Seaf The Troll said:
Supreme commander all the way, the first one not the 2nd. it has a large Tec tree and works well on-line against lots of people. I have had games that took almost 8 hours and after that we started up again.
the map and the scale of subcom make it more interesting with being able to have a total of 1,000 units on the map at one time.
If you like games with huge tech trees/lots of variety in units/structures/whatever, long, epic campaigns that last several hours, and huge numbers of units, I have to pimp out AI War. It's kind of unusual for a multiplayer RTS in that it's co-op only (or single-player, but it's not remotely as much fun without a few other people), and the AI opponents explicitly
do not try to emulate/mimic human players. The AI has its own units and structures and follows a different set of rules than the human players do, but none of it is hidden from you like in some games that give the AI fake difficulty by letting it cheat.
The goal/challenge of it is to figure out how to defeat it without pissing it off so much that it wipes you off the map first, because the more of its territory you capture or resources you eliminate, the more powerful it gets, so you have to carefully plan a large-scale strategy that'll let you reach your objectives efficiently and adapt it on the fly as situations change, especially on higher difficulties where you have to do that just to survive. It's all about prioritizing targets, only taking things you absolutely need, and figuring out how maintain a balance between attacking/harassing and protecting your own space.
Generally, if a campaign (which is a single, enormous map with dozens of planets and plays continuously with no distinct "levels" like some games) lasts
under ten hours, it's because you lost. Unless you're playing on too low of a difficulty level, it routinely takes 10-12 hours, maybe 15 if you're very evenly matched, or even as much as 30 on an extra-large map. Fortunately you can save and pick up where you left off at any time, and it has very good support for adding/dropping/replacing players if not everyone can show up all the time, which my gaming group takes advantage of; we have a few regulars who are there every week, and a few other people who rotate in and out when they happen to be around.
The tech tree is so big that despite games lasting a dozen hours, you'll never unlock everything in a single game, so you tend to end up with different people specializing in different areas depending on what kind of stuff borders their territory or what their play style is. It's surprisingly well balanced considering how huge it is, though, and there are regular patches (usually every few days) to fix anything anyone finds that's over- or underpowered or add new features/improve old ones.
And 1k units on the map at once? Try 30k normally, and up to 70-120k on a large map late in the game. You get some seriously epic battles on a scale you almost never see outside of movies. We've had stuff happen like three people sending a few thousand ships into a heavily guarded system swarming everything, but that was just a distraction to keep the defenses occupied while a fourth person snuck a transport with a couple hundred more ships behind their lines...which itself was a feint to allow half a dozen raiders to sneak around to hit a single valuable target from the other side. And that was just what was going on in one little corner of the map. And stuff like that seems to happen at least once every time we play (maybe 3-4 hours a week). It's awesome even when it fails, just because of the sheer scale of things.
Ok, ok. I'll shut up already. I do really like it, though. It's kept a group of us getting together to play every week for several months so far, and we keep having fun and finding new stuff to try, and it's very well supported with patches and cheap-but-huge expansions. A couple words of warning, though: it can take a little while to really get into it, and I find it
much better with a few other people than in single-player. I wasn't very impressed at first by the demo or going through the tutorials by myself, but after you get a few hours into a campaign with 3-6 players all
goofing around coordinating everything over Skype/Vent/whatever, everything suddenly starts to come together. The tutorials/demo are helpful, but they don't really give a good sense of how the full thing plays out when it's at its best.
Tibike77 said:
Oh, and before I forget, a few lost gems very few people ever bothered with : Darwinia
I <3 me some Darwinia. It's not a very difficult game, at least on the normal settings, and it's not terribly long, but I like the way it takes a somewhat different approach to things than most games, and the length is actually a good thing, because it's not padded out with lots of repetitive levels like some games are. The stylized graphics have actually aged rather well, because everything is simple and abstract, so unlike games that go for more realism in their design, it doesn't look so dated, and as an added bonus that means it'll run extremely well on pretty much any machine you throw it on. Totally worth the couple bucks it costs these days (at least when it's on sale; it's normally something like $10, but it's easy enough to find for $2-5). Kind of makes me want to play it again now.
