What was the hardest RTS campaign level you've ever played?

WC1 was piss easy, specially in the later levels once you got demons and water elementals

I fucking failed this one level in supreme commander like 2-3 times because my commander kept getting cruise missile sniped.
I unironically fucking seethed.

you cannot beat this mission on the first try without knowing all the enemy routes and placements beforehand

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Fucking Age of Empires 1. I don't even know the name of the mission. Just fuck it. Not falling about the Definitive Edition btw. They made missions fair.

Fucking any of the installation levels in SC/BW.
Tiberian Sun.
The last mission in Legacy of the Void was taxing af but I think I beat it in one go.

>Pure Classic Toss lineup
>Recalling armies back and forth on different fronts to stop the fags.
Good times.

Did they ever fix the armor bug in WC3 campaign? Where units have normal/piercing attacks and light/medium armor from original WC3 but the counters are updated to work like they do in TFT, which means that crypt fiends are hard countered by flying units who 3 shot them while frost wyrms are basically invincible? I always needed to uninstall the entire game and just install WC3 without the expansion if I wanted to enjoy the campaign.

The (hard) Balnazzar level in WC3 with Sylvanas and Garithos. You -have- to teleport both armeis to the same side in order to make any progress, and the other base will probably get fucked while you do it.

Tigress in C&C generals on brutal.
Best generals player in my state didn't even beat that level, and he could easily beat 7 brutal AIs in skirmish.

If you include bugs, then the last mission of the original C&C had a bug where you couldn't launch the nuke meaning you couldn't finish the level.

Out of all the RTS games I've played. There's only 1 fucking mission I've never been able to beat in my life.

Krogoth Encounter.

How the fucking fuck are you supposed to beat this level. Like 5 minutes into it you got Krogoths being sent to you already.

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Ironically, out of all the single player RTS missions I've played, In Utter Darkness on Brutal is the one I spent the longest trying to beat. It just continually dumped enemies on me and punished any failure to defend yourself hard.

None of SC1's missions, nor any of the first four C&Cs gave me the same trouble. I assume because IUD was a straight slog that required good micro to keep your forces alive and good macro to replenish what losses you do take, in addition to knowing where spawns come from and all that.

On another note, what's the most fun map you've ever played in an RTS? I really liked the ant missions from Red Alert and the C&C: Firestorm Nod mission where you were given a fist of Nod and had to manuver around the battlefield building up your forces while avoiding enemy attacks. I also liked that day/night cycle zombie survival map in Starcraft 2, which eventually got turned into its own custom map.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with savescumming

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serious qustion: I grew up playing starcraft 1 and the old civilization games on my dads shit computers. I guess I had fun but I never got good or anything. i watched some videos on how to play starcraft 2 and i understand what you need to do but i feel like you have to sit there and practice the controls/build orders/micro and multitasking. is that the case or are some people just naturals at it? i got kind of discouraged because i didn't want to practice it like an instrument or something.

starcraft 1 has some intense shit in the later campaigns.

Not a hard mission, but
>Playing Wings of Liberty
>Fighting the Protoss on the mission with the mining drill, it's tough and you're encouraged to use it on enemy units if things get too hairy.
>About 10 minutes in, I have an epiphany.
>Build four command centers with scanner sweeps, continually scanner sweep the enemy base.
>Laser can target enemy buildings, so I just destroy the entire enemy base with the laser without even losing a unit.
>Once their forces are crippled, walk in and kill the remaining stragglers with tanks and goliaths.

I wish more games had creative ways to beat their missions like that. You even get a special message from Matt mentioning the enemy is no match for you and you instantly get a victory. He does it on every map where you don't have to kill all enemy forces too, feels great.

Not that its traditional by any means but Mechcommander Gold is pretty hard, also in this middle of this mod its pretty interesting and can be hard AF moddb.com/mods/tiberium-crisis

You pretty much have to train like with any other sport if you want to play online competitively. That always discouraged me personally. Because by the time you get good, nobody plays the game any longer and the servers get shut down.

AoE2, the last Saracen level is just unreasonable if you do it the "intended" way and build the wonder in your town immediately. Much easier if you take out the enemies one by one or if you build the wonder on a small island. (patched in DE I think)

Settlers 2, Europe is hard, and the last campaign level was meant to be cheesed with the ridiculous amount of gold the enemies have.

Level 4 of Amoebattle

i still haven't beaten the last mission of SC2:WOL on brutal

>"BATTLEFIELD EXPANDED
>Giant army and several huge bases right outside what you thought was the map boundary
>Lose shortly after because you didn't grossly over do it against your original opposition

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The worst is that you can never stop playing either or you will no longer be able to play online.

You have a small window of time to pick up a new competitive RTS on its release, where the large playerbase coupled with the lack of a known meta will inhibit most player skill to the point where novices stand some chance to get into the game. If you start here, even as someone with relative inexperience, you have a good chance to learn if your diligent.

As time advances, you have a continued case of "the bottom falling out." The playerbase begins to wane as those less enthusiastic step out and those who cannot be bothered to improve quit in frustration. This continues over and over again until only a fraction of "masters" are left playing the game. At this point, there is no one to hone your skills against in an even match. Furthermore, if you take a break for a year and come back, the meta will have evolved so much during your absence, you won't even have the knowledge of the latest trends and playstyles to enable you to make educated decisions during a match.

Your only options at this point is to study the game like subject in college, which is often poorly documented by this point, so you either need to watch live, current replays from proficient players if you can find them or engage with one of these people one on one and have them agree to bring you up to date. Attempting to deduce years of developments in the meta and balance of the game on your own is a futile endeavor, while it's logically possible to do so and even innovate, the likelihood of any individual putting in the combined effort and time of a community in a far shorter timeframe is laughable.

RTS's greatest strength, that much of the gameplay is emergent and the game state has an absolutely massive amount of possible states, is also its greatest weakness in retaining players. There's simply too much meta knowledge required to bring the uninitiated up to speed to play.

Yeah, SupCom missions were really outstaying their welcome. I guess they were insanely long to compensate for the fact that there aren't that many of them in the campaign. I guess TA did it better, with more mission with more variety in them.

WC1 is baby tier easy

sc2 is full of scrubs you should be fine just start playing and get better as you play

To be fair, I always get filtered inthe 3rd orc mission. The AI loves to spam priests that instaheal the footmen AND other priests, so their army becomes this impenetable wall. It's not fun to play.

Spiders... you just spam out some spiders, easy as. The easiest follow up os to mass produce hawks, but you can go ground too with maveriks. Alsp, you can use spy planes to locate a core constructor, just send a transport and pick it up, move your commander outside of your defenses using cloak (or put defenses on hold fire, but thats risky) and capture it. From there you can spam the cans or build your own krogoths.

you hold some seriously misguided ideas, buddy

Unless you're referring to SC2, there's not really any RTS that still holds a live enough community to debunk that line of thought. AoE2 had a slight resurgence with the Definitive Edition, but even that's primarily made up of players who've been playing for quite some time.

CoH1/2, SupCom/TA, all the greats have fallen into a small playerbase that unwittingly functions as a gatekeeper to online play by virtue of how long they've been playing. Trying to break into these games now is a futile for all but the most dedicated; the tourist might as well play skirmish because they will never amount to anything worthwhile without significant investment.

There's less competitive RTS games that break this mould, such as Dawn of War 1's modding scene where the fun is just smashing as many units together as possible, but playing these games are akin to playing Starcraft 1's "Fastest Map Ever" maps--it's a fun, silly, imbalanced experience aimed towards people who want to see armies duke it out with minimal strategy involved. It's not at all akin to the jousting between players at a tournament level RTS that's had years of balance patches applied.

A lot of this doesn't really apply to me because the game I played got a few patches after release until it was balanced/finished. No meta shifts or anything happened and I doubt I would have any issue picking it back up and playing like I used to. Would probably just take a game or two to warm up to it's controls again and thats it.

I never understood Warcraft 3. They made all the characters have one fucking million of HP to the point were towers were fucking useless.
Also, fuck Low and High Upkeep. It killed my desire to play against other players or even the AI (without cheat codes) No wonder most of the people played shit like DotA and tree tags instead of ladder.

I would love to play a version of W3 but with the balance similar to W2.