Supreme Commander gone gold

I don't see a problem with that. What if you want them to do that? The units should go in a straight line to the objective if they can, that is important when planing your strategy. Of course units getting stuck is a big problem and should not happen but I have barely see it in the final version.

Units attacking obstacles because there is a enemy in the other side is a bigger problem. They don't see the terrain when attacking at all.

 

Supreme commander is disappointing to say the least. I am sorry, but it is.

First of all, this game is extremely cpu dependent and i couldnt make it run on my p4@2.4ghz. I mean it could run but when i made like 100-200units and went to fight the first battle, the game was running at 1frame per hour. Reducing graphic details didnt affect performance(the x800 xt pe could handle the game just fine) so the game was unplayable. Note, that i could run company of heroes with med/high effects just fine and company of heroes is far prettier than supreme commander.

But even if you do have a strong cpu, this game sucks. Lets talk about pathfinding. Dune 2, an rts game that came out 15 years ago had better pathfinding than this. Pathfinding is a complete and utter joke. What do i mean? Ever seen units pumping into each other for 10mins? Or 1 unit bumping into the next over and over and over and over again till it gets to its destination?

Especially if you use the "help/follow" command, all hell breaks lose. Its pathfinding madness i tell you. How many years does an engineer needs in order to start constructing a building next to him? It flashes and pushes and tries to move for years if there are other units next to him.

Not to mention how far each unit stands from the next when moving a stack of units. Yeah, lets spread all over the map, without a formation or even a hint of tactical deployment. A complete joke. This isnt even good for an alpha. Did they even test the damn game?

The graphical interface sucks. Its HUGE and blocky and offers no information. Yes, lets put an interface that covers 70% of the screen while showing no important information. You select a unit, and the gui doesnt write any stats that this unit has or even its damn name. Have you ever seen so big, yet useless gui in your life?

Graphics? Hardly impressive but i can live with them. It would have been nice if we had a bit cooler water physics(especially with explosions in the sea, etc). They are a bit blocky for my taste but considering the number of units that a battle can have, graphics are ok.

We need shortcuts for constructing buildings. We must have configurable shortcuts for everything, especially for a game like this that requires so much constructing.

The scrolling speed is way too fast and not smooth enough when zoomed in and there isnt any way to adjust it from the options. The best way to scroll around is by pressing the scrolling wheel(using it as a third button) but even that isnt that useful cause it scrolls the speed the opposite side that you move the mouse. Scrolling speed should automatically scale according to how much zoomed in you are.

This game has serious issues. It has no tactical mechanics or anything like that. And even if it has some interesting strategical concepts, it is just build, build, build and take your trillion units and move them towards the general direction of your enemy. And it is like that, simply because build efficiency is more important than anything else.

This isnt strategy, this is just stupid. Total war series have large scale battles but they incorporate very solid tactical options. As soon as you think "thank god we moved away from stupid spam units/buildings rts", this comes out. I dont have anything against spamming but on this game spamming is extremely prevalent, mostly due to how the economy works(surplus resources are lost).

 

I can see that with all the AE weapons at your disposal. Splash damage appears deadly in this game.

 

None, but this isnt the point. By spamming i dont mean just spamming units but generally spamming(buildings and/or units). And i said that that spamming is a huge factor for this game, simply because the way the economy works. The surplus of your economy cant be easily stored and it is often "lost"(especially if you arent fast/good enough player).

This leads to "omg, spam whatever to keep my resources fully utilized at all times". And spam whatever can potentially be more effect than a carefully designed strategy/tactic. This might not be an issue for good players, who can spam and micro at the same time, but it will be an issue for noobs/average players.

Turtling works probably because its easier to spam buildings and fully utilize your eco, than to spam units and fully utilize your eco. Spamming units actually takes more skill, because units need to get moving in order to be effective. So you need to spam and micro your units and plan your strategy at the same time.

Anyway, my main problem was the interface and the pathfinding. Especially the pathfinding. Take 100 tanks and tell them to go from A to B. It is a joke. And even when they manage to get to B, they will be spread all over the place, with no tactical deployment/formation.

If you want a large scale rts, you need to have good ai because the player cant precisely move the units. On a game like wc3, you can have crappy pathfinding because you have few units. On a game like total war or supreme commander, the ai of your units is extremely important. Also important are the tactical options(formations for example) and generally the game should be made so that they player can actually use the units effectively.

I dont know any modern rts with this bad pathfinding. A unit kept pumping into another unit, over and over again. Each time it pumped into the unit, it pushed the second unit a bit forward and eventually there was enough room to go around the unit, but it didnt go around, it kept pumping into the unit. And the pumped unit didnt move in order to let the other unit pass.

I mean come on? If you have bad pathfinding algorithms, then make the units have like 0 footprint so that units can pass "through" each other or something.

I think that supreme commander is way overhyped. If it wasnt for the TA ancestry, it would have been a 70-75% game. But because it is overhyped, it gets 90%+ reviews. Yes it has some nice features(i like the shift queueing display, the minimap, the rally point syncs, the drag and drop building, etc) but it has huge disadvantages too which greatly affect gameplay.

 

The game foments building energy/mass storage because it gives bonus to production.

Read the manual, there are formation options but they aren't showed in the GUI by default. In any case with a CPU as bad as yours the game control lags and it may give you the wrong impression of how the game works.

 

On traditional rts, you need to expand cause otherwise you will run out of resources. So you have to expand if you want to gather resources. On supreme commander, although expanding is important, it doesnt seem nearly as important as traditional rts.

Anyway, for me the pathfinding killed it.

 

It's likely your CPU is having trouble. I tested out the largest map (81x81km) with 6 AIs and a 1000 unit cap. Pretty soon I noticed that the movement of my troops were really strange (compared to a small map or the campaign). Checking out Task Manager showed both my core fully used =/


As for expanding, the most important thing in SC is scouting actually. You need to find your opponent quickly and start harrassing his engineers that are trying to build mass extractors. Then scouting is important so that you know what's coming. There should be no way an opponent could build something like a T3 artilllery without you knowing.

 

Winning in TA, and probably SC, simply comes down to offensive strategy/tactics and your ability to get resources faster than others and use them optimally. If you can excel at both of those, you will beat everyone.

Those who play defensively will never win. Not ever, ever, ever. Building a fortress is wasting time for me to just smash you into the ground with a multi-front assault. Confuse the defenses and then walk over them. I've done it time and again. At least in TA. I don't see SC being any different, honestly.

Of course you need to prepare slightly for incoming attacks, but a good offense is better than any defense in almost every situation.

My biggest concern with SupComm is that some units may be unstoppable if used right. That is certainly the case with some of the air units. Taking out a commander is also even more devasting with SupComm, and maybe easier than ever.

Pathfinding seems to be massively improved over TA.

IMO, SupComm feels like a refinement of TA, but a simplification as well. It feels like they took the TA gameplay that evolved over the years and that I've played for like a decade now, and focused on its base elements. It's a weird feeling. I haven't played enough of it yet, but it is very much like TA in so many ways. The problem with what they did is that if they focused in a wrong way on some things it could break the game, too. This is something the modders have dealt and struggled with for many years with their unit packs.

 

Now why oh why did I have to waste 3 full hours on building the most powerful experimental unit... is that sane guys?

 

I hope you just never heard of stacking constructors to a task

 

OK, wow.
Just installed & played two skirmishes vs. the 'normal' AI to work out what I'm doing...



OK so the normal AI is kinda a walk over & I wasted heaps of time just trying to work out the basics (including managing to grind my economy to a halt...) but once I got some stuff happening, yah its good so far (also stuffed around building stuff for kicks even though I could win easy enough

I didn't run into any unit limit with something like 600 units in action by the end of my 2nd skirmish & thats very promising.
Absolutely loving the ability to drag & drop existing patrol paths & relocate/re-order queued buildings.

Frame rate was tolerable for me but it was indeed stressing my system more than most games I've been playing on it.

The not so good was mostly that it is reasonably easy to get the ground unit pathfinding stuffed if you have too many units for a given area.
I think its better than it had been in TA but certainly not perfect.

I seemed to have some strange things happen with my economy where for ages I'd struggle with it just slightly out of balance & stuff building very slowly but then suddenly it would hit a tipping point & everything started getting built really quick, wierded me out a lot really.

Pleased to see a couple of buttons for Mods in the game, I expect to see some great stuff in the modding side of things.

 

I'm considering this game... however...
How well can I expect this game to run on an A64 4200 x2? /w 2gb ram

My friend got it, he has an older single core A64, and the performance is beyond a joke. If the commander blows up, it pretty much halts for number of seconds.
I could understand it being a fixed frequency thing, where there is a set amount of work to do every second - so if it goes even slightly over everything grinds to a hault.

 

The economy is based on "mass" and "energy". There are also storage units for both, so that you can build up a kind of capacity buffer to enable you to perform bursts of building even when you don't actually have enough mass or energy income to support what you are spending. The more you're building, the more you can run out of energy/mass and then stall everything. It's pretty rough when you run out of energy and your forcefields conk out. There are also options to suspend production or work of any unit in order to drop your requirements down and get out of the race condition.

The tipping point you describe happens when you have enough mass and energy income to always meet your building requirement, and the race condition never happens.

 

Thanks to Google and a guy at the GPG forums, I got my 59000XT to run with the /novalidate switch. Some wonky textures, some funky looking explosions and some missing effects, other than that it ran OK.... that is, until the poor 3800+ nearly bowed out. Running at 100% the whole time (compared to 80% on the dual core) it got reaaaally slow with more than a handful units on the screen and a long building queues caused an unenjoyable slideshow, probably due to the AI hogging cycles. According to some guy on the forums FX and other NV 2.0 PS capable parts do not support hardware instancing which is why they are not supported. No idea, but I might try this game again in a year maybe or two.

 

I am LOVING this game!

But honestly, my first few hours playing it I didn't like it. The game is almost overwhellmingly complicated when you have no expereince. And the graphics initially come across as uninspiring. When I started the tutorial I didn't think I was going to enjoy the game. I was thinking of returning it, so I said f*ck the tutorial and just jumped right into the game.

The first couple missions are easy enough to beat even if you play very badly. But what you do learn very eary on is just how important and just how powerfull base defenses can be. So even a total noob who does not understand the economy of the game or strategy at all can manage to survive long enough against the AI to learn the correct way to approch the game.

Once you figure the economy system out and learn how to build strategically so you don't bankrupt your resources you start really kicking ass.

I love how the "tank rush" is totally ineffective in this game. I love how you have to actually plan a good offensive using a mix of offensive and defensive units to beat your opponent. I've only played through the UEF campagin so far. But the more I play it the more I love it. I love tactical zoom! Tactical zoom was hard to get the hang of at first and I kept thinking where is the mini map, but once you are comfortable with it, you see how brilliant is is.

I'm playing widescreen at 1920x1200 on a X2 3800 and a 7800GTX. The game does chug a bit during really large assaults. But generally it runs pretty well.

Here is a tip some players might fight useful. Learn how to use the spy planes well! At least vs the AI this has worked very well for me. Before I launch any significant offensive on an opponents base I always put a plane in the air nearby on a patrol route. You only want them flying near enough so you can get good visibitly on at least part of the base. You don't want to be flying over their base or near enough to be in range of their Anti Air.

Sometimes I will send a kamikazi plane into their base just to get a good look at their layout. But for a actual assualt the better your long range visibility, the more effective your long range weapons like your missles and artiliery become. You can pound them from a very good distance if you have eyes in the sky.

 

Easy solution :

Stealth a Mavor and confuse your enemy in the meantime with pointless kamikaze runs and naval blockades.

Honestly...3 times now i've just thrown loads of pathetic units at my enemies to distract them while gradually building a Mavor and it's worked perfectly. Just have to keep about 20 engineers (or more...50 is better if you're got the energy for everything) under a couple of T2 stealth generators, sorrounded by T2/3 artillery. If they try and encroach upon your base with a massive army, open up the stealth, pummell them into the ground, then close up again...then as soon as possible, get that Mavor going and just nuke em' to hell. It's surprising how well it works.

It's also extremely satisfying sending some stealthed engineers on a transport to a nearby corner behind your enemies' base and setting up a stealthed firebase and just raping them when the time is right. For complete destruction, time your firebases' onslaught with the firing of your Mavor for utter devastation. Then all you have to do is deal with the stragglers.

 

While this was a fun tactic when I was learning, a good TA player will never have one of those empty corners in the first place (except right at the start).

Yes, I'm a TA player, I understand this stuff but in TA the transfer from a starved economy to fully functioning economy didn't seem to be so dramatic.
I'm thinking adjacency bonuses are a likely culprit.
That or the fact that I've mostly played just Core Prime Metal maps in the last bunch of years & they are more forgiving of economy imbalance

Reading the .pdf manual its fascinating to see how very similar to TA units a bunch of them are

In Supremacy (game continues after commander dies) mode, my most hated TA tactic, the Commander Rush will be vastly more devastating.

On a related note, the Really Big Commander Kaboom should encourage dispersion of vital structures...

Still only played the two skirmishes, big day at work & too buggered to play right now.

 

It's extremely surprising how often people do this. I guess a large portion of players are pretty much new to the TA/SC world. I did play TA back in the day, but it was for fun and I never really got serious with it...I feel I can with SC and i'm really enjoying it