Thought I'd make a quick post here in light of the (sorta) announcement/leak of this game coming to Steam.

For some basic evidence for the topic title statement, see the following video:

Notice that there isn't any awkward attempt to play Starcraft Lite in that video, there isn't any terrible fumbling with controls trying to micromanage, and that in fact the vast majority of the player's time is spent playing an action game.

So what gives? The way I see it, the story goes like this:

- The game is supposed to be played as a large-scale action game. Troop commanding is done mostly automatically, and the vast majority of the player's time is spent jumping from place to place on the battlefield, killing lone enemies, harrassing distracted enemies, fighting or messing with the enemy leader, helping their own army take down a building or fight an enemy army, playing a guitar solo, and generally helping out where they see fit.

- To do the troop commanding in a way that frees up the player's time to do other stuff, the flag needs to be used. Nothing complicated, simply putting it by a resource node at the start of battle, then moving it up when necessary - but without this, the player's troops will sit at the base when they spawn and do nothing, meaning the player has to constantly monitor them and ferry new troops to the front lines, every single time they spawn.

- However, its importance is not emphasized by the game nearly enough. Even more alarmingly, in the single player, the flag is a collectible item, and it's possible to miss it entirely. These two issues came together to mean that most players found themselves having to spend the majority of their time in battle flying back and forth between the base and the battlefield, collecting new troops as they spawn, meaning their time that they could spend actually taking part in the battle was very limited.

- When fighting in battle, players have essentially three techniques available: quick-but-weak combo moves; powerful teamup moves that protect them from damage while in use; and guitar solos with varying effects, many of them game-changing, with cooldown times to match the potency of each spell. Each of these three techniques are extremely important and it is vital to use all of them to do well in a battle.

- However, the game was advertised not as an action-RTS but as a hack-and-slash game, therefore the abilities that were put by far to the forefront of the player's mind were the hacky slashy combo moves. The teamup moves were introduced as puzzle solutions in one-off missions rather than as powerful techniques for battle, and the solos were left scattered around the world for players to find in their own time. Neither of these expositions really highlight the usefulness of these techniques, meaning players saw their own abilities largely as nothing but their weak combo attacks.

- Therefore in battle, in the rare moments that players could find to try to involve themselves in the fighting, they would only use their weakest moves, meaning their effectiveness was severely understated. More to the point, I think a lot of people jumped into a big group of enemies unprotected and died immediately. This effectively warned players off from taking part in battle, it seemed to be saying "No, your role isn't down here - it's up in the sky, monitoring everything" even though this was completely untrue.

So the end result is that players, through no real fault of their own, had a shit time in what is really the best part of this game by far. They didn't try the multiplayer, where the battles really shine and come into their own, outside of the slightly gimmicky scenarios that are used in the single player. And now this game is coming out on PC I'm seeing people still believe that the game "would have done better without the crummy rts bits" without realizing that A) the 'rts bits' aren't really RTS and definitely aren't crummy, and B) the game is entirely designed around the battles, they're not something that was just added in, they're the heart of the whole game.

Oh, and I'm not saying I didn't do the exact same thing too, because I totally did.

Yup, this seems entirely in line with my own experience playing the game.

I think the real problem was that hwen you are in hectic battles is kind of hard to select one unit to do something you wish to do while not sending all your army ... I mean there is a way but I have never been able to effectively use it ever .... that is I think the only fault I see in the systems :( , but anyway I love this game and recently replayed it and still think tat it was a shame more people didnt get it/buyed it.

@Aetheldod: I think the point is you're not meant to select one unit, it's not a micro game. Your one unit is you, team up with the unit you want to use or do it yourself. That's how I played it and I never had any problems, and really enjoyed the game. As inferred in OP people were trying to turn it into Starcraft (micro orientated, single unit go here/there) when really you didn't need to and you just moved your big army from one side of the battlefield to the other. I suck at Starcraft, maybe that's why I liked this game?

It really is a hack'n'slash with a rts skin, maybe too much of a convincing one? Because people bought into it too much and tried to play it like one to the games downfall. Anyways, I thought it was an awesome game and while I can understand peoples frustration I think this really does from a case of you're playing it wrong. Not that it's anyone's fault but the developers, maybe they didn't expect people to try play it like that? There's something to be said for keeping it simple, they gave people too much rope, which turned out to be just enough to hang themselves with.

That's an interesting perspective. If the game does end up being released on PC I'll most likely buy it. I'll try to keep these tips in mind during the last part of the game. In fact, I was under the impression that a keyboard and mouse might be more appropriate for the final part of the game, but, after seeing that video and reading your post, I guess that's completely wrong.