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Warhammer Mark Of Chaos - How Is The RTS?
Steven Williamson writes "HEXUS.gaming's resident wood elf, Steven W, jumped at the chance to take the eye-opening trip to the Games Workshop HQ in Nottingham, home to the unique venue that is Warhammer World.
What started out as a run-of-the-mill press event to see the latest real-time tactics videogame set in the Warhammer universe ended up capturing my imagination and quashing any previous hang-ups I almost certainly had about the people who played Warhammer and indeed the tabletop game that has spawned this latest PC game, Warhammer: MOC."
Champions have been a major feature of Warhammer Fantasy Battle long before the Warcraft authors played Dune 2...
This post is awesome.
No punctuation sentence fragments very hard to underst
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Is that the comic book guy on the bottom-left side of the photo?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Hangups? What, people who play Warhammer are too nerdy for the slashdot crowd?
Yeah, I play 4 different GW games, I'm sure that they will be much better than any Warhammer computer game, at least until Age of Reckoning comes out...
Alas, no. Just monday morning slashdot posts pre-coffee.
Now, work am off to I do time no more waste.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
This guy is really enthusiastic. You have to dig through the dythirambic spew to get the meat. At least you can't have the standard GW step 3 aka buy tons of figurines at high cost. Yeah I skewed against them, cry me a river
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Well, Warhammer had unit champions way before W3 was even planned. And they're not at all like the unique Warcraft characters; each unit can have a champion. They're kinda like squad leaders.
Leveling up builds character.
What on earth prompted the inclusion of Skaven (rats, basically, for those of you playing at home) as a 'core' race over Orcs? Unless there's been a significant change since I last visited my local GW, Orcs have a far bigger following.
For the non-wargamers, this is akin to FIFA 2007 letting you play with Manchester City instead of Manchester United.
I'm not against the idea (of dropping either Orcs or Man U. *grin*), I just find it curious. Won't they have the same problem as with Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, when all the Imperial Guard players had a sook about not getting to play their army (except as a "Dog of War" in one mission)? Or is the percentage of people buying this game who actually come from the tabletop version so low that it just doesn't matter?
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
I used to work at GW. Both in the US, and across the pond [When they were located in Lenton, and for about 2 months after they relocated to the new building.]
:P [seriously]
.. so who knows.]
HUGE building, big spacemarine on the top. And, they have their own pub
Stuff like computer programs have ALWAYS been the bastard step child of the company. They are always Licence deals, and the company itself keeps creative control.
Little known fact, Blizzard entertainment origially wrote 'warcraft' to be a RTS of warhammer. Approached (i think it was) Steve Godber on the board, for a licencing deal, and was turned down. Instead the deal was given to Mindscape, who made 'Shadow of the Horned Rat' which was a colossal failure.
The guys at Blizzard were big Games-Workshop fans:
Warcraft = Warhammer
Starcraft = Warhammer 40k
Diablo = DungeonQuest / HeroQuest
I think the guys at Relic finally got it right, and that the Studio(At GW) finally got someone with a clue to make video game decisions. [although the MMORPG that they had going, died, but it seems that they moved the licence over to Relic
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Warhammer Mark Of Chaos How Is The RTS Homer no function beer well without.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
As I understand it, the difference is in the nature of the battle.
_ Red_Alert
RTT games are those where you start with a certian set of troops and have to guide those troops through an engagement. You don't normally get any more, and the game is usually over when that one battle is won or lost.
RTS games are larger, or longer - they are made up of many battles. You build a base, create armies and have several battles.
A good example of a RTS is Red alert, A good example of a RTT is Myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_(computer_game)
I find it strange that they found the RTS awe-inspiring as opposed to the amazing MMO being made by the *soon to form* EA Mythic. I can't imagine the guys at GW not *more* behind the up-and-comming MMO, especially with some crazy guy promoting it from his phone, and the fact that they had issues with the previous developer and could use all the confidence re-building behind this new game.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
It's about time that people stopped calling RTSes stratergy games and started refering to them as tactical.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Well the real time part is obvious (as in, not turn based), so the real issue is the difference between strategy and tactics.
To oversimplify it, a military strategy includes all the logistics of war, including the acquisition and allocation of resources, management of supplies, as well as the global movement and positioning of troops.
Tactics just refers to the specific maneuvering and commanding of troops engaged in combat.
So basically, how you command your units at your base, and where you choose to send your troops to engage in combat (such as which enemy locations or strongholds to attack first, etc.) are your strategy; and how you command your troops once they are in battle are your tactics.
So an RTS will include such elements as gathering resources, and then spending those resources on building structures and recruiting troops and units as a core element of the gameplay. A tactics game will focus mainly on how you micromanage your troops in battle, and leave the logistical elements such as recruiting or resource gathering either as secondary or completely separate.
A good example of the difference between tactics and strategy is seen in the Rome: Total War. They have a turn-based strategy portion of the game where you build structures in your cities, recruit your soldiers and move your armies around the world map. Then when a battle starts it switches over to a Real Time Tactics game, where all you are concerned with is ordering your troops around the battle map to win the encounter. When the battle is resolved it switches back to the world map and the strategy portion of the game.
I generally prefer tactics to strategy, as real time strategy is a bit unrealistic (building entire cities in the same time frame as it takes to fight a battle is just unrealistic to me), but the Total War mechanism of breaking those two elements apart works perfectly for me. It allows the strategy to take place over a time frame of months to years (as it should) and the tactics portion to take place over a matter of minutes to hours (as it should). I'm curious to see how this PC adaptation of Warhammer worked it out, as I enjoy a good RTT (and there aren't many).
Tactics is units, movement, and positioning.
Strategy is which units, resource management, and larger scale goals.
It's the macro/micro thing. Strategy is the macro, the big picture. Tactics is the micro, where the rubber meets the road.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
All of the above responses are correct, the problem is that RTS games have strategy elements in ADDITION to the tactics, rather than instead of the tactics.
I have always thought "How can this be a Strategy game if I have to spend half an hour maneuvering my group to the right spot and then hand position each one in their deffensive positions?"
A real strategy game (the kind Ive been waiting for) would allow you to define, create and maneuver Battalion level oragnizations, not individual units. Then the "Factories" (or whatever) would fill the organizations as needed instead of having to go to the factiry and say "Create 5 orcs and put them here".
This would allow players to focus on actual strategy elements.
It would be great. Create an empty unit, tell it what types of units to have, tell it to patrol my western flank. Then select some factories to "Fill out" the unit. Anytime it take casualties the factories will crank out replacements. Let me set behaviors for the organization as a whole and seperately for units with the organization (sort of like the original Earth 2150).
That would be so much more fun than the "Real Time Micro Management" games out there today.
I had the whole game designed at one point, but my programming skills blow.
Games Workshop is the Microsoft of the gaming world. Many RPG and Tabletop enthusiasts still have vivid memories of GW severly abusing their market power to push independent vendors to take minimum quantities of their stuff only to prepare and probe the market for their GW-only outlets in close proximity to these exact shops. This all started in the early to mid nineties.
GW is a mean bunch of quasi-monopolists pushing overpriced stuff and comes at position #2 for killing of diversity in the Tabletop/Fantasy/RPG Market - right after Magic.
As a result I don't buy stuff from them and encourage any Tabletopper to play game from other vendors. Warmachine from http://www.privateerpress.com/ is a very neat (I'd say better) alternative to Warhammer. Check it out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca