worked because the AI in those games was dumb as rocks and would throw exactly the same amount of force at the player over and over again, so if you could survive one wave you could survive infinity waves.

Creeper World, as mentioned, is the one which gets around that by leaning into it. The "enemy" is just a process. Purple goo that slowly fills the map obeying fluid physics with all the quirks being around the map itself, the tools you get, and different ways the goo can be propagated.

The LOTR RTS games had a great defensive scene. Since units leveled up, it was important to keep them safe and healed, and you could add a lot of changes to your fortresses to make them have offensive capabilities or restorative properties for your units.

Sure, all that ceased to matter once someone summoned the Balrog, but the entire point of the game was to win before that happened.

Turtling came with its own hurdles, too. Since you want to level up your units as fast as possible, and there were a limited number of neutral enemies around your base, it was encouraged to be as aggressive as possible with clearing out neutral camps as you both race for power creep through dominance.

[warty goblin]

Let's just be honest here, Battle for Middle Earth is the most fun RTS series ever made. I'm sure the multiplayer was an unbalanced mess, and thank heavens for that because the singleplayer was absolutely glorious. Between the excellent art and music, and just how bonkers the units and powers could get, running around stomping the AI was a gift that never stopped giving.

Designing for multiplayer is the worst thing to ever happen to the RTS.

[LibraryOgre]

I have come to the conclusion, in Fallout 4, that Piper's kink is getting shot in the back with a shotgun, given how frequently she runs into my goddamn line of fire.

[Taevyr]

I have come to the conclusion, in Fallout 4, that Piper's kink is getting shot in the back with a shotgun, given how frequently she runs into my goddamn line of fire.

So what you're saying is..... you're gunning for her?


Meanwhile, I've been doing a run of Stellaris, Shattered ring start. "Turtling", in a way, since I've focused tech, expanded until I had only 3 chokepoints leading into my systems, fortified those, then fortified the inner ring of "core" systems while filling it with 3 ringworlds and the megastructures that provide base resources and a view of the entire galaxy. Ringworld habitat preference is quite a nerf, though a good one; couldn't colonize anything until I got droid technology, which further encouraged me to play relatively tall. The only non-ringworld planet I colonized is essentially "strip mine Prime".

The only hitch in the plan were the determined exterminators that spawned "north" of me: first time I had to build an actual fleet early in-game, and if it weren't for my heavy tech investment/early defenses, I'd have likely been wiped rather early.

[LibraryOgre]

So what you're saying is..... you're gunning for her?

I'm angling to get into the news sheets, yeah.

There's a comic around about Fallout 4 companion mechanics, where you are with someone until they love you, so you can get the perk... then you dump them off and go on to the next person, so you can get THEIR perk. I'm trying hard not to go places so I can get bonus XP with Piper's Perk.

[Anonymouswizard]

So I picked up two games in the Steam sale.

The first is Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. I really want to say I like it, but I've only just completed the prologue and Nokia is already the most annoying character in existence. Which is a shame, because from the story I've seen and the limited amount of combat it's been really fun. I hope to post more about it once I've played a chapter or two, but I didn't have time last night to really get into the meat of the game.

It is however very pretty, with itt's artstyle meaning I don't have to comprimise on graphics to get it to run decently on my laptop.

The second game was Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, which I saved for tonight because I know it's good. I need to beef up my RAM so I don't suffer slowdown during loading and so I can pump the graphics off low and have the game look pretty (and as I remember this can be a pretty game), but it's still very enjoyable. I messed around with the character creator until I came out with an Arisen I liked but wasn't a standard RPG Protagonist (in either the JRPG or WRPG model), ending up with a tall, skinny, well muscled woman with red hair and a relatively masculine face who's going to pick up the Mystick Knight class once I get the chance. The combat is fairly meh, I've certainly played better but I've played worse combat as well and the 'climbing giant monsters' part is just incredibly fun. I had also forgotten how nice the platforming feels for an RPG, I've played better platforming but the movement in this game is much better than I remembered. A decent speed run, a much faster dash, and a decent jump with a good autograb makes even just exploring the opening town fun to do.

Plus Dragon's Dogma gets how to use a dragon. Your first impression is of a terrifyingly powerful beast that you can barely hurt, and which kills you and does something strange that brings you back as an undead. But then the game goes 'your quest is to kill the dragon, but you need to really level up first', and while I've never got to the dragon when I played the Xbox version this is a combat system to fight a dragon in. The dragon is big, bad, the major threat of the story, and we have a personal reason for stabbing it in the face. Yes, I know already that there's another big bad behind the dragon, but the dragon is your personal nemesis.

[Rynjin]

Dragon's Dogma combat feels meh until you get deep into the nuance behind it. There's a LOT of depth in its surprisingly simple presentation, though learning that depth is arguably not necessary until you get to the post game and Bitterblack Isle stuff.

I'm kind of addicted to making small characters in that game because you sprint so much faster (and unlike other games, this is not an illusion; your character's height/weight matters).

This guy's channel is really good for learning some of the deeper, cooler stuff about the mechanics of the game.

[Taevyr]

The second game was Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, which I saved for tonight because I know it's good. I need to beef up my RAM so I don't suffer slowdown during loading and so I can pump the graphics off low and have the game look pretty (and as I remember this can be a pretty game), but it's still very enjoyable. I messed around with the character creator until I came out with an Arisen I liked but wasn't a standard RPG Protagonist (in either the JRPG or WRPG model), ending up with a tall, skinny, well muscled woman with red hair and a relatively masculine face who's going to pick up the Mystick Knight class once I get the chance. The combat is fairly meh, I've certainly played better but I've played worse combat as well and the 'climbing giant monsters' part is just incredibly fun. I had also forgotten how nice the platforming feels for an RPG, I've played better platforming but the movement in this game is much better than I remembered. A decent speed run, a much faster dash, and a decent jump with a good autograb makes even just exploring the opening town fun to do.

Plus Dragon's Dogma gets how to use a dragon. Your first impression is of a terrifyingly powerful beast that you can barely hurt, and which kills you and does something strange that brings you back as an undead. But then the game goes 'your quest is to kill the dragon, but you need to really level up first', and while I've never got to the dragon when I played the Xbox version this is a combat system to fight a dragon in. The dragon is big, bad, the major threat of the story, and we have a personal reason for stabbing it in the face. Yes, I know already that there's another big bad behind the dragon, but the dragon is your personal nemesis.

Ooh yeah, I love Dragon's Dogma. Great fantasy beasts and creatures that make full use of their size or multiple heads or whatnot, epic magic and combat including climbing opponents to reach weak spots, companion AI that actually works when you know which knobs to turn... I always enjoy returning to it for a while.

[Anonymouswizard]

Dragon's Dogma combat feels meh until you get deep into the nuance behind it. There's a LOT of depth in its surprisingly simple presentation, though learning that depth is arguably not necessary until you get to the post game and Bitterblack Isle stuff.

I'm kind of addicted to making small characters in that game because you sprint so much faster (and unlike other games, this is not an illusion; your character's height/weight matters).

This guy's channel is really good for learning some of the deeper, cooler stuff about the mechanics of the game.

I think I might be going 'meh' at the combat because you only start with two skills, I remember it being better with a full set. For a party based action RPG it's great, and I'm sure once I really get into the game again I'm sure I'll reevaulate it. Still better than Elder Scrolls combat by a country mile.

Oh yeah, height and weight matter a lot, but IIRC correctly in a fairly balanced way. I played a small character on the console version, so I wanted somebody heavier.

Ooh yeah, I love Dragon's Dogma. Great fantasy beasts and creatures that make full use of their size or multiple heads or whatnot, epic magic and combat including climbing opponents to reach weak spots, companion AI that actually works when you know which knobs to turn... I always enjoy returning to it for a while.

Oh, I love the atmosphere and enemies. The story isn't that great but yeah, the systems are great.

[Sermil]

Let's just be honest here, Battle for Middle Earth is the most fun RTS series ever made. I'm sure the multiplayer was an unbalanced mess, and thank heavens for that because the singleplayer was absolutely glorious. Between the excellent art and music, and just how bonkers the units and powers could get, running around stomping the AI was a gift that never stopped giving.

The multiplayer was alright, but it did have issues in the end game. Once both sides got their super power (Balrog or Army of the Dead), there was no way to stop your opponent from casting it over & over & over. There was no "superweapon building" you could take out or anything like that.

So people could get stuck in a loop where player A's army & B's army were fighting, player A would summon the Balrog and kill all of B's army, and then start to wipe out B's base, only for B to summon the Army of the Dead, and wipe out A's army. By the time either side had recovered their forces enough to realistically start attacking the other's base afterwards, the timers on the Balrog and Army of the Dead were nearly recharged, and the whole cycle repeated. I saw games go back and forth something like 5 times in a row like that, which is about 25-30 minutes of not-very-interesting repeats. It was a combination of factors: A low unit cap, which meant you couldn't really leverage a slight economic advantage in the end-game; tough bases which took a full, max-unit army to damage, so you couldn't assault early before the timers recharged; and, as I said, there being no way to prevent your opponent from using their superpower; no way to do a surgical strike and take out the superpower.

Definitely the single-player was the star of the game.

Designing for multiplayer is the worst thing to ever happen to the RTS.

Ya, a lot of that was actually from piracy. A single-player campaign can be easily stripped of copy protection and played without paying for it. By the late 2000s, networks were solid enough, and game companies had PoPs in enough places, that having multiplayer always and only flow through a server was realistic. So companies could start checking that you actually owned the game you were playing (think Battle.net). If multiplayer was the star of the show, then people would have to actually buy your game, instead of some unknown-but-believed-to-be-large fraction of your players stealing it from you. (Believed-to-be-large by the big game companies; I don't have an opinion.) And, not only were the networks improving enough that multiplayer-through-central-server was realistic, but a lot of game companies wanted to expand into new markets in new countries -- many of which did not do a good job of protecting IP. There was an assumption that, in those markets, making anything that could be pirated would sell effectively 0 copies. The only way to make money was to make a game where the online component was an integral part of the experience, so a multiplayer-first game.

The RTS genre, being a heavily-PC-based genre, was even more affected by this than other genres, since the difficulty of modding consoles kept piracy low for the console side of those genres.

Fortunately, I think the game industry overall has moved away from that; they've seen that some players want a single-player game, and even if there's some piracy, there's money to be made from players who aren't interested in multiplayer games. Unfortunately, almost no one makes pure RTSes any more, so there's no one left to make said single-player games.

[MCerberus]

This may seem a little odd, but if we're talking about RTS related trainwrecks that we can't help ourselves with,

Anyone remember C&C Renegade
Westwood did not die with dignity, but still in glory.

[IthilanorStPete]

This may seem a little odd, but if we're talking about RTS related trainwrecks that we can't help ourselves with,

Anyone remember C&C Renegade
Westwood did not die with dignity, but still in glory.

I loved the multiplayer for that game.

[Starbuck_II]

Playing
Legend of Heroes: Tales of Cold Steel 1
Really enjoying it so far.
Those darn cadzores from Fallout New Vegas are the worst (they called something different in this game, but they poison just as deadly).

[factotum]

Playing
Legend of Heroes: Tales of Cold Steel 1

Have you played any of the other games in the Trails series? There's an on-going narrative across all the games, and while ToCS 1 doesn't really get super deep into that, by the time you get to the fourth game there are going to be a lot of people wandering around that you have no idea who they are if you haven't played the earlier titles!

[DaedalusMkV]

Have you played any of the other games in the Trails series? There's an on-going narrative across all the games, and while ToCS 1 doesn't really get super deep into that, by the time you get to the fourth game there are going to be a lot of people wandering around that you have no idea who they are if you haven't played the earlier titles!

Speaking as someone who never played the Crossbell games and went through Sky (skipping the third game, which is irrelevant to the story) after CS 1 and 2... It's not all that big a deal. Sky's good, but pretty old-school. I'd honestly recommend anyone interested in the series play through Cold Steel 2 first, and if you're really into it at that point go back and try the Trails in the Sky games. If you can't get through them, it's not that big a deal. They explain pretty well who the recurring characters are and what they're doing in Cold Steel 3 and 4, so while you definitely get more enjoyment and depth out of it if you have the context from the previous games, it's really not necessary at all to have played them. And all of that stuff really only comes into play starting in Cold Steel 3. 1 and 2, while tying into the meta-narrative, are really a fully self-contained story and don't require much or any context to get full value from.

[Cespenar]

Speaking as someone who never played the Crossbell games and went through Sky (skipping the third game, which is irrelevant to the story) after CS 1 and 2... It's not all that big a deal. Sky's good, but pretty old-school. I'd honestly recommend anyone interested in the series play through Cold Steel 2 first, and if you're really into it at that point go back and try the Trails in the Sky games. If you can't get through them, it's not that big a deal. They explain pretty well who the recurring characters are and what they're doing in Cold Steel 3 and 4, so while you definitely get more enjoyment and depth out of it if you have the context from the previous games, it's really not necessary at all to have played them. And all of that stuff really only comes into play starting in Cold Steel 3. 1 and 2, while tying into the meta-narrative, are really a fully self-contained story and don't require much or any context to get full value from.

Mostly true, yeah. I'd put the starting point at Cold Steel 1 instead of 2, though.

[DaedalusMkV]

Mostly true, yeah. I'd put the starting point at Cold Steel 1 instead of 2, though.

Ah, yeah, that's what I meant. Do Cold Steel 1 and 2 first, then go back to try Sky 1 and 2 (and 3 if you really, really enjoy the first two). Don't play Cold Steel 2 before Cold Steel 1. That would be a terrible experience.

[PraetorDragoon]

So I picked up two games in the Steam sale.

The first is Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. I really want to say I like it, but I've only just completed the prologue and Nokia is already the most annoying character in existence. Which is a shame, because from the story I've seen and the limited amount of combat it's been really fun. I hope to post more about it once I've played a chapter or two, but I didn't have time last night to really get into the meat of the game.

It is however very pretty, with itt's artstyle meaning I don't have to comprimise on graphics to get it to run decently on my laptop.

The second game was Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, which I saved for tonight because I know it's good. I need to beef up my RAM so I don't suffer slowdown during loading and so I can pump the graphics off low and have the game look pretty (and as I remember this can be a pretty game), but it's still very enjoyable. I messed around with the character creator until I came out with an Arisen I liked but wasn't a standard RPG Protagonist (in either the JRPG or WRPG model), ending up with a tall, skinny, well muscled woman with red hair and a relatively masculine face who's going to pick up the Mystick Knight class once I get the chance. The combat is fairly meh, I've certainly played better but I've played worse combat as well and the 'climbing giant monsters' part is just incredibly fun. I had also forgotten how nice the platforming feels for an RPG, I've played better platforming but the movement in this game is much better than I remembered. A decent speed run, a much faster dash, and a decent jump with a good autograb makes even just exploring the opening town fun to do.

Plus Dragon's Dogma gets how to use a dragon. Your first impression is of a terrifyingly powerful beast that you can barely hurt, and which kills you and does something strange that brings you back as an undead. But then the game goes 'your quest is to kill the dragon, but you need to really level up first', and while I've never got to the dragon when I played the Xbox version this is a combat system to fight a dragon in. The dragon is big, bad, the major threat of the story, and we have a personal reason for stabbing it in the face. Yes, I know already that there's another big bad behind the dragon, but the dragon is your personal nemesis.

I really tried to get into Dragon's Dogma several times, but it just didn't click with me.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I really tried to get into Dragon's Dogma several times, but it just didn't click with me.

Same here.

[Anonymouswizard]

Meanwhile I never got into Skyrim but did get into Dragon's Dogma. I've got my pawn (using the Strider class at the moment, and going to have them spend some time as a Ranger as I do my Magick Knight thing before they become a Fighter as I pursue sorcery) now and am on my way to Gran Soren now, so the game is in full swing.Will play more tomorrow, but I've remembered hgow annoying fighting wolf packs can be (always more of the things).

Dragon's Dogma is not a game for everybody vcertainly, but I love how smooth the platforming feels, really enjoy climbing on giant monsters (maybe I should have gone Strider), and fimnd the story engaging enough. It really is nice having the faster run speed of a tall character though.

[MinimanMidget]

I really liked the platforming in Dragon's Digma too. Unfortunately, every large enemy I encountered after I got to Gran Soren was a half hour grind of spamming attacks, climbing on them and spamming attacks, and reviving pawns, so I gave up on it.