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Saturday 9 February, 2008
Gamelog #3
Entry #2
GAMEPLAY
For my second hour, I played a single player skirmish as the Americans and with difficulty set to normal. A significant difference in gameplay, it did not take long for my opponent to sail over from his island and quickly destroy everything, forcing me to restart. After I restarted I played smarter, building a sizeable army at the very beginning. This round was more evenly matched, which more or less resulted in the two of us racing to achieve more technology than the other. Because we were both confined to our own small island, it was difficult for both of us to attack, since we had well place turrets and giant forts and armies, I crushed him whenever he attacked me and he crushed me whenever I attacked him, although I did manage to raze some of his buildings. Eventually my eyes started to hurt, so I had to stop.
Again I learned more about the mechanics of the game. This time I learned how to acquire technology resource (by garrisoning citizens in universities and priests in temples) and what they are used for (resource upgrades and advancing through epochs or civilizations). I also partially learned how to advance through the different epochs, although I am still not sure what allows you to advance in the first place.
DESIGN
This game is very similar to Age of Empires. It has civilians gathering resources and building structures, separate buildings that produce different unit (barracks for soldiers, stables for cavalry, etc) and various different resources to collect such as food and gold (unlike requisition by holding command posts in games like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes).
One of the unique characteristics I liked about this game is the technology resource and technology upgrade system. Unlike other RTS games like Dawn of War and Age of Empires where you shovel out food or requisition for an upgrade, you put citizens in a university and it is equivocally the same as them studying up on how to manage resources better. Also another aspect I liked was how territory was organized and how control of it was maintained by building certain buildings, like the city center. It is similar to how in Age of Mythology, there are certain number of settlements where one could build a town center on. In Empire Earth, however, each territory limits the number of certain buildings that can be built (i.e. only one university and a maximum of six houses can be built).
One of the things that frustrated me was that there were too many resources to manage. While I do prefer RTS games that require more than just two resources, it was very hard to keep track of which resources were low. Also the tin, iron, and stone resource look very similar to each other, which made me think at times I was getting all I needed or could on the map when really I was completely missing out on a certain type of resource. Also, most RTS games have the ability to give consecutive commands to a unit by holding down the shift key (such as left clicking on part of a map and then another part of the map, making the selected unit go to the first left click first, then go to the second click instead of immediately going to the second click). This made it harder for me to explore the map. While there is an option to have a unit explore, it usually goes about it in a random order. Also, ctrl doesn’t allow the user to deselect certain units when a big group of units are highlighted. This makes it difficult when troops are near civilians. I have to first move the civilian out of the way if I want to select only troops.
One of the things I noticed is that unlike most other RTS games where you have to manage a balance between workers and military units, you didn’t really have to in this game. The squad cap was extremely large. I never came close to maxing it out. I’m not sure if I would consider this a good thing or a bad thing. In general I like the challenge of having to be wary of not creating too many workers; I think it helped balance out the need to more effectively manage resources.
This game has a lot of the RTS elements I would like to implement in my own game, the technology resource being a big one. I’m not sure about the territory concept; it’d be a little hard to do. I’d definitely pull back on the number of different resources, especially since mine would already limit the amount of freedom on the user. Also, instead of using individual units like this game uses, I’d ideally use squads like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. This is still a great game and I’ll probably be constantly coming back to it.
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