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Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

I acknowledge Starcraft's dominance, but my personal favorite game of all time was Total Annihilation. At the time (98/99), it was probably the most advanced game out there. I played my cousin across the country over 33kps modem, and we each had 500 units moving around at the same time. With 1000 units total, each 3D rendered, the action slowed down a lot, but it never crashed, and allowed us to play entire games across the country reliably. It was truly a feat of software engineering.

Chris Taylor (the creator of TA) came out with Supreme Commander in 2007, which I bought a new computer for just to play, but I only played it for a few months, more because I got busy rather than not enjoying the game. But both games never seemed to catch on as much as Starcraft 1 and 2 have. I'm seriously considering picking up Starcraft 2 but it's already 2 years old, so I think I probably missed the boat.

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If you haven't seen it yet, you'd probably be very interested in Planetary Annihilation (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-anni...) which is being made by a significant portion of the original TA and SupCom teams.

Wow, thanks for that link, it looks amazing! This might be the first Kickstarter campaign I might contribute too...

I contributed and the team has been very active in sending updates via email. Nice to know they are caring about suggestions too. In the meantime, you should get the sc2 HOTS expansion when it comes out soon. Everyone is going to have to relearn sc2 with the new expansion anyway, so it's a great time to jump in. Until then... just watch some streams to get familiar with the game. http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/

...And I was the guy that played the turned based Lords of the Realm II for some reason.

Anyway, Starcraft 2 is still pretty active on the casual side, and with the new expansion coming out later this year (already in public, but not open, beta) it will surely drive a flock of new players. On the note of Supreme Commander, one of the top players of that game has been a Starcraft 2 pro since beta (TheLittleOne, aka TLO).

Hey, I played - along with my father - LOTR II too, it was nice :) I still have some memory of the soundtrack and effects, maybe the best part of that title.

I still miss something like Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, that was a surprisingly great game.

I have to say that I do prefer RTS, my first one being Ancient Art of War waaaaay back :)

However, I did get in my share of turn-based games. I remember when I first played Civilization, it was over Christmas break during college, and I didn't go home because it was too expensive. I ended up playing Civ for 3 days straight, and my Christmas dinner was toast, 6 boiled eggs and peanuts... whatever I could rustle up quickly without taking too much time away from the game.

I remember playing Lords of the Realm 1 on a Win3.1 laptop my aunt gave me in 2004. The combination of RTS and TBS is awesome. Today I am into the Total War series, the latest being Shogun 2.

I love Starcraft 2 as well, and play it occasionally. In Starcraft however you're forever stuck in skirmish mode; there's no possibility of conquering a whole country in a very long campaign like in Total War or Lords of the Realm, and developing your nation into an economic powerhouse on the way there.

You can play a starter version of SC2 for free, if you're interested. It lets you play online against others, but you're only allowed to play as Terran, and you're not allowed to play ranked matches, only custom games. You might have a hard time finding people to play against if they haven't updated the map list from the link below, but I suspect they have. Worth checking out if you think you might be interested.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/3250656

As for missing the boat, a lot of people still play SC2. They're going to be coming out with an expansion soon, so the game should see an influx of new players when that happens.

No, the starter edition map pool has been unchanged since its announcement.

Whenever I've seen clips of Starcraft / Starcraft 2 played at a high level it looks a lot more like an action game than strategy.

I see a lot of "micro" (or clicking really quickly to move a unit into range to fire but then out of range of the enemy unit's retaliation).

Supreme Commander 2 seems to have moved somewhat in this direction too, most of the online games I have played are on quite small maps.

I guess this is because big scale strategy games just take too long to play and people just don't have the time.

As an extreme example of this , I remember some years ago when I shared a house with some avid gamers who were into Heroes of might and magic. I remember two of them took a week of work and played a single game of HOMM (4 or 5 , can't remember which) for the entire week and still weren't done by then end. Bearing in mind this was playing for around 16 hours a day for 7 days straight. So 112 hours in a single game.

I don't think I've ever seen a finished game of HOMM in my life.

Whenever I've seen clips of Starcraft / Starcraft 2 played at a high level it looks a lot more like an action game than strategy.

That's because the high-level strategy is invisible until you understand it. It's things like subtle variations in build order, timing, unit and expansion placement, etc.

Search YouTube for Day[9]'s screencasts, watch a few, and notice how many there are. SC2 is a very deep and difficult game. Even if you're really good with fast action and micro, you won't get far without a good strategy to match.

check out the open source Spring engine: http://springrts.com/. it started as a full 3d implementation of TA. now it has it's own games, but some are heavily inspired by the original.

The famous TotalA soundtrack is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAdOQtAFEs

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