are u supreme commander material?

[Jaraknarn]

hey, just wondering wat peoples thoughts are on supreme commander 1, is it not worth the disc its printed on and i should wait for number 2, or is it as good as the hipe on the box? Its only 3 quid at the shop i mean, but that usually means that its bad, all help appreciated

[toblix]

I hear it's... supreme sorry.

[Jaraknarn]

I hear it's... supreme sorry.

Aw man, i was hopin for . . . EXTReme, it just didn't have an air of supremecy around it

[Scrobbs]

If you like C&C - go for it. If you preferred Company of Heroes, don't bother.

[elmuerte]

hey, just wondering wat peoples thoughts are on supreme commander 1, is it not worth the disc its printed on and i should wait for number 2, or is it as good as the hipe on the box? Its only 3 quid at the shop i mean, but that usually means that its bad, all help appreciated

If you liked Total Annihilation then get Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, it's the best of the whole series, and supcom 2 is the worst.

Or at least, according to my friends who played a lot of TA, supcom, supcom:fa.

[Donk]

I played Supreme Commander 1 and Forged Alliance a lot, 90% multiplayer. That game is damn sweet. Let me know if you want to play... I'm still up for a game anytime. Too bad the community isn't bigger, those that are playing are hard core and multi is HARD .

Supreme Commander 2 however, I'm fucking loving it. Haven't played much else since SC2 launched, am about 40 hours on multi. Why am I loving it?

First of all is the strategic zoom, why is this not in all other games (and applications for that matter).

Also it now has Steam for friends and matchmaking, so much more seamless and easier than GPGNet.

The variety in strategy and how you play is vast, land pimp, air pimp, ACU rush, transporter ninja, experimental rush (awesome), turtling, artillery whore... all of these have counters if you do proper scouting

Playing a game of SC2 compared to SC1 is much more smoother and streamlined(FPS and gameplay a like), it has all the elements from the first one but condensed into a smaller time scale, you will have multiple experimentals in a longish game. A longish game is 30-40 minutes instead of 60-90 minutes back in the day.

I could go on. I just played my first ranked 1v1 game recently, the other guy built research stations for all his starting resources and marched forward with his ACU and starting engineers. I was saving my research points for until basic scouting had been made and as soon as I saw the dude trudging along towards my base I put my points on my ACU. When he showed up in my base I took out his engineers healing the ACU and then whittled down the ACU itself and winning the game.

I lost my second ranked game though was land rushed and was ill equipped to deal with it.

I still miss the replay vault though.

[Jaraknarn]

Well i got it home, it took an half an hour to install and then wouldn't even start coz of system compatibility issues (sigh) but im getting new pc soon, so hangin on to the copy as something to look forward too

[Armchair General]

I have to say that I found the plot and voice acting in the SC2 demo crap to say the least. Mediocre game imho too.

[brkl]

I am not Supreme Commander material. Not even Middling Commander material.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yes, I am supreme, but my name isn't Commander Material.

(Yes, I deserve a good kicking for that, I know.)

[Jaraknarn]

I am not Supreme Commander material. Not even Middling Commander material.

I protest that statement!*

*(see new idle thumbs forum user guide, chapter 9 : Brown nosing)

[twmac]

In a delirious haze over the weekend, on too little sleep and too much of a head cold, I played 8 hours of Supreme Commander 2 on the X360.

Why did I do that?

Well, depsite being the least of the commanders I had a lot of, maybe imagined, fun. I am rubbish at stacking orders and haven't figured out many of the subtleties that may exist but I ahven't played an RTS for that long since Z.

[Sno]

I remember trying the 360 demo for SupCom2 back when they released that on Live and being relatively impressed with how they handled all the interface stuff. On the other hand, there's apparently a lot of nasty game-breaking bugs that were never fixed in that version, and SupCom 2 is a pretty rubbish game regardless of where you play it. (Design concessions were made that created a much more bland and uninteresting game, boo at the simplified economy and smaller maps.)

I loved the first Supreme Commander though, and don't even get me started on Total Annihilation, i have boundless adoration for that game. (So i'll concede there's a bit of "disgruntled fan" in my dislike for SupCom 2, but i will still insist that it is nowhere near as good a game as the others were.)

[Sno]

When i originally played Supreme Commander, i came at it having been an absolutely gigantic nerd for Total Annihilation, but it ended up being the first PC game my once-awesome computer would prove woefully inadequate for, and so i never really put it through its proper paces. (Honestly, along with Crysis, it remained for years one of the only games my PC couldn't really adequately cope with.)

Having recently just built a new PC, i reinstalled Forged Alliance, got it all patched up, maxed out every graphics option and ran a huge 7 AI skirmish with a thousand unit-per-player cap, and i did it on the largest map in the game. It was amazing, and it never dipped below 60 FPS.

Supreme Commander is pretty awesome, you guys.

(Obligatory: TA is still my one true love.)

Also, apparently GPG just released a big game-changing patch for SupCom2, i saw it while i was trying to track down the updates for the disc version of SCFA.

[Thrik]

I was always intrigued by this game but upon trying the demo was almost immediately put off by its apparent complexity compared to say, C&C. Maybe I was just being a namby pamby, though.

[Sno]

You have to think about this style of RTS in a different way. You're not micromanaging battle tactics and resource collecting as much as you're trying to sustain a balanced, growing economy while orchestrating broad troop movements. They're not necessarily overly complex games in and of themselves, but to ensure that you're able to focus on the things that you need to focus on, they have fairly complex control schemes.

Figuring out how the queuing options work is what makes everything click into place and be manageable. Stacked orders, build queues, waypoints, and patrol routes. Especially in TA, everything clicks together when you figure out the many things you can automate with patrol routes. (Engineers will automatically reclaim resources when it's required, and assist in repairs and construction when it won't hurt your economy. Patrolling aircraft will also automatically make use of supply pads while on a route. Patrols tend to be less useful in SupCom because of the vast distances present in its maps, however.) SupCom even gives you an option for automating air transports with their ferry command.

I also really appreciate the wealth of viable defensive options, which is not just effective defensive turrets, but the games' signature massive long-range stationary artillery and even those huge defensive bubbleshields in SupCom. Defense is an often ignored element in RTS's, but it's a huge part of these. (Kind of a turtler's dream, definitely games for people who get a kick out of trying to engineer an impregnable fortress.)

They're RTS's for people who enjoy long, methodical battles on a grand scale.

[Sno]

Having never really run matches big enough to be affected by it, i'm a little surprised to find that after about an hour, both versions of Supreme Commander apparently suffer from a pretty crippling memory leak in their AI that progressively slows down the game even on high-end PC's. The end game is effectively crippled in big skirmish matches.

So i'm soured on SupCom, but there were always lots of little things i didn't like about it, relative to TA.

So I took this to its logical conclusion and i reinstalled TA from my original discs. (I opened my TA case and immediately scratched the skirmish disc, argh!) I had to manually pull the files off the expansion pack discs apparently because the installers were 16-bit software that would not run on this modern PC, and Windows 7 repeatedly objected to me running the core game's own still-functional installer. Game seems to play fine though! Music plays one song and stops, but otherwise the game runs fine.

TA is still awesome.

SupCom gives you a lot of access to a lot of battlefield information in some fairly elegant ways, and also adds a few important UI shortcuts, but a lot of the essential queuing mechanics are virtually identical to how they were in TA, the original game is still eminently playable. (There's really just the old issue of how TA utilizes the radar in fog of war matches, combined with how the UI doesn't scale with resoultion changes.)