ITT: The hardest RTS campaigns you've ever played
Never got past the 3rd mission. Base campaign was a breeze even on hard. Expansion campaign is ridiculously tough
And I never beat the final mission of this one as a kid, even with savescumming. Been wanting to give it another shot as an adult
>>1722254AOE2:DE Le Loi on hard difficulty
man, i love warcraft 2. no metas, no competitive community, build orders, aps, studying wikis, shortcut optimization, just pure unadulterated rts experience. no bagge, it is just fun. created the genre, everything fits like a glove, you have the intuitions muscle memory already.there's a remake of the engine, that allows it to run on modern pc's. needs original assets from gog, or old-games.ru (https://stratagus.com/)
>>1722254Majesty - The Northern Expansion filtered me hard.
>>1722359>thinking the game has none of thatboy have I got some bad news for you
>>1723374Oh, you mean the main problem of which no one takes the concept of "competitive esports" seriously anon?
>>1723375I legitimately do not understand what you just said, but warcraft 2 has metas, build orders, and a competitive communitynot like any of that would change the game for someone who solely plays single player or with friends, you know, like every other rts
>>1722359>man, i love warcraft 2. no metas, no competitive community, build orders, aps, studying wikisall of that is included, you're just ignoring it.what if I told you... you can play brood war and frozen throne with the EXACT same attitude... and have FUN? Try it, it's great.
Warcraft 2's meta is actually pretty straightforward: bloodlusted ogres. To the point that most matches online are orc vs orc, as humans have no hope to compete in a straight fight.But as mentioned above, none of that matters when you're not playing competitive mp. I'm pretty happy just playing the campaigns
>>1722365Fucking barrows
>>1722359ignorance is bliss.
>>1722254I'm about to play Beyond the Dark Portal. Which campaign is harder?
>>1722256i got stomped in the tutorialif this site wasn't anonymous, you could never get me to admit this
>>1725932How? You don't even fight an enemy base in the tutorial
>>1725946isn't this thing he's attacking here considered a "base"?https://youtu.be/rfdD6jr3gDM?si=SfJdY3-AXrw0wG83&t=2397i should clarify, i didn't actually get my stuff wiped from the map, i just lost all my troops and a fight and was completely exposed to a counterattack, so i GG'd, so to speak
>>1725953Fair enough. It's been ages since I last played the tutorials. But I do recommend going back and giving it another shot if you want. Kohan is criminally underrated
>>1725932>>1725953And if it makes you feel better, I lost the tutorial campaign in AI War 1. Not just lost all my units but actually got my base overrun. Only time it ever happened
>>1725921From GameFAQS:>Plot aside, the expansion is, as normal, more of the same. There are 12 levelsfor each side, but they are a lot more difficult that any of the original set(except some of the 12-14 levels). Level-wise the human's have the hardesttwo levels, but the orcs have more hard levels. Both have a couple of levelsthat a surprisingly easy though (if you're careful).
*loads cheat engine*Nothing personal.
>>1722254Anno 1503 destroyed my ass, on mission 3 or so you have to avert a bankruptcy gameover within like 10 minutes and I couldn't do it
Mental Omega is hard as balls.
>>1726380Agreed. How can a returning player even begin to dare hope playing its missions?My butt was ravaged into horbit very soon
>>1722359>created the genre,That would be either Dune II which it copies and improves upon, or C&C.
>>1725921From what I remember, the human campaign. But I have last played the expansion a very long time ago. I dropped the original mid replay for RL reasons. I will probably have to restart the campaigns someday.
>>1726342Zoomie this was the age when Cheat Codes were built into the game. Just "It is a good day to die" and you are done.
>>1722257What was this game? An official Blizzard campaign? Or was it like Duke!Zone where another company sold a CD with new missions? I think I tried it and couldn't even beat the first mission.
>>1727061It was in the custom campaign map included with the game.
>>1722254Empire Earth's Russian campaign
>>1726823I still remember the time I had gotten all the way through the frozen throne orc campaign and gotten to right before where you fight admiral proudmoore and my cousin saw me playing and just goes hey wanna see something cool and types in "whos your daddy" into the chat and activated the one hit kill invincibility cheat lol. I was like wow thats cool and then another time when I was playing a 4v4 mp game I typed it into chat and one of the enemy players thought I was insulting him and my teammate told me in team chat that cheats don't work in mp.
>>1727111this man knows https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1713211129381545.webm
>>1725921I heard orcs is harder because you can't heal your hero characters and you automatically lose if they die. I only played the games with cheat codes when I was a kid.
>>1727111>he has never beaten Lost SoulsSad, but also don't.
>>1722257fucking hell I get flashbacks, forgot how hard those missions were. Took me hours for the final mission
that one map in Earth 2140 where your base is outright attacked filtered me.
>>1729681nearly more than a decade after, I still remember how after losing so many times in the second mission, I just went "fuck it" and focused everything into mass nuke bombers.funny how the rest of the campaign was relatively easier, until the last mission of course.
Not entire campaign, but one of the missions of the Core campaign in Total Annihilation. "Departing Rougepelt" is outright broken. 30 seconds into the mission and you're attacked by a large army and gunships.It's one of those mission the enemy starts will a full army but on standby, while you start with nothing. But the level has random meteor showers that can hit anywhere on the map. 8 times out of 10 the meteors will hit some of the enemy army, wake them up and move en masse to your position. Just bad level design
I can't think of many campaigns that shriveled my balls from start to finish, but I can think of many individual missions.>Tibsun>Nod have to retrieve the Tacitus from a train>a train that easily outruns all your units>will only stop for a few seconds at each station>oh yeah there's a GDI base and a rogue Nod base to deal with>here's 1 attack cycle you faggot
>>1726220You are misremembering. This game was insanely easy
>>1722254Men of War Red TideA campaign full of stealth missions. In an RTS.
Mental Omega isn't necessarily hard but christ it's intense. i know I'm in for an hour of holding on to dear life until I figure out what's exactly what they want to me attack first.
>>1739169Can't you just block the tracks with a unit?
>>1739169>>1741299Just checked and hostile trains just crush or blow up anything in their way. Also it's "Salvage Operation" and I don't have the patience to finish it again today. I don't remember the mission well but just from having 2 buggies and 3 riflemen in addition to the bike you've mentioned versus patrolling groups of titans and diskthrowers it's prime bullshit.
Just an exercise in trying and dying. Rinse and repeat until you figure out what works.
Finally got around to doing "Salvage Operation" and it's one of those puzzle missions. I remember from the previous runs that it is supposed to end with you keeping at least one of your engineers alive until you stumble into the crashed ship in the middle of the map and then you start getting fucked by reinforcements or computer-controlled opponents waking up and starting to spend the money they have been accumulating. Unless I'm mixing it up with the equivalent GDI mission.Either way, you can instead go all the way around the map to Hassan's forces base and take it. But for that you need to feed the civilian units and structures to your 3 grunts because they are the only ones who can both quickly gain those experience levels necessary for getting partial regeneration and okay enough at dealing with everything without dying to it simultaneously.There is one group of civilian (but hostile) units and buildings right away and another near the northern border of the map.
>>1726819Original Warcraft was as influential as Dune II. Resource gathering with peasants, multiple unit selection, but yeah, it's Dune II that's solely responsible for the genre.>>1741681These were made to sell walkthroughs. I mean, it's possible to complete them on your own, but they really require save scumming and multiple retries.
>>1741681>>1741622what are today's recommended versions for the first games and tibsun?
I was going to say Company of Heroes 1 on expert but a quick look on youtube shows people effortlessly beating it by cheesing the AI
>>1741681Oh so it's a "capture a construction yard and a refinery when a harvester is unloading" kind of mission.Gotcha.
>>1742146i think the history fags say the first rts was herzog zwei
Battle Realms is bullshit, that mission where you have to defend one central building from raiders and all you have us all the heroes you've met so far (and you can permanently miss if you choose the "wrong" missions on the overworld map) filters me every time
>>1742316Probably the remaster for the first games.Cncnets version of Tiberian sun just worked for me. On Linux as well.
>>1742146>These were made to sell walkthroughs. I mean, it's possible to complete them on your own, but they really require save scumming and multiple retries.You vere bound to reload about 3 times per 2 missions on a completely new campaign anyway. Not everyone was yet so good as to recover from most mistakes even in the relatively easy campaigns of that age.And that specific mission is one of the worse thought-through ones, that anon is right.>>1742460Kind of, in fact you can just go straight sought from that northern train stop (which you can blow up for experience anyway), blow up the truck that actually has the mission goal (spawned as a veterancy "crate") and have your win in like 10 minutes if you took your time. You don't even need to send an engineer into the ship.The trick is surviving the patrols with each infantry group including 1 diskthrower, and especially the two titans on the big loop below the bridges. From what I remember if the walkers see your units they lock onto them and not return to patrol (the only thing I remembered from playing the mission many years ago).
>>1742316I'm the one who posted the screenshot and I'm playing the original just with Firestorm. Which, turns out, greatly improves veterancy (halves requirements and doubles non-specific benefits) and that helps in this mission quite a lot.
The order in which I managed to beat the campaigns for the first time:>RA: Soviets>TD: GDI>TS: GDI>TS: NOD>RA: Allies>TD: NODIn my experience the campaigns get easier with every newer game. Although beating it for the first time, meaning that I played it on easy mode when I got stuck (and still getting stuck, lol). Note that the original version of TD didn't have difficulties back then, they natively started with the release of RA. Generally, GDI campaigns are easier than NOD, Soviet are easier than Allies.TB campaigns had a few missions that were real stoppers which let you leave the game for several months or even years to retry later. Also there were missions that were significantly harder than their alternative choices. Note also that you couldn't save on the mission selection menu, so just 'picking the other one' wasn't an option, especially when you haven't saved your game for a long time and sometimes had to replay 3 missions.
>>1723406>what if I told you... you can play brood war and frozen throne with the EXACT same attitude... and have FUN? Try it, it's great.You can even play the original Starcraft with that attitude. Without even patching it. It's actually better because no medics, no corsairs, no retarded balance changes.
>>1742146>These were made to sell walkthroughsChrist I never thought of that! The masochism that went into some missions makes sense now.
>>1742583Herzog Zwei beat Dune II to the punch, but the fact that it was a console game and created by Japanese developers are sore spots for RTS fans so they prefer to pretend that the game never existed