Impossible Creatures: General Gameplay
To be honest, Impossible Creatures' core gameplay is mostly interesting to me for how you can see shades of things to come. The campaign play tends to boil down to spamming your biggest ranged unit, with maybe artillery mixed in or some kind of melee, either way to handle infrastructure faster. I don't know what competitive multiplayer is like, but I'd be surprised if it's significantly more nuanced -maybe Insect Invasion is, but I'm still talking the base game here.
Electrical generation in Impossible Creatures is pretty clearly a forerunner to Power generation in Dawn of War. You get an arbitrary hard cap on a basic resource generator, and then you have another, overall better resource generator that isn't hard capped but can only be built at specific locations. Dawn of War gets a bit smarter and more nuanced about it, with the big conceptual change being that where Impossible Creatures imagines Electricity as primarily a secondary resource with a component of it being heavily used in research (Advancing to a new Tech Level always costs more Electricity than Coal, up to twice as much), in Dawn of War Power generation is actually used more heavily by most vehicles. This avoids the silly situations that can occasionally happen in Impossible Creatures where you're spending Coal almost as fast as you're hauling it in while your Electricity is over 10,000 and you have no way of spending it faster than you're generating it; in Dawn of War, a Power-heavy economy is a vehicle-oriented economy, not a wasteful economy.
The basic idea of a central HQ whose loss is likely to be game-ending is a continuation of Homeworld, and Impossible Creatures shares the notion you can't build more. Dawn of War switches over to HQs being something you can build more of, it's just there's a hard cap overall and each additional one you build is more expensive without being any more useful than the prior copies, which often works out pretty similarly and is mostly notable for A; expanding your strategic options a bit if 'HQ loss equals death' is one and B: tying into how Power economy works in it. (Specifically: that your Plasma Generator cap goes up if you have more HQs, and so if you want to expand your Power economy on a map with no Thermo Plasma Generator spots you'll need to build an additional HQ first)
More abstractly, Impossible Creatures is experimenting some with a more physic-y approach to combat than is typical of RTSes, and Dawn of War takes it much farther: in Impossible Creatures, there are abilities that let units charge targets and the like, which are suggestive of cool concepts but the game doesn't manage to do much with them. In Dawn of War, suddenly knocking units around is a stock concept, and when it incorporates charge mechanics they tend to be noticeably more meaningful, with charge attacks bypassing units and terrain and/or knocking down targets for a moment. Again, mostly interesting as a Sign Of Things To Come.
A different abstract angle is the reduction in the explosiveness of the economy: in Homeworld, there's not really hard limits on your economy. You can just keep dumping resources into units that harvest resources to a fairly ridiculous extent, and your economy will keep scaling appropriately. This creates all kinds of wonkiness in a variety of RTSes, and most RTS series at some point put some effort into reducing the insanity.
eg Warcraft II let you dump insanely large numbers of workers into individual Gold Mines, with the only realistic limiter being the pathfinding on workers locking up if there's too many workers going in and out at once, then Starcraft made it so only one worker unit could be harvesting from a given Mineral Field at a time so there's an actual upper limit to local economic expansion, and then Warcraft III pushed things down to 5 Workers at best for a given Gold Mine and also has a very harsh overall population mechanic to further limit your ability to explosively grow your economy without negatively impacting your military capability.
Impossible Creatures tries to make the economy less nutty basically the same way Starcraft did: only one Henchman can work a given Coal pile at a time, and there's only a few Coal piles at each resource site. (And it also introduces Electricity as a secondary resource with hard-capped upper limits to total generation) Dawn of War finally sidesteps the issue entirely, dumping the notion of a harvester unit in exchange for capturing Strategic Points providing a clear upper limit on how far your economy can expend and, critically, largely doing away with the dichotomy of investing into your economy. (Well, when it comes to Requisition; Power instead relies on the hard cap-based solution)
The progression there is pretty nifty, and I especially appreciate that Relic was willing to get creative to fix the issue. Even if Impossible Creatures still has an explosive economy, it at least tried a very different model from Homeworld instead of trying to tweak Homeworld's model. Most RTSes I've seen tend to try to solve such problems in a manner that sticks to the core mechanics that create the problem, with whatever 'fix' they apply being something that utterly fails to address the core issue. Concrete example: I used to play Tiberium Wars. One of the patches for its expansion tried to 'fix' the tendency for players to grow their economy explosively by making Refineries more expensive and more power-intensive, the latter demanding you invest more money into power generation to support them. This slowed economic growth, but it didn't remove the point that building additional Refineries increases your revenue which can be spent back into more Refineries, which is the crux of what creates these explosive economy models. Dawn of War shifting to a completely different economic model really is the only way to solve this kind of problem.
Combat-wise, it's interesting how Impossible Creatures is a bit of a precursor to Dawn of War in terms of melee vs ranged combat. In most RTSes, units only have one attack, with ranged units just... shooting point-blank. In Impossible Creatures, units have completely separate range and melee attacks, with one of the mechanical results being that often ranged attackers are weakened by being attacked in melee because they'll switch over to their melee attack, which is probably weaker than their ranged attack. This is a clunky, kinda weird version of Dawn of War having units tied together in squads and having the entire squad forced into melee battle if any of them are being hit by melee attacks, a fact that opens up a lot of cool gameplay dynamics for Dawn of War and in particular escapes one of the common RTS problems of melee units just being 'bad ranged units'. The mechanic doesn't do a lot in Impossible Creatures (Ranged units can still use ranged attacks on other units, they just can't use them on units that are in roughly melee striking distance), but it's still interesting that this major Dawn of War mechanic sort of existed already in Impossible Creature.
One thing Impossible Creatures could've used more of was autocasting of abilities, not to mention more smartcasting. There aren't very many activated abilities in the first place, but then they're also hampered by the need to invest a fair amount of micromanagement into them. Stink Cloud, for example, is a potentially incredible tool for countering the game's trend toward ranged unit dominance, as it completely blocks off ranged unit fire into an area for an extended period of time... but your units won't use it autonomously and if you have a group selected and issue the order to use it all the currently-selected units attempt to use Stink Cloud wherever you specified. This makes it irritatingly micro-intensive for no real benefit to the player's experience. (Frankly, I'm baffled as to why it's a targeted ability at all, rather than 'click to instantly activate at current location') Since you can easily spam a low-tech creature with Stink Cloud, this isn't like how many pre-smart/auto-casting RTSes kept powerful special abilities limited to units that were expensive and had to be used carefully, such that the micromanagement necessary was reasonably proportionate to the payoff. It would, in some ways, be more 'honest' of the design if Stink Cloud were outright a passive version of its current effect, doing away with the micromanagement without particularly changing the way it can be potentially used by a player.
(This seems to be a bit of a recurring problem with Relic, where abilities require activation even though it would be entirely possible to make the ability passive without changing much, or in some cases without changing anything other than freeing up the player's micro)
This is especially irritating because the AI behaves in an intelligent auto-cast-esque manner, with groups of Stink Cloud units automatically having one unit respond to incoming ranged attacks with a Stink Cloud, followed by a single other unit in the area firing off a new one when the old one runs out, and so on.
Overall, Impossible Creatures is more interesting for what could have been and for what it led into than for what it is. It's a fairly bland 'craft-style RTS when it comes to the core gameplay, crazy premise aside.
Electrical generation in Impossible Creatures is pretty clearly a forerunner to Power generation in Dawn of War. You get an arbitrary hard cap on a basic resource generator, and then you have another, overall better resource generator that isn't hard capped but can only be built at specific locations. Dawn of War gets a bit smarter and more nuanced about it, with the big conceptual change being that where Impossible Creatures imagines Electricity as primarily a secondary resource with a component of it being heavily used in research (Advancing to a new Tech Level always costs more Electricity than Coal, up to twice as much), in Dawn of War Power generation is actually used more heavily by most vehicles. This avoids the silly situations that can occasionally happen in Impossible Creatures where you're spending Coal almost as fast as you're hauling it in while your Electricity is over 10,000 and you have no way of spending it faster than you're generating it; in Dawn of War, a Power-heavy economy is a vehicle-oriented economy, not a wasteful economy.
The basic idea of a central HQ whose loss is likely to be game-ending is a continuation of Homeworld, and Impossible Creatures shares the notion you can't build more. Dawn of War switches over to HQs being something you can build more of, it's just there's a hard cap overall and each additional one you build is more expensive without being any more useful than the prior copies, which often works out pretty similarly and is mostly notable for A; expanding your strategic options a bit if 'HQ loss equals death' is one and B: tying into how Power economy works in it. (Specifically: that your Plasma Generator cap goes up if you have more HQs, and so if you want to expand your Power economy on a map with no Thermo Plasma Generator spots you'll need to build an additional HQ first)
More abstractly, Impossible Creatures is experimenting some with a more physic-y approach to combat than is typical of RTSes, and Dawn of War takes it much farther: in Impossible Creatures, there are abilities that let units charge targets and the like, which are suggestive of cool concepts but the game doesn't manage to do much with them. In Dawn of War, suddenly knocking units around is a stock concept, and when it incorporates charge mechanics they tend to be noticeably more meaningful, with charge attacks bypassing units and terrain and/or knocking down targets for a moment. Again, mostly interesting as a Sign Of Things To Come.
A different abstract angle is the reduction in the explosiveness of the economy: in Homeworld, there's not really hard limits on your economy. You can just keep dumping resources into units that harvest resources to a fairly ridiculous extent, and your economy will keep scaling appropriately. This creates all kinds of wonkiness in a variety of RTSes, and most RTS series at some point put some effort into reducing the insanity.
eg Warcraft II let you dump insanely large numbers of workers into individual Gold Mines, with the only realistic limiter being the pathfinding on workers locking up if there's too many workers going in and out at once, then Starcraft made it so only one worker unit could be harvesting from a given Mineral Field at a time so there's an actual upper limit to local economic expansion, and then Warcraft III pushed things down to 5 Workers at best for a given Gold Mine and also has a very harsh overall population mechanic to further limit your ability to explosively grow your economy without negatively impacting your military capability.
Impossible Creatures tries to make the economy less nutty basically the same way Starcraft did: only one Henchman can work a given Coal pile at a time, and there's only a few Coal piles at each resource site. (And it also introduces Electricity as a secondary resource with hard-capped upper limits to total generation) Dawn of War finally sidesteps the issue entirely, dumping the notion of a harvester unit in exchange for capturing Strategic Points providing a clear upper limit on how far your economy can expend and, critically, largely doing away with the dichotomy of investing into your economy. (Well, when it comes to Requisition; Power instead relies on the hard cap-based solution)
The progression there is pretty nifty, and I especially appreciate that Relic was willing to get creative to fix the issue. Even if Impossible Creatures still has an explosive economy, it at least tried a very different model from Homeworld instead of trying to tweak Homeworld's model. Most RTSes I've seen tend to try to solve such problems in a manner that sticks to the core mechanics that create the problem, with whatever 'fix' they apply being something that utterly fails to address the core issue. Concrete example: I used to play Tiberium Wars. One of the patches for its expansion tried to 'fix' the tendency for players to grow their economy explosively by making Refineries more expensive and more power-intensive, the latter demanding you invest more money into power generation to support them. This slowed economic growth, but it didn't remove the point that building additional Refineries increases your revenue which can be spent back into more Refineries, which is the crux of what creates these explosive economy models. Dawn of War shifting to a completely different economic model really is the only way to solve this kind of problem.
Combat-wise, it's interesting how Impossible Creatures is a bit of a precursor to Dawn of War in terms of melee vs ranged combat. In most RTSes, units only have one attack, with ranged units just... shooting point-blank. In Impossible Creatures, units have completely separate range and melee attacks, with one of the mechanical results being that often ranged attackers are weakened by being attacked in melee because they'll switch over to their melee attack, which is probably weaker than their ranged attack. This is a clunky, kinda weird version of Dawn of War having units tied together in squads and having the entire squad forced into melee battle if any of them are being hit by melee attacks, a fact that opens up a lot of cool gameplay dynamics for Dawn of War and in particular escapes one of the common RTS problems of melee units just being 'bad ranged units'. The mechanic doesn't do a lot in Impossible Creatures (Ranged units can still use ranged attacks on other units, they just can't use them on units that are in roughly melee striking distance), but it's still interesting that this major Dawn of War mechanic sort of existed already in Impossible Creature.
One thing Impossible Creatures could've used more of was autocasting of abilities, not to mention more smartcasting. There aren't very many activated abilities in the first place, but then they're also hampered by the need to invest a fair amount of micromanagement into them. Stink Cloud, for example, is a potentially incredible tool for countering the game's trend toward ranged unit dominance, as it completely blocks off ranged unit fire into an area for an extended period of time... but your units won't use it autonomously and if you have a group selected and issue the order to use it all the currently-selected units attempt to use Stink Cloud wherever you specified. This makes it irritatingly micro-intensive for no real benefit to the player's experience. (Frankly, I'm baffled as to why it's a targeted ability at all, rather than 'click to instantly activate at current location') Since you can easily spam a low-tech creature with Stink Cloud, this isn't like how many pre-smart/auto-casting RTSes kept powerful special abilities limited to units that were expensive and had to be used carefully, such that the micromanagement necessary was reasonably proportionate to the payoff. It would, in some ways, be more 'honest' of the design if Stink Cloud were outright a passive version of its current effect, doing away with the micromanagement without particularly changing the way it can be potentially used by a player.
(This seems to be a bit of a recurring problem with Relic, where abilities require activation even though it would be entirely possible to make the ability passive without changing much, or in some cases without changing anything other than freeing up the player's micro)
This is especially irritating because the AI behaves in an intelligent auto-cast-esque manner, with groups of Stink Cloud units automatically having one unit respond to incoming ranged attacks with a Stink Cloud, followed by a single other unit in the area firing off a new one when the old one runs out, and so on.
Overall, Impossible Creatures is more interesting for what could have been and for what it led into than for what it is. It's a fairly bland 'craft-style RTS when it comes to the core gameplay, crazy premise aside.
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