Hard to imagine in all these posts about Starcraft, Sins, and RPGs I didn't even see one person mention Earthbound on the RPG part.

Surumon take a count of people who actually played earthbound(I did for like a grand total of 10 minutes) and then you wont be so surprised .

Exactly theres hundreds of button bash strats out there so why aim to make this game just like them? Really great game and forums I may say(Something I can seldom say ) but this whole issue of turning sins to generic rubbish is worrying me!

It absolutely is, you are just deciding to stick with an account's use of it, i.e. as a synonym for "profitable". It is profitable and popular, and a whole lot of fun to a whole lot of people, but like fun, "best" is subjective, quit trying to make it some absolute that it is not.


I like how you equate skill in a strategy game with ability to click quickly and precisely but not with being unable to cope with the requirement that you take landscape into account, how you feel twitch reaction is more strategic the actual planning, how you seem feel being able to manually position your troops using a limited interface where they will be useful makes a person more of a strategist than knowing a better strategy that they cannot execute because the interface gets in their way. Strategic ability, outside of the current way the RTS genre has developed (real life and chess for example), has almost nothing to do with how fast a person can move dumb-as-rock pieces around. It has to do with setting up patrol routes, supply lines, and deciding on paths to combat zones; not telling Private Last Class Homer to move two feet to the right.


Its funny how you don't even see how much credit where none is due you give this game. Or do you actually know for a fact that it was a design choice not necessity that resulted in this?

Oops, I meant accountant's.

Oh my...Is this 1999, or people are still arguing about which is better, TA or SC?

Pssshh, that's not even a contest, TA, hands down



LOL, yeah... The limit of units on-screen? The interface which requires you to click million-times-per-second in order to do something? The bad pathfinding and units stuck behind buildings? A pure ingenuity. All part of Blizzard's grand strategy. It has nothing to do with the fact that it has the exact same gameplay mechanics as Warcraft 2, a game that was released almost three years prior to it, of course.

Still, SC's grand achievement for me was its excellent atmosphere and storytelling. No other RTS beat it to this day, IMO.

I'd say Homeworld's story did a pretty good job, but it is hard to say as StarCraft's story couldn't keep interested long enough to finish one campaign. In general I would agree though, most RTSes I don't even notice or pay attention to what they try to pass off as a story.

Okay, I'm betting MAny fans will be disapointed in Starcraft II, because it will be like every other RTS. Thanks the Blizzard Fan Boys for making the other games be like their favorite stinkin' game, destroying all creativity!

I'm sure PC Gamer will still blabber about how "unique" StarCraft II is (unique being stupid and extremely over rated), and give it a very high rating, one it doesn't deserve. Blizzard is losing it. Warcraft 3, and now Starcraft II. Losers.

Etrius

I was the one that posted my concrete complaints about Starcraft a few pages back which were answered by some.

1) Moving and shooting...if you have to micro-manage that then it's not really moving and shooting, it's you micro-ing his every step and adding a fire step in teh middle. Personally I don't want to play a game like that.
2) Selecting groups...the poster said that all races can select 12...remember I only played the original Starcraft, sans patches. Back then Zerg could select 12, every other race selected 9.
3) Queuing up 5 at the factory...believe it or not, not every game has the same mechanic of making you pay upfront when you queue! Some games charge the unit cost only when it starts production...
4) Unit balance...yeah I said it was bad. It was. I'm sure they patched that. Hell the Dawn of War original game had bad balance issues too.
5) Units not shooting back. Again, this was the original game and since that's not really acceptable Unit AI, I'm sure they patched they too.

Point being, those things ruined the fun of Starcraft for me and they are real concrete complaints. Some of those problems were eventually fixed. Others, people just got used to. I played games at that time that did not have those issues.

As for the comment that micromanagement = skill or at least is conducive for pro-style competition, I don't agree. TA had lots of unit and production automation and still required alot of skill to play. If you're not micromanaging, you're spending your time managing something else...it's not like you're going to sit there idle! TA was played competitively in original CPL. In TA, skilled player vs n00b, you just overwhelm him with your production. Skilled vs Skilled, you have to beat him by strategy, misdirection, probing for weaknesses, and slamming him with an attack that he can't defend. Micro is less a part of the game, but that doesn't mean it requires less skill, just a different kind of skill.

Heck, some make you pay over time during construction, far superior!

I agree; preferable to the Blizzard mechanic, to me at least, by far. That's one thing I'll always appreciate about CnC.

I am hoping that SC2 will be great although I have the aching feeling it will be like WCIII or bliz will find a new and unique way to F**k it up. Havent liked a bliz game since Diablo 2.

CnC, Spring, TA, SC, and even Homeworld I believe.

Strange, almost everyone I know has played it and beaten it.
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Staying a bit on topic, I'm not really going to argue which RTS is better. It's all a mute point really, everyone will stick to what they liked best and it won't really move beyond that.

Ok i must address the unit imbalance issue sometimes the testers like the unit imbalance i was a part of the beta testing for dawn of war and at the time the super units were much more costly to build which made up for the imbalance, this is probably what happened in the case of starcraft

and on the selection limits most RTS's made have this limitation even the turnbased games