Ok I just finished both tutorials, and this isn't a review of the game itself. More of a review of the controls. As an huge PC RTS fan I am really impressed, nay, SUPER DUPER impressed with how EA nailed the control setup for this game.
I have to reteach myself certain ways of doing things, but all which needs to be done is some adjusting and the controls work well. EA has thought of virtually everything and I'm surprised at how well it all works on the 360 pad. Shocked, really. The controls literally are completely retooled. The biggest difference you will notice right away is that the mouse cursor is locked ot the middle of the screen, even when you move it. But you can use the right stick to move and pan the camera and the whole setup works very well. Analog stick doesn't have as much precision as a mouse, so this was a smart move keeping it centered on the screen.
Hotkeys take a tiny bit more work, but this works well too once you get the hang of it. The default hotkey is set to your entire army, and then you can set up six other hotkey settings beyond this. You select the troops you want, and then go to the menu with your selected troops and choose one of the hotkey symbols. At first I was a little annoyed because I thought I had to go into the menu to keep on selecting my hotkeyed troops, but the tutorial doesn't say you can switch hotkeyed troops on the fly with left dpad arrow. With one press it makes things easy to switch between your hotkey troops and works great. Using hotkeys can help you switch between areas quickly on the fly if you think outside of the box a little, because you can't access the mini map with your cursor like you can in PC rts games.
The mini map is still in the game, but you can't access it at all anymore with your move to move the camera places on the fly. I thought this would be a hindrance at first, because I wondered how I'm going to build new troops and explore and battle at the same time. Well this was thought of too. Let us say you have troops battling in the southern part of the map, and you have a base in the northern part. Do you need to take forever to move your mouse cursor north to your base to get reinforcements? Nope! If you press the left stick the game automatically goes back to your main fortress at your base where you can recruit new calvary and archers. Now how do you get back to the battle quickly? Well hopefully you hotkeyed your troops. Just select your troops battling from your hotkeyed setting, and hit the X button. When you hit the X button over a selected unit it always goes to that unit right away. So there is an easy workaround to moving around the map quickly without using the minimap.
As far as selecting units, you can select individual units, whole groups, the entire army, or all units of the same type easily. If you hold down the L trigger and A it selects all of your army units onscreen. If you just one calvary and archer unit, you can select th calvary unit with the A button and then add the archery unit by holding the left bumper and hitting A over their group. If you just want all archers you can hold down the right bumper and hit A over an archer group.
Like I said before, it all works extremely well but you just need to think differently than a PC RTS when you play it. Fantastic job on the controls EA! No more excuses to keep rts games off of consoles anymore.
I have to reteach myself certain ways of doing things, but all which needs to be done is some adjusting and the controls work well. EA has thought of virtually everything and I'm surprised at how well it all works on the 360 pad. Shocked, really. The controls literally are completely retooled. The biggest difference you will notice right away is that the mouse cursor is locked ot the middle of the screen, even when you move it. But you can use the right stick to move and pan the camera and the whole setup works very well. Analog stick doesn't have as much precision as a mouse, so this was a smart move keeping it centered on the screen.
Hotkeys take a tiny bit more work, but this works well too once you get the hang of it. The default hotkey is set to your entire army, and then you can set up six other hotkey settings beyond this. You select the troops you want, and then go to the menu with your selected troops and choose one of the hotkey symbols. At first I was a little annoyed because I thought I had to go into the menu to keep on selecting my hotkeyed troops, but the tutorial doesn't say you can switch hotkeyed troops on the fly with left dpad arrow. With one press it makes things easy to switch between your hotkey troops and works great. Using hotkeys can help you switch between areas quickly on the fly if you think outside of the box a little, because you can't access the mini map with your cursor like you can in PC rts games.
The mini map is still in the game, but you can't access it at all anymore with your move to move the camera places on the fly. I thought this would be a hindrance at first, because I wondered how I'm going to build new troops and explore and battle at the same time. Well this was thought of too. Let us say you have troops battling in the southern part of the map, and you have a base in the northern part. Do you need to take forever to move your mouse cursor north to your base to get reinforcements? Nope! If you press the left stick the game automatically goes back to your main fortress at your base where you can recruit new calvary and archers. Now how do you get back to the battle quickly? Well hopefully you hotkeyed your troops. Just select your troops battling from your hotkeyed setting, and hit the X button. When you hit the X button over a selected unit it always goes to that unit right away. So there is an easy workaround to moving around the map quickly without using the minimap.
As far as selecting units, you can select individual units, whole groups, the entire army, or all units of the same type easily. If you hold down the L trigger and A it selects all of your army units onscreen. If you just one calvary and archer unit, you can select th calvary unit with the A button and then add the archery unit by holding the left bumper and hitting A over their group. If you just want all archers you can hold down the right bumper and hit A over an archer group.
Like I said before, it all works extremely well but you just need to think differently than a PC RTS when you play it. Fantastic job on the controls EA! No more excuses to keep rts games off of consoles anymore.
