[Grall]

Eh? It's released in the US now, wtf?

It won't unlock until tomorrow here!

And how can a patch be ~50%, if not more, of the total install size? That's MADNESS, I've never heard of anything nearly as crazy.

[swaaye]

Sounds a whole bunch of the game assets had some oopsies. And that's beyond the fact that the entire game is an oopsie.

[hoom]

People are mis-reading the patch.
Mine is at about 50% progress, 90MB downloaded.
It says Updated: 2121MB/4484MB further down but thats obviously not the patch size.

Edit: Ah crap, 750MB & progress is at 55%, maybe it is really going to download 2GB then

Edit again: And now it says I've downloaded 6GB (no friggin way has it done this much) & the Updated bit says 2889/4484...

BTW whoever had the stupid idea to do 5 multiplayer maps as an 'exclusive' bonus for pre-orders is a fucking retard.
Worse, each has a CD Key that needs to be activated separately on Steam

[Silent_Buddha]

Tried it at a friend's place who is even more into RTS games than me. :P

Yup, definitely not going to buy it. They completely and totally ruined their take on the RTS genre. A close second to ME2 for the most disappointing sequel of 2010.

/sigh...

Regards,
SB

[hoom]

So its about time for an update on this.

SupCom2 is certainly not a proper sequel to SupCom1.
Once you accept that its a more normal-scale & type RTS, its actually pretty fun though.

There were a bunch of bugs/balancing issues on release but these have been much improved.
AI is much improved.
The 3 sides seem to be pretty well balanced & most of the experimentals are fairly useful without being excessively strong.

The main balancing issue seems to be that Commander upgrades can create a monster that can take on several Major Experimentals at once pretty easily.
It means that a bunch of multiplayer games degenerate into Commander death-match.
Personally I like that this is possible at all & its definitely possible to counter it.
Early game Commander rush can be beaten with the help of a Point Defense + early units + Commander because the Rushing Commander will only have slight upgrades.
Later on a fully upgraded Commander is still vulnerable to Air units.

Originally a bunch of the experimentals were underpowered & not used in multiplayer but most have been adequately buffed.

In the original SupCom, Cybran was the best team to play & this was initially the case with SupCom2 as well but balance fixes have kept all 3 pretty viable.
Possibly UEF is currently favoured with Artillery being buffed & shields slightly nerfed in the most recent patch, which is a nice change vs SupCom1 where playing UEF was all but a guaranteed lose.

The singleplayer campaign is distinctly mediocre & the story not great, only gets a bit interesting right at the end.
I think some pre-rendered CGI story bits would have been better than the badly animated & very basic in-game scenes.
There is no plot line trying to explain the shocking scale discontinuities in the maps & maps are not modable so there can be no community made fix.
At least some of the maps have a nice concept but the scale issues & often low-poly + poor texture quality in the distance let it down.

I definitely expect it'll be a much more fun game to play than Starcraft2 though.

[Grall]

I can't play it at all, having discovered all of the maps are pathetically small. This'll be the last time I throw money at a chris taylor-made game, they've all been crap except for his George Lucas-like accidental success with total annihilation.

[swaaye]

It was a whole $11 on Steam the other day so I got it. The demo was boring so there was no way I was buying it at $50, but for $11 I'm game.

I played a few missions. It's decent. But FA is way better IMO. I even liked FA's single player a lot because of the immense scale and decent challenge, and I beat it a few times.

FA and TA w/ CC are Taylor's best games IMO. I'm no judge of his fantasy stuff tho.

[hoom]

Interesting, I actually haven't got FA.
Have seen quite a few people say that its good.

I was very pissed off that they did an expansion with bugfixes & charged as nearly a full game & it didn't apply the bugfixes back to the original.

[swaaye]

I'm with you on being annoyed about the original SupCom being a $50 beta test that was canned after a bit for a "standalone expansion". I got FA way cheap though, and it is better than the original game (less bare, more "finished"). Much, much more entertaining single player.

[hoom]

I'd thought they were done with this & on to their next thing but surprisingly GPG have come out with another big patch this month & a smaller bug-fix patch.

We got AI improvements, balancing changes, pathfinding, frame-rate optimisations, LoD/shield impact improvements (s & a bunch of bug fixes too.
Finally the Pre-order maps are available to everyone (such a dumb idea).
On the down side, Cybrans now have a separate mass converter. I liked mass converter being part of their energy plant.

There is also a DLC pack coming with the return of the Monkeylord & several other new Experimentals rumored to include Cybran stealth field generator and EUF Experimental shield generator
Sounds like even more AI improvements, several new maps plus other lower level units coming with it too.

Videos:
http://au.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/s...ment-dlc-video
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...-from-team-gpg

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

There's a lot of info at the GPG forums.

[Grall]

Screw monkeylords and mass convertors, can we have some friggin' huge maps please?

I hate it that there's not a single 15x15km or greater map in the whole game. I haven't been able to play it even for a minute because the maps are so damn cramped. I want a lot of AIs on big friggin' maps, SC:FA was great for that even with its crappy performance. I had such hopes for SC2...

[swaaye]

Yeah patching this game is missing the point. Uhg. It needs a total overhaul. If they hadn't called it SupCom, then I think I would be less critical though.

I'm convinced that GPG went collectively insane sometime after Forged Alliance was released.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

That's what happens when you make everything small enough to run on a console.

[Grall]

They even went so far as to remove the support for 3rd-party maps in the PC version. That really irks me, deliberate gimping of a previously very customizable game is akin to taking a good long piss on your own customers.

Do it at your peril, developers...

Partly it is my own fault I suppose. I could have read more previews of the game instead of placing a pre-order. Then I would have found out that large maps were out, custom maps were out, and basically all the stuff that made the original game epic is out.

So fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again!

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Grall

They even went so far as to remove the support for 3rd-party maps in the PC version. That really irks me, deliberate gimping of a previously very customizable game is akin to taking a good long piss on your own customers.

Same reason Epic gimped third-party support in UT3. They didn't want people using the PC to make maps that run great on a modern PC, but can't run on a console due to their much lower spec.

[Npl]

There aint a map-editor for Demigod either, and thats not on consoles. Back then the explanation was that the toolchain to create maps involves quite a few professional tools, which makes sense as Demigod and Supcom2 maps always have some custom background and other useless graphical bling-bling. (That doesnt make the decision right tough).

And considering the tiring console-argument, just look at the popular games on PC... like Starcraft 2. No innovation, same old shit as 10 years ago, small scale, little strategic depth. The proper word is "mainstream appeal" and aint limited to consoles.

[hoom]

Another movie
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...o#toggle_video

Couple of the maps look bigger there but yeah I wish there was a map editor.
Would like to see some properly big maps & ones without so much choke-points.

[swaaye]

I remember GPG saying that there's no editor because the commercial tools they use in-house can't be released publicly or something like that.

[hoom]

DLC is out, officially called Infinite War
Pics of new units, maps etc here
http://www.gamereplays.org/supremeco...id=677058&home

Etched Desert 8 player is looking like a suitably big map

[hoom]

Originally Posted by latest patch notes

The Infinite Build Queue

In the launch version of Supreme Commander 2, you immediately paid for units and structures when queued. With this patch, you pay for units when construction starts. While it may sound like a simple change, it changes the way you play the game and manage your economy. It allows you to pre-plan your bases and unit queues beyond what you can afford with your resources at any given time during a game.

[swaaye]

lol. They make it sound like it's a new paradigm in RTS gameplay. Nevermind that their previous two SupCom games worked like that. And TA. So they're backtracking on their crazy design changes.

It seemed to me that one big intent with SupCom2 was to eliminate the learning curve of the economy (well, learning curve in general lol). They didn't want morons getting frustrated when they queued up a ton of things at once and drowned in resource debt. They didn't want you to have to think about building an efficient base by linking buildings. Etc. Maybe they've decided they went a little too far. Heh. SupCom2 is like a bastard runt child of StarCraft+SupCom+C&C+SoaSE. Small scale simplicity with a research tree.

Apparently the AI is neat though (I haven't really bothered to examine it much), but who really cares when the rest is depressing. Lemme go back to FA + Sorian AI for some massive quad core killing insanity.

What's interesting is it's not an unfinished product really. It runs well, it's stable, it works. It's just that the design changes are baffling!

[hoom]

Just in case you missed it Sorian got hired by GPG late in the development & the AI fixes post release are by him.

Yeah, dunno what the hell they'd been smoking with that economy change, this is still awkward vs TA/SupCom but much less so than the launch version.

I try to come up with elaborate stories of how they could hire someone who had never played TA/SupCom & who wound up writing that bit of code the only way he knew how and somehow everyone else missed it or assumed it was what Chris Taylor wanted.
But from the vids he's been doing I think it may just be that he's crazy & this is a case of public pressure being given in to

[Kyyla]

Ok it was 5 euros on Steam so I decided to give it a try. Well, yeah, plays like a C&C. Back to FA with sorian AI.

[Npl]

Both the game and its DLC are at sale at that Intestinal parasite called Steam right now.
I fear I will regret the 7.5 € expense.