Starcraft 2

[Navaros]

But you have to do this and more in old style RTS games too. You have to constantly build workers, take expansions and watch them against any attacks(such as a a reaver drop in the midddle of your workers).

The DoW style games take out just the "building workers"part. And as a result you can concentrate on your army and battle more.

You definitely do have to build peon workers in DoW and micro them to every freakin' point on the map and constantly be babysitting them. Building and microing workers in DoW is probably the most cumbersome and aggravating worker gameplay RTS mechanic ever designed. True that in "old style" RTS'es you have to defend your workers, no doubt. But you get to do that that via microing combat-effective units to defend them instead of spending much of your time microing the workers themselves.

The difference is in old style RTS games you dont have to manually micro your workers all across the map constantly and then do nothing but waiting and watching them (feels like watching grass grow!) til your resource income hits the specified number to fortify a resource point; when you can then start building with that worker. Only to then have to repeat the whole process again several times per game --- like you do in DoW. And of course if you need "new" workers in DoW because the one you had ready got killed, you have to micro the new ones starting from way back at your central base. Whereas in old style RTS games getting a new worker from the base to resources is not so much of a pain since they are much more closeby. DoW is the RTS King of constant, necessary peon worker micro-mangement. Which detracts a lot from and sucks away a ton of legitmate, fun gameplay time that could have come from micro-managing combat-effective units.

Of course, it seemed among the majority of DoW players they set their games with unlimited resources right off the bat and therefore bypassed all those annoyances - and the entire "resource collection & being limited by the resources you have" aspect of the game. Which of course, were not the settings that game was designed around or balanced for. I would think the annoying "constantly micro a peon worker to every point on the map in DoW" gameplay was a factor in determining that preference among most players.

I am curious how the other DoW players in this thread found microing the peon workers in the described ways to be fun?

Also agree that holding critical points is vital to every RTS, DoW was no different and didn't bring anything new to the table whatsoever in this regard.