Can't disagree with you, when playing C&C it was all about the economy system and number crunching units; Red Alert 3 especially.Problem was, for Halo Wars this boiled down to the same thing when I played. There were rock paper sciccors blancing, like with Command in Conquer, which in theorey works, however ultimatley it was unit strength in numbers overpowering positions, and very agressive styles of play that dominated immensley.
However lacking the similar ecomic reliance also meant a shift in agressive tactics. Sure I would agree about with about with diverse units, however endgame did seem to consistently boil down to a large mass selection, then pushing into the enemies large central base.
Which is why I consider Supreme Commander to be a much better RTS (than the lot of them); however Halo Wars just didn't feel console minded at all. It took the Dune 2 template, that C&C had, then re applied it for gamepad comands. Things like Unit selection slowed down the game considerably and felt unintuitive; which affected the pacing (comparing to C&C3's macro tiberium pump). C&C'3 unit offering (even with the scrin side) was pretty diverse, offering an interesting scope; however when playing with like minded friends, who didn't unit rush made for insteresting strategies; sabotage, teleporting units hit and runs.
But that is from my playing experience, and looking at the game design of either games; I didn't play much of either online, let alone competitivley.
Ultimatley, port a game like World in Conflict to any console platform, and it would work like an absolute charm.
skrat_01
I was upset when World in Conflict got canceled for the 360, that game looked great and really I wanted to give it a try (I didn't have a pc back then so the only way I would have played it is on the 360) I also didn't try supreme commander 2 as well, so again I can't really comment on that. If it had come out sooner I probably would have gotten it, but by the time it did come out I figured I would just use halo wars and even possibly CnC to tie me over until StarCraft 2 comes releases and I stop playing all other games for a while :P
But anyway, I kinda did play CnC and HW competitively. I was by no means the greatest at either of those games, but between the two I just found Halo Wars to be the better experience semi-competitively speaking. As far as controls go I won't lie, I did like CnC's better for the most part. It gave me more control over my units which is good. Halo wars took the other end of the spectrum though which kinda worked in it's own right however. I would almost never use the secondary abilities of my units in CnC because they were too much of a hassel to use. I didn't like taking 3 seconds in the middle of a battle to open up a menu and select an ability of a specific unit, whereas in halo wars your unit's secondary abilities were only a single button press away. I know that not all of the units in CnC have secondary abilities, and that not all the abilities need to be used in such an urgent fashion, but what I am trying to get at is that I found Halo Wars controls to be easier to use and I got faster results from them most of the time when you include all the hot-keys (which for some reason they never gave a list or told us about all of them which I found to be really stupid on ensembles part). I don't understand how you thought unit selection was slowed down in comparison to CnC's could you explain more specifically what you thought the problem was? I mean in many regards they were actually kind of similar (select all, select all on screen, select all of this type on screen etc.) In any case I would have personally liked a control scheme that is sort of in-between HW and CnC, one that was better streamlined than CnC's, but more complex than HW's.
Now, when I read your second paragraph I couldn't tell which game you were talking about at first, because both games kinda come down to that from my experiences with them. In CnC you are just going to end up with a large army no matter what, and in halo wars you kinda need a sizable army to take down those bases. They have a lot of health and to take them down "quickly" you need a good amount of units. So, I don't know what to tell you about that. If you are attacking a base then you are either trying to go for the kill, or you are trying to harass and kill a specific building or two in order to get the edge on your opponent before they can try and stop you.
Also, as it has been said before, CnC is a fast paced game with the focus being on aggressiveness. If you can find like minded people who play less aggressively then yeah, you can get a lot of interesting scenarios that you would never get in HW, but I mainly focused on playing competitively against random people for the most part, so I didn't really have those experiences as much simply because the game didn't allow for those scenarios to be as useful. Since I tried to play somewhat competitively for the most part I didn't use the crazy stuff that the game offered very often unless I was just messing with people and then I would just go all out with the crazy.
When messing with people in CnC3:TW I would do stuff like build a line of power plants all the way down the map, then put stealth generators and obelisks behind them, that way whenever they tried to bring an army towards my base they would just hit an invisible wall of death. They couldn't fire back at the obelisks either because the powerplants were blocking the armies line of sight and they were invisible so the computer would get confused and couldn't target it which meant it couldn't attack it, rofl. I would just slowly build this wall of death forward until it was in their base and then I would win. Kind of a D-bag thing to do, but they gave me enough time to do that so it's their own fault.
Yup, you can never get that type of hilarious experience in HW, but I still found that from a competitive stand point that HW was better (on the 360 at least).
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