Pumping Irony

So after a year or two of Aaron occasionally nudging me to get Battle for Middle Earth II, I did buy the game and its expansion, The Rise of the Witch King last month when I built this new computer. Between work, and now bouncing back and forth between the PC and 360 and oh, so many games (what have I done to myself?) Aaron and I finally got into a co-op match today. He asked that I complete the tutorial first, but honestly I didn’t get much out of it. I’m certain (oh, lookie over there!) that my (oh, check this out!) attention span (oh, go over here, there’s a… wait… what was I looking at before? What do you mean my base has been destroyed?) had nothing to do with it…

Aaron’s big thing isn’t the regular RTS mode, it’s War of the Ring mode, which is a turn-based conquest game. When battles occur, there is the option of Auto-Resolve where the AI will examine each force and determine who will win, or Real-Time battles where the game shifts into the standard RTS mode. This can be very handy if it looks like your forces are outnumbered or would otherwise lose the automated battle, so you can jump in and manually build a base, train units and try to overcome the odds.

For our first game, Aaron set the enemy AI to Easy and gave us an AI ally army so it ended up 3 (Aaron, Me, and AI) versus 2 enemy AI to hopefully ensure a victory so Aaron could teach me the ropes. There’s a lot of ropes to learn in this mode. It’s quite complex, at least for someone like myself who just likes to see stuff blow up.

During the Tactical Phase, you play on a map like this, similar to a board game along the likes of Risk. Using the mouse wheel will scroll in (as shown above) or out to view the whole map of Middle Earth.

Here, I am the Green army, while Aaron is orange and our AI ally is blue. The tactical phase is where you tell your Heroes and normal units to move to occupy neighboring zones, join forces into a larger army, or move into enemy territory. Additionally, you may be able to select your home territories to build new forces or resources. Conquering an entire region gains your armies varied bonuses or perks.

Over Skype, Aaron was giving me the basics and giving me his suggestions on what to build and where to move. Basically I ended up with one barracks to train a unit each turn and everything else was a resource unit to keep money flowing. As you can see on the screen above, you can see what all allies’ movement plans are so you can coordinate if you’re not using some VOIP solution (there is also an in-game IRC client to text chat) but no enemy movements are shown. Quite a bit of strategy and surprise comes from that, since you never really know what your opponents are up to or what they’re planning.

Here we entered our first real-time battle. The standard RTS game loads in with whatever forces you had in a given zone at the time the enemy was encountered. If, for example, you owned the territory you’re battling on and already had a barracks placed there, when the game shifts to RTS mode the barracks is already there, saving you that initial step so you can build something else.

I wish I’d taken screenshots in some of the later battles where Sauron’s forces sent a dragon and some mountain trolls at us. I have more fun in this mode just because this is where all the shinies and explosions are. As usual, however, I find myself exploring and watching what’s happening and completely forgetting to build up and move my own armies until I’m taken unawares and nearly annihilated. /sigh

Back to the Tactical Phase, you can see we’re conquering more and more territories for the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. Aaron usually prefers to play the forces of Mordor but just for the sake of introducing me to the game while I’ve only played through the first 4 missions of the campaign, we played the Good Guys this time. Aaron once more gave strict orders suggestions on what movements I should make in order to best team up against the enemy. The enemy AI took Helm’s Deep and we thought we were going to have one helluva fight to get it back but just as we moved in to fight for it, the AI retreated and tried sneaking behind us elsewhere. We took Helm’s Deep in auto-resolve because we so badly outnumbered the AI it wasn’t worth loading the RTS mode for. Trying to sneak behind us split their forces so we jumped on them and played a real-time battle again, this time Aaron and I going on an immediate offensive rather than building a base and army first. We won in 3 minutes doing that rather than 30+ minutes that the previous few real-time battles had taken.

Take that, Sauron!

Aaron saved our game there; I think we’re at Turn 7 or so of the War. We can pick up later and continue until we’ve defeated the forces of Mordor and freed Middle Earth.

Back in the day (“the day” being the Win95-98 era for purposes of this discussion) there were two genres of PC gaming I was heavy into: FPS and RTS.

I’ve mentioned the hardcore competitive FPS leading to my current RSI enough, so I won’t go there (or did I just? Ha!) again right now.

RTS, however, was always a bizarre genre with me. I would often jump on board new RTS after new RTS, just like MMO Addicts Tourists jump from MMO to MMO, just like I did with FPS titles. The difference is that I never really progressed in my RTS knowledge or skills; whatever I did back then is pretty much what I do now, and it was never good enough.

I’m sure I tried enough RTS demos and full games, but the first to really engage me was Total Annihilation. None of this 2D isometric maps and animated sprites garbage; TA had full 3D modeled units and terrain, and awe-inspiring art and graphical effects, for its time. TA is pretty much the only RTS I ever played online. By “online” I mean dialup with a friend who lived a few blocks away. Just the two of us with whatever VOIP client was around back then (probably Roger Wilco or something primitive) so I’ve never actually had to deal with zergs, rushes, and all the other annoying facets of multiplayer RTS gaming. It’s one of those strange personality quirks where I don’t mind hopping onto a public FPS server and playing on someone’s squad or team, or obviously doing group content in MMOG’s, but when it came to RTS’ they were always 1v1 or 2v2, something small and therefore a little too cozy for my comfort zone, especially when it was all too apparent that I would be a liability if teamed with someone, and utterly destroyed in 1v1. I am also uncomfortable in shooters such as Gears of War or Left 4 Dead, which are 4v4, so I tend to not play those games online at all unless I have friends to team with.

Granted, my attention span is also a huge problem in RTS’. I tend to get caught up exploring new corners of the map (“Oooooh what’s over here? Ooooh shiny!”) or zooming in and watching my little dudes fight (“Ooooh, did you see that killing blow? Cool!”) meanwhile my opponent is, you know, actually playing the game and managing his resources, building his base and sending all variety of new units at my base. Half the time my base was close to being destroyed before I ever noticed; far too late to actually do anything about it.

The last RTS (RTT actually) I bought was World in Conflict, which I bought on launch day along with a Norwegian friend — hi, Jostein!. The plan was to have a game in common we could play together since he adamantly refuses to try RPG’s — especially the MMO variety. But between the time zone differences and my addiction fascination with MMO’s in 2007 and 2008, and his addiction fascination with FPS’ we only had the opportunity to play WiC once.

With WiC anyway, I’m making a gradual attempt at getting over my shyness of small-player games, so I’ve joined in a couple public servers a few days ago. Got my ass handed to me repeatedly, but no one said anything about it. I have no idea how to effectively use any of the roles in multiplayer aside from Support. Not too hard to spawn some heavy artillery and send volleys of shells across the map at enemy tanks and troops. The problem is I’m defenseless (and not paying attention because I’m zoomed in watching the destruction) when an enemy player sends a squadron of attack helicopters on a S&D sortie to take out my artillery. But Oakstout, Aaron and a few others have WiC so I’ll keep plugging away gradually and try to learn the game.

I’d previously mentioned I picked up Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 (and its Chaos Rising expansion) on Steam on Oakstout’s recommendation. I’m a few missions into the campaign — my hero is level 6 I think now? — and it’s quite enjoyable. It’s a RTT game, which suits my attention span better since there’s no base-building and resource micromanagement. I love the RPG-like abilities and being able totally swivel the 3D maps around just like I can in World in Conflict (and Massive’s earlier games, the Ground Control series). Oak joined my campaign for a few co-operative missions and that was a lot of fun, so I can see myself sticking with DoW2 for awhile. I’ve also got at least 2 other friends in addition to Oak who are wanting to play online.

Speaking of the Ground Control series, I installed GC the other day but was horrified to see that I could not increase the resolution beyond 1024×768 which on a widescreen LCD monitor is extremely blurry. Uninstalled. In retrospect, I realize I could have attempted to play in windowed mode but I usually have difficulty focusing on gameplay in windowed mode. We’ll see. I did order Ground Control 2 now that I have a PC that can play it. Granted, my last PC could also have played it nicely but I was too addicted fascinated with MMO’s to even consider picking the game up. My loss. GC2 is an excellent RTT and it’s extremely easy to see where Massive picked successful elements of GC2 and imported them directly into WiC. Unfortunately, Sierra shut down the master servers for the GC games in November, 2008 so I won’t be able to play online with anyone. Not that I know anyone who’s heard of Ground Control, but still…

While playing DoW2 the other night, Oakstout kept mentioning Company of Heroes. I’d never heard of it — darned MMO’s! — so after we finished our DoW2 session I popped onto Steam and installed the demo. I was impressed enough to buy the Gold edition, which includes the base game and the Opposing Fronts expansion. It’s also from Relic, and it’s easy to see where some of the concepts they pioneered in CoH were imported to DoW2, but CoH does have (seemingly more streamlined so far?) resources and building, so it falls squarely into the RTS category, though I’m really liking the way they pulled it off so far.

Finally, as I mentioned last week, Aaron has been wanting me to get Battle for Middle Earth 2. That was tough! No one had it in stock anymore, not even online unless I wanted to pay $80 or more. Clicking the link in the EA Store shows it for $10 so I jumped on that. Turns out that’s only the Rise of the Witch King expansion and not the game itself, which even EA doesn’t sell in their own store. Doh! Ebay saved the day; I found a few retailers there selling the few remaining new copies in stock for $15. I can play the campaign just fine but while trying to register the game for multiplayer I was informed that the registration code has already been used. Effing pirates! I can get a new registration code but I have to mail EA my manual along with a letter explaining the situation, etc. What a pain in the ass. Why don’t they just have a phone number and/or an online contact where I can handle this? Mail? Seriously? The EA Store-generated code for the Witch King expansion works fine, obviously, so Aaron and I can play that but I want the original game working too, just for the general principle of the whole thing. Effing pirates!

Just like “back in the day” where I kept buying RTS games and not playing them, I’ve had the new PC working for what, two weeks, and here I go again… But at least this time I still have a leftover dosage of MMO Burnout Syndrome — and friends to play with for a change — to keep me interested.