Cause of the lackluster impression

I identified several causes why PA feels and looks so outdated and unimpressive

-global and globular scale forces you to play at the highest zoom level which makes the whole game of you looking at tiny icons over a colored ball, you can clearly see this in youtube videos where it is almost impossible to find any animation and any visuals of any unit.

-this in turn makes developers comfortable in reducing all visual aspects of the game, like animations, models, weapon effects.

Consider how impressive this was-


Do you see how in PA every single aspect is lessened compared to that old RTS?
Now consider this game-


This is as close to cinematic experience as you get without sacrificing anything and staring at tiny dots all the time, isn't it far more enjoyable to actually see the action, I can't believe I actually have to point this out to people. Everyone always wanted to play the games we saw in cinematic trailers, no matter the genre but RTS genre would especially benefit from this approach.

Why did you create a new thread for this?

It's funny, how you post the trailer for SupCom, which was mostly played at the highest zoom level which makes the whole game of you looking at tiny icons over a colored suare.

Why does this matter? When I'm taking over multiple worlds and fighting battles spanning a solar system I'm not going to be zoomed in on an ant saying, "Gee Golly, it's SO purdy."

People need to learn that RTSs aren't about LOOKS it's about GAMEPLAY. If you want the looks, go play COD or BF4. Just because all the big companies shove the "Graphics" ideology down our throats doesn't mean it's true.

PA's style is unique, like Borderlands. There are also a LOT more things that will be added to making it gleam and sparkle. People need to WAIT.

It's astonishing that even the first Dawn of War(Dark Crusade, Soulstorm) has better animations and graphics than most RTS that came after to this day, it was super enjoyable to watch such live world come together.

Edited for appropriateness.​

Player immediately zooms out to look at coloured icons on coloured ball.

Yeah looks do matter for player enjoyment.

Otherwise we would be seeing Dwarf fortress on Korean TV.

Dawn of war was good, but it's most epic armies are tiny compared to the PA's raiding squads. You simply cannot see fancy graphics and play on enormous scale. If you are looking at grahics, your camera is low and you can effectively control a couple of dozens of units at most. If you have hundreds of units to control, you simply cannot do it with low camera and no matter how good graphics are, you are not going to see them.

The style PA is using is good. It tries not to be realistic, but to be good looking and functional, and it does that fairly well.

OK, I'm done with this forum, I haven't experienced this kind of aggressive cultish censorship in my entire life.

People disagreeing with you = aggressive cultish censorship?

Most of my posts so far haven't appeared at all in previous topic and the rest are modified. Pay ******* attention.

This thread post misses the joys of strategic zoom. I can zoom out to watch the big picture or I can zoom in on 1 unit in 1 of 1000s of battles to watch that unit specifically. It also misses one of the exciting features of this game "the Chrono cam" which allows for instant replays at any zoom level IN GAME.

Coming from SupCom, if you were expecting something else than looking at strategic icons, I really don't get it. Coming to the forums just to announce that you don't like this game is hardly threadworthy, and is considered inflammatory negative trolling, when you have zero suggestions on how to improve the situation. Any quality forum HAS to be moderated, precisely for this reason.

Yes, I don't know from where did people get the idea to cherish this spammy/disposable units mentality in an RTS. It's definitely a turn for the worse. It lacks depth and makes a joke out of tactical thinking and real strategy, besides ruining the capacity to enjoy visuals.

Nobody here is trying to destroy RTSs that you like. You can still enjoy graphical fidelity of Dawn of War 2, or any other game that you like. But your opinion is not the only one. Some people like to see huge armies of thousands of units and are ready to sacrifice graphical details for it. There is no Perfect Game, only Perfect Games. There should be different types of strategies, appealing to different types of audiences. DoW, Starcraft, Total War, SupCom - all those games differ in a lot of ways, but you shouldn't say that one of those ways is inherently better or worse than all other.

@plasmafired is right, strategic thinking and big picture isn't real strategy. Military leaders of old, like Hannibal and Alexander didn't know what the heck they were talking about. Real wars were fought 5v5 so that everyone could see the spears and arrowheads glisten in the sunlight.

Doesn't realy matter ... why? The scale of information gathering in current RL and in this game poivided with radar and satalitescouting are far bigger than what was possible before the ages of radar sonar, as well as photography and planes and of course computers
imagine what guys like alexander or hannibal might have been able to do if they had access to that kind of informationgathering technology ... in that case they too might have been not on the battlefield anymore but steered their campaigns from their thrones behind monitors
having a look on battlelfields like (excuse the cheese) gods of war

ProTip: My post is satire.

Once again, a thread in the Uber any videogame forums goes like this:
> A new guy comes in and complains about one aspect and demands it changed to something else
> Forum regulars point out their mistake
> OP gets pissy, calls the forum a circlejerk and says he leaves forever
> Flaming ensues

They were also far worse than the very first game of that series.

It really seems to me that you are an RTT player, not RTS.