I’ve played RTS games for a long time, including Warcraft, Warcraft2, and Command and Conquer. The genre got old to me, it seems you keep getting more and more to manage and your victory seems determined by how fast you can scroll around and give your units orders. Click click click click click.
I’m looking for a RTS (real time strategy) game that isn’t reflex based; one where your units have some AI and can be given missions to complete. Are there any games like that out? I remember one from Activision called Dark something where you could choose your unit behaviors.
Ever played any of the Total War games? They have a turn based tactical section, where you move your armies around the map and dictate what sort of units/structures your various cities will build. But when you encounter an enemy, it switches to a real-time battlefield that’s much more realistic than any other RTS I’ve ever played. A unit of swordsmen, for example, is about sixty guys. Armies can have a couple thousand individual soldiers in them, depending on your unit mix. Battles require a fair approximation of real-life military strategies to win, and there’s a fantastic mix of historical (and, sometimes, a few not-quite-so-historical) units. There’re four games in the series at this point: Shogun, Medieval, Rome, and Medieval 2.
There’s also Company of Heroes, which is a WW2 RTS. It’s more of a traditional RTS, with scenario-based gameplay and all the building and fighting taking place on the same map, but does a pretty good job of translating all that into a realistic game. One of the highlights is that every single object on the map is destructible. Got some Germans holed up in a farmhouse? Call in an artillery strike and level the entire building. Great fun, and I say that as someone who usually despises RTS.
If your PC is relatively new and snazzy, get “Supreme Commander.” The nuclear explosion effects will give you massive boners, and the strategic/tactical control is wonderful and really gets around the clicky aspect (to some extent) of RTS games.
My favourite mission in this game; you’re required to hold a town square for a certain amount of time, while being attacked by soldiers, light vehicles/tanks and a bit of artillery (though if you have time you can destroy that). It starts off as a pristine square, surrounded by buildings and a church. After defences and the actual battle, you’re left with a ruined, scorched, caltrop-ridden warzone (and that’s having won). It just looks fantastic. And it’s a great game aside from that.
I’m not sure how reflex-based i’d call it… you can leave your units for a short amount of time in a defensive position while you focus on somewhere else. But generally it’s a case of attack/counterattack, rather than constant waves you need to deal with.
That would be Dark Reign. Great game, that: In addition to being able to give a broad range of behavior orders (Go get healed when health goes into the yellow, or Harass any enemy units you encounter from point A to point B, but don’t go too far off path, or the like), you could also pause the game and give orders while paused, for the times when you just couldn’t click-click-click-scroll over-click-click fast enough. Man, I wish I still had a computer that could run that.