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).
bobderwood97_1
Oh I haven't played C&C 3 on the 360 I do own it and KW on the PC, my problem with HW was in general with the controls especially unit selection (group units especially) - waiting for the selection radius to expand, or picking individual units etc. While I know there are serious limitations, I do think it could have been done better, and effected the pace less, making the game a bit faster. However I didn't know I could group units.Otherwise I can defiantly empathise with your points; I didn't get into playing either competitively, the matches of C&C I did play online boiled down to rushes, which were infuriating; with RTS games in general it is true, a leveling playing field is best. But as far as the scope of tactics employed with C&C, i'd have to look at the WCG replays to get a better idea - of how it is competitively played, but i'd certainly believe Halo Wars is much better on the 360 in this regard.
The tactics you meantioned is what I mean by flair. With an RTS you are essentially given a toolset to beat your enemy with, and the creativity in how you can use it makes the game a whole lot more engaging and personal - as well as expanding the tactical scope; things like the economy system also increase the complexity (surpreme commander 1 did it brilliantly). With Halo Wars the creative use of units was decent, however it couldn't say it was as good as C&C3's - structures also being something that is important if you choose to put them in your game.
I think the problem inheritantly lies with this brand of RTS design for consoles -the base building, resource gathering, then building loads of small multiple units and micromanaging. It just doesn't suit the functionality of a gamepad - half the challenge is fighting the UI or the limitations then actually focusing on the strategy.
Which is why World in Conflict would be great. Sure it has no base building and you generally control a very limited amount of units (and call in a variety of support options), however the gameplay is very fast paced and team oriented like Battlefield games; it very much about unit coordination, and timing. This style of game over XBL with a gamepad would work perfectly.
Supreme Commander on the other hand... I really don't know how the first would have worked on the 360 in its port because even for a PC RTS it is very fiddly and extremely complex. However the scope of tactical and strategic options is immense, one of the most remarkable things about the game. I have only played the demo of the second, however as a friend put it (and from what I read), it feels more like a large scale command and conquer game than Sup Com.
Honestly, if the genere is really going to kickoff on a console it really needs to not only be built from the ground up for it, but look elsewhere in regard to how it's game design will function; instead of adapting something to a gamepad, or over simplifying something. It is all very doable too.
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