GameRager: I used to love me a bit of Team Fortress Classic many years back. I sukked at the veteran opponents but on lower levels I often had fun sniping people at respawns for the fun of it.
FPS multiplayer always seemed a bit more doable for me, at least when compared to the need for excellent APM and micro in RTS. It's just a shame that I'm in the small minority of gamers who never grasped port forwarding. Otherwise, I would've had even more fun with
Unreal Tournament and
Quake III Arena.
DubConqueror: That must be one of the reasons I had such a hard time with Age of Empires 2. It's in my character to take time to prepare, build up strength, before attempting anything. It's how I live my life and I'm having a hard time doing the opposite in a game.
Same here. I was always a fan of epic battle scenes where two massive armies would meet and duke it out until one side emerged victorious (à la the original
AOE's opening cinematic). So naturally, I tried to emulate this with virtually all the RTS games I played as a kid. Turtling was a must, because you can't have an epic-looking army unless you bought yourself enough time to create one. While games like
Warcraft II kind of allowed for that style of play, it was
AOE2 and several of the then-newer ones that outright punished you for turtling too much. While early aggression makes sense as a strategy, it was something beyond my comfort zone. Plus, I always assumed that AI bases were designed to be impregnable until much later in a game.
~~~
No joke: "The Siege of Paris" took me about 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete. That certainly sounds ridiculous, but I think all that extra time was warranted. Despite starting with a really decent army and being tasked with besieging a city, this was no simple undertaking. First of all, the city of Paris was huge and brimming with Castles, Keeps, and those damned Elite Longbowmen. Secondly, there were no Monks available to me for healing - a critical liability in this type of scenario. And lastly, I wasn't sure if this was purely a rescue-and-escort mission, or if I'd eventually be given a base and have to wipe out an AI after building up. Due to this ambiguity, I ended up taking the really long approach...through the front door, no less. Online walkthroughs recommend sneaking westward and luring the defenders out one-by-one. Not knowing this was possible, I just knocked down the main gate and used Joan to micro all those blasted Longbowmen. Since Joan could regenerate hit points, I used her extensively to prevent unnecessary damage to my regular army. Eventually, though, the relentless hordes of enemy Longbowmen necessitated using the bulk of my army, so damage was unavoidable. That's the mission in a nutshell. Had I known that no new objectives would pop up later, I wouldn't have wasted time destroying everything and exploring the entire map.