Beginner's RTS

Masterdog

Masterdog

Masterdog

Soldato
Joined
1 Jan 2007
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3,186
Location
Exeter
Hi all,

Can anyone recommend me an RTS for someone who's only real experience is the Settlers? I'd like to try getting into a decent RTS but I'd like one with a nice shallow learning curve and a decent tutorial. Don't really mind how old it is as long as I can get it to run in Win 7.
Ideally it'd be set in modern times but these seem to be in short supply so don't really care when it takes place. Any suggestions gratefully received!
 
I would suggest the original Dawn of War, its a sci fi setting, but it brings you in gradually and is a great game to boot.
 
You could get the Command & Conquer first decade box set, and just work your way through. The first few games are fairly simple, but fantastic games.

Once you feel like you've mastered them, Sup Com is the only option. :p
 
Red alert 2 and age of empires 2 are what I learnt of. If you want something more modern, battle for middle earth 2 is really easy to pick up to practise with.
Once mastered though, Supreme commander is really the only way to go :)
 
Warcraft 3 and the frozen throne expansion were great and might even still be played online, but a great story and brings you through quite gently.

Start with that or go with the command and conquer first decade first. :D
 
Company of heroes but that's ww2.

after that supreme commander 1 is tied with "best rts" with coh but goes the other end of the scame (massive battle compared to coh's small battles)
 
Company of hereos gold edition with all three games is an absolute bargain for the best single player RTS available. Its my favourite as i can control it and understand it.

Supreme commander 1 plus expansion (not 2!) is about £10 for both if you look around. This game is manic on MP, so much so that i can't handle it but many people think it better than sex with 3 big boobed supermodels at the same time.

Starcraft 2 will probably be better than all of these for the sheer amount of players and from what i hear an amazing match making service. Single player is a long campaign plus its made by blizzard who will constantly balance and patch it.

If i was you i would buy all three
 
Actually Company of Heroes looks ideal...WW2 would be perfect (when I said modern I meant not swords-and-sorcery kind of thing). Hopefully it'll break me in gently.
I tried Red Alert 2 back in the day and didn't really enjoy it but might have to give it another try now I'm old and more patient. Sup Com does look awesome but I'm a bit intimidated by the scale :)
Thanks for the suggestions chaps!
 
Starcraft 2. As already said the match making service will be good for you and should also give you a challenge. You will get a lot better the more you play it, learn the units, their abilities, when to expand etc

There will also be thousands of replays and tutorials to watch
 
Supreme Commander is a great RTS but it's not for beginners.

Dawn of War
Command & Conquer
Warcraft 3

Those are the ones i would suggest.
 
If you like the 40K universe Dawn of War II is a great RTS. It is not quite the same as a "traditional" RTS though - you only control one small group of guys, so it's all about the micro-management [it uses the same engine as Company of Heroes I believe. Though in CoH you do get to control a larger amount of units.]

However, you have got to play Command and Conquer. They're nearly all pretty much fantastic :)
 
With your experience of Settlers, I'd say you'd need a bit of a slow start, which leads me to recommending the Spellforce series ( 1 and 2, both with good expansions available). It's going very cheap nowadays, as well.

I really nice mix of planning-, constructing,- and RTS game. Seems ideal to me. I've had hours and hours of fun with it. Genre-wise it fits right in the middle of a game like Settlers on one hand and RTS games on the other.

After that you can look at some of the more hectic games mentioned above.
 
Starcraft 2 will have by far the most tutorials, guides, videos, replays, strategy discussions, etc. SC2 was my first RTS pretty much, the only other one I've played is CoH (and Age of Empires when I was little, so that doesn't count :p). But CoH is rubbish compared to SC2 lol.
 
About the Starcraft II recommendations here: I think it might be a bit early to recommend this to anyone, considering it's not even on sale yet.

In the past we've just seen too many eagerly anticipated sequels that turned out to be only adequate or mediocre.

I'm not saying that this will be the case with Starcraft II, but it's a possibility.
 
npjnpj said:
About the Starcraft II recommendations here: I think it might be a bit early to recommend this to anyone, considering it's not even on sale yet.

In the past we've just seen too many eagerly anticipated sequels that turned out to be only adequate or mediocre.

I'm not saying that this will be the case with Starcraft II, but it's a possibility.
Click to expand...
Seeing as how loads have people have been playing the beta, I think it's safe for them to recommend it. :)
 
npjnpj said:
About the Starcraft II recommendations here: I think it might be a bit early to recommend this to anyone, considering it's not even on sale yet.

In the past we've just seen too many eagerly anticipated sequels that turned out to be only adequate or mediocre.

I'm not saying that this will be the case with Starcraft II, but it's a possibility.
Click to expand...

The beta is 99% the retail game, minus the campaign. The multiplayer in the beta is pretty much exactly what we're going to expect in the retail version, and the multiplayer is what most people are going to be buying it for in the long run.
 
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