RTS... Can't see those colored dots I hate it.

http://images.rtsguru.com/screenshots/62/full/62_8.jpg

http://images.rtsguru.com/screenshots/246/246_4.jpg

Horrid!

This Horrid RTS is similar to the first RTS game I played I HATED IT!

You finished Dune 2 with Atreides? You can congratulate yourself, AFAIR it was the most difficult campaign. Or at least me and quite a lot of my friends had a lot of problems with ~20 years ago. Fremens were pretty useless and babysitting sonic tanks was very tedious. I think I should have skipped them completely, I usually had ~6 of them so sooner or later one of them damaged my other tanks badly. Perhaps that's the reason I found it to be difficult.

My favorite site was Ordos. I had a lot of fun using the deviator on the devastor, sending it back to enemy's base and activating the auto-destruction button :)

My last mission's score was the best with Atreides (around 1500 and ranking as Emperor), because I only had Sonic tanks as vehicles (except harversters of course), and around 7 high tech facilities (for ornis) and around 8 palaces, all of them (high tech and palaces) synchronised to periodically bomb the ennemy waves by waves, sonic tanks remaining in defense before the last assault. Maybe one or two launchers to destroy rocket turrets.

With this strategy, you cannot be defeated ;-)

Real Time strategy games are WAY to TEDIOUS for my liking.

I personally thought Ordos (the green ones) were the most difficult. Maybe this was because their special unit was pretty crap compared to both Atreides' and Harkonnen's special units (meaning the tanks). On paper it sounded good, being able to convert enemy units to your side, but in practice it was quite crap.

What made Atreides especially easy was the bug that (IIRC) if you slowed the game speed all the way down from the options, your special unit (sonic tanks) would shoot at an incredible range, and they could kill enemy tanks long before they got to firing range. On the other hand, if you speeded the game up, your sonic tanks would suddenly get laughably short firing range.

I don't know if they ever fixed that bug. I replayed the game last year or so, with the latest (at least official) patches, and I think the bug was still there. Not sure though.


As for Dune 2000... yeah it was nice, but I liked Starcraft more (as a single-player game, at least). And as many others have voiced the opinion, Emperor was (even) better. I really should replay Emperor at some point, all I can remember is that it left a good taste in my mouth, even though I don't remember that much of the actual game anymore.

While Dune 2000 is a Dune 2 remake and had much better user interface and game engine, I still felt playing it was quite a different experience. So in that sense I don't personally feel Dune 2000 fully replaced Dune 2. Then again, playing Dune 2 nowadays with its poor UI is a feat in itself. Painful micromanagement hell.

My personal favourite was Harkonen. Devastator tanks are just kickass, they inspired the Mammoth tanks in the original C&C. Lost track of how many times I played Dune 2 but I completed with all the factions. Atreides can be fun and their Sonic tanks are good against repelling Sandworms, and I mainly use them for ranging vehicles and structures, everything else goes to Siege tanks. When the Devastator comes I just mob with Siege tanks.
The last time I played Dune 2 was in 1995 I think lol. Would love it if it came to GOG.

Not at all if you know how to use it ;) Some of your orders are canceled immediately but some of them are executed to the very end. For example: if you convert a launcher and order it to attack wall segment usually it will obey until the wall is destroyed. With a bit of luck it will destroy one or two building nearby (or at least damage them a bit). If you convert two units and order them to attack each other then in most cases they will continue fighting until one of them is destroyed.

Still, I felt it was much easier and more straightforward to just decimate all enemies with Atreides' sonic tanks or Harkonnen's devastators, than to try to lure enemies to fight each other. :)

Converting enemy units is not my jam either.

My usual strategy is Triple D's - Deploy, Dominate, Destroy :P

Dune 2 brings back a lot of memories. Loved it, finished it several times, finished it with all sides.
A true classic and the lift off of the RTS genre.

Dune 2000 was better, but lacks that nostalgic feeling Dune 2 has.

I sure hope that EA puts the Dune and C&C games and their addons on here.

As for game design with Dune* and C&C*, a review I once read stated it very nicely:
You want a good well balanced RTS with great multiplayer options, Starcraft is your game. If you simply want to have fun and goof around, C&C is your game.
I like RTS games, though am not too good in them. Red Alert 2 is my all time favorite RTS. I actually reinstalled it last Saturday and am replaying it again.

I remember Dune 2k had Brad Dourif as the Harkonnen advisor (the same guy he played in the Dune film), and John Rhys-Davies as the Atreides guy. Westwood always had such amazing acting talent for their FMV's, you just don't see that anymore.

Didn't find it linked in this thread yet, so vote it up folks:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/dune_2000

Well, I'm used to playing 320x240 games on a 28" screen. Sure it would be nicer if the image was sharper but I don't see how the low resolution is a problem.

Also: how many GOG games are there that you refuse to play for such reasons then? o_O

None, because they play perfectly fine in DosBox windowed mode with normal2x or normal3x setting.

And if a game is not DosBox and doesn't have windowed mode I always try to find a widescreen patch , fix, whatever. And when there's really nothing I can do, I play the game as it is :P If a game has native 1024x768 res, that's enough for me. Anything lower is a blurred mess. Maybe you have a better display and it doesn't look that unplayable as on mine.

Yeah, everyone says that, my brother already said that when we played the game soon after the release on our Amiga 500 (although that one was generally harder because of some AI improvements). It may be harder than playing as the other houses but I don't consider the game (at least the DOS version) very challenging, even playing as Atreides (and especially compared to Warcraft 1 >.<). I don't exactly remember my strategy but I'm pretty sure that I used a lot of Sonic Tanks and that they were pretty darn effective.

Lol, yeah. I never really played the Ordos, mostly Harkonnen and then Atreides when I tried the game two years ago again but my brother did use the Devastator's self-destruct a lot when playind as Ordos. He also beat the game as Ordos but IIRC (at least in the Amiga version) the Deviator's effect would last only for a very short moment on the Devastator so it made more sense to blow it up on spot. I'm wondering whether it lasted longer in the DOS version.

Also: IIRC (not completely sure) Sonic Tanks can't harm each other which made the Deviator much less dangerous when playing as Atreides. I think I recall images of Sonic Tanks shooting each other with no effect.
Indeed, I also hate blurry images but I only really encounter them in DOSBox when the wrong rendering settings are applied. With DOSBoxed games I usually just set the renderer to "openglnb" (at least I think that's what I had to do), this should result in a low res but crisp image. Can't complain about blurriness in low res Windows games but as you said, that may have something to do with my screen or the driver settings of my graphics card.