I met a couple of dudes over the weekend and we gamed at this place in Kuwait called Arena Lan Gaming center. That’s on the secondfloor of the Wataniya mall in the road as Fanar Cinema etc. And the cost of playing there is 1 kd for 3 hours. Pretty decent deal I think ..
Anyway, it was playing the game that really got me super hooked to strategy and rekindled the forgotten love of learning strategy and warfare. The game was Company of Heros and in it I realised what a shitty game Warcraft 3 is in strategy as opposed to this game. This was pure warfare as was fought in the second world war.
I understand Warcraft 3 is a fantasy world, but so is Starcraft and you realise the 2 things that make Warcraft 3 an inferior strategical game is the “teleport scroll” and the “massive hp units”. I mulled over the games I played and realised how quickly strategy and warfare are very essential in all RTS combat games. There are some basic components to the game that I realise cover ground in almost all Real Time Strategy games. Hautamaki, one of the greatest writers of the starcraft world, mentioned the Power and Mass equations. Now that is slightly too detailed to note down here but what I’ll do is distill information to give you the basic underlying skills/actions needed to play in RTS games.
a) Resource Generation (Macromanagement)
Simply put, if you don’t have resources you can’t make an army. You don’t make an army you die. So gathering resources are of primary importance but you know the more important thing in this? It is to decide whether you wish to mass in large numbers early and attack or you power (tech) your way up the ladder to get yourself higher/tougher weapons of destruction. The tradeoff being that you need more resources, have a smaller army that can defend/fight off an assault.
b) Tactics of Operations (Micro)
This includes everything from flanking, to diverting, conning the enemy, taunting him and hitting from higher ranges by using the terrain options. In company of heros you see that the tank has higher armour concentration in the front of the tank, therefore to hit the tank you would have to hit from the back, I took out a tank by drawing the enemy tank towards me while my riflemen with sticky bombs went from the back to hit them. That is the art of flanking. This way of battle is important because it keeps your units alive and more important renders the enemys ones useless. It’s also important to keep a mixed army so you don’t get run over by hard counters.
c) Recon (Scout)
This is of primary importance to know what the enemy is up to. If you see him powering his way to tanks, you can start capturing map area and resources, if you see him massing an army coming to assault you, you can either follow suit or power your way with defence structure massing. But generally there would be a hard counter to that, so the point is Recon is very important to both know where the enemy is, what his plans are and hit at the right time to ensure damage.
Anyway Im super excited about the game and hope to get a good enough computer to run it or head to Arena to play it.
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