Something in City of Villains has me reminiscing lately about something that I had a lot of fun with, quite a few years ago.

The Casablanca of computer games, the game that everybody knows every line of dialog from, is Blizzard's 1998 science fiction real time strategy game StarCraft. Like everybody else, I loved it, and still think it's probably the best designed, best-written computer game ever. And it was one of the first games to include, in the package price, unlimited play against other players over the Internet, through Blizzard's now-infamous (for out of control cheating) Battle.Net. But as much as I loved the game, I pretty much had to give up playing against other players after a couple of tries. Nobody would ever finish a game against me.

See, here's the deal: a real time strategy game is (normally) one where you start out with a tiny, almost completely defenseless force and a chunk of land with some resources; the other players start out with the same or the equivalent somewhere on the other side of the map. Your objective is to build up your economy, and your technology, to the point where you can sustain the army that goes over there and kicks their backside, while they race to do the same thing to you. There's a theoretical upper limit to the size of the armada you can produce, but there's a lot of variation within that, in the mix of units. But when most people play against each other, it never gets anywhere near that limit. Instead, what they do is what's called the "grunt rush," or specific to StarCraft, the "zergling rush." How that works is that you race to produce a single squad of maybe half a dozen or 8 of the weakest combat units in the game, completely un-upgraded in technology, and race them towards the other guy's resource gatherers. If you get there before he gets his 6 to 8 guys done and wreck his camp, the game is over. Usually one side successfully grunt rushes the other in about 20 minutes to half an hour.

I think that's no fun. And ironically, it also turns out not to be an inevitable feature of the game. In the same time that it takes to build a grunt rush, I can usually build, say, 3 guys and a couple of hardened passive defenses around my town. They won't do anything to him, but they run a pretty good chance of slaughtering his grunt rush. That leaves me having spent fewer resources up front, and having concentrated more on advancing the tech tree and the economy, which gives me a slight edge in the race from there to a full-sized armada. And what I discovered was that without a single exception any time that I tried, if I survived the grunt rush, the other player would deliberately crash the game, force the software client on his end to quit or disconnect, forcing a draw. I managed to find enough of them in online chat later to ask what that was all about, and it wasn't about their fear that I might win. It was because to play the game that I wanted to play it might take 2 or 3 hours. And by restricting the game to just grunt rushes, they could play 6 matches in that amount of time.

Yeah, but what they would never get to see doing that was what I thought was the most beautiful thing in the whole game: two fleets of 12 fully-upgraded Terran Battlecruisers, each followed by a 6-fighter squad of fully upgraded Wraith stealth interceptor escorts and with its own up-armored Science Vessel in low orbit overhead to provide long-range scanners. That was one of the configurations possible within the limit, with enough units left behind to provide basic defense around my base. And what was so beautiful about that was that it was slow, stately, and utterly relentless. There were only a few enemy configurations that could challenge it. It might take me 3 hours to get that fleet assembled, but once I did, I could just slowly and steadily advance it across the map, watching everything try fruitlessly to dent even one or two of those immense battlecruisers before getting completely demolished. If you knew it was going to be coming, there were configurations of units you could build that could swat it from the sky. But otherwise, it was a dauntless, dread-nought, unstoppable steamroller of remorseless mechanical beauty, every bit worth the wait.

And I thought of that a week or two ago when I realized why I keep going back to my (currently almost level 46) namesake character, the Infamous Brad, a roboticist mastermind with force fields, invisibility, and flight on the Virtue (unofficial roleplaying) server. Other people hate teaming with guys like me. We clutter up the fight with metric tons of clanking steel. And worse, it takes me about 90 seconds of setup time at the beginning of every mission before I can take one step or fire one shot, which is long even by mastermind standards. But once I get all six droids unpacked (3 monkey-sized battle drones with pulse laser fists, 2 protector bots that cast their own shields and repair other droids and throw stun grenades, and 1 immense plasma-cannon and flame-thrower equipped and multi-rocket launcher wearing assault bot), then reinforce them with two upgrades and three additional layers of force fields each, then protect myself with stealth and another layer of force field? I am, for the next five minutes, an almost completely unstoppable force of nature. Almost nothing heroic or villainous that is within 5 levels of me can do more than barely scratch one of the weakest drones. And the droids lay down so many overlapping fields of fire that everything in their way just withers. Then, 5 minutes later, I have to come to a complete stop and take another 20 or so seconds to recharge all of their force fields, while my whole team gets annoyed and (usually) goes ahead without me ... only to find out how much slower less safely things are going without that steamroller backing them up, until I catch up.

There are other archetypes and power combinations in City of Villains, each with its own "feel" to it, from the strategic planning followed by intense bursts of action you get from playing most stalker configurations, to the jump right in and whale on things all day feel of playing most brute designs, especially ones with the "invulnerability" defense, to the semi-suicidal do-or-die attitude of most successful dominators, to the constant ebb and flow of offense versus defense in many of the corrupter configurations and quite a few of the mastermind ones. But nothing I've tried yet, on either the hero side or the villain side, recaptures that glorious feeling of guiding stately fleets of battlecruisers in a slow moving dance of relentless destruction like my 'bots with their force fields do. (And when I'm up against an NPC faction that uses their own giant robots or battle mechs, like the police or the Council or the Malta Group, I've been known to yell as I tell my droids to initiate combat, "Oh, yeah! Red hot droid-on-droid action!" Giant mech battles for the win.)

I do wish I had more friends who played, even if only to chat online with while playing. And for those of you who do play, my global chat handle is still @InfamousBrad.