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Jake

BlizzCon Blowout: Idle Thumbs 40: Idle Thumbs 40,000 (Nobody Beats the Blizz)

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I don't remember a cover system, but I do know that Z had you collect and hold territory to acquire resources.

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Although the cover system was good, it was the mechanism that forced you to move forward constantly to gain areas of the map to gain resources that did it for me. It made it impossible to turtle and build up, forcing the game into a fast paced frantic thrill.

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I am not aware of any Cover System in Z... and i finished the game (although it took me a long, long time ;) ).

But there are some innovations that also appear in some newer Relic RTS-games:

- The map is partitioned into sectors, each with a flag to capture it.

There are no ressources in Z except "time", meaning: the more sectors you own the faster your buildings produce new units.

- No basebuilding. You start with a single HQ-Building in your starting sector, which you can produce all units.

But there are also buildings in a lot of the other sectors. They produce units for the owner of the sector.

- Infantry is used in Squads of 2-5 Men, you dont give orders to single infantrymen.

- Infantry Squads can pick up Grenades. That gives them the ability to destroy vehicles which they couldn't damage with their regular rifles. Similar to Bazookas in CoH.

- You can build a lot of stationary weapons like gatling guns and howitzers to defend your sectors. You can kill the guy manning those using small arms fire (snipers, machineguns..) and send one of your own guys to man the gun. This is also an important mechanic in CoH. In Z you can also kill the crew of jeeps or even tanks (!) and capture them. :eek:

- On a lot of maps bridges play a big role in Z. You can destroy those with Big Guns and repair them with a special engineer unit. Also a big part of Coh. I dont know though if Z was the first RTS to do this.

- There is an APC that can carry an Infantry Unit. That unit can fire their weapons from the transporter. Depending on the Infantry those can be Rocket Launchers, Flame Throwers, etc. Similar to some Transporters in CoH.

Overall it was a much more dynamic single-player game than every other RTS at that time. Still a lot of people didnt like it, it think mainly for 2 reasons:

1. It required micro managment. You couldnt just win by outnumbering, so you had to be able to win fights between similar sized armies. That required stuff like staying out of the enemies weapon range. A lot of projectiles in Z move quite slowly so you can often move your units out of the way and avoid being hit. But i think in 1996 hardly any player even thought about doing that... including me ;) I just sent my units towards the enemies like i did in C&C and watched them either destroy the enemy or get destroyed.. the outcome was very unpredictable if you just let the unit AI do its thing. That seemed very random and was frustrating. I couldnt get past Mission 11 or so. After i played games like Warcraft 3 and learned to pay attention to "micro" i went back to Z and it was a much more fun experience. Plus i was able to beat it.

2. A lot of things just are very random Z. If your troops destroy a rock that is in their way, fragments of that rock will fly all over the map damaging units where they land. If a vehicle explodes the same thing happenes. This can lead to crazy chain reactions... sometimes thats funny but sometimes very frustrating if your heavy tank gets destroyed by a flying cactus.

Also the unit AI in Z is kind of strange. Different unit types have different intelligence levels in this game. Snipers are supposed to be super smart, the big guys with rocket launchers are terribly dumb. That has influence on path finding and behaviour in battle. But even the "smart" units sometimes behave just stupid. Getting a unit of snipers to take advantage of their higher weapon range is not an easy thing to do and sometimes impossible, they will just run into the enemies weapon range for no apparent reason.

Another source of randomness: as mentioned earlier you can kill the crew of vehicles with small arms fire. So if your medium tank drives by a group of enemy riflemen in like 5% of the cases they will just get a lucky shot and kill your tank driver.. and then capture the tank themselves. In a lot of cases this will turn around the battle because a single tank is a big deal in Z.

Edited by freak-o-mator

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Sounds like CoH pulled quite a bit from Z. As I said, what killed it for a lot of people was the unreliable multiplayer network code. What was Battle.net like in its early days? CoH used UDP for multiplayer sessions, and had lots of problems interfacing with different players' routers. It's better now... Battle.net has obviously been around for years, and ironed out niggles ages ago. So, was it crap early days? Did people even notice, as it was prolly the first thing of its kind in the RTS arena?

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...and from inauspicious beginnings, Frank the Necromancer journeys into the badlands.

Excellent! My first game was with a Necromancer as well. Then a Paladin, then a Rogue, then a Druid (expansion had come out). When they announced Diablo III, I started a game with a Barbarian, and I think I'm stalled near the end of Lut Gholein. I should go back and continue that. I'll be getting a laptop soon too, and intend to start up a new game on that one. Either Sorceress or another Necromancer. I've already played it with him, of course, but that was in 2001. I'm crap with spell-heavy characters anyway. Needless to say, you should get a lot of mileage out of this game.

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Yeah, I can see it's a massive game. The necro is pretty good, although the skeletons are quite aggressive and will wander off. The golem is solid though.

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Excellent! My first game was with a Necromancer as well. Then a Paladin, then a Rogue, then a Druid.

Rogue? Do you mean Amazon? She was my first DII character, although I never thought she was that great.

The Assassin though, from the expansion... she was awesome. Also the basis for the rogue class in WoW.

New players might not have seen this:

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Yeah, I meant Amazon. She was called the Rogue in D1, so I got confused there. That commercial was great. I've never seen it, and I bought it the month it came out. Ah, back when nobody cared if a 13 year old bought an M rated game...

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Yeah, I played Rogue in the first Diablo (for some reason I often end up with female characters in story-lite RPGs). I really liked that you could hire the Diablo classes as mercenaries in Diablo II.

I think the Diablo 3 classes are interesting retools of the previous characters. The Wizard (WIZAAAAAARD) is the sorcerer/sorceress with extra stopping power; the witch doctor is the necromancer with perhaps a dash of druid; the monk seems like the assassin with a sprinkle of paladin. It's almost a shame that the barbarian is just a bit older. Is there still one to come? We seem to missing a rogue/amazon ranged warrior class.

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I was excited about somebody having the same experience as me, but then I realized it was just a spambot stealing my exact words. Damn.

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