Let me start by saying I'm not much of an RTS gamer. They've always intrigued me but I've never really had the time or the energy to give one a chance. A friend of mine is involved in the Warzone 2100 resurrection project and he's recommended I check out the game. Before I do, I thought I'd come here and open up a discussion about it. My question is, as a complete n00b where RTS is concerned, will I be able to quickly pick this up and get to grips with it? If not, then do you have any suggestions for alternative, easy-to-pick-up RTS games that I can check out? I'd really like to give RTS games a shot, so I'd appreciate your input on this one.

Thanks in advance.

@dankempster:
Crazy that your asking this about a 10year old game, not to mention obscure.  Anyway my roommate plays it, by I think you start with something else.

 
Bet you didn't think anyone would reply to this post.

A really old thread, but I thought I could try to give some kind of reply. The basic concepts of the game are pretty easy to grasp, though the tutorial never describes some of the unusual design choices considering the resource gathering in the game, making that bit hard to get right on your first time playing the game.

The game is rather similar to Total Annihilation - the game focuses on long range artillery and resources are infinite, and there is only one resource - oil, and to "harvest" oil, you build oil derricks on oil wells found on the map. So far so good, but what the game never mentions is that for the oil wells to work, you have to construct a power plant, and one power plant can only power 4 oil derricks, when you've got more than 4, you have to build another plant - and that's the only use for the power plants in the game (unlike C&C, Dark Reign and other RTSes where power plants are also used to power base defenses and your mini map).

That should be the only issue you come across until the late game, when you have researched long range artillery and a lot of different sensor/radar systems, which do have rather complicated uses.

The standard sensors and the wide spectrum sensor will do the usual thing of detecting units and displaying them on your minimap,but they'll also order any of your artillery in range to fire upon those targets, then we have counter-battery sensors, that will detect enemy artillery emplacements and order your artillery and any connected units to attack those positions, and then we have VTOL sensors that will do that stuff but only order your flying units to attack those targets, as well as warn again incoming aircraft, and a more recent addition to the game (it is still in development, after the source code was liberated in 2004 it's been having a lot of fixes and changes) is the radar detector - a sensor tower that will detect any nearby enemy sensors and direct your units to attack them.

Another thing that is different in WZ2100 compared to just about any other RTS is the commander units - they basically work like small control groups (and the game has the standard RTS type control groups too, making you able to make a control group of multiple commanders each with a group of units on their own - if you'd want that), and apart from just working as a control group, the commander can take control of factories to make sure that units you produce in them are automatically assigned to the commander, as well as calling in artillery support from your artillery emplacements.

The game as has a basic experience system - your units gain experience from killing enemy units (commanders and sensors get xp from their connected units), and obsolete units can be recycled to create newer units but still retain their experience level.

And we haven't even mentioned the single player campaign yet which got so many unusual things going on that you're best off reading about it on TV tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Warzone2100

But hey, the game is totally free for Mac, Linux and Windows, so it's always worth checking out. :)

The time between posts in this thread is baffling.

That is how I like forums. Getting a bit stressed out by this recent posting frequency though.

I know right....

I loved this game on the PS2 and was looking to get it for the PC as I just found out it was on PC. But GoG does not have it and I wonder if it could still run fine if I found a copy.

Edit: A quick search and I found the site http://wz2100.net/ and they are still updating it the last update was last month on the 24th