Bay 12 Games Forum

I understand the reason they do that, I just wish there wasn't so much needless micromanagement. Currently they act like a bunch of retarded school children. If I tell a group of soldiers in Dawn of War 1 or 2 to attack a target they move so that they are ALL in range, squeezing past each other if necessary. I have to micro them if I want them in cover, or to use special abilities, but I don't want to(and should't need to) make sure they can all shoot the target I told them to shoot.

Even better - you can very easily tell units whether they should be using ranged, melee, or mixed attacks.  And they'll move into the right range. 

So you can grab a whole pile of units and tell them to attack someone...  And the melee guys will charge right up front and start swinging, while the ranged folks stay back.

It can still be handy to micro-manage things a bit...  Focus fire on something specific, or use a special ability... But as far as simply making sure everyone is actually in range and doing damage?  Just tell them to attack.

Is anyone else finding it borderline impossible to actually get into a game, or am I just cursed?

I spent 2+ hours trying to get into a game the other night...

More often than not it wouldn't even connect me to the game lobby.  A couple times I got into the lobby, only to have the host bail because we weren't filling up fast enough.  Then it failed to load the map a couple times.  I got kicked for absolutely no reason a couple times.

I managed to actually join just four games, over the course of over two hours.

Of those four games, two of them ended successfully.  One of them just ended abruptly - I suddenly found myself looking at the main menu again.  I'm not sure if I got kicked, or my connection dropped, or what.  One of them ended after the host got himself killed and he quit.

Over two hours of trying to connect...  Over and over again...  For about 20 minutes of actual gameplay.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Blizzard's RTS games in the past...  They used to be the king of the hill.  And I have absolutely nothing against that style of gameplay.

But it's been so long since the first StarCraft came out...  I've played lots of really good RTS titles since then.  And I've got absolutely no attachment to the storyline at this point.

I'm sure I'll wind up buying it eventually, but I'll probably wait 'til the Battle Chest eventually comes out.

Especially since this first release is going to focus on the Terrans, and there are two planned expansions that will focus on the Zerg and Protoss.  I'll wait until I can buy all three for the same price as just the one right now.

For me, it would have to be Dawn of War 2. It wasn't enough like the original. It felt more like a shitty RPG instead of an awesome RTS. No base building at all.

That was my first impression as well.

I got into the beta, fired it up, and was horrified.  Absolutely no base building at all.  WTF?!  Where's my lovely RTS?

I was so disappointed that I didn't even buy the retail release.

I did, however, go out and pick up a Warhammer 40,000 starter kit and give it a try...  Fun stuff, even though I can't paint worth shit.

Then they had a THQ pack on sale on Steam a month ago...  All the Dawn of War games, even the new ones, for just $50.  I bought it.  I played DoWII.

You know what?  After playing real Warhammer 40,000 the base building doesn't make sense.  Yeah, I still enjoy the original DoW games...  But you don't build bases in Warhammer 40,000.  You just don't.

You build your army, complete with custom wargear, and drop down to the battlefield.  And that's pretty much all you've got to work with.  No building a barracks to turn out more marines.  No harvesting resources.  None of that.

Which gave me a new appreciation for DoWII.  It's actually a pretty decent game.  Not an RTS, at all.  But decent anyway.

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Oblivion is seriously the best game I have ever played. It has an interesting storyline, brilliant side quests, tons of dungeons and everything was interactive.

The side quests were decent. The main story was, well, it was a Bethesda storyline. Lots of noise up front, a good start, then a slow degradation into "who gives a fuck" land. Once you start going into the Oblivion portals....I basically stopped caring.

And as for "tons of dungeons"...you mean tons of generic ass dungeons, broken up visually by one of four texture sets, that they made 50 million of and just scattered liberally into the world.

Yeah. Tons of dungeons. Too bad once you've explored the 10 or so directly outside the starting city....you've seen them all.

You know, that's pretty much how I felt about Oblivion.  And everyone else simply raved about it, so I thought I was missing something.

The dungeons quickly became repetitive.  After the first dozen or so I just didn't really care that much.  I went through a bunch of them for the loot...  But that was really the only motivation.  There wasn't really much of a sense of exploration or curiosity or anything like that.

And the storyline really did get pretty boring.

I spent tons of time on side-quests...  Did the assassin's guild thing, and re-built my own secret pirate ship base, and worked my way up through the thieves guild...  All sorts of cool stuff on the side...

But the main storyline just got dull.  Very quickly.  I just didn't care enough to keep going.  The only reason I finished it was because those oblivion gates were getting too annoying to ignore.

I enjoyed Morrowind a whole hell of a lot more.

The main storyline was much more interesting with the ancient prophecy and the quarreling gods and all that good stuff.  The geography was more varied and interesting.  The architecture was just plain funky.  I thoroughly enjoyed creeping around some of the dwarven ruins.  The game had some kind of high-fantasy meets post-apocalyptic feel to it.

The Marathon series are some of the best games I've ever played.  Good gameplay, terrific storyline, good (for the time) graphics, challenging enemies, interesting levels.  Great stuff.  Really wish Bungie would have done more with that, instead of all the Halo stuff.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Clive Barker's Undying.

MechWarrior II was great as well...  Some of the newer MechWarrior games are good, too, but they don't have marauders anymore.

Grmbl, I can't reproduce it exactly.

I took my first on scene save from above. So now, if I create a stockpile going from outside the burrow to inside it, the dwarfs will logically (!) put stuff in the portion of the stockpile that's inside the burrow and refuse to use the part outside the burrow ("drop off inaccessible). Everything else seems to work fine too. Strange.

Anyway, I'll do some more test; but right now what I don't understand is the "restrict to a burrow" alert parameter. Since civilians don't do squat outside their burrow, is this restrict function usable with civilian burrow?

Or to put it another way, I'm trying to defend/manage a classic designed fortress. So I need to switch between two modes: "go anywhere you like/need", and "stay inside my walls because you don't want to kiss the goblins/giant spiders too close". How can I manage that without manually creating a burrow for my whole fortress at each ambush, or adding/removing manually several dozens of dwarfs at each ambush?

Create the burrow ahead of time.  Cover the entire "safe" area of the fortress.  Basically anything inside, if you're trying to replicate the old "dwarves stay inside" function.

Then you need to set up an alert in the military screen.  You should have an "Inactive" alert which basically does nothing.  There should be a little "civ" next to it.  This means that it is the active civilian alert level.  This means that, if you haven't modified your "Inactive" alert at all, they won't do anything special.

You want to create a new alert that restricts your dwarves to that safe area burrow you just created.

When you're under siege, you set that new safe zone alert as active.  It should get the little "civ" next to it.  Your dwarves will be restricted to that burrow.

If you assign dwarves to that burrow, they'll stay in it all the time.  This isn't what you want to do.  You want to leave the dwarves alone and rely on the alert system.

is there a way or a mod to show how much of each type of bar, etc of everything i have?

The stocks screen shows what you have in your fort.

In order for that to be accurate, however, you need a Book Keeper appointed.  And he'll want an office.  And you'll need to tell him how much time to spend counting.

But once he's updated the records, you should have a fairly accurate count of what's in your fort.