The Batlord's Attempt at a Life of StarCraft

The Batlord · 10-07-2016, 11:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Plankton

I hear ya. I've logged hundreds of hours on C&C. I used to play with my good buddy Jimmy (disc golf dude) where we had everything networked in his home through a couple PC's. We were both really good at it, so most of the battles were pretty epic. This was 15 years ago, and I realize things are quite a bit different now. I still fire up C&C through MagicISO (CD imagaing tool) every now and then, and destroy a few AI army's.

Still, after checking out a couple of the vids you posted, SC looks really similar and I kinda wanna play it now.

Which C&C? 2016 - 15 = 2001. So... Generals? Red Alert 2? Tiberium Sun? Red Alert 2 was my first RTS and I played that game so much that it's become embedded into my gamer DNA. Would love to have played on a LAN, but I only knew one other person who played and dragging either of our computers to the other's house wasn't really an option.

And StarCraft is definitely more complex than C&C, which is a much more casual friendly series. Each of the three factions plays completely differently, from unit and building types to how you build... everything. So you almost have to learn three games at once if you want to be at all good with more than just one race.

The mechanics are also more subtle and hard to master. For example, in C&C you can queue up units to be built and forget about them until they're done, but in SC, while you can still queue up units, it automatically takes resources for each unit queued even if they're not being built yet, unlike C&C. So it's bad strategy to queue up units since that will be money that is not being used that could go to other things, meaning that you have to be Johnny-on-the-spot with remembering to build units constantly, meaning that you have to constantly shift your attention from the other million things you have to be doing at any one time in order to check on your build times, meaning that you have to hotkey your unit-producing structures to save all the time you would otherwise waste on manually checking them, and then you have to learn how to do all this by instinct.

I'd tell you how satisfying it feels to finally get that **** down, but I'm still hopelessly terrible ATM.