That just reminded me of the Battle for Middle Earth (very fine game, if you ask me. But not the sequel) level with Helm's deep. No such restrictions. The objective was "survive".
First time, I almost didn't make it. I accidentally shot a bomb that had been planted at that wall segment and sent my guys flying. I tried to hold the wall for a while longer, but there were simply too many of them so I pulled back.
When that first wall goes down, you get to see just what a gloriously f***-ed up design Helm's Deep is in regards to fending off enemies with any degree of competency. When it went down I was pushed back steadily until I had all my heroes and every peasant I could spew forth from my last two or three buildings fighting right outside the inner sanctum's walls.
And it just went on like that. The enemy poured through that little gate like a never-ending tide of sword-swinging evil, and I just tried to keep my dudes alive long enough to hold them back. I seriously thought I was going to lose that time.
Just when it all seemed so hopeless, in came the cavalry. Or, rather, the ents. With these new reinforcements I soundly trashed the undefended troop-producing cauldrons and stopped the flow coming in to my weary chaps. After that it was a breeze of just cleaning up the stragglers.
Easily one of the most intense moments I've ever had in an RTS. Unless you count Sacrifice as an RTS.
And when I started really getting into the skirmishes, I had another one. I had set up a match where I buddied up with a medium-difficulty AI ally against two hard-difficulty AI enemies. Things were going just fine up until about four minutes in, when I glanced at the minimap and noticed something disheartening. Namely, my ally getting trounced by the joint forces of the two bad-guy AI's.
There was nothing I could do to save him, and I knew what was coming. I quickly pulled my troops back to the castle (I loved the castles they had in that game. They actually felt right. Why they had to completely bugger it up for the sequel is beyond me), started churning out archers and set up the wall defenses.
I then sat in terror as each of my outlying farms was obliterated, one by one, like some sort of sick crumb trail. After the last one, there was a brief moment of utter horror as I couldn't see the army I *knew* was marching towards me.
And then it came. Boy howdy, did it ever. I saw uncountable legions of orcs come spewing out of the fog of war, backed up by catapults, trolls, haradrim, and even a couple siege towers.
Hell had officially been set loose.
What followed was the most grueling RTS battle of my life, where I furiously clicked in order to keep the walls stocked with archers and to rebuild the wall trebuchets in order to fend off the catapults. I held them off rather well, which is quite impressive when you've got two hard-AI enemies focusing their sole, concentrated (it was really quite impressive how they lumped their armies together into one seething juggernaut of doom) effort on you and you alone.
I would practically sit on top of the resource meter and wait long enough until I had the paltry fee required to send out another squad of archers. I tried to circulate them in shifts, so that the experienced squads could rest for a while and restock for free. But, normally, I didn't have the manpower for that luxury, and they were forced to bleed on the walls till the last man fell.
A couple battering rams then managed to knock down my gate, and I immediately thought "oh bugger, now they've got me".
I'm still not entirely sure how I managed to do it, but I somehow kept the hordes at bay long enough to patch together the gate again. The feeling of safety didn't last very long though, as it quickly came down for a second time. Right around when the flying Nazgūl came in to pick off my trebuchets for the umpteenth time.
I soon realized that this was just going to keep going on forever. I was hanging on by a thread, but I knew that my side had an ace in the hole. The problem was digging deep enough into the hole to find it.
Gandalf the White, easily the most powerful hero in the game, was sitting in my keep and twiddling his thumbs while awaiting the outrageous fee required to bring him down to the battlefield. I knew I had the ability to generate the resources... The problem was that I was currently using them to patch up my defenses.
So I took a chance. I let my guard down. This was one of the most harrowing times of the entire battle, just letting them smash away at my walls while I prayed to Necoho that I'd raise the cash in time.
Just as the enemy was pouring into my streets, Gandalf emerged from the doors to dispense with some righteous asswhuppin', wizard-style. He blasted the hordes to bits while steadily gaining in power from their pathetic carcasses. I felt as though everything was going my way. The old fart was my saviour.
So I valiantly picked up the sword once again and put my defenses into full gear, with Gandalf leading the way. Things were really looking good for me, and I noticed that I was actually starting to beat them back.
But then the old geezer croaked and I had to go through the process all over again. However, on the second try, he managed to gain enough experience to reach his top-level ability (which essentially wipes out every nasty on the screen). This made things much easier, and I noticed that the siege, although it was still oppressing me like a rather spiky vice, was starting to look up. I could keep my defenses in top working order, and still have resources left over. And the resources were growing. With a little time, I qould finally have the oomph to take the battle to them.
But then I noticed something weird. There were no more orcs. I looked around and found thousands of corpses, but no living ones. This was odd.
Cautiously, I opened the gates and sent out a scouting party (A.K.A., Gandalf) to look around. Nobody.
After some more scouting and some outpost-blasting (they had savaged my farmlands and turned them into hideous abominations to fuel their war effort, just like they should), I discovered something.
I had not only killed all the orcs, I had KILLED THE FRIGGIN' AI. Seriously. The AI had simply stopped functioning. They no longer produced units, didn't rebuild structures, didn't do anything. I happily bounced around and smashed all their utterly undefended strongholds to the ground, and the only resistance came from the automatic arrow towers that had been set up earlier in the game.
I think that I had simply played for so long, with no progress for the AI, that it no longer knew what to do and just snapped. Quite an accomplishment, I must say.
And to keep this from being utterly off-topic, Gandalf is quite capable of taking on armies by himself, and there are a couple missions in the campaign where you have to use only heroes against a large enemy force. They're not generally that powerful however (with the exception of Gandalf and Legolas), so it doesn't quite fit.
BfME2 had customizable heroes, and some of them could get quite strong with the proper experience. But this had problems. Namely, the skill selection system was so buggered that you really only had three or four choices if you actually wanted a USABLE character, the characters were almost all ugly and had horrid animations (a person who manages to stab themselves with their own sword should not be called a champion of war), and the troll heroes ran like gits and didn't have splash damage attacks LIKE ANY SENSIBLE TROLL.
That, and the rest of the game was fluorescent puke.
But, if you really wanted to, you could essentially design a solo character capable of taking on armies by himself when he reached the highest level. But you'd have to put up with everything else just to get one very small benefit.
In conclusion, this post is useless and I should go to bed.
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Topic: awesomely powerful games (Read 8523 times)