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I bet you can buy it for less than $20.00 now...

I've been a huge RTS game fan since my first, WC2. Since then, I've played almost any RTS I can get my hands on, and I have to say bar none, Sacrifice is the best RTS game ever, and for me, best GAME I've ever played. I've been playing it almost a year now, and it continues to get more and more entertaining. Even the newer generation RTS games don't compare (Empire Earth, Battle Realms).

Sac is the first RTS I've played where tactics are just as important as strategy. Those mostly unused RTS features like formations have a big impact on the outcome of battles. Micromanagement is often worthwhile. Mass units are far from a guaranteed win like some RTS games, and because the resource management is light, Sac is just pure in-your-face action. Not to mention you're right on the battlefield along with your troops :)

Another benefit to the light resource management is that it's very possible to lose your whole army, run off to a corner of the map, summon a whole new army, and be back in the game. Depending on the game length, this usually happens many, many times over on both sides. With traditional RTS games, once you're overpowered, you're done for.

If you're an RTS fan and you haven't played Sacrifice, you should, or else you're doing yourself a disservice. Even the single player campaign is well done (imagine, a game with great voice acting and a cool story!). There's 5 different gods, each with a set of 11 unique units, many with special abilities. Each god grants ~8 unique spells to your wizard as well. The depth is just amazing, and yet, it's still very well balanced.

Best of all, single player runs under Linux using Transgaming's WineX :)

www.sacrifice.net

is Shiny's Sacrifice! It almost requires a GeForce or later to run, but has a style of gameplay I haven't seen before. You play from a third person view as the general of your army on a huge island. It's worth looking at if you haven't seen it. Wine even emulates it.

Go out and purchase "Sacrifice". It is an RTS game where you have a definite character. You are a wizard who can summon creatures to fight other wizards. You will be running around in the middle of the battle commanding your creatures and casting spells. You can even be killed, but usually you come back to life rather soon. (Only when you have lost do you not come back to life.)

Tim

I was going to make the same comment, but since you beat me to it, I'll just add to your comment.
Anyone want to make a quick buck? Make a FPS with online capabilities that has great graphics. The end.
Doesn't this bug any of you? ID *used* to make innovative games (they invented the FPS). Now they are just the company that comes out with the newest FPS engine. Why not use the 'sacrifice' engine? I don't think the "greater polygon" is needed as much as the "full outdoor feel" that is used in sacrifice (sacrifice.net for the webpage, btw).
From the previous posts ran yesterday, I think that ID needs to stop worrying about adding polygons, and start worrying about what totally new innovations haven't the gaming community seen.

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If you are looking for something dissimilar to anything they will have played before, try the game Sacrifice. It is an RTS/FPS hybrid with a fantasy theme, very cool, and very different from any other games.

Their FPS Strafing and aiming skills won't help them since your creatures, not you, do most of the actual fighting, and their RTS "Built a lot of peon" skills won't help them either, as there isn't any traditional resource gathering.

Learning curve isn't too bad, just make sure they are all given a good 3 button/wheel mouse, it is essential for controlling the camera.

Tim

As a god you, over time, become either good or evil. You are presented with quests to help you define yourself. One example is that of a missing boy, his father asks you to help him find the boy, you could either bring the boy to the father, or do something evil like kill the boy, drop him in front of the father, and then kill the father for asking.

The interface is especially interesting, as spells will be cast with mouse movements. By shaking the mouse over the screen you can create a fireball to hurl at your opponents and there are many variations on every movement to make the spell weaker/stronger or have a diffrent effect. This game will support multiplayer, but your character will be perserved from single player; You can play SP till you feel comfortable with your character/famaliar, then jump into the swarming masses and show your hand.

The AI is what is most impressive about this game, Lionhead has taken games to a new level by having you teach a famaliar who takes the shape of an animal in the game ranging from a cow to possibly a dragon (there are secrect titans hidden throughout the game) and the animal, infused with a bit of your power, becomes a titan. The way you treat your Titan and what you teach him to do, and how you do it, will help form what kind of titan it becomes. If you teach it to eat your villagers when it gets hungry, then your villagers will learn to run away when they see it coming, and your Titan will become evil in the process. The teaching system isn't a matter of making a few simple decisions and then your Titan becomes exactly what you want him to be, it is a test of your patience, and endurance, and of your personality, putting a little bit of you into the game.

Unfortunatly, Neutraliaty isn't really an option in the game, as the really powerfull spells/abilities come from being truly as good or evil as possible. Also, you have no direct control over the units in the game, you have to persuade them to do things for you, like make the villagers worship you by showing them a bit of your power and encouraging them, or encouraging them in a diffrent way by making an example of someone who doesn't worship.

As for the graphics, it looks quite a bit like the recently released game Sacrifice which is a third person role playing real time strategy game, which doesn't look bad at all (and plays nice). As long as the game doesn't look like something I might play on an Atari, who cares? While Black & White might be a good topic for a thread, why use the screenshots to bring it up?

More info on B&W can be found at BWVault, one of the oldest BW Fansites that didn't bottom out.

There are people out there fighting the good fight. Its difficult, and the odds are against you, but truly different and original games are being made right now.

(Shameless plug alert) Take a look at Sacrifice

Oxryly

Sacrifice looked to be the most well-crafted game at E3 and a lot of fun. It's ludicrous to eulogize the RTS as "dead and buried" while praising the very fresh and playable Homeworld and eliding upcoming games that are actively reinventing the genre like Sacrifice, Black and White and Halo. Gamecenter's eulogy for the RTS convinces me only that they dislike some recent RTS games so much that they've become jaded on the subject.