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Rob Zacny

Episode 321: Act of Aggression

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Three Moves Ahead 321:

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Act of Aggression

This week is a full house with Rob, Troy, Tom, and Fraser all weighing in on Eugen Systems' Act of Aggression. Tom stands alone as the half-hearted bastion of defense for a game that underwhelmed the panel. An unintuitive UI, questionable ethnic portrayals, and general crappiness had Fraser "so angry he punched a child", a deed which is now forever rendered in text.

Act of Aggression, Wargame Series, Act of War

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Haven't played Command & Conquers: General but all this talk about build order reminds me of how we under appreciate Rise of Nations.

 

The game is complex as heck yet it has a very straightforward build order. Almost all buildings are unlocked by advancing age - this button on top of your screen. Some are unlocked by one of 4 other techs, but only with first couple of them. This part made simple yet you still have a good dozen types of units per age, each one has a unique role and some of them fulfill very special roles (supply, scouting, buffing, insurgency). And none of them require any techs or other buildings. You get barracks - you see all possible upgrades and what's needed. And you only need age and military.

 

Meanwhile traditional RTS is structured as a learning experience. You are almost required to learn it step-by-step in campaign of some sorts, otherwise even on easiest difficulties you can't make any interesting decisions.

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The biggest problem with this game is that it brings nothing new to the RTS formula. It is a prettier, souless clone of Act of war and Generals.

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Haven't played Command & Conquers: General but all this talk about build order reminds me of how we under appreciate Rise of Nations.

 

The game is complex as heck yet it has a very straightforward build order. Almost all buildings are unlocked by advancing age - this button on top of your screen. Some are unlocked by one of 4 other techs, but only with first couple of them. This part made simple yet you still have a good dozen types of units per age, each one has a unique role and some of them fulfill very special roles (supply, scouting, buffing, insurgency). And none of them require any techs or other buildings. You get barracks - you see all possible upgrades and what's needed. And you only need age and military.

 

Meanwhile traditional RTS is structured as a learning experience. You are almost required to learn it step-by-step in campaign of some sorts, otherwise even on easiest difficulties you can't make any interesting decisions.

 

I tried to play Rise of Nations within the last year, with the re-release on Steam. I found the whole thing pretty bewildering, even though I'd played it when it first came out. There are so many choices to make at any given moment- there are multiple resources, there's a building for each resource type on top of the resource collectors, each of which have several upgrades, there are multiple military buildings with unit upgrades, there's the advancement tree... On top of this I should be expanding and scouting and grabbing special resource nodes let alone fighting battles.

 

Figuring out how to expand without constantly choking on some resource or another, or falling behind militarily, would take flippin' forever, and more dedication than I have time for. 

 

I think the trick to the action RTS is how to make units interesting and distinct without major overlap, while maintaining faction identity. Relic's Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes are the gold standard for me, but the Starcrafts and C&C: Generals also do a great job. You have to move beyond 'this unit counters this one' towards 'unit X beats unit Y in these circumstances, but Y can hold its own in these other circumstances.' Then build up relationships within the faction: 'Y beats X when unit Z is in support'.

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While we're on the topic of old school RTS's, I've been playing a fair amount of Total Annihilation recently. The game didn't used to run for me, but for whatever reason since I upgraded to Windows 10 it runs fine now. And it's wonderful, and I'm sad there hasn't been a game of the same complexity and scope since it came out. Despite not having played the game in over a decade I was able to grasp everything after a single skirmish match. I can't imagine that being the case for most other RTS games. Obviously Supreme Commander did a great job of overhauling the graphics and UI of the game, but it also vastly increased the scale of the game, and it plays a little slower. I just want a RTS that is a little more constricted in scale, and that plays faster without playing at the breakneck pace of a SC 2 or something.

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Figuring out how to expand without constantly choking on some resource or another, or falling behind militarily, would take flippin' forever, and more dedication than I have time for. 

 

Nah, you underestimate yourself. You see, in RoN you instantly learn "build order". You know what can you do, the question is what should you do. And there you can learn by reacting to various challenges. In those arcade-ish RTS you know you want to build big tanks. Build order tells you how to do it in objectively better way. While in RoN, like in Civilization, there are few objective truths and multitude of strategies. When the game tells you someone has advanced in Era and you have not it doesn't mean anything. You may have chosen to expand or build Rush military, you don't need Era advancement for that.

 

Try again, man. It really is much easier to learn than, say, StarCraft, as it depends on your metastrategic much more than on learning specific mechanics - and all mechanics you need are quickly advised by the perfect UI.

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  Great podcast, and quite something when Fraser "Soft Soap" Brown gets angry. Two points

  • I don't think Tom Chick quite understands how mortally he offended Fraser by offering him tea at the start of the chat. For former's illumination,
  • Re the game's target audience, cf the following from Chris Thursten in the Crate&Crowbar pod (btw, when's the crossover episode?), 

From pods and reviews, I get the impression that, to paraphrase the two-edged praise Joseph Conrad once gave to a friend's historical novel, "Act of Aggression may well be the swansong of the traditional RTS, and I, for one, am glad to have heard it."

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Act of War, to me, wasn't even that good at its time, and I certainly don't think it needed a spiritual successor ten years later.  RUSE and Wargame were a lot more original takes on the genre that worked better, though both had some flaws, and instead of injecting more of that interesting originality or taking those original ideas and refining them, they just went back to the old well.

 

I had hoped Act of Aggression would be closer to RUSE but more cleaned up, with less mushy control and better balance.

 

I don't think the traditional RTS is dead per se, but you really have to put more craft into it than Eugen did to make it pleasing to play and I don't think that happened at all.

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So I tried Act of Aggression, and wasn't that surprised by the negative tone of y'alls podcast about it.

 

 

My overall take was similar, and many of your points fleshed out in my mind what I hadn't been able to put a finger on. Thus, I play tested steams new refund system, it works as advertised. 

 

 

RoN is a great game, "Civilization you can play on your lunch break" 

 

 

 

 

idk, ever since Company of Heroes came out I lost interest in the traditional RTS "spam all the things" and win by economic attrition....I like being able to stick guys or units out in the field and know they won't get killed immediately without me at least knowing what killed them. Yes, a Flak88 will do very bad things very quickly to a Sherman, but, you will have enough time to realize your mistake and save the rest of your forces....I think some of this is that I'm older now and literally can't be asked to put in the effort to play a fast paced twitch RTS anymore...

 

 

 

 

To add to the list of "old school RTS" : I've been enjoying Homeworld Remastered, while I don't like the fact that they basically reskinned HW2 with HW1 unit skins, I can appreciate the effort, and they are still updating and patching the game, I think they only have a couple guys working on the project still, so updates are slow...but, they are still coming...

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Before C&C Generals and AoW, TopWare put out a similarly themed game on the (early 3D RTS) Earth 2150 engine:

 

world_war_3_black_gold-3.jpg
http://binged.it/1K3bMQR

 

The factions were USA, Iraq, and Russia. Very similar in that and some other respects to Generals. Probably both were inspired by the first US / Iraq war and the idea that it was fueled by the need for oil. Does not play anywhere near as smoothly as Generals of course. It may have been a game that was made pretty quickly in order to make some more of that engine that ended up quickly forgotten and maybe not noticed by many to start with. They were still doing 2150 expansions at the time. Maybe they'd even heard news and details of Generals' development and took inspiration from that or vice versa.

 

Generals, like many other C&C games was great after modders got ahold of it. Or maybe after the expansion. AoA sounds like a lot is carried over from AW like POWs and units one selects weaponry for but then has a much more complicated economy. Do things feel as cramped as they did in AoW? Part of the theme of that game was urban combat--you capture banks and fought over and between building. Even starting out a game away from the urban center of the map, there was never much room to build up. You had to expand quickly as you could only fit like four buildings in your starting location and couldn't tech up without building more.

 

---

 

Sclpls, I also played Total Annihilation recently--on a Mac laptop. Thanks GOG. Claud, I feel sad every time I hear that the traditional RTS has died out, or will die out, or especially, that people are wanting the format to die out. Some people love it.

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While we're on the topic of old school RTS's, I've been playing a fair amount of Total Annihilation recently. The game didn't used to run for me, but for whatever reason since I upgraded to Windows 10 it runs fine now. And it's wonderful, and I'm sad there hasn't been a game of the same complexity and scope since it came out. Despite not having played the game in over a decade I was able to grasp everything after a single skirmish match. I can't imagine that being the case for most other RTS games. Obviously Supreme Commander did a great job of overhauling the graphics and UI of the game, but it also vastly increased the scale of the game, and it plays a little slower. I just want a RTS that is a little more constricted in scale, and that plays faster without playing at the breakneck pace of a SC 2 or something.

 

TA remains my favorite RTS; we played the hell out of it in office matches when it was newish. There were some nasty exploits (one guy we played with would build hundreds of stealth fighters and send them all in to your base at once, which would lag your machine so badly that it turned into a slide show; if the automated defenses weren't up to the task you were destroyed), but it remains the most fun I've had in an RTS.

 

In particular, there were so many strategies you could pursue that you could never really be sure what would come over the hill at you. And man, those classic "shit, we haven't heard from Dave for 15 minutes, I'd best start preparing for a saturation nuke strike" moments.

 

Or the time where I'd completely lost, but I had one underwater fusion reactor in a little lake somewhere, which was enough that my commander could keep his stealth system active, and I was sneaking around the map trying to find the enemy commander to d-gun him and force a draw.  It didn't work, but it was a riot.

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Yup, the early Arm flash tank rush was another strat that would lag the hell out of the game, and was more or less game breaking.

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