I certainly respect your preferences, but there's not much reflective of design critique.
Level design (which difficulty is a part of) is design. Heck, in some games, their design synergizes with how difficult (or easy) the game is.
Rather, here was just a bloated comment about how things were too easy for you except for that one time that they weren't because you didn't predict a hold out mission ending in quite a predictable flood-of-units kind of way like they usually do.
I feel like there's a difference between "not ending in flood of units" and "sudden tech switch" and it's kind of dishonest to brush it off like that. Watching your walkthrough, you made much of the same mistake and lost your left flank, putting yourself at 8.7k lost (and would have failed the bonus objective given an extra 30 seconds). To put it in perspective with my playthrough, I went from a loss in my first playthrough to losing 4.5k, both of which having the majority of my losses at the end. If a small amount of information (yo you need goliaths for the carriers at the end) leads to such a giant swing in outcome, there's a problem. As Starcraft is a game about imperfect information, part of designing a SC2 mission is to make sure the player gets enough information to make the right decisions (or give them time to breathe if they're expected to make the wrong ones).
WoL casual has enemy units with halved health, that's major hyperbole.
I mean I beat "The Grey" with 6 dragoons. I doubt I could do that with mid-campaign WoL missions. The Glory of Scion mission, i pushed with an incredibly small force (maybe 40 supply at most) and rushed to the end. Defenses and attack waves outside of Too Greedy and Eye to Eye are generally low.
Anyway, saying most of the gameplay is not engaging is entirely subjective at best, blatantly dishonest at worst. Easy and Interesting are not mutually exclusive of each other.
I agree that in many cases, Easy and Interesting aren't mutually exclusive. I did enjoy the Moloch puzzles, simple as they were. However, the core of Starcraft is such that you do generally need some difficulty in order to make a macro game interesting (or, at the very least, the ability to lose the mission). And the missions themselves indicates that the team wanted gameplay with some attrition with the amount of resources it gives you. Momento Mori gives you 5 expansions, for example. 2 expansions is basically lategame, and they give you more than twice that. Does that mission require that much? Not even close. Look at your 5k mineral bank and 2k vespene bank in your walkthrough.
You may also want to avoid saying stuff like "this was good, but I have low standards" when trying to sell your viewpoint.
I don't think I'm very good at recognizing a good story and want to avoid overpraising something I don't have skill with.
That being said, I'm not blindly tone policing. I do agree with the point you made that bosses having too much health. To followup on that, the stakes could be higher such that the player can't take as many hits, especially on higher difficulties, and/or removing the tips explaining what all the enemy abilities do. I do recall a bit of backtracking in the first Terran mission to collect bonus objectives, but otherwise am not sure where else.
I also liked the puzzles during the Moloch mission, that was easily the majority of the playtime.
The puzzles were certainly one of the better parts of TiC.
Avoiding detectors was easy and they could probably just move a bit faster to compensate, but that was just to bridge small gaps between stuff, like you mentioned.
The hotkey UI changes could be underappreciated, but they outright change the way heroes are used in a simple, concise way that reduces garbage clicks, which most RTS's suffer from. There's a lot of potential there for any other creators to consider using this system with multiple spellcasters.
The downside of TiC's hero system is you get rid of 3-4 ability heroes for 1-2 abilities per hero, which can take away from a hero's theme.
In closing (TL;DR): DO NOT PLAY Thoughts in Chaos if you are TChosenOne, I wish I could have written this before it was too late! The man knows what he likes and that is a wonderful thing; I genuinely hope he finds more of what he is looking for because more and different stuff is good stuff. DO PLAY Thoughts in Chaos if being maximally challenged is not your top/only priority as an RTS player because practically every other aspect is quite polished - the quality is multifaceted from many angles - and you will likely enjoy the ride.
I absolutely agree with a lot being polished. I just wish the gameplay outside of the "new" stuff got the same attention everything else did.
Thoughts of Chaos is the epic conclusion to The Antioch Chronicles, a large-scale custom campaign. TiC weaves together a narrative made by many different characters from different faction and have them slowly converge until the finale. It features acceptable voice acting (the protoss voices will grow on you, and it gets better in later missions), and quality editor work (terraining, models, etc), as well as a well done and entertaining story (despite the ending being too cliche) by my admittedly low standards.
However, any fun that one would normally get from the story is instead leeched away by 110% mediocre gameplay, which mostly seems like a way to pass the time between story segments rather than engaging and enjoyable.
The gameplay, first and foremost, suffers from slow pacing. There's plenty of long winded backtracking through empty and very weakly defended areas in both macro and micro missions. Here's an example: TiC has a stealth mission, reminiscent of HotS' ship infiltration mission. However, instead of combat, you're greeted with (admittedly well-thought out) puzzles, halfhearted enemy detection patrols (you don't interact with the guards other than just walking out of their zones), and halfhearted kill defenseless, undefended structure to progress. It got to a point where I tried to break the monotony by attacking some random guards and escaping the detectors gaze. This gets back to what I previously said about "waiting x minutes", you're moving through the ship for a certain duration to get to the next puzzle, enjoyable gameplay be damned.
Difficulty, like many aspects of gameplay, didn't seem to get much thought either. "Hard" in TiC means "WoL casual". Many hero units are broken, and with minimal micro they can multiply a small force's effectiveness by tenfold. Many missions can be beat by getting 10-20 units and just steadily rolling across the map. But in two missions it's very, very, hard, unless you understand the correct choices you need to beat the mission (which would require editor diving or some really lucky guesses). Of course, such information is only going to come to you once you lose the mission once. As an example, there's a holdout that features extremely high tech ground units (archons, reavers, ultralisks) with a few air superiority fighters and dropships. Suddenly, on the last few waves, the mission throws the curveball of 2 carriers (capital ships) per wave. Hopefully you built enough anti-air that you couldn't know that you'd ever use. If there had been any hint in an earlier wave, I would have enjoyed the mission. It was on my skill level, a nice terran holdout with some interesting twists. Due to not seeing any indication, I fortified my tank line and suffered, and lost a lot of .
Bosses have HUMONGOUS HP bars, backed up by tiny amounts of damage so that phase transitions, many of which are accompanied a cutscenes or "action pauses", are played a significant duration apart (have to have SOME space between emotional moments). Combine this with high cooldown abilities, and I had trouble staying alert during boss battles, as rarely they did anything cool, interesting, or required effort to dodge.
In closing (TL;DR): DO NOT PLAY Thoughts in Chaos if you're looking for a campaign that gives you something to do. If you must see the story because you've seen the first two (and you should see TiC in that case), use cheats (i.e."move" or "god") or watch Jayborino's videos to avoid interacting with the gameplay as much as possible.
Level design (which difficulty is a part of) is design. Heck, in some games, their design synergizes with how difficult (or easy) the game is.
I feel like there's a difference between "not ending in flood of units" and "sudden tech switch" and it's kind of dishonest to brush it off like that. Watching your walkthrough, you made much of the same mistake and lost your left flank, putting yourself at 8.7k lost (and would have failed the bonus objective given an extra 30 seconds). To put it in perspective with my playthrough, I went from a loss in my first playthrough to losing 4.5k, both of which having the majority of my losses at the end. If a small amount of information (yo you need goliaths for the carriers at the end) leads to such a giant swing in outcome, there's a problem. As Starcraft is a game about imperfect information, part of designing a SC2 mission is to make sure the player gets enough information to make the right decisions (or give them time to breathe if they're expected to make the wrong ones).
I mean I beat "The Grey" with 6 dragoons. I doubt I could do that with mid-campaign WoL missions. The Glory of Scion mission, i pushed with an incredibly small force (maybe 40 supply at most) and rushed to the end. Defenses and attack waves outside of Too Greedy and Eye to Eye are generally low.
I agree that in many cases, Easy and Interesting aren't mutually exclusive. I did enjoy the Moloch puzzles, simple as they were. However, the core of Starcraft is such that you do generally need some difficulty in order to make a macro game interesting (or, at the very least, the ability to lose the mission). And the missions themselves indicates that the team wanted gameplay with some attrition with the amount of resources it gives you. Momento Mori gives you 5 expansions, for example. 2 expansions is basically lategame, and they give you more than twice that. Does that mission require that much? Not even close. Look at your 5k mineral bank and 2k vespene bank in your walkthrough.
I don't think I'm very good at recognizing a good story and want to avoid overpraising something I don't have skill with.
The puzzles were certainly one of the better parts of TiC.
The downside of TiC's hero system is you get rid of 3-4 ability heroes for 1-2 abilities per hero, which can take away from a hero's theme.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Thoughts of Chaos is the epic conclusion to The Antioch Chronicles, a large-scale custom campaign. TiC weaves together a narrative made by many different characters from different faction and have them slowly converge until the finale. It features acceptable voice acting (the protoss voices will grow on you, and it gets better in later missions), and quality editor work (terraining, models, etc), as well as a well done and entertaining story (despite the ending being too cliche) by my admittedly low standards.
However, any fun that one would normally get from the story is instead leeched away by 110% mediocre gameplay, which mostly seems like a way to pass the time between story segments rather than engaging and enjoyable.
The gameplay, first and foremost, suffers from slow pacing. There's plenty of long winded backtracking through empty and very weakly defended areas in both macro and micro missions. Here's an example: TiC has a stealth mission, reminiscent of HotS' ship infiltration mission. However, instead of combat, you're greeted with (admittedly well-thought out) puzzles, halfhearted enemy detection patrols (you don't interact with the guards other than just walking out of their zones), and halfhearted kill defenseless, undefended structure to progress. It got to a point where I tried to break the monotony by attacking some random guards and escaping the detectors gaze. This gets back to what I previously said about "waiting x minutes", you're moving through the ship for a certain duration to get to the next puzzle, enjoyable gameplay be damned.
Difficulty, like many aspects of gameplay, didn't seem to get much thought either. "Hard" in TiC means "WoL casual". Many hero units are broken, and with minimal micro they can multiply a small force's effectiveness by tenfold. Many missions can be beat by getting 10-20 units and just steadily rolling across the map. But in two missions it's very, very, hard, unless you understand the correct choices you need to beat the mission (which would require editor diving or some really lucky guesses). Of course, such information is only going to come to you once you lose the mission once. As an example, there's a holdout that features extremely high tech ground units (archons, reavers, ultralisks) with a few air superiority fighters and dropships. Suddenly, on the last few waves, the mission throws the curveball of 2 carriers (capital ships) per wave. Hopefully you built enough anti-air that you couldn't know that you'd ever use. If there had been any hint in an earlier wave, I would have enjoyed the mission. It was on my skill level, a nice terran holdout with some interesting twists. Due to not seeing any indication, I fortified my tank line and suffered, and lost a lot of .
Bosses have HUMONGOUS HP bars, backed up by tiny amounts of damage so that phase transitions, many of which are accompanied a cutscenes or "action pauses", are played a significant duration apart (have to have SOME space between emotional moments). Combine this with high cooldown abilities, and I had trouble staying alert during boss battles, as rarely they did anything cool, interesting, or required effort to dodge.
In closing (TL;DR): DO NOT PLAY Thoughts in Chaos if you're looking for a campaign that gives you something to do. If you must see the story because you've seen the first two (and you should see TiC in that case), use cheats (i.e."move" or "god") or watch Jayborino's videos to avoid interacting with the gameplay as much as possible.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)