Recently, I played a few old RTS games (Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun) and a few more recent ones (Red Alert 3, Grey Goo) and I was struck by how differently paced they are.
In the old games, everything happens slowly. You accumulate resources slowly. You build units slowly. Your units trundle across the map slowly. In Tiberian Dawn, for example, building even a single medium tank is a significant investment of time and money. Building a second tiberium refinery can effectively double your income, but it also means making yourself vulnerable for a long time if your opponent decides to put that initial investment into a rush instead. Everything happens slowly enough that you have time to act deliberately, and every action feels worth deliberating.
New RTS games, by contrast, feel like anxiety simulators to me. You rack up resources quickly. You churn through your build queues quickly. Units charge across the map. There's never enough time to do all the things I need to do. Oops, I tried to use proper combined arms tactics to assault an enemy base, but that stole my attention away from my build queue, causing me to ram my resource cap and now I'm pissing away credits. Oops, I tried to get my build queue in order and in the process my unit blob was left vulnerable and now the enemy's flanked me and destroyed my artillery. Oops, I tried to set up base defenses and while I was doing that my enemy beat me to that highly contested resource field by a few seconds.
When I lose in an old RTS, I feel like it's because I wasn't clever enough. When I lose in a new RTS, I feel like it's because I wasn't fast enough.
Back then I wanted to like it but the "pro" scene drained the joy out of me. It was unavoidable because even casual battle.net play had that attitude creeping in.
Yeah, I could never handle online play in Starcraft, I'm just saying this is not a new phenomenon. I played the hell out of the campaign though.
That's part of why I hated what Starcraft 2 eventually did to Kerrigan: the character from the first game (while already questionable and likely some sort of "dare ye enter my magical realm" writer spankbank material, villain origin story and all). I did enjoy the campaign at the time and got into the music and the vibes (and ignored the "Confederacy" and other really sus shit until later) and even the story until the sequel shat the bed with "corruption" cliches sort of overwriting every previous character motive.
Same shit ruined World of Warcraft for me with Wish Dot Com Cthulu.
I loved those late 90s cg cutscenes and was a small child so all the "confederacy" shit flew right over my head at the time.
I got yer Zerg right here, heh heh.
'at's a zergling, Lester, smaller type of zerg. Needn't be out this far unless... Aw shit.
Hey, to be fair the space Confederacy gets fucked on and owned by every other faction including the protagonist Terrans.
I actually kinda fw the "deep south in space" aesthetic, and the portrayal of the Confederates as deeply incompetent morally bankrupt assholes makes it a bit more palatable imo.
Yeah, it does, I do remember that.
The manual art did seem to glorify them a bit with cool space motorcycle poses and so on, though.
Spent a short time trying to battle.net the custom maps (which many were absolutely amazing looking) but no rando's would ever want to play them.