Entries Tagged 'RTS' ↓

I’ve been watching a lot of SC2 Livestreams recently because I’m curious about how top players approach the game. It turns out that basically they’re just really damn fast, have excellent game awareness, scout well, and build the right counters. They pretty much just do everything that you can theoretically imagine you ought to do and do it very well.

On Sunday night I was watching a top Protoss player, Orb, doing his thing and nerd raging about losing, when I noticed that Wicked, a Zerg player who also has a stream, was in the chat. Wicked ended up challenging Orb to a best of three and it was a really compelling viewing experience. Because both had streams, you could watch the action simultaneously from both their perspectives, along with a running commentary from the chat rooms of both players, who supported and heckled their respective stream owners. The games were very evenly matched, with Orb’s amazing psi-storm skills battling Wicked’s slightly better macro technique. It was, in short, an excellent Zerg vs Protoss exhbition match, which really showed off the strengths and weaknesses of both races. The dramatic tension that came from seeing both players’ perspectives and knowing crucial things about the game that the players were unaware of was actually breathtaking. There were nail-biting moments such as when Orb came so close to scouting Wicked’s expansion, which would have led to him destroying it and winning, or Wicked’s decision not to counterattack with mutalisks after a big win, whilst we knew Orb had absolutely nothing to defend with and may have been knocked out then and there. It made for great viewing!

This kind of spontaneous match up, viewed from a first person perspective for both players, is something which as far as I know is completely new to the Internet and makes for great entertainment. I hope to see similar organized events emerge in the community as streaming becomes more prevalent. I feel like a caught a glimpse of the future on Sunday.

I got my first taste of DoW2: Chaos Rising on Tuesday night with the release of the new patch that updates vanilla DoW2 with new units for all the original races in preparation for the release of the new expansion. I gimped myself in the only game I managed to play by forgetting to update my gridkeys mod an having all my hotkeys bound to random junk as a result, but I still got a bit of a feel for some of the cool new stuff. In particular, the new librarian unit for SM is rad. Veil of time, which lets your devastator weapons teams attack without having to set up, is just as good as it sounds. When used on heavy bolters it’s kind of like having barbed strangler warriors, only the fire a hell of a lot quicker and do much more damage. I’m keen to try it out on heavy plasma devastators and see how imba it is.

Yesterday I bought the expansion pack itself and had the opportunity to play through the first few missions. The difficulty was a little too low, so I found it pretty trivial, and gridkeys messes up some of the hotkeys in the campaign, but in general the experience was great. When I played the original campaign I went for a super-shooty army that sat back and mowed everything down, mostly because I never leveled up Thaddeus to a point where he didn’t just die horribly to everything. This time round I’m going for a melee heavy build and it’s working really well. The key thing is getting Thaddeus the ability to heal himself when he combat jumps, which is very often. With my force commander also jumping around and Davian Thule the dreadnought smashing things with his power claws my strike force is pretty ridiculous in a scrap. I’m not 100% sure about what the right choice for my 4th squad is though. I’ve been going to Avitus armed with a missile launcher, just because taking out buildings is a pain without explosives, but I might switch to Cyrus with shotguns, and use detpacks to take out buildings instead to stick with the close combat theme.

So far the plot itself is awesomely cheesy and over the top in that wonderful Warhammer 40k way, and the incidental dialogue from your squad leaders between missions works particularly well to bring out their personalities and advance the plot. In all, the single player seems strictly better than the original DoW2 and I can’t wait to get back to it over the weekend.

Dran came up to my office after work today to have a crack at this whole SC2 beta thing. Apparently being Korean he is genetically endowed with awesome RTS skill right off the bat. We were mutually surprised and delighted to discover that we both prefer Zerg. Go hivemind! Dran’s first game was on Lost Temple against a fairly passive Protoss who mostly stayed in his base whilst Dran expanded like a madman and grabbed 2 expansions, one crossmap, and then proceeded to power drones and zerglings. Unfortunately for him, the Protoss player managed to mass air in the meantime, and Dran ended up losing a base race with zerglings and ultralisks vs a blob of void rays. His second game was much more successful though. He managed to fight off early pressure from a double proxy gating Protoss and then counterattack with speedlings into his opponents base, killing all his probes and forcing a GG. Defeating the proxy gate cheese won him a hivemind high five from me.

We alternated playing and my games were pretty solid. In particular I managed to win convincingly against cannon pushing Protoss who tried to block my ramp by countering with a fast tech to banelings. My opponent was amazed that I managed to beat my way through 4 cannons so quickly and asked how I’d done it, which I good-naturedly explained. I then expanded and teched to hydras, eventually overrunning his base with speedlings and hydras out of a nydus tunnel, winning me a high five from Dran.

Actually, pretty much all my games involved horrendous backdooring via the nydus network. I’m really digging that play. Usually my opponent will have a well defended ramp, but I can completely bypass it by spawning a tunnel exit, often right next to his workers by scouting with an overlord. Even if he counters, I can just hop back in the tunnel and defend, plus I can pump units through the tunnel throughout the attack - it’s like having a proxy gateway right in my opponent’s base. It seems vaguely unfair, but it sure it a hell of a lot of fun.

I was inspired by Day Nine’s podcast series on playing the original Starcraf,t in which he said the important thing is not to have a build order, but to have a plan; a vision in your mind of what you want the mid-game to look like and a corresponding list of the things that you’re going to need to help you reach that game state. Since I’m playing random, this involved brainstorming a 3×3 matrix of stuff that I was aiming for in my early game, which made things a bit complicated. I tried to refer to it at the start of each game in order to give myself a basic plan, and then noted what worked and what didn’t after each game. I played 10 games in total with a 50% win ratio, so I guess the automatch system seems to be working pretty well, even if my plans were a bit spotty.

Game 1 was ZvT, for which my plan was speedlings into mutas. I saw a great opportunity for an attack because he hadn’t walled the front of his base, but I massed far too few lings to be able to take out his marine blob. In two cases I attacked with about half the number of lings that I should have and this allowed him to get himself established, then crush me with a marine and tank counterattack.

It was ZvT again in game 2 with a similar start, being unwalled marines out of 2 barracks, but this time because his base was open again I opted for a stronger roach based play and pushed right into his base. Shortly after he had managed to stabilize I got mutalisks and finished him off. My transition was a bit uneven though, because of focusing needlessly on roach micro.

Game 3 was ZvP and again I came in early with 5 imba roaches and caught his army with its pants down. His small zealot and stalker force couldn’t hold me off. Had he defended his ramp things might have been different.

Game 4 was PvP and my opponent played very strangely. He massed tier one forces out of 4 gateways and walled himself into his base. I built zealots and stalkers out of 2 gateways, then teched to colossi which I used to push through his wall. After a few false starts the push cracked through and colossi baked his ground forces with PeWPeW lasers!

In game 5, TvP, I tasted my own colossal medicine when I failed an early reaper harass and ended up with a marine, marauder, and medic army that got baked by that tripod lazer fire. Until that point things were very back and forth though, with my marines holding off his zealots and stalkers. I think if I’d gone for heavy banshees or more marauders things wouldn’t have been too bad.

There was more colossal fun in game 6, PvZ, where he went roaches and I walled up to tech for colossi. Although I lost, I felt like it was a good move, because when the colossi came out they absolutely brutalized his ground forces. The problem was just that I needed a critical mass to kill any zerglings that managed to make it through my lines to the attack them, but I generally only had 1 or 2 in my army. The problem was basically that I was too aggressive in counterattacking.

In game 7, again PvZ, I had the chance to do it right and won. I pushed for colossi much faster and was careful to keep lings off my nimble tripods. The right time to attack was when I had 3 to 4 colossi. Colossi completely brutalize roach swarms in a way that’s beautiful to watch.

Game 8, TvT, was a big eye opener for me. My opponent went mass banshees, which I had never seen before and it was super strong. I turtled then expanded with marines, marauders, medivacs, and tanks and started massing, but me managed to catch me with my pants down and do heavy damage with his flyers. This game taught me the importance of hotkeying comsat sweep, as I fumbled pathetically to reveal his cloaked banshees so my marines could shoot them down. After losing a tonne of SCVs and having two command centers sniped, I decided to call it quits.

My success with colossi in PvZ continued, but not unequivocally, in game 9. I managed to get fairly early colossi, and expanded, but he ninjaed into my base twice with nydus worms and did heavy damage with a mixed force of lings, roaches, and hydras. His macro was quite good, so although I was able to hold him off, the constant flood of units kept me from doing much else. The game came to an end when the server had to restart, so it was a draw, but I was on the back foot. I think I needed to build more gateways sooner, and probably more cannons.

My final game of the night was ZvP, in which I went for roaches, transitioning to mutas and he took a quick expansion defended with cannons. I ran past the cannon front line at his expansion and sat behind his minerals, chasing away his workers and destroying his nexus. He managed to expand twice more though, and his macro was reasonable. I expanded and massed mutas from 4 hatcheries to try to beat down the floating that I was doing. My mutas harassed him from the air fairly inefficiently, because I wasn’t very confident against his cannons and stalker army. He massed quite a large mixed ground forces army and managed to force his way into my expansion and kill drones, but I managed to killed them off with roaches and mutas. He then tried repeatedly to harass with dark templar, but I had detectors and mutas at base.  Eventually I managed to rebuild my drone force and tech to broodlords, which are amazingly good. They’re kinda like necromancers in WC3 in that they shoot out little melee guys that quickly become an unmanageable horde. After I killed off his main defensive army of archons, high templar, and stalkers with the help of the broodlords he conceded. It was the longest and closest game I’ve played so far.

Starcraft 2 is a fascinating game. Like its predecessor, there are two levels at which the counter system works. The first is what you’d expect: anti-air units counter air units, units with bonus damage to armor counter mechanical units etc. The second is more interesting though - build orders counter one another. Say two players are playing optimally, then from the start of the game there is relatively limited number of game states that can be reached by a certain time. For example, if you fast expanded, and you played optimally so you have no wasted resources, then your army must be smaller than someone who didn’t expand, assuming they instead spent the resources you put into your expansion on growing their army. That means there’s a window of vulnerability in your build that someone who scouts you and notices it can exploit. Similarly, if you can make it to a high threat unit like flying or cloaked units before your opponent can build a counter, then you can do a tonne of damage until the counter comes onto the field, which is another window of vulnerability. SC players call attacks that exploit these windows timing attacks. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist to the same degree in DoW2 and I find it fascinating.

My builds, however, have thus far been one big protracted window of vulnerability. I feel like I’m getting somewhat more comfortable with my macro, but because I’m playing random I haven’t really had a chance to firm in any particular build orders, so my early games are always kinda slapdash. I’m a long way off doing proper timing attack.

I played another 9 games last night, going 4 wins, 5 losses. 6 games were in my placement matches which unsurprisingly put me into the bronze league. My placement games saw me winning 4 of 6 games. Game 1 was TvZ in which my opponent massed only lings and I crushed him with marines, marauders, and medivacs. Game 2 was ZvP in which my hydra massing failed and I was overrun by a mixed force of zealots, stalker, and sentries. I never even managed to scout his gateways, and I expanded at an inopportune moment. Game 3 was TvT in which we both went marines and siege tanks, but my push reached his doorstep first and I denied him the expansion whilst expanding myself. He managed to reach air, but it wasn’t enough to help him. Game 4 was TvP in which I pulled off a surprisingly effective reaper harass, killing a lot of probes and forcing him to cancel his expansion twice! This prompted him to build a lot of photon cannons, which was good for me because at the same time I teched up to siege tanks and he conceded once they reached his ramp. Game 5 was a ZvZ in which he massed roaches whilst I went for fast hydras and got crushed. I don’t entirely know why, but I think it was because of some of some miss-micro in moving my units around causing me to lose early hydras. He compounded his advantage by throwing in mutalisks and denying my expansion twice! I feel like I could have won this game if only I’d been more attentive, but roaches are really strong so there’s not much room for error. In game 6 it was PvP in which I cheesily quick teched to void rays and he conceded since he had no counter. After all this, I was finally placed into the bronze league at something like 17th place.

Feeling chuffed from a reasonable number of victories and confident that my fellow bronze leaguers would all be noobs, I forged ahead into ranked games and got CRUSHED three times in a row.

My first league game was wierd. It was TvT and initially we both went for a marine and tank build, but I beat him to the punch and contained him whilst he played very passively. Thinking that I had this game in the bag I showily teched to battle cruisers, but I mounted my attack from across a gap, which was cool because he couldn’t fight back, but I also couldn’t advance my ground army to support. This meant that my push was slow and he was able to mass AA faster than I could mass cruisers allowing him to make a come back. The game could have been very different if I’d just attacked up his ramp like a normal person, rather than trying to show off. My second and third games were even less spectacular. In both cases I tried to cheese and got shut down - serves me right! The second game was ZvT in which I tried to roach rush, only to discover it doesn’t really work against a walled in Terran. He easily held off my initial push, then went MMM and banshees. I had no AA and my army was too small from having been thrown away on his wall, so I just crumbled. The third game was PvP in which I walled in and tried to void ray rush, but got shut down by mass stalkers. Undeterred I teched to carriers, but was only able to get 3 out before he attacked with his stalker blob and made short work of them. If I’d gone for a mothership as well I think I might have been okay.

My macro is getting marginally better, but as I said, I’m questioning the wisdom of playing random every game, since it doesn’t really give me an opportunity to refine my builds. I think I’m going to keep going random for another 20 games, just so that I get a more solid feel for what each race can do, then pick a race to specialize in. Currently I’m thinking either Zerg or Protoss. Terran is waaaaaay too fiddly, although they do have the best music by a long way.

Last night I had another crack at the SC2 beta and tried basically the same thing on the same map, but this time with a Protoss opponent. This time I pulled off the build more efficiently, but my opponent was much more aggressive. By the time I’d massed 8 Mutalisks he had a large mixed force of zealots and stalkers. I panicked and tried to kill off his stalkers with my mutas but given that they’re pretty much a hard counter to mutas that didn’t go to well. When I saw I was losing the battle, I pulled back the dregs of my muta army and tried to spam zerglings, but his zealots were already ripping through my main base, destroying my spawning pool and spire. I tried to attack with a combined force of lings and mutas, but miss-microed and ended up with my mutas attacking first and getting smashed by his stalkers again. My lings then arrived and managed to kill off his first wave of stalkers, but his zealots finished off my lings and then a wave of reinforcements arrived. With no tech buildings to build units I was forced to concede. I had floated almost 2k minerals, which I ought to have spent on lings or roaches, but I wasn’t expecting such a large ground attack force.

Peli also had a crack at SC2 with me watching on. His matchup was Protoss vs Terran and lasted a good 40 minutes. Watching him was interesting because it clearly showed how unintuitive some elements of SC2 are. For instance he would always right click to attack buildings or a specific unit, when what he really wanted to do was attack-move to a place, and as a result he several times sent his army marching past enemy units to their deaths. He also had a tendency to not rally a large enough force, attacking without enough AA to counter the banshees that his opponent was building, so the game lasted longer than it should have, given his economic advantage. Hotkeys and control groups also fell by the wayside, which hurt his game. Other than those things though, he grasped pretty well what was going on and managed to claw out a victory in his first match.

With trepidation I logged in to the Starcraft 2 beta using the account that I’d borrowed from a friend of mine last night. I’d prepared a bit for playing my first game ever by reading a bit around on how to get started with the original Starcraft, but that doesn’t alter the fact that 1v1 RTS games are among the most stressful and unforgiving gaming experiences out there, so much so in fact that I stopped playing 1v1 DoW2 because it was too stressful for me.

SC2 blows DoW2 out of the water in terms of complexity and attentional demands. In DoW2 I feel like it would be possible to micro every unit on the field basically optimally at the top tier of play, but in SC2 the armies are so large that doing that would be impossible. From my reading on the original game I took away that as a newbie I should not worry too much about trying to micro my army and instead focus on macro, building my economy, expanding, and producing units without floating resources. This is an aspect of SC2 which doesn’t really exist at all in DoW2 in which the only thing you can build is power generators, so it was a bit of a radical shift in focus for me, but I set my sights upon that being what I’d try to focus on in my first game.

I chose random race, clicked the automatch button and within a few seconds was paired up with a zerg opponent. Once the map loaded I saw the familiar Zerg hatchery greeting me; I’d rolled a mirror match with me playing probably the least intuitive race in the game. It took a few seconds for me to realize that building drones is actually a 2 step process for Zerg, you have to select larvae and then morph them, which confused me for slightly. After that some of my memory of SC1 kicked in an I started pumping drones continuously. “Heya this is my first game, go easy on me” I said. My opponent responded “Don’t worry I’m using a trackball.” Poor guy! I chilled out a bit since him having no mouse probably meant I’d have a control advantage.

I queued up waypoints for a scout drone to check all the mineral points on the map and then went back to spamming drones. A little later I noticed a drone running around inside my base and thought “Damn he’s scouted me already!” before realizing that it was actually my own drone, which had been unable to actually get out of my base because of the new destructible rocks feature in SC2 blocking my base’s choke point. Having discovered this I figured: Okay, so that means I can probably boom safely and then rush to Mutalisks. I sent out my overlords to scout, and found him before losing my scout overlord to a small army of queens.

From here I executed a really bad boom and Muta tech strategy, which saw me floating thousands of minerals despite me trying my hardest to spend it all as soon as I got it. In retrospect I should have blasted my way through my rocks much earlier and expanded with the extra money, or at least built some turrets to defend against any Mutas he may have been building. To eat up my minerals I eventually ended up pumping roaches, which I had read were imba, and smashing my way out to expand a few times, but by that time my Muta army was just about online. They hit his natural expansion just as he was starting to mass a much smaller army of Mutas, which I quickly blasted before his queens could move to support them. I then knocked out the queens and destroyed his expansion, forcing a GG with a fat army of Mutas in the air, a blob of Roaches bashing his destructible rocks, and 3 expansions building at various points around the map. I was still floating thousands of minerals like a total noob, but managed to at least spend all my gas by spamming Mutas.

Looking at the post game stats I saw that my economy score was at least twice his. He’d built a reasonably large ground army, but hadn’t spammed drones as hard as I had, and the army never made it out of his base because of the destructible rocks. I may actually have been in trouble if he’d come out of his base earlier in the game, but focusing on macro really did win me the game in this case.

The whole game I felt like a total klutz. I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do, but my control over the game was mediocre and I was floating horribly. I dread to think what the experience must be like for someone who has never played SC before or even never played an RTS game before, looking at the bewildering array of options and trying to figure out what the heck they’re supposed to do. SC2 is also massively aulde skewle. It’s very focused on building up your economy with workers, research, and production buildings, in contrast to extremely micro focused games like DoW2 or CoH. I’m not entirely sure whether I like that, though it may just have to do with my skill level.  Nevertheless I was pumped enough from playing my first game to make me want to try the game some more and get more of a feel for how it plays. It remains to be seen though whether the gameplay is appealing enough for it to replace DoW2 as my RTS of choice.

Mistress S and I had our second round of games in the unranked DoW rooms tonight. We played three matches, winning our final match through a take and hold victory! Hooray for our first win!

We played all three games on Biffy’s Peril, which is the map with 4 relics and a critical location in the center. I still feel hugely incompetent controlling my guys and make large numbers of unforced errors. I’m discovering that the secret to being slightly less overwhelmed is to set up automation for some of the niggly stuff, like giving my cappers way points to go and take points one after another without me having to micro them or setting my barracks rally point to be my Tau Commander. Putting my barracks and vehicle beacon on overwatch proved handy for keeping down my float and getting an army up with little effort, but I’m guessing it’s not how the pros do things. I also found out that you can set the default stance for units produced in the Barracks by pressing the hotkey corresponding to that stance while the building is selected.

I’ve been trying to do the classic Tau opening of TC + Vespids, but have screwed it up every single time. My Vespids have rarely lived beyond their first few feeble attempts to kill a generator. It takes a pretty serious amount of micro to get your guys into the enemy base and smashing things up within 45 secs of the game starting, but it can be done and I’m determined to get it down pat.

In the first game my Vespid rush went okay! I managed to hit the Space Marine player while he was (unbeknownst to me) teching up to Grey Knights and managed to take out a generator and an LP. Shortly thereafter he chased me out of his base with Grey Knights. At that point I realized that I’d spent way too much time microing my Vespids and not enough time building my economy, meaning I was behind in capping and unit building. I pumped out a squad of Firewarriors which proved to be completely useless against Grey Knights. In the meantime Mistress S had been harassed by a Stealth Suit decapping one of her strategic points and had forgotten that she needed Guardians with Warlocks to see them, rather than a Farseer. Before realised her mistake the damage was already done and her economy was on the back foot. From there we wilted under pressure from Grey Knights and massed Firewarrriors. It was a bit of a debacle.

In the second game I futzed about and got my Vespids killed without really doing anything. I spent the rest of the game franticly ordering around units to do nothing effectual, whilst simultaneously failing to build my economy or tech up. I basically ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, got pushed back into my base, then ended up putting my Vehicle Beacon and Barracks on overwatch to suck up the huge amount of req and power that I was floating and pushed back out to the middle. Our opponents held the center point and got a take and hold victory. We thought we’d been completely outclassed, but when we looked around the battle field after our loss it became clear that all their stuff was dead except for the dregs holding the center.

In the third game we pulled a similar trick to that which our opponents had pulled on us in the last game. My start went a lot better and so did Mistress S’ tech. I still lost my Vespids in a hostile Necron base, but at least I got them in there really fast! My Stealth Suit expansion turned out much better than previously, capping 2 relics in the center plus the middle point, which ended up winning us the match by default. I even manged to get down LPs on most of my points. The low points were my Vespids repeatedly dying and my Kroot suiciding onto mass Fire Warriors. I could barely keep track I what I was doing myself, so Mistress S’ troops turning up to support me seemed positively miraculous.

With dual boot capabilities finally in place on Mistress S’ Macbook we were able to play our first games of 2v2 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade yesterday. We lost 3 out of 3 fights, which was fairly disheartening, but we analyzed what we did wrong and hopefully are learning from our mistakes. The last game we played was quite close and at one point it looked like we might win, so it’s not like we’re a lost cause.

I’ve decided to play Tau, because I love their aesthetic and I like the idea of smashing things with hardcore shooty infantry. Mistress S is going Eldar, because they’re strong and also they incidentally have a female leader. This means that we’re both jumping into two noob-unfriendly, micro-intensive races. Hooray! I expect us to get smashed over and over before we start to get any good.

Our first two games were on Biffy’s Peril, which has 4 starting locations linked via ramps to a central area containing relics, power, and a central critical location protected by heavy cover, all surrounded by negative cover rivers. Our basic plan was to build an army and hold the center. In game one we were playing against Necron and Chaos. Our initial push towards the Chaos player was repelled, and my Fire Warriors were constantly locked up in CC from that point on. Spending too much time trying to dance my thoroughly countered Fire Warriors left me floating a whole stack of resources which should have been pumped into building my economy and teching. We discovered at our expense that only Eldar can use Webway Gates, so I found myself stuck in Mistress S’ base at one point, trying to get back to my own to defend, but having to run all the way back when I’d thought I could teleport. It didn’t help that Mistress S wasn’t used to using her Macbook keyboard to handle hotkeys, and so kept pressing the function key instead of control, and then later wondered why her control groups were all screwed up.

In the end we got out spent, out teched, and out played. I needed a counter to the chaos CC troops, which I did get in the form of some Kroot, but it was too little too late. I didn’t expand aggressively with my Stealth Suits after taking the obvious close points. Things that we did do right are that we fought near turrets and on ledges, which help us beat some superior armies. Mistress S got Howling Banshees to help vs. CC and I ended up teching to Sky Rays with missile barrage, which would have been decent had they not come so late.

Game 2 was on the same map against double Chaos. This game went slightly better, but one Chaos player massed Heavy Bolters early, which totally countered our infantry for some time. It didn’t help that I left my Kroot on attack stance, which let them be lured into the Heavy Bolter clump and be killed in seconds. We managed to keep a presence on our half of the central area and teched up to tier 4, but we were slow in doing it. They also beat us to vehicles, which meant we were doubly on the back foot, particularly since I forgot to get Broadsides to defend our position and I learned the hard way that Fire Warriors suck pretty badly against vehicles. Mistress S’ army frequently found themselves in combat without me noticing, letting our opponents get a few 2v1 fights, which went badly for us.

Eventually I got Sky Rays, which smashed the Heavy Bolter clumps, particularly combined with Eldritch Storm. They teched into Defilers which Mistress S countered somewhat with Firedragons, but in the end they swarmed us with a better economy and pushed through our base defenses. I got out a Greater Gnarloc, but it couldn’t take on a Bloodthirster and Daemon Prince at the same time. Again we found ourselves outplayed with a lot of req floating that could have been spent on something that might have helped us.

Game 3 was against IG and Necron on a map that had a single choke point dividing the teams’ starting bases. We suspected IG would go heavy turret, and were right, so we fast teched to try and get something to deal with the turrets. Necron pushed through in the meantime, but we had enough troops hanging around to fight them since IG didn’t support them, giving us a 2v1 fight. We managed to tech well, but couldn’t work out what the heck we really needed to break through the turret wall. I suspected I needed Sky Rays, but couldn’t get a Stealth Suit close enough to target them without getting shot. I now know that I probably needed Path Finders. Throughout the game there were a goodly number of skirmishes fought in the choke point in which Missile Barrage was really punishing and out units managed to hold off several waves of attack. We even managed to push through their lines all the way to the back of their base, before being forced to retreat by a Baneblade. I teched to tier 4 and got an Ethereal with the thought of using Air Caste Strike to smash through the turrets, but I never got the opportunity.

Things were looking like a stalemate, until they got Basilisk artillery and the Necron Monolith came online, then things started looking very bad indeed. Most of Mistress S’ base had to relocate due to continued shelling, and my base was being harassed by the Monolith jumping in and out. We were able to pound it when it came in and force it to teleport back, but it did a lot of damage each time, which we couldn’t fully rebuild and became a big drain on our resources. Mistress S gave them a taste of their own medicine, jumping some Warp Spiders and Grav Platform units into their base, but their harassment was more effective. Ultimately I ought to have backed her up with Vespids and Stealth Suits.

Finally, the game wound to an end after a long fight, with us eventually losing the battle of attrition, having no real counter to the massed Basilisks that could attack us without fear. A final wave of attacks from the Monolith and Baneblade combined broke the back of our defense. I think that we played incorrectly and that we should have completely circumvented their turrets, going for a Stealth Suit, Vespid, and Warp Spider attack on their base far earlier, preventing them from developing whilst we teched up. Once they had the Basilisks online we had no real answer, which was an irritating consequence of the race match up. Also I realize now that I needed Path Finders to be able to get my Sky Rays to out range their turrets, which would have made punching into their base earlier in the game a whole lot more feasible.

Last night I went along with a bunch of friends to CityHunter net cafe on Sussex Street. I’d discovered that they have both World in Conflict and Team Fortress 2 installed there and was keen to give them both a shot. We all rocked up at around 10pm and staggered off home after 5 hours of rip-roaring video gaming fun. We had none of the problems that had often plagued us at CityHunter, such as incorrectly configured installations, although several people’s machines crashed while playing WiC. It was a very satisfying gaming experience.

WiC was the hit of the night. Several people there had never played it before but quickly got the hang of things, especially MadAdam, who was running and gunning with his infantry in no time. We tried several different formats: All vs. AI, 4v2 and 3v3 and I think that ultimately 3v3 was best, but having 2 more players would have made it gold. The absolute best thing about the game is that it’s easy for people to just jump into and play. One of the big problems with getting a fair sized group of people to play most RTS games is that you have to wait for everyone to be ready, which isn’t true of WiC since you can just fire up a server and have people jump in when they’re ready. There’s also no player elimination, which is one of the most serious downsides of most RTS games, since it means people sitting around bored whilst waiting for the other players to finish.

I racked up some serious kills as infantry, which is now without a doubt my favourite role. The fact that you can counter any units (aside from artillery) by yourself and also hide in forests makes them great fun to play, if a little micro intensive. I particularly enjoy locking down a point then sallying out across the map in choppers or trucks to cause mischief, or paradropping behind enemy lines, hiding in forests, and causing mayhem.

Team Fortress 2 was also a hit, which made me very happy. Again, we had people playing who’d never played it or the original, but had a great time. With small numbers of players a sentry gun can really make a big difference in a map. Also, the map sizes for most of the conquest-style maps are quite appropriate for small teams, particularly the maps where there’s a roughly linear route between command points that need to be captured since they channel the small number of players into the same area. The highlight of the game was certainly the medic and double heavy weapons guy defense put up by Mistress S, Valenos, and I on the final control point of (I think) Well. Both classes are so much better than they were in the original QWTF. With her healing us, we were practically immortal and managed to hold out for a good 5 minutes of frantic capping attempts before they finally snuck through and won.

We also had a crack at Starcraft, which was aulde skewl. That game has not aged terribly well! The graphics were understandably dated, the resolution is pathetically low, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what half the stuff in the game did. I remember did that battlecruisers rock though and also that there’s no such thing as too many SCVs, so I pumped out both like there was no tomorrow. I blitzed Valenos’ base and expansions before finally succumbing to a horde of carriers backed by arbiters. I’d completely forgotten that stasis totally rocks out and it effortlessly neutralized my carrier horde. IMBA!

There will certainly be a repeat performance and I particularly hope that WiC will become a staple of our gaming group.