I'd seen Cossacks and Stronghold Crusader before, and oddly enough it seemed like the model count was too high. However, I think I may need to give them a shot here when I can get ahold of a copy. Does Cossacks have basebuilding like AoE2, or is it just armies vs armies?

Never played CoH or SC2, and the only C&C I've played has been Tiberian Sun. Given what I've seen of those series, though, I would hazard that CoH would slot in at position 7ish, SC2 at 6ish, and Red Alert 2 (The C&C I've personally thought the most highly of) at 5ish.

Total War is amazing, and my favorite for that easily has to be Empire: TW, and for me I prefer that setup (Turn-based, but then swapping to real-time battles) over pure turn-based games like Civ. My favorite entirely-real-time games are probably PA and Sins of a Solar Empire, leaning towards Sins probably due to my…

I feel like Total War is an entirely different beast (Being entirely focused on regimental fighting and not having any in-real-time basebuilding elements), and iirc CoH had no basebuilding at all.

Does the port include Tales of the Sword Coast? I know my brothers and I had a copy of that, and we were crazy-excited to use it with out BG savegames, but there was some error and it never loaded the saves right, and starting a fresh game caused it to crash to desktop every time you played for more than 15-30 minutes.

My buddies and I got ahold of some copies and played like crazy as a freshman. I still remember when I unlocked the full glory of the Gothic Locust Swarm during a team game and used it to pull back a win.

Oh, I was just posting it in response to the bit about "old stuff can be just as good as the new stuff."

"TheWonderTheWonderTheWonderTheWonderThe-NOOOOOOOOOO!"

I still say that this game still continues to stand tall against modern RTS games like SC2 and Planetary Annihilation.

Dayum. Between this and the Illidan/Tyrande banter, I think I may be jumping into HotS as soon as I can. The story was always my favorite part of WCIII and SC, so references to it will hook me a lot better than they would in LoL (I've played LoL, and until I saw mentions in this thread, didn't know they even had…

Huh. Was there at least a nice variety in metas, or did each faction usually hew to a particular build order and strategy once you got into upper-level play?

So was the "big changes" just impact shifts to the meta? If so, I can see why that would continuously disrupt attempts at high-level play. Were there any issues with longer-term unaddressed and/or OP metas?

If anything it showed how an extra race can make the game wildly unbalanced if Blizzard is not paying attention.

Well, somebody else mentioned that they did do some patching, but my impression was that it was not patched anywhere near as much as SC1 was, which is a real shame as I much prefer WC's aesthetics to SC

See, I feel WCIII was a good transitional product, and now that LoL and MOBAs have come into their own, it's high time we get a WCIV that goes back to the roots of RTS without a focus on heroes (At least, without that focus in multiplayer. Campaigns with heroes are fine by me)

That's fairly disingenuous to not see the same thing in SCII: All three factions have upgradeable main centers, each has a melee unit and a ranged unit, and so on.

True, it would be a small change, but the differences between the workers for the different factions would still have a drastic impact on the game.

I liked the heroes, but as a player who has absolute shit micro (AoEII Goths FTW!) they were too hard to manage alongside the rest of a force, and as a result I tended to end up focusing on either managing my hero or my army effectively, to the detriment of the remainder.

Well, was Blizzard supporting it in terms of balance in the same way as they did for SC1 and SC:BW? I know they went into SC2 focusing on multiplayer balance, but I can't recall ever reading or hearing about any continuous patches or balance tweaks to WCIII (Admittedly I wasn't heavily into the pro scene for it,…

Again got to ask have you ever played SC2 multiplayer.