“To the leader, to the prior, the victim, the Messiah”
Well here we are at part six of this series.
I’ll start this one off by saying I’m not much of an RTS fan. It’s not really a genre I play very regularly. I find that too many of the games in this genre place a focus on massing as many resources as possible in the shortest amount of time.
I’ve never really understood where the ‘Strategy’ part comes from. Using a Zerg or Mamoth Tank rush is not what I would consider strategic in anyway. Doesn’t matter though, people still seem to love this stuff so I guess I’m in the minority here.
Anyway thought I’d get that out of the way as that greatly effects my choice for the best RTS of the decade.
Best RTS – Medieval II: Total War (PC) (2007) Wikipedia
Many of you might be going “wtf, that’s not an RTS you ghay phag newb phag” To those people I point you to my above statements. oh and also a wholehearted “STFU"
Anyway, back to the point. It was hard to choose the best game out of the Total War series, many would argue for the orginal Medieval: Total War, it did after all sell the most copies and remains very popular today. As good as the orginal was I personally think the sequel was better in almost every way.
Most of this was due to the battles. Whilst Rome: Total War was the first to give us 3D battles in the series, Medieval II refined it. The bit that helped the most was perhaps the most cosmetic, unique designs on each individual soldier. No more did you have an army of total clones marching into battle with you, now you actually have people who look like individuals battling other individuals on a spectacular battlefield in Medieval Europe. Sure if you looked close enough you’d see that each unit was just a composite of several different randomly assigned textures and there were some doubles, but when your looking at armies which could number in the thousands it’s hard to really care about the odd double.
The Total War series deserves it’s own award really, for bringing what really is a tabletop war game to the PC. This IS a stratergy game, no resource collecting and no ‘press A to win’ tactics (well none that will ever work). It combines a Risk style turn based campaign map where you train your troops and take care of you land with a brutal and purely strategic real time battle map. You deploy your army against another and then engage in a battle of wits and skill. All the things which would have influenced the battles of the simulated era are in the game and used to realistic effect. I remember a battle where I was outnumbered 10 to 1 (Damn Germans and Italians) and simply by using the terrain to my advantage I was able to actually win the battle! I annoyed the two armies so much they even started to attack eachother! I’ve never had a memory like that in any other RTS (probably because most of them end in ‘haha you got pwned’).
The best part about these games is that the campaign map and battle map could be set at different difficulties. So if your like me (and my dad) and are just in it for the battle simulations you can play the game accordingly.
Medieval II was really the high point of this series for me, it had great graphics and was able to brilliantly simulate battles like no other game before it. This represents the most refined and well tuned Total War game out there. Sure Empire: Total War is great but I think they need a bit more time to get the new era of warfare right. Right now I find Empire a bit slow and overly political for me. However I suppose that is fairly accurate of that century isn’t it? 😛
Anyway, if you love strategy and battle, I highly recommend you give Medieval II and the rest of the Total War series a try.
Honourable Mentions:
Shogun: Total War – The game that started it all, Amazing and Mind-blowing. ‘nuff said.
Dawn of War – Perhaps it’s because I love 40K so much, but this is really the only RTS I enjoy. Probably because it breaks a bit from the traditions via it’s requisition points system. Even the C&C series is changing to be more like this game.
That’s all for this week guys. Will be working on a quite cool D&D adventure that I’ll be DMing on Sunday for the rest of the week.
Wrap up of how that goes and the best Open World game of the decade on Monday
See you then!
– The Valiant Knight
The Valiant Knight 