Big Total Annihilation fans, come answer my question!

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,603
9
81
I just got Sup com and Forged alliances today, i only played TA for all of 5 minutes, the first core mission and i got bored because there was no damn music, i cant play a game without music, even the original c&c would suck without music. Its a shame i would have liked to played some more and thrown those ARM scumbags off of core prime or whatever it was called, but anyways....

What did you think of supreme commander when compared to the original total annihilation? Did it introduce any new concepts or better gameplay etc?
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
82,854
17,365
136
Tons of new concepts. Did you play it or just sit and listen to the music?
If you dont play you wont get music. When the action heats up so does the sound track.
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,603
9
81
Originally posted by: shortylickens
Tons of new concepts. Did you play it or just sit and listen to the music?
If you dont play you wont get music. When the action heats up so does the sound track.

You cant hear the music unless your CD drive is drive D: which it isnt since i have two hard drives.
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
82,854
17,365
136
Are you talking about TA or SC?
I know TA requires the CD in the D drive since it uses old-fashined redbook audio.
 

Justinus

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 2005
3,167
1,509
136
Supreme Commander is extremely similar to Total Annihilation. I think the strategic zoom really helps out with the scale of that line of games. It was a huge pain in the ass to slowly scroll around a giant map like Seven Islands.

Supreme Commander really had a great idea with the experimental units, which was only touched on in Total Annihilation. In the Core Contingency expansion pack, they introduced a factory called the Krogath Gantry, which created one unit: The Krogath. It was a huge unstoppable killing machine that was labeled as an experimental unit.

Also, Supreme Commander really made it easier to control hundreds of units simultaneously with the strategic zoom and the ability to edit queued commands. You could sort of do that in Total Annihilation, but it was really buggy and difficult because of the lack of strategic zoom. You couldn't control and edit the movement path or construction path of anything on a mapwide scale like in Supreme Commander.

That's all I can think of right now..
 

razor2025

Diamond Member
May 24, 2002
3,010
0
71
What the forged alliance expansion "fixed" was the transport craft's ferry ability. In the original, it was stupid in that you have to queue up or select the cargo to individual transports, even though you have grouped the transports together. In the expansion, you can group transport and do a group ferry, leaving one clickable ferry icon. This should've been included in the original game, and I think it was mentioned in the previews. Annoying that it wasn't placed in the original game.
 

Vaktathi

Member
Feb 4, 2006
119
0
76
Originally posted by: Soviet
I just got Sup com and Forged alliances today, i only played TA for all of 5 minutes, the first core mission and i got bored because there was no damn music, i cant play a game without music, even the original c&c would suck without music. Its a shame i would have liked to played some more and thrown those ARM scumbags off of core prime or whatever it was called, but anyways....

What did you think of supreme commander when compared to the original total annihilation? Did it introduce any new concepts or better gameplay etc?

I seem to remember that not only did Total Annihilation have pretty good music, if you put in another CD while playing it would play music off that.

as for SupCom, its pretty much an expansion on TA, a bigger scale with the same core gameplay. pretty awesome all around.
 

BlueAcolyte

Platinum Member
Nov 19, 2007
2,793
2
0
Forged Alliance is much better than the original... Less turtling and mass fabricators, more experimentals and unit-cap busting, PC-melting, explosion-blinding battles.
 

MrWizzard

Platinum Member
Mar 24, 2002
2,493
0
71
WAAA! No music, Yes it does you just have to have the music disk in, cool thing is you can put any music disk in and listen to anything.
 

EvilComputer92

Golden Member
Aug 25, 2004
1,316
0
0
I thought Supreme Commander was terrible compared to Total Annihilation. TA's interface felt was much more intuitive compared with Supcoms. Supcoms units felt generic and I could barely tell them apart by looking at the build pics. Every unit and structure take far too long to build when compared with TA. I preferred the Core and Arm factions to the crappy UEF, Cybran, and Aeon. The defensive structures are far superior to any offensive unit in general, save for the experimental ones, and the game encourages turtling far too much.


Other than the strategic zoom, the camera was horrible in Supcom. It faced directly down no matter what and it looked nearly like a 2D game. As soon as you let go of the spacebar the camera would revert to it's default top down position.

The game runs mediocre at 1280x1024 in medium sized battles on a Dual Core Opteron 165 2.8 Ghz, 2GB and an 8800GT. TA ran at a constant 45fps back on an old Pentium II, even in large battles. Even the music in TA was far superior to the one in Supcom. Supcom's music felt more appropriate for Oblivion considering how calm it felt. It didn't sound like you were fighting a war. TA feels overall much more sleek, polished and fun and I still play it from time to time.

To the OP, I would say stick with Total Annihilation if prefer games like CNC3 and Starcraft.
 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
348
126
Total Annihilation had one of the best musical scores I've ever heard in a computer game. When I think of good computer game music, the first title that I think of usually is TA.
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,603
9
81
Well in the time from starting this thread till now ive gotten a hold of he TA cd's and will play it fully when i have nothing else to play.
 

40Hands

Diamond Member
Jun 29, 2004
5,042
0
71
Ahh good ol TA. Full Moon FFA anyone? Flash rush ftw! Also Gods of War was one of my favorite maps.
 

chizow

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2001
9,537
2
0
Spam Commander's greatest draw is also its biggest flaw. Its moderately fun once you get massive numbers of units and throw them at each other, but the problems are as others described. Units are mostly the same and when you're zoomed so far away in order to control them they look 2D anyways. Defensive structures are way overpowered (not as bad as when first released) and air units get shredded quickly. Also way too much rock-paper-scissors with super-specialized units resulting in an all or nothing approach. Pathing and unit responsiveness is also horrendous, particularly with naval units.

Huge Naval battles are about as fun as um....those "Electronic Football" games from the '80s where you throw 22 figurines on a vibrating metal sheet and flip the power switch, then wait 4 hours for the guy with the foam football to cross the goal line. You can cut this down somewhat by selecting a few at a time and then using way-points, but between the horrible turn/move times and the horrible pathing, its incredibly frustrating. Air units are much better with movement and pathing, but they get ripped apart so quickly by AA or defensive structures. Land units are somewhere inbetween with better pathing but retain slow responsiveness. Also, with units of different speed you'll need to micromanage their advance as faster units will not slow down for slower units in the same battle group.

I also found repairing to be really slow and frustrating. In the end there's very few units that are even worth putting that level of effort into as its often faster to just queue up another dozen or so units. Anyways, its a decent game, but I enjoyed WiC and CoH a lot more than the SC offerings.
 

torpid

Lifer
Sep 14, 2003
11,631
11
76
Originally posted by: EvilComputer92
I thought Supreme Commander was terrible compared to Total Annihilation. TA's interface felt was much more intuitive compared with Supcoms. Supcoms units felt generic and I could barely tell them apart by looking at the build pics. Every unit and structure take far too long to build when compared with TA. I preferred the Core and Arm factions to the crappy UEF, Cybran, and Aeon. The defensive structures are far superior to any offensive unit in general, save for the experimental ones, and the game encourages turtling far too much.

I agree. I thought TA was far better. Supreme Commander just feels like an updated TA with major imbalances to me. Also, maybe I never figured it out and it's there, but it seems like there's no way to fully automate your base in SC liked you could in TA. There is always some level of micromanagement.

 

ibex333

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2005
4,086
119
106
IMO, compared to original TA, Supreme Commander was HORRIBLE. It is a very bad game indeed... Somehow, it just FEELS wrong. When zoomed in close, you cant really play cause everything is too big. When zoomed out a lot you can play no problem, but everything gets so small I can barely see my units.
Everything develops slooooooowwww in this game. Even when I put like 5 construction bots on one of the high tech buildings they still take forever to build. If both players want to first build up high tech units and then fight it out, the game can take hours upon hours... I'm not a fan of the gfx either. Call me crazy, but they don't look better to me than TA. In fact I PREFER Ta's gfx to this crap.
Also the interface sucks. Good control of your units in not accessible and not easy. There is no button for making formations - you have to use a frigging shortcut. I find this inexcusable despite the fact that I prefer shortcuts to clicking stuff. It's the principle of the thing. I cant find any way too keep my units from charging into danger and getting killed. Somehow, no matter what I do my units follow the enemy into his base after being attached and get slaughtered. This happens every time and I cant find any way to stop it. With so many things to do, so much micromanagement, and so many units on screen, the devs could give a player better control.

All this being said, I could still see myself playing SupCom if only the game was properly balanced, allowed the player to have good contol of what's going on, and building times were sped up at least 4x.

There was a time when I preferred TA to C&C, but that is definitely not the case with SupCom.
 

ibex333

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2005
4,086
119
106
IMO, compared to original TA, Supreme Commander was HORRIBLE. It is a very bad game indeed... Somehow, it just FEELS wrong. When zoomed in close, you cant really play cause everything is too big. When zoomed out a lot you can play no problem, but everything gets so small I can barely see my units.
Everything develops slooooooowwww in this game. Even when I put like 5 construction bots on one of the high tech buildings they still take forever to build. If both players want to first build up high tech units and then fight it out, the game can take hours upon hours... I'm not a fan of the gfx either. Call me crazy, but they don't look better to me than TA. In fact I PREFER Ta's gfx to this crap.
Also the interface sucks. Good control of your units in not accessible and not easy. There is no button for making formations - you have to use a frigging shortcut. I find this inexcusable despite the fact that I prefer shortcuts to clicking stuff. It's the principle of the thing. I cant find any way too keep my units from charging into danger and getting killed. Somehow, no matter what I do my units follow the enemy into his base after being attached and get slaughtered. This happens every time and I cant find any way to stop it. With so many things to do, so much micromanagement, and so many units on screen, the devs could give a player better control.

All this being said, I could still see myself playing SupCom if only the game was properly balanced, allowed the player to have good contol of what's going on, and building times were sped up at least 4x.

There was a time when I preferred TA to C&C, but that is definitely not the case with SupCom.
 

chizow

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2001
9,537
2
0
Originally posted by: ibex333
All this being said, I could still see myself playing SupCom if only the game was properly balanced, allowed the player to have good contol of what's going on, and building times were sped up at least 4x.

So true, which is another peeve of mine with this game. There is no resource management, as unused Power/Mass is wasted Power/Mass. The solution in this game isn't faster build times, its build more simultaneously. Another thing I hate about some RTS games is having to rebuild the same structures over and over again and SC really makes you do that if you want to keep up with the horribly slow build times, which are still vastly better than trying to position a unit while battling horrible pathing and inertia only to deal with even slower repair times.

 

Eeezee

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2005
9,923
0
0
Supreme Commander sucked much more than TA, unfortunately. I really had high hopes for it, too. TA was just way ahead of its time.
 

BlueAcolyte

Platinum Member
Nov 19, 2007
2,793
2
0
Yea, the original sucked... I doubt I can convince you guys to play the expansion though, there is more diversity there.

A lot of people complained that FA was what SupCom should have been and they didn't want to pay for the changes.