It's not so much about getting a town. It's about it being a classic level where you build up towns as does the enemy, then you attack and take over his trying to defend yours. Unfortunately such levels in HoMM5 made up maybe 25%. Most were of the "unusual" variety.

You’re right on this, I would have liked to see more standard scenarios in campaign too.
A twist here and there is nice, but it loses its value if there is no baseline to deviate from…

I remember in Star Trek Armada there was one level where you didn't have a base or some important building, and you depended on trade with the Klingons for resources. I really liked that one.

I think there was another more typical baseless level too where you just had to protect yourself on a transition through enemy territory. Anyway I really liked the Klingon one.

Not really. I like being able to make a backup plan.

Oh, I just recalled: Incarceration in Pop3D sucks.

Indeed, very interesting thread

It's funny, I asked the same thing myself when i played Battlezone recently where "baseless" missions sadly make up a huge part of the campaign.

I loved these kinds of levels as a kid in games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft II because they were comparably easy to grasp, the management aspect was the hard part for me back then. I would often actually load my brother's saved games at random until I found one of these missions and then only do that one.

In retrospect I'm not a big fan of these kinds of missions. I mean, big surprise, a game usually does not get better by removing one of the core features. These missions are often frustrating and even when they are good, they are usually very shallow and/or suffer from pacing issues. In some titles they are used well as teaching tools, forcing you to learn micro management or specific options that are easily underestimated, but as far as I'm concerned more than 90% of these kinds of missions are unnecessary and even when they are good, they usually aren't as good as the base building missions. Most of the time I just want to get this over with.

And a huge problem with these kinds of missions is, in my experience, that developers tend to use them for stuff that the game just isn't good at, like stealth gameplay and shit. And often enough they are the opposite of teaching tools because they happen to use custom mechanics that do not apply to any other mission.

That said, I guess the StarCraft series uses these missions rather well and they keep the games from getting too monotonous. Some of them were just infuriatingly boring, though.

There were some levels like this in the campaigns of the original Age of Empires. In some of them you would eventually acquire a base, in others you'd stay with your small group of units until the end.

I have fond memories of:
- Holy Man (Babylon)
- The Great Hunt (Babylon)
- The Assassins (Yamato)

Specifically, The Great Hunt is one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.

I think was Holy Man that only started out that way. You started with just a priest, had to convert a peasant, and THEN build a base.

ain't that every side mission in Activision games? :P

I generally can't stand them. Probably put off by the impossibly difficult ones from Age of Empires...

But as F4LL0UT mentioned, if you take out a major element of a game it's not surprising that it doesn't work well... most RTS units are designed to die quickly and be replaced, basing a mission around keeping a limited number of them alive is annoying at best.

I think the Tanya missions in Red Alert were ok, but Tanya was so over powered I often won whole normal levels with her so I'm not sure that really counts...

Yuuup. Seriously, fuck the mission in Act of War: High Treason that starts you out controlling ONE soldier, in the middle of a wooded are, surrounded by randomly patrolling squads of enemies (with the occasional tank!), and tells you to sneak through to get to I'm-not-even-sure-what-because-I've-never-gotten-there. I've been stuck on this fucking mission for over a year. D:<

I have this on CD waiting to play it.

I heard good things about it so far, so your post is kind of putting me off. Why would you say it's unfair?

Well, most RTS players are very bad at them. Including me, though only in competitive aspect.

You mean human-vs-human? Is the single player campaign good?