Originally posted by §P0oONY
Total War series, easily.
Yes. Most definitely but for me its more strongly towads the Rome: Total war game then anything else.
Anyways my favorite are the following:
-Age of Empires II: My first ever RTS game which is still loads of fun
-DoW: Dark Crusade: Which makes tons of improvements upon its predecessors and possesses more tactics then your standard RTS.
-Company of Heroes: Hellishly tactical and puts the whammy on what an RTS should be. Squad AI which actually ducks and takes cover with fully destructable enviroment makes for a hellishly awesome game.
-Supreme Commander: Grand strategy on the epic scale with absurdly crazy scaling where Monkeylords tower the hell over thier T1 unit counterparts. And Nukes. Nukes are pretty damn crazy. Not many games have done nukes on that kind of maddenning scale before. Supreme Commander should now claim ownership of the initials "SC"
Blizzard RTS games never make the list though
COH
Starcraft
Rome: Total War
and Medieval 2: Total War
Star Wars: Empire at War (It felt great killing Rebels with like 15 destroyer cruisers under my control)
Age of Empire's series (The father of RTS games, why didn't anyone mention it?)
Warhammer 40,000 series wasn't that good for me...
I think thats about it...
I'm sorry but Starcraft was defining moment for RTS.
It still carries the SC.
Supreme Commander, good game, but I hate the pathfinding in this game. Ahh, its soo annoying, and the scale is impressive, but its too much sometimes. I can barely see all the units, and sometimes I attack one side, and then I'm like, "where the hell is the other group"...realizing that they got obilerated and I didnt see it. And the singleplayer is crap.
For me, Starcraft did nothing for me. I wasn't impressed with it's simplicity(or the fact that you can only select a max of 12 units which really irked me), cheap rush tactics. It did however have a half decent storyline and clicking on a single unit multiple time amused me.
Hmmm. For me it was actually quite easy to keep track on every single unit and action in the game and to keep track of my losses as well. It gets even easier when your using both the main screen and the mini map screen(which can both be zoomed in and out to my own surprise). Hell, most of the time, when i'm playing the tactical screen is my main screen and the screen to see my battles are actually my min map.
Holding SpaceBar is your friend as you get that DoW camera feel. If you let go though it will return to normal. There is however a button(cant recall which one) that negates that function and leaves the camera as free form as you want it.
And to be fair, Chris Taylor made this game to be more oriented towards Multiplayer. Just like the first Dawn of War was centralized around multiplayer. Both had poor Single Player but that did not stop them from being a downright awesome game.
Yeah, it is.
The only people who complained about rush tactics is people who couldnt defend rush tactics.
You have to remember that SC came out in the late 90's. Obviously, games of today are going to be better, but what SC did was unbelieveable. Still havnt found a game where 3 sides are competely different (not just looks) gameplay wise, yet all our evenly balanced. The units are also some of the best I've seen still today.
It's not the camera that bugs me....its how small each individual unit is. Maybe its something to get used too, but it's Supreme Commader is not as good as CoH, even thought they're completely different games.
Age of Empires > Warcraft ALL the way. Added to that more people played Age of Empires. More people where wanting to play a game which would let them be in the medieval times, unlike Warcraft, which brought an unreal fantasy which gamers weren't really into yet. Warcraft became famous only after it's first serious.