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Maxus
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Post by Maxus »

Surgo wrote:Yes, I feel it's a much worse competitive game than Melee was.

edit: Brawl does not have better stages. Like a full half of them aren't competitively viable. Compare that to like 5 or 6 that got banned in Melee.
And competitive play is the One True Standard by which a game must be judged? I admire the creativity and artistry that went into many of the stages, enough to make each one fairly unique is how you have to approach it, and, yes, the ways you can't control the stages.

I, rightly or wrongly, have a soft spot for a fighting game that makes 'environmental hazard' mean something.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Yeah, but for those games you can play a game or five easily, you were never meant to play them solo.

FPS and RTS games are a bit better to play solo, since they tend to have solo content in the first place. You learn how to navigate maps, improve your reaction time and learn exploration paths or build order.
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Post by Surgo »

Maxus wrote:And competitive play is the One True Standard by which a game must be judged? I admire the creativity and artistry that went into many of the stages, enough to make each one fairly unique is how you have to approach it, and, yes, the ways you can't control the stages.
Not necessarily, but the fact that so many stages are either really good or ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE for competitive play (with more on the latter end) with barely anything in the middle like Melee had, is ridiculous.

The best comments on the artistry of the stages I've had from my group, who generally aren't competitive players, actually came from Final Destination and Battlefield.

They could have kept the great artistry and went for more viable stages. A great example is Luigi's Mansion. This stage is like the perfect counterpick -- it stops you from using projectiles in the same way you would on Final Destination. It's done beautifully, great art and great work went into this stage. Why can't more stages be like Luigi's Mansion?

Some of the stages only need a little touching up to make them competively viable. Like Hanenbow. If that platform on the bottom left was removed, and the leftmost tree made closer to the others, this would be a fine and viable stage that I think would be sorta like Pokefloats in how it was used. Instead, Pit just runs circles around guys with recovery even as good as Marth on this stage.

Obviously, some stages are unsalvageable, like Mario Bros or Temple, or Shadow Moses Island (in singles). And that's fine. But some just need a few small changes, and that's ridiculous.
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Post by Maxus »

Surgo wrote: Obviously, some stages are unsalvageable, like Mario Bros or Temple, or Shadow Moses Island (in singles). And that's fine. But some just need a few small changes, and that's ridiculous.
What the heck is wrong with Shadow Moses Island? It's one of the more neutral stages. The only real peculiarity is that you can't immediately throw people off the side of the screen.
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Post by Surgo »

You can become nigh unkillable by standing near one of the walls, teching off of them whenever you get a hit that would send you anywhere. This translates to somebody who gets a stock advantage will pretty much just sit there and never lose it.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I dislike Shadow Moses because I can never get a wall broke quick enough to get one KO in the 2 minutes it gives you for a fight, because I have to break the wall, AND fend off my opponents, most of which aren't concerned with walls at all.
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Post by Maxus »

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:I dislike Shadow Moses because I can never get a wall broke quick enough to get one KO in the 2 minutes it gives you for a fight, because I have to break the wall, AND fend off my opponents, most of which aren't concerned with walls at all.
I change tack with Shadow Moses island, and instead work on throwing them up and juggling them until I get a KO.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Maxus wrote:
Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:I dislike Shadow Moses because I can never get a wall broke quick enough to get one KO in the 2 minutes it gives you for a fight, because I have to break the wall, AND fend off my opponents, most of which aren't concerned with walls at all.
I change tack with Shadow Moses island, and instead work on throwing them up and juggling them until I get a KO.
I'm not good enough at brawl to manage to do that.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Surgo wrote:Don't take the AI practice suggestion in Smash or any other fighting game. It will make you worse.
It's better to find a creative fighting style that works for you, no matter how unorthodox.
If anything, it throws opponents off their feet, but the true purpose like with Jeet Kun Do is to adapt the avatar running around to the user's own learning style.
Make many mistakes and learn from them.
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Post by Surgo »

...what the fuck are you talking about?
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Post by JonSetanta »

Whatever.

So in Soul Calibur 2, how does one go about doing the "drop kick" move for Nightmare? Something about pounding 'forward' twice and then kick, and while kick is depressed (and letting up) then hit one of the attack buttons. He ends up just doing a shoulder ram and no drop kick.
Oddly, Necrid (using his sampled parasitic move list) can do drop kick fine and reliably. Shit.
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Bad solar empire BAD!

Post by PhoneLobster »

Being a strategy game fanatic I took some suggestions from this thread and tried out a couple of games.

Dominions 3. I'm dissatisfied with They got it half right. A million cool customisable options and a highly project/action based decision making process.

But the graphics and UI are really bad. And I don't just mean "This is clearly an outdated and low budget project" I'm OK with that, what I'm not OK with is a failure to use the resources they had available to make things look pretty.

How damn hard is it to have an image file biger than 5 pixels by 5 pixels for sprites, or at least for appearance in unit description windows, events, etc...

And ultimately despite some pretence to the contrary with its character action based stuff it seemed it still boiled down to a fairly unintuitive and frustrating horde building race.

Warlords was better. Heck, I think Warlords 1 was probably better...

But hey its clearly amateur or something so it gets off lightly in criticism from me, I just won't bother wasting my time on it.

Now SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE. That doesn't get any kind of mercy.

Here are the bullet points.
1) It REALLY talks up its graphics tech in its promotion. And though its not horrible I did see better looking very similar stuff like 4 years ago.

2) It is really buggy.
It's crashed my system on exit from a game (not the game just A game).
It's regularly sufferring from graphical glitches and sound drop outs that SEEM to be related to it somehow giving up focus to other applications (or maybe it just DOES that).
And in the last game I played of it it spontaneously chose to lock out access from the fleet menu, declare I'd lost capital ships when I hadn't, prefent me from selecting existing fleets, and then raised the population of my home planet to the ground without ANY enemy present...
And that's patched to 1.04, which I had to dig up from gamers hell because I didn't want to use their annoying Stardock utilities.

3) And yes, it's a Stardock game. And though I'm glad stardock continues to support and bring us this genre of games they don't seem to have ever done so with a GOOD contribution...

4) And ultimately it's just you know THAT space game. You know the one. The uninspired frustrating ass of a game released by SOMEONE every couple of years or so.

Let me expand on point four.

Does this sound familiar?

Credits, metal and "ore"/"crystal" resources? Constantly waiting for them to turn over the latest target number so you can que up a new ship in a shipyard or something. Trading the resource types at a significant loss to get those stupid crystals when you need them.

A dull little research tree more resembling building upgrades from a Blizzard type RTS requiring specific numbers of structures to be built then variable resources to be spent to unlock new units, upgrade existing ones (+5% to light frigate damage WOW!) and enhance various resource production (AAAAAH).

How about several classes of ship all premade and highly non customizable and at least one class of experience gaining ship that gains ability points that can be spent on one of a massive four (yes FOUR) different static or active improvements (OOOh, +5% to energy weapon refresh rate of allies in a small area, YES!) including stupid cool down powers which expend a limited mana resource. (I'll give them this, you could put those powers on auto at least).

How about really harsh unit caps. With a long tree of very expensive upgrade techs to squeeze out the next tiny increment to your available forces.

How about a map made up of jump lanes (or pointless empty space that you never ever run into enemies in) in between highly important resource gathering and production locations with caps on available defence and production structures? With a number of premade maps that often seem EXPRESSLY designed to prevent actual use of choke points in a useful way. Though I can understand that since the game is so fucking shallow it would become incredibly obvious if you could actually pile all your boring little investments at a single choke point.

How about game play which while slow and frustrating is sufficiently like an RTS to prevent real decision making. Not that it matters because there aren't any really exciting decisions anyway. Anyway what you do is juggle the resource market and keep clicking the buy/tech/build/experience buttons whenever your resources or ship experience levels up and try and take territory and accrue a bigger horde faster than you opponent. And try and put it between you and him at one of those annoying non choke point choke points.

Then you have to spend another half hour slowly bombing his last remaining planets.

You know that game? I do, I've been buying the damn thing once every 1 or 2 years since forever. I got like four games just like it. And all of them are so dull I'd have to dig them up from their rotting graves just to tell you their titles. And I preferred those earlier ones to this! Some of them did it better, or had more innovative fringe differences.

What little differences does this bring? A mission based diplomacy system, that's actually good sadly its not very smart and kinda slow and frustrating.

An "achievement" system where by doing various things in games you win little medals. Yes. You get a little medal for "Sending dude through wormhole" or "Winning a game with no stationary defences". I'd care more if the medal were prettier or if I got something more exciting than a medal ticked off a long dull list and a "tiny you did this!" note on the events ticker.

You get to explore planets for artefacts and special sites. Cool! Except the special sites and artifacts just do stuff like +10% to unit mana regeneration". Yeah...

Oh, and another note. Only three dull races. Small tech trees. Similar and very small ranges of units and structures poor AI and fucking annoying pirates.

So Sins of a Solar empire is a bad game in my book. It appears to have all the budget and hype in the world (well, can't be ALL of the budget in the world, it is a Stardock game) and yet it is utterly disappointing on almost every front.

The baton for latest cool strategy game, especially MOO successor has NOT been passed on by a long shot (indeed this game is more of a starcraft successor than remotely anything like MOO) so as far as I can tell it still rests firmly in the hands of Sword Of The Stars An actual innovative and playable game full of cool tech and exciting space adventure if nothing else.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Maxus »

Eheh...The only RTS game I've ever played extensively is a 1998 game called Warbreeds.

So I think I'll stay out of this.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

I think its worth noting that these are KIND of not RTS games. They are supposedly just outright strategy games or their successors.

Dominions is turn based with non controllable auto resolved battles.

Sword of the stars is turn based with very brief, but well enough done RTS battles, which can be auto resolved.

Sins of a Solar Empire really is an out and out RTS, and not even a good one. But it CLAIMS to be a major space strategy game. Apparently the "unrivalled scale" achieves that aim... yeah sure...
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Tue Apr 29, 2008 2:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Maxus wrote:Eheh...The only RTS game I've ever played extensively is a 1998 game called Warbreeds.
Holy. Fuck. I was just thinking about this yesterday.
Saw it in a magazine ad a long time ago, and then never any mention of it afterward.
I remember the hype about its AI coding. Adaptive, automatic, make your own units....
How is it?
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Post by Maxus »

sigma999 wrote:
Maxus wrote:Eheh...The only RTS game I've ever played extensively is a 1998 game called Warbreeds.
Holy. Fuck. I was just thinking about this yesterday.
Saw it in a magazine ad a long time ago, and then never any mention of it afterward.
I remember the hype about its AI coding. Adaptive, automatic, make your own units....
How is it?
I enjoyed it, actually. Here's the breakdown;

-The setting was an alien world. Some time ago, the original inhabitants of this world discovered genetic engineering and made three slave breeds of creatures. Then, a group of them tried to fulfill a prophecy and engineering a kind of creature called the Magha. The first Magha turned against the Yedda (yeah, I have a good memory for names), and soon the slaves races did too, and the four created races between them almost wiped out their creators and set to doing war on each other, although the campaign has the Tanu and Kilika eventually ally, and the Magha eventually enslave the Sen-Soth.

-There are four races, each with five creatures, although you needed to build an Advanced Gene Lab to grow the last two. Every race has a basic Shaman (builder dude) who does all the building, repairing, planting, and gene collecting, and the shaman class, in the game world, seem to be the ones to call the shots. The races each have a defining characteristic (The Tanu are orange and reptilian, and move extremely fast, the Kilika are blue and purple and are slower with more resilience, the Sen Soth are Mardi Gras-colored insects and their major virtue is how fast their development times are, and the Magha are alien/devilish and they've got weird units, like two being able to cloak themselves when not in combat.)

-Your only resource is cropland. On every map are patches of blue ground where your shaman can plant seeds that quickly grow into energy-producing plants, which will spread to fill the cropland. Plant some pods, let them grow a bit, and you can build a refinery to harvest the power from them, and the refinery will let you build other stuff within its radius of effect. You get things like turrets and radar devices and so on. You get, like, 16 units of energy from a fully-grown pod, and the pods do spread rather quickly.

-When you decided what units to grow, you selected the weapons they'll be born with. You had your own racial weapons (like the Tanu had things like hammers, and one of their high-damage weapons was a buzzsaw), but you can also learn enemy weapons by sending a Shaman out to collect DNA from enemy corpses, which eventually rot away. The two campaigns have you start off with a very low tech level, and earn better weapons and the like from the enemies as you go along. It should be noted that the weapons are actual appendages. They're part of the creatures.

I beat the Tanu campaign, but couldn't ever get past one of the end missions of the Magha campaign, because before I could get properly situated a whole tidal wave of orange and blue creatures would come rolling out of the fog of war.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Aw. Damn. That's pretty much just a Dune RTS knockoff.
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Post by Username17 »

An important note is that in Dominions 3 you can assign the troops orders before the battles, meaning that in many cases you can achieve surprising wins by getting elite troops back to kill the opponent's leaders or holding back and using a lot of ranged weaponry on slow or unarmored enemies.

Late game Dominion Wars are way more about quality than quantity. A powerful magician can wrack up hundreds of kills by himself in a single battle, making horde-driven play dangerous and certainly not the be all and end all of the game.

Winning the war is more about minimizing losses than it is about maximizing kills or army size. And yet, troops get tired and late game magics will virtually guaranty a certain number of deaths on both sides of any major conflict. Juggling quality and quantity is not a simple question and the sweet spots are radically different for the different countries (Man favors large numbers of archers and small numbers of disposable axemen to hold the line until the late game when you can get enough knights together to really start breaking through lines on your own; and Niefelheim favors brute squads of ~5 frost giants to go beat the crap out of things until they get together enough evil sorcery to back that up with a disposable horde of demons and the undead).

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Post by Surgo »

I won a small (28 person) local Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament yesterday.

Finals are here (crap quality): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t9YXcz2moM

And once again, I see a number of areas I really need to improve on.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Y'all move around too much, watching you two gives me vertigo.

Although I am far from tournament material, I tend to stay in one place with a strong defense and wallop anyone who gets too close. I wouldn't do well in your tournament, but amongst the people I know, that tactic works exceptionally well.

I tend to prefer heavier characters, my faves are Bowser and King Dedede. (Can't get a handle on Wario though, he handles weird.)
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Post by shau »

Does anyone know where I can get a newbie guide for dominions? It kinda sounds interesting but it seems like every discussion I read about it is so filled with obscure gameplay mechanics and strange acronyms that I have no idea what is going on. Maybe I will try out the demo later.

I also am reinstalling BG2 right now. I played that game to death but I never seem to get all the way through.
Last edited by shau on Thu May 08, 2008 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by K »

The Dominions III forums have a Strategy sticky that has a collection of links to nation-specific and general strategy posts.
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Re: Bad solar empire BAD!

Post by Koumei »

PhoneLobster wrote:Warlords was better.
I have only played a demo of Warlords III, and loved it unconditionally. The little quests that pop up and may cause diplomatic issues with your allies, the lovely art for units and heroes (not to mention just a little titillation in some cases, with others not having a shred of that and just being "awesome"), and a simple interface with strategy (okay okay, and "numbers", but even that is downplayed) being more important than "choose this move now. Quick, quick, hurry!"
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Warlords III, specifically the dark lords reign expansion was the pinnacle of the warlords series. Four was a bit of a let down going back to warlords one or even before with many features apparently DELIBERATELY.

But I have hopes for Warlords V, IF is comes out.

The entire warlords battle cry series pisses me off. I hear good things about whatsit called the 'Puzzlequest'? Spin off but it angers me by not being Warlords V.
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Post by Username17 »

I didn't even know that Puzzlequest was nominally part of the Warlords Series. That's really weird. It's a good game, but lacks much in replayability and is not a strategy game at all. In any case, I think I had the most fun with Warlords 2. The random map generator it had was actually a fair mark superior to the one they released for Warlords 3 and the army/scenario customization was a fair bit better. The graphics were state of the art for 1993, and that's seriously all I even want out of a strategy game. I can make decent looking pixel art for sprites, but I can't do 3D or animated anything free hand, so that's that.

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