Now many of you will think its insane when I tell you that I regularly play Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2, on online/offline field based strategy game, in the style of games such as age of empires, for up to 10 hours.
Why you may ask?
Does it really take that long to win a game?
The answer is no.
The average game is 30 minutes long, with most players chickening out if it looks like they don't have all the advantages However among the servers, exist, well people like me. For now lets call my type of gamer the architect. Architects are concerned with developing the fastest ways of getting hero units, buildings, wealth and much much more, so that when my enemies have 200 men between them after 10 minutes of honourable non-rushing, I have already established myself with a hefty 600 units, with full armour and weapon upgrades.
But that simply answers what sort of things us architects do, and not why we do it.
Some may call us utter, bas***s for ruining the game experience for other players, simply because we team up with each other and take down anyone who doesn't play our way in about the time it takes for yatzee to pick his nose....wait that was off topic...any way, the reason us architects exists is because we want to show you how the game should be played!
Now I am not saying you have to play our way to have a good time, however I am saying that If you play our way you'll have more fun.
And as most audiences here like stories I have one of my own.
It all began on the 15th of January 2009 at 7:43pm. Me, and 7 other 'architects' although we didn't call ourselves that back then, where engaged in the popular lord of the rings map Helms deep. At first we were too equally matched to win or lose and so we slowly played around with where we placed buildings, resources buildings, unit populators, and this went on for several hours, with my selective amnesia I like to think that It was for an hour...or 3.....lets call it 6 hours....Now on this map there are 3 defenders and 5 attackers, with an average of about 1000 men in each players army. After seve....I mean 6 hours of perfecting building placement we had each got our unit populations to 6000. Which is a pritty huge deal considering the servers arn't developed to handle that many units in total let alone that many for each of the 8 players.
So there we were with 8 x 6000 = 48000 units on a map, where we had agreed to let each other mass an army for one final battle, where the majority winner would stay on whilst the losers left the game servers. Now picture this for me, 48000 units. That means in my army I had 4000 cavelry units and about 2000 units of archery. Now for any of you who have every watched a film with huge armies colliding, and wished you could get the same effect from a game, this is probably as close as it gets in the RT-Strategy world at the moment. Now I won't lie and say that the lag from all our computers wouldn't have put off the average gamer, a long time ago, however suffise to say it took me 15 minutes to select all my men, and a further 15 minutes to select units 2 attack.
After 3 hours of probably what could be seen as the matrix slow motion scenes in slow motion x10, we finally had a winner.....I would have won had I just moved the cave...any way after this we realised how much fun It had all been.
Since then I have had 2 more such games, and have put alot of thought into what makes me want to spend so much time on this game. I have already perfected nearly everything that slows you down in game, and win every game I play unless I play against a fellow architect, and so I have come and posted my story in the small hope that there are others out there who have either attempted similar things in other rts's or have tried to expand the limit of games out there. Any way, call me madman if you wish, i just wanted to see peoples response, and if you agree that you think game designers should build RTS games with unit pupulations larger or around that which we achieved.
Why you may ask?
Does it really take that long to win a game?
The answer is no.
The average game is 30 minutes long, with most players chickening out if it looks like they don't have all the advantages However among the servers, exist, well people like me. For now lets call my type of gamer the architect. Architects are concerned with developing the fastest ways of getting hero units, buildings, wealth and much much more, so that when my enemies have 200 men between them after 10 minutes of honourable non-rushing, I have already established myself with a hefty 600 units, with full armour and weapon upgrades.
But that simply answers what sort of things us architects do, and not why we do it.
Some may call us utter, bas***s for ruining the game experience for other players, simply because we team up with each other and take down anyone who doesn't play our way in about the time it takes for yatzee to pick his nose....wait that was off topic...any way, the reason us architects exists is because we want to show you how the game should be played!
Now I am not saying you have to play our way to have a good time, however I am saying that If you play our way you'll have more fun.
And as most audiences here like stories I have one of my own.
It all began on the 15th of January 2009 at 7:43pm. Me, and 7 other 'architects' although we didn't call ourselves that back then, where engaged in the popular lord of the rings map Helms deep. At first we were too equally matched to win or lose and so we slowly played around with where we placed buildings, resources buildings, unit populators, and this went on for several hours, with my selective amnesia I like to think that It was for an hour...or 3.....lets call it 6 hours....Now on this map there are 3 defenders and 5 attackers, with an average of about 1000 men in each players army. After seve....I mean 6 hours of perfecting building placement we had each got our unit populations to 6000. Which is a pritty huge deal considering the servers arn't developed to handle that many units in total let alone that many for each of the 8 players.
So there we were with 8 x 6000 = 48000 units on a map, where we had agreed to let each other mass an army for one final battle, where the majority winner would stay on whilst the losers left the game servers. Now picture this for me, 48000 units. That means in my army I had 4000 cavelry units and about 2000 units of archery. Now for any of you who have every watched a film with huge armies colliding, and wished you could get the same effect from a game, this is probably as close as it gets in the RT-Strategy world at the moment. Now I won't lie and say that the lag from all our computers wouldn't have put off the average gamer, a long time ago, however suffise to say it took me 15 minutes to select all my men, and a further 15 minutes to select units 2 attack.
After 3 hours of probably what could be seen as the matrix slow motion scenes in slow motion x10, we finally had a winner.....I would have won had I just moved the cave...any way after this we realised how much fun It had all been.
Since then I have had 2 more such games, and have put alot of thought into what makes me want to spend so much time on this game. I have already perfected nearly everything that slows you down in game, and win every game I play unless I play against a fellow architect, and so I have come and posted my story in the small hope that there are others out there who have either attempted similar things in other rts's or have tried to expand the limit of games out there. Any way, call me madman if you wish, i just wanted to see peoples response, and if you agree that you think game designers should build RTS games with unit pupulations larger or around that which we achieved.
