The very first thing I noticed about Sins was that the combat reminded me of Warcraft. (1)
It's the twin necessities of creating a balanced fleet (army) and then making sure that army is kept together whilst moving about the map, which are the two core principles of Warcraft III. (2)
It's based upon the idea of individual units being too weak to make any real impact, and therefore making it pointless to send scattered units around to make attacks. (3)
Hell, Sins even has hero units! (4)
Yes, you need to capture strategic resources around the map, but you need to do that in every RTS in history (grab that gold/stone/wood/food pile before the enemy!). (5)
You will get eaten alive. Warcraft is all about uber micro, unit countering, and judiscious use of hero abilities. (6)
Play Sins online, and you'll see plenty of frigate spamming and rushing. (7)
Why would we have all the complaints about underpowered capital ships otherwise? (8)
The silly thing is, the reviewer is obviously talking crap. (9)
(1) That may be true for you, but Ted here next to me thinks about mollusc shells every time he plays Sins. In other words, I would assert that your association is a little bit far-fetched.
(2) Instead of saying 'Warcraft III' you could have said 'any RTS ever made' since your description was rather nebulous and ambiguous.
(3) I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here, but from my perspective you are mauling yourself. Taken in a 'step back and look at the RTS genre' way, your statement describes, once again, every RTS ever made. Forces are stronger when combined, damage piles higher with more units, kills are made faster with more damage, deaths are made slower with more kills.
Taken, however, in terms of Warcraft III vs. almost every other RTS made, your statement couldn't be more incorrect. WCIII gives a player huge penalties for having large numbers of units, the macro is braindead easy (remember, this is in comparison to other RTSs like Starcraft), the mere EXISTENCE of heroes - all this leads to an extremely micro-heavy situation where, in fact, every single unit is MORE important than they would be in other RTSs. In Starcraft, if you lose a marine from a damage spike, no big deal. You've got 11 more. And 2 other CTRL groups full of stuff. In WCIII, however, losing a single unit is a big loss since your army size is limited, and you are therefore more dependent on the actions and abilities of each individual unit.
Yes, you won't split your units all around the map, but each one is incredibly important to your overall scheme (when compared with other RTSs).
In Sins, there is also a penalty for having more units. But it differs in a lot of ways from WCIII. The first thing is that it's almost ALWAYS desirable to have more units (even at the expense) - in WCIII, it's almost ALWAYS desirable to have fewer units (that is, fewer than the penalty amounts). Also, in small games, where one might imagine that WCIII and Sins can actually have some kind of valid comparison, the first 'tier' penalty is almost negligible. You have to have quite a large, long game, before you reach 30% and 70% penalty.
The next thing that differs is the nature of the penalty. In WCIII, some of the very miniscule macro that you need to do (if you even need to do it, depending on how long the battle takes) revolves around resource gathering. In Sins, there is no resource gathering macro. All resources are essentially tied together by the 'strategic point capture' method. In Sins, you are being penalized less heavily (even at the same percentage) since you don't have to manage your resource income (expand, build mills, move dude to resource B from A).
(The other obvious difference is that in Sins, you take the penalty forever and ever amen until the match is over.)
(4) Here, we can agree.
(5) There is a fundamental difference here in that the resource macromanagement in DoW is essentially nil and is more a function of your micromanagement ability in that you capture these points at the DIRECT expense of the other player through battles. In other words, the combat capability and economy of both players are very closely related functions. In a game like Starcraft, not nearly as much. In a game like Sins, very much so (with a very similar 'build a spy station here' mechanic).
(6) In (1), (2), and (3) you seem to have set up a case against this point (this point being true).
(7) You'll never see this in WCIII, as you said. This is one of the fundamental differences between the two games. Large armies ('Starcraft-style') vs. small strike groups ('Warcraft-style').
(8) You can make a good point here, but that is not a good example to choose. Making a 'hero' unit too powerful in this game is a recipe for disaster since you can build more than one. Heroes in this game are already extremely powerful (way more than worth their supply) at level 8+. Having them being any more so would see this game become a hero rush game, where everyone rushes up to more caps and sends them to each other's homeworlds. In other words, it is questionable or at least up to debate whether the complaining about this particular facet is legitimate.
(9) Here we can also agree. If you read reviews from IGN and their ilk, you can see that they display at least SOME level of professionalism in that they have a system of points, and they talk about important (to players) aspects of the game such as bugs, crashes, gameplay, niggling idiocies, and a whole list of things you will see in every 'professional' game review. This review is a big pile of sophistry. 'This game tries to be like Starcraft, and I didn't like Starcraft, so I don't like this game, and you shouldn't either.' is not a game review, for example. It doesn't speak about the GAME ITSELF which is what people really wanna know about - not that kids that played Starcraft beat you up in high school.
"The concept of restricting travel between planets to a few pre-established lanes is a bit wonky in a game that's supposed to be simulating the wild, wide-open expanses of deep space."
-This game didn't meet my expectations that it would be MoO in 3D.
"After several hours of this incessant buildup, conflict becomes almost inevitable."
-I only played two games against the easy fortifier AI on a huge map. Notice the very unbiased 'incessant.'
"If you can balance pluses and minuses and click the right ship-creation buttons, then you too can conquer the galaxy, it seems, which is profoundly disappointing."
-Learning how to play Go is too easy, so Go must be a trivial and uninteresting game.
There are numerous other logical fallacies in this rather small and incomplete review (where are the racial differences?). The biggest thing that got me was the high density of weasel words ('it seems like', 'essentially *blunt hyperbole*').
Nowhere in this review did he actually REALLY criticize anything apart from saying 'I didn't like it.' At least the 'pro' reviewers will give us analogies to explain problems or provide videos or hilarious screenshots of idiosyncracies - they'll give us concrete examples like 'unit movement is quirky', 'AI pathing is dreadful', 'the framerate dives during X', 'textures are ugly and the artwork is patchwork' or SOMETHING. This guy just doesn't want to tell you what's wrong with the game, he just uses words with negative connotations whenever he describes an action.
Really, it was a waste of time to read that review, and even worse that I should respond to it!
http://xkcd.com/386/
