Comments on: Thoughts: Red Dragon.

By: SomeGuy

SomeGuy — Thu, 21 May 2015 11:46:31 +0000

I like the game except for the one thing.

The advertised Ships feature is actually worsr part of the game, so 90% people in multiplayer play land-only maps.

By: Everblue

Everblue — Fri, 02 May 2014 15:58:59 +0000

I got to platinum rank in Starcraft a couple of years ago playing only mech terran. I would love to go back, but played a few games and simply can’t cope with how terrible I am now. My MMR rating also has barely decayed it seems, as I am still matched with gold league players who murder me.

I’ve started playing Dota recently and am loving that game, albeit I am incredibly frustrated already with IDIOTS who feed the opposing team FOR GOD’S SAKE.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Fri, 02 May 2014 06:19:00 +0000

I’ve tried to think again about this problem. In Total War you have many different units too, but there’s not so much difference between units of similar role and at least you see unit’s primary role (light infantry, artillery etc). Here with your examples of how 1 letter change may mean that the unit has AA gun it’s much harder. And icons do not help, cause this “recon” or “transport” icon may mean that the vehicle has no weapons at all or that he’ll shoot my infantry from afar with machineguns.

Couldn’t they use some keywords? Or quick table rating like total war does? 3 stars vs armor, 1 star recon, 2 stars vs infantry?..

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 01 May 2014 17:31:15 +0000

My problem is that either anyone not fanatically devoted to Starcraft was scared off long ago or the matchmaking is hopelessly broken. I’m level 6. The lowest-ranked opponent I’ve played was 29. The highest-ranked was over 100.

I jumped into Warcraft III back in college, long after the game was out, and didn’t have an experience like this. I actually was decent as the Horde and more than once surprised opponents with my (now fondly-remembered) favored strategy.

Starcraft II is just a nightmare, though.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Thu, 01 May 2014 14:39:12 +0000

Today I’ve tried to play League of Legends cause Hearthstone dropped me to a 20 rank. After seeing some threats, insults and REPORT shouts I’ve remembered why I didn’t play LoL for so long. And they didn’t even insult *me*.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 01 May 2014 13:05:03 +0000

Every so often I think about trying Starcraft II multiplayer again, and then I remember how stressed just doing the five calibration games made me. It’s not for the faint of heart.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 20:21:49 +0000

I’ve recently been trying to get into Starcraft II and it is like punishment from God. You have my sympathies.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 21:15:17 +0000

This is part of my criticism of the focus on adding new units: there are so many that you have to boil them down to twenty-odd unit types which all function more or less the same way, and so adding more of each type is pretty meaningless. That it’s historically been so multiplayer-focused is another weakness of the series, since while the matches are stonking they do rely on you learning the minutiae of the units to do well.

However, against the computer you can get away with not knowing much of that stuff because the computer is particularly vulnerable to smart positioning of even awful units. It’ll happily run its armoured units straight into woods and towns full of infantry, for example, and so you can get away with a generalist approach based on the unit icons (which do explain unit role pretty well, although I’m not sure where they’re documented in Airland Battle). You don’t need to know the strengths and weaknesses of every individual type of ATGM to employ an ATGM team effectively: stick them in a wood with a decent line of sight towards the enemy’s expected approach, and you can basically forget about them for the rest of the game since they’ll do their job without any intervention from you.

That being said, having just attempted to make a deck in Red Dragon for the first time in a year the deck construction is absurdly overwhelming because there’s so many units and you can go mad trying to figure out which one you should take and why. My advice is not to worry about that too much; just take stuff into skirmish mode and see how it works out for you.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:28:02 +0000

Now that I’ve went back to read your review of Wargame EE I see that you’ve tried to warn me about all of this.

I don’t understand how some games can immediately ask you to invest hundreds of hours in it to be able to get fun and understand what happens… and become popular. Same thing happens in Dota/LoL, but they’re fun and quick and fantasy but this is I don’t even.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:08:11 +0000

I don’t get Wargame. Bought Airland Battle recently and like it’s complexity and difficulty, but there’s something inherently imbalanced about it. Realistic detailed graphics do not make sense cause you mostly work with icons zoomed out. At the same time the units are so diverse. You don’t even see unit roles anywhere, you have to click it and check what weapons it has, how far can it shoot, how much shots can it fire, can it shoot helicopters/planes. I feel like I’m in party-based RPG without any classes defined. I’ve completed 2 campaigns and still checked every unit statistics before battle to try to grasp what I’m working with. It feels that there’s a very long way to being able to understand what happens in the game, and even longer one to multiplayer.

Also with all it’s realism it tells me that WW3 would be a series of battles with ~10-20 units on each side.