what I'm really playing
That list in the sidebar is kind of a ruse. I mostly pick up Metroid Prime: Hunters for multiplayer battles (which I generally lose). I've finished the first two of a paltry seven new missions in the SWAT 4 expansion. I keep telling myself I'm trying to savor the flavor. I've all but given up on Star Wars: Empire at War, because what I thought was a brilliant design concept has since become unmanageable late in the Rebellion campaign. F.E.A.R. is there like a candle I hold for the day when I can get a better computer, or at the very least a video card that's able to do the heavy lifting. Which happened a lot sooner than I thought, no thanks to the deafening hype surrounding Oblivion.
So I currently divide my game time between Age of Empires III, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and its Winter Assault expansion.
Firstly: Why Age of Empires III? It's not like I enjoyed myself while playing it. Well, maybe I did once I started ignoring the idiotic story. I've now moved on to fighting the game's unpredictable/stupid/cheating AI in skirmish mode, leveling up my home cities and building shipment card decks. I think the game's disrespect for historical fidelity and eight year old gameplay has instilled in me a brand of indignation that won't be satisfied until I determine exactly what went wrong with the game and how it could have been improved. I fully intend to share these findings.
About halfway through the Rebellion campaign in Empire at War, the initial novelty of the experience wore off and I was able to see more clearly. The engine used for the ground battles was actually pretty ugly when zoomed in. And I only felt confident that I would win a ground battle if I had entire legions of reinforcements waiting in orbit, because the tide of battle tended to turn very quickly once Imperial vehicles became involved. So it didn't really feel like strategy. More like the management of armed forces. This has been done better.
At that point I decided to reinstall Dawn of War, a game I knew radiated the frenetic and visceral nature of frontline combat. I also used it as an excuse to check out the expansion released last year. I didn't bother with the painfully short single player campaign; I went straight to skirmish mode. With the ground-based combat of Empire at War fresh in my mind I immediately noticed a few things: the battles had multiple, logical outcomes like complete annihilation or simply controlling points on the map; the combat was constantly in a fluid state and there were no breaks to reinforce units; and most importantly, the battles were almost always fast. The trouble with RTS is that it's so focused on resource gathering that you end up fighting battles of attrition against your opponent: you attack, lose a few units, your opponent attacks and they lose a few. The armies regroup and the entire process begins again. In Dawn of War, you'd better have a strategy in place before you begin taking those control points, because you can lose ground as quickly as you've gained it. Dawn of War captured the essence of being a field commander. It deals in the currency of territory and strategic points. It has distanced itself from the economics of most RTS games, and revealed what is possible if combat was given precedence over the acquisition of arbitrary materials.