Macaw wrote:Most of the satisfaction in something like Simcity is also stuff like trying to evolve the zones really high (which in turn gives more population). Planning and managing an area well enough that a zone can evolve into bigger and bigger stuff until it becomes a skyscraper is incredibly satisfying. I know this alone wont drastically change your mind on anything, but its one of many factors that makes Simcity and similar games fun.
And stuff like this is part of the reason SimCity is better than Minecraft, but it's not enough. Or, to put it another way, it's good but it could be better.
Macaw wrote:In an RTS you madly rush to kill the enemy and the map is over.
And in SimCity you madly rush to hit your population target and the map is over.
And if length of play is what you want, the hugest maps in Supreme Commander can take hours I've heard. Maybe even days. Europa Universalis is an RTS (a grand RTS), and it can take weeks. There's no reason why games with conflict in them have to last less than games without conflict.
Macaw wrote:In a city building game you put more time and effort into the construction of a single city and managing it and seeing it evolve is the fun. You say you get more fun building stuff in Age of Empires 2, but to me its a totally different feeling to a traditional RTS, I really can never compare the two, I just get more fun out of building focused games myself.
Well, maybe YOU can't compare them, but if you think about it that's how it should be since you only play one of the things you can't compare. I play both, so I CAN compare them.
Look, remember the equation I gave you earlier?
Dune II = Herzog Zwei + SimCity
In more general terms, this can be rewritten as:
Real-time Strategy = Real-time Tactics + Real-time City-building
Or more simply:
Strategy = Tactics + City-building
And this is indeed the definition of strategy, if you look it up on a dictionary or Wikipedia!
All you are saying then, when you say that you don't enjoy RTSes, is that you don't enjoy tactics. Therefore it should come as no suprise that you enjoy city-building games more than RTSes. I, however, enjoy tactics just as much as I enjoy city-building, hence a genre that marries these two activities (the RTS genre) is superior to either of the other two, simpler genres.
And if you want to argue that the other two aren't simpler, we are going to be here a very long time as I try to explain set theory [
> ] to you, so I am hoping that you won't :)
Macaw wrote:From a city building perspective the bases in Age of Empires are about as lifeless as stuff in Minecraft, because everything is still just used for getting the next unit or research. In Knights and Merchants you have cute little graphics and animations bringing to life the medieval town, the woodcutter cuts trees down and the carpenter turns them to planks at the sawmill. The stonemason mines rock then chisels it at his hut. People go to the tavern to eat. Workers have to flatten the land with shovels to build roads and structures, farmers grow crops. All these are things that make the town fun to build, manage and look at.
This is ignorance talking. On of the awesome things about Age of Empires is precisely that there are 4 instead of 1 or 2 kinds of resources (as in previous RTSes), and the fact that you can see your little workers cutting down trees, fishing, mining, hunting differents kinds of animals, skinning them, taking the stuff back to your town, erecting walls, planting crops, etc. You haven't played the game, dude. Is this aspect of the game more developed in the pure construction games? Of course it is. But I explained to you why this is so. Because there is ANOTHER aspect in Age of Empires, that is very much LESS developed in the pure construction games. And besides, as I have already said, all these genres are evolving, and we can't be far away from an Age of Empires game with a construction model as complex as that of some of the games you love. Indeed, that is the ONLY way forward for the RTS genre: to continue to complexify both the tactics and the construction aspect, as they have been doing from day 1.
Macaw wrote:icycalm wrote:But my guess is that I will still prefer something like Cossacks or American Conquest, and ideally a Cossacks or American Conquest game with the city-building part as complex as that of Annos.
I actually enjoyed playing those games a bit just to fully build a town, even though there was no real satisfying city building payoff as it was still very much traditional RTS design with everything based around military. The huge amount of workers on the various resources and incredibly large and gorgeous buildings certainly made the building aspect more satisfying though.
And this is why you actually enjoyed these games, more than early RTSes: because these are late-RTSes, and hence have a more complex construction aspect than the early ones. And in the future this will improve even further, as it always has. As for them having "no real satisfying city building payoff": this is a contradiction of your previous sentence. The payoff was the pleasure you said you got from them in your fist sentence.
I also want to draw your attention to the co-op aspect of these games. In Age of Empires one player can build the city, while the other is defending it and fighting wars. I struggle to convey to you with words how much fun this is, and that's why I am offering to play the game with you online so you can see yourself. And this is indeed the future of the genre. After all, in real life no one runs an empire by himself either, and games will inevitably continue imitating real life in their quest to increase in their scope and their complexity.