The Everyday Guide to Real Time Strategy

Introduction
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Team Fortress 2 is the culmination of about a decade's worth of software development, not to mention the result of 15 years' evolution of the First Person (FPS) genre itself. Premise: two teams run around like silly buggers, merrily blowing each other up to achieve objectives, such as capturing points, stealing Top Secret Suitcases or encouraging a large atom bomb on rails to trundle into their opponent's base. Players can pick one of nine specialised character classes to perform different roles, like the Heavy, the Sniper, the Medic, and so on. Team Fortress is an exceptional team game, where playing your part of a larger whole is more important than doing your own thing. Combining consummate art direction, light hearted characters and near-flawless gameplay, TF2 generates some of the best fun and silliness to be found in any computer game, anywhere.

Once upon atime in the last century (about 1999 to be exact) this site began as a single page, trying to promote a small Real Time Strategy LAN party. Like most LAN's at the time, everyone played first person shooters. RTSC was supposed to be a little homework reading, helping smooth the way to learning some strategy gaming, show where all the best game guides were on the Web, and hopefully on the day, there'd be a group of new strategy netgamers ready to rock and roll.

It wasn't entirely successful.

Well, no one read it for a start. It was wild watching those Gods of PC gaming turn into complete no-hopers when it came to doing something as simple as building a base and getting a few units out on the field. They had no more concept of what was going on than, say, my mum.

This was largely before broadband, flat screens, nVidia cards, and a version of Windows that moreorless worked. People dragged their big, bulky CRT monitors and Pentium II gaming towers to a LAN venue, spent an hour trying to plug it all in, and then another hour coaxing Windows networking to come to the party. Every third or fourth PC usually malfunctioned - and irritable sysadmins, who had come to a party to have fun, would find themselves doing more work. But eventually, standing triumphantly around a litter of pizza boxes and a clutter of caffeinated drink cans, there'd be a proud circle of lads ready to Blow Shit Up. Usually, non-stop to 4am: it was just as hard to dismantle a LAN as assemble.

Now after all this, trying to encourage some serious hard-core, stimulus-response Quake fans to dabble in a real time strategy LAN was like trying to extract teeth from a cabbage.