Bought Supreme Commander - such terrible game

[BlueAcolyte]

I like the game... Although getting a patch would be nice. THQ seems to have abandoned us lately.

More specifically:
-The expansion fixes many problems with the original.
-I like the sense of scale and strat zoom
-There are actually multiple strategies
-The community is great and the game is easy to mod: many great mods.

I guess it's not everyone's thing.

 

[imported_Alx]

Wow, that's pretty harsh. I would say Supreme Commander doesn't come close to fulfilling its potential, but at the same time I think it's a good game, though something of an acquired taste.

You can't look at SupCom through the Starcraft/CoH lens, it's a very different type of game. In what other game can you set up an unlimited command queue for every unit? Or have huge air transports automatically pick up your tanks as they come out of the factory and carry them across the mountains to the battlefield while being escorted by a squad of air interceptors? Or have batteries of long range artillery dumbfiring at an enemy base from behind energy shields?

The "spam" argument is just as rubbish as it is when applied to starcraft. All players have equally limited resources, therefore whoever utilizes their resources best wins.

Folks at gamereplays only concern themselves with very specific types of games, which I would say do not lend themselves well to what supcom should be all about, try some larger map team games.

 

[HannibalX]

I liked SC but just like TA it doesn't take much to win. Just build a "line of laser towers and AA towers all the way to your enemies base.

 

[shortylickens]

I find it utterly fascinating that everyones complaints could easily be solved by TA:Kingdoms, and yet almost nobody even remembers that game.

Kingdoms is far superior to TA and Starcraft in every way. But none of those fans like it because it had archers instead of mega-plasma-photon-death-tanks with broken alien skulls hanging from the turrets.

Also, ALX (the lurker) was right.
SPAMMING in Supreme Commander is the same as in Starcraft. Whoever wins the resource war will likely win the game. But at least TA and Supreme Commander had the good sense to make resourcing less intensive & time consuming by automating it, and making it less of a factor by allowing infinite resources.
Now you actualy get to focus on playing a war game instead of a dumbed-down version of SimCity.

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: EvilComputer92
TA owned Starcraft and Warcraft and every other RTS in it's day. Supreme commander is absolute junk.

Nothing "owned" Starcraft.

 

[Jax Omen]

See... I couldn't ever get into TA... because I played SupCom first >_>

*runs*

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: Jax Omen
See... I couldn't ever get into TA... because I played SupCom first >_>

*runs*

TA had a cool mod called TA Spring I believe. It let you take FPS control of a single unit at any point in the game.

 

[Malladine]

I enjoyed Supreme Commander for a while. If my CPU was better I might still be playing it. The zoom capacity was fun and tooling with "icons" most of the time doesn't bother me much, since I grew up gaming on some of the originals. I thought it did have an epic scale, comparatively.

What game has as many units? I guess Rise of Nations, maybe, but it has squads composed of multiple models rather than individuals, per say...

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Originally posted by: Pale Rider
I liked SC but just like TA it doesn't take much to win. Just build a "line of laser towers and AA towers all the way to your enemies base.

lol i assume you never played against other people or ai mods.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Originally posted by: skace

Originally posted by: EvilComputer92
TA owned Starcraft and Warcraft and every other RTS in it's day. Supreme commander is absolute junk.

Nothing "owned" Starcraft.

TA owns starcraft in every way possible

 

[Schadenfroh]

Supreme Commander cannot suck.... it uses multiple cores!

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Supreme Commander cannot suck.... it uses multiple cores!

And multiple monitors!

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: Inspector Jihad
TA owns starcraft in every way possible

Not even close. Not in game play, not in the number of people who played it, not in balance, not in art, not in game polish, not in story.

TA was great for it's time, but comparing it to Starcraft is asking for it to lose.

 

[imported_Alx]

More people played Starcraft because it had a preinstalled user base from warcraft2 and a state of the art online matching system. TA was a first effort and had to be played through msn zone. More fans means more money, more polish, more balance etc etc.

But you can't get around the fact that Starcraft is still orcs in space, basically a perfection of an old formula, whereas TA tried to advance the genre with a true 3d engine, line of sight, unlimited unit and building queues, realistic representation of air units. Come to think of it, there are still no other games that do any of those things, except for 3d.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
I find it utterly fascinating that everyones complaints could easily be solved by TA:Kingdoms, and yet almost nobody even remembers that game.

Kingdoms is far superior to TA and Starcraft in every way. But none of those fans like it because it had archers instead of mega-plasma-photon-death-tanks with broken alien skulls hanging from the turrets.

I remember that game and did enjoy it quite a bit. I did really like some of its innovations, and it was one of the first games to introduce limited/hero-like units with the faction Dragons. I'm pretty sure it was also one of the first games to give units Veterancy improvements both visually and statistically.

I think the biggest problem though with TA:K was its insane system requirements at the time to play it reasonably well. Pretty sure I had a P3 500 with a V3 3000 at the time and it brought my system to a crawl. Its also the first game that really made me appreciate different API rendering modes and GPU importance running a V3 in Glide vs. a ATI Rage in DX.

But ya I hated Spam Commander as well, although FA was a lot more enjoyable. SC had its moments, but it involved spamming up from nothing to get to that short climactic spam fest that might bring a slight grin to my face.

 

[EvilComputer92]

Originally posted by: skace

Originally posted by: Inspector Jihad
TA owns starcraft in every way possible

Not even close. Not in game play, not in the number of people who played it, not in balance, not in art, not in game polish, not in story.

TA was great for it's time, but comparing it to Starcraft is asking for it to lose.

The only ones I can concede to Starcraft are number of people who played it and story. Gameplay, balance, and polish were all done far better by TA. I can't even begin to list the innovations that TA brought to RTS. 3D gameplay, a unique resource system, battles on a scale previously unheard of and a massive unit and structure count which allowed hundreds of strategies, all of which could be countered.

 

[Jax Omen]

Balance - NO.

Starcraft has three DISTINCT factions. TA has two mostly-identical factions. TA achieves the same balance as WC2.

Starcraft has three distinct factions and, at any skill level, no one faction has any significant advantage over the others. From a newbie to the korean tournament pros.



NO other game has the balance Starcraft has.

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: chizow

Originally posted by: shortylickens
I find it utterly fascinating that everyones complaints could easily be solved by TA:Kingdoms, and yet almost nobody even remembers that game.

Kingdoms is far superior to TA and Starcraft in every way. But none of those fans like it because it had archers instead of mega-plasma-photon-death-tanks with broken alien skulls hanging from the turrets.

I remember that game and did enjoy it quite a bit. I did really like some of its innovations, and it was one of the first games to introduce limited/hero-like units with the faction Dragons. I'm pretty sure it was also one of the first games to give units Veterancy improvements both visually and statistically.

I think the biggest problem though with TA:K was its insane system requirements at the time to play it reasonably well. Pretty sure I had a P3 500 with a V3 3000 at the time and it brought my system to a crawl. Its also the first game that really made me appreciate different API rendering modes and GPU importance running a V3 in Glide vs. a ATI Rage in DX.

But ya I hated Spam Commander as well, although FA was a lot more enjoyable. SC had its moments, but it involved spamming up from nothing to get to that short climactic spam fest that might bring a slight grin to my face.

Kingdoms didnt use 3D acceleration for anything more than enhancing the cloud effects for fog of war. The units and terrain were software rendered.
But yes a P3 500 was too slow. Problem is, when that game came out there were already P3's in the 1Ghz range, which was more than powerful enough to handle it.
And my laptops Celeron 366 actually did an OK job too, certainly not great, but more than enough to make an RTS playable. I think it must have just been your system.

 

[themisfit610]

Originally posted by: Alx
Wow, that's pretty harsh. I would say Supreme Commander doesn't come close to fulfilling its potential, but at the same time I think it's a good game, though something of an acquired taste.

You can't look at SupCom through the Starcraft/CoH lens, it's a very different type of game. In what other game can you set up an unlimited command queue for every unit? Or have huge air transports automatically pick up your tanks as they come out of the factory and carry them across the mountains to the battlefield while being escorted by a squad of air interceptors? Or have batteries of long range artillery dumbfiring at an enemy base from behind energy shields?

The "spam" argument is just as rubbish as it is when applied to starcraft. All players have equally limited resources, therefore whoever utilizes their resources best wins.

Folks at gamereplays only concern themselves with very specific types of games, which I would say do not lend themselves well to what supcom should be all about, try some larger map team games.

Supcom was a lot of fun to me, but I got bored with it eventually.

It totally is a spam game, that's all there really is to it. Resources are unlimited, it's just about how quickly you can build power plants and mass fabricators. I dunno, I though it was pretty, I loved artillery and the experimental units were a lot of fun, but the game always ends up in a spamfest of t3 siege bots in the end, supported by some experimentals. *shrug* I guess I didn't have what it takes to win the spam war....

~MiSfit

 

[shadowofthesun]

I actually rather enjoy SupCom. I find it a pretty fun RTS.

Unlike some of the comments I see (namely the OP's), I actually enjoy the larger scale. SC favors macro over micro, and that's clear from the beginning with the strategic zoom feature. You can pull off some cool stunts with micro, such as dodging artillery shells and destroying much more powerful units by being more agile, but the focus is clearly on the large-scale- massive armies, massive artillery, massive experimental units. SC is definitely not for the player who looks after every unit like a favorite child. Being able to hurl a large army at my enemy, using queued movement commands to stay out of dangerous tactical locations, and then returning to my base to strengthen my economy and build another force- that's the beauty of SC. You don't focus on individual battles; like the old maxim goes, "You may have won the battle, but you will lose the war"- SC focuses on victory over any individual achievement. It's just a different style of RTS, like Sins of a Solar Empire- less focus on individual battles, more focus on the scale of the engagement as a whole.

To address specific complaints- the movement AI was improved drastically in Forged Alliance. Also don't know why the OP bought both SC and FA- FA works as a standalone game, pretty much the only reason I picked it up as an impulse buy. As for balance, the units indeed are similar, but to say they are the same is a vast overstatement. I can tell you that an Aurora will always lose to the M1 striker tank, even though they are both T1 tanks. However, the Aurora can travel over water and is much more agile- just one example of the ways in which SC maintains balance while providing diversity.

The strategic zoom, in my opinion, is one of the greatest features of SC. You can't easily manage 300+ unit armies with a traditional 3d RTS view; I find large armies difficult enough to control with the limited zoom out in games such as Warcraft III. When you learn to manage the symbols effectively, traditional RTS views will seem weak and uninformative. I agree that I was taken aback at first by the simplicity of the interface; icons flying around is far from the most cutting-edge graphics money can buy. However, the game is about controlling and managing units effectively, not being pretty, and in that regard, SC is a total success. Plus, once you get good at efficiently managing units, you'll have more than enough opportunities to zoom in and enjoy the carnage your units will cause.

Finally, resources are far from unlimited. While some dislike the ability to just "create" basically your own resource deposits from fabricators and power plants, the truth is that a larger economy has its drawbacks. Not only does it require a high initial investment which your opponents may have instead invested in the army now pounding your base to rubble, but their volatility makes them a tempting and vulnerable target. Expansion of economy, while certainly faster and more free than in traditional resource-based games, often requires strategy and creativity far beyond the obvious.

OP: I don't know if you played Forged Alliance yet, but it addresses some of your concerns. It adds a bloom render and some higher end graphics features, and the movement AI is much improved. Plus, there is additional diversity added to the four races. At the end of the day though, it just seems like SC is not the kind of game you'd enjoy.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
I find it utterly fascinating that everyones complaints could easily be solved by TA:Kingdoms, and yet almost nobody even remembers that game.

Kingdoms is far superior to TA and Starcraft in every way. But none of those fans like it because it had archers instead of mega-plasma-photon-death-tanks with broken alien skulls hanging from the turrets.

Wow, I guess there are a lot of different opinions.

I loved TA and was excited about TA:K - I actually prefer the fantasy setting.

But I found TA:K unplayably just bad, in terms of gameplay. It was a disaster.

I see the post about TA:K features and it may be right, but that doesn't count as much as the issue of fun. I still bought it and the expansion to support Cavedog hoping for more good games, but we all know how that went. Did the same with Dungeon Siege hoping for Chris Taylor to make another great TA type game.

It's been too many years to give many specifics, but I remember TA:K being very tedious.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Originally posted by: shadowofthesun
I actually rather enjoy SupCom. I find it a pretty fun RTS.

Unlike some of the comments I see (namely the OP's), I actually enjoy the larger scale. SC favors macro over micro, and that's clear from the beginning with the strategic zoom feature. You can pull off some cool stunts with micro, such as dodging artillery shells and destroying much more powerful units by being more agile, but the focus is clearly on the large-scale- massive armies, massive artillery, massive experimental units. SC is definitely not for the player who looks after every unit like a favorite child. Being able to hurl a large army at my enemy, using queued movement commands to stay out of dangerous tactical locations, and then returning to my base to strengthen my economy and build another force- that's the beauty of SC. You don't focus on individual battles; like the old maxim goes, "You may have won the battle, but you will lose the war"- SC focuses on victory over any individual achievement. It's just a different style of RTS, like Sins of a Solar Empire- less focus on individual battles, more focus on the scale of the engagement as a whole.

To address specific complaints- the movement AI was improved drastically in Forged Alliance. Also don't know why the OP bought both SC and FA- FA works as a standalone game, pretty much the only reason I picked it up as an impulse buy. As for balance, the units indeed are similar, but to say they are the same is a vast overstatement. I can tell you that an Aurora will always lose to the M1 striker tank, even though they are both T1 tanks. However, the Aurora can travel over water and is much more agile- just one example of the ways in which SC maintains balance while providing diversity.

The strategic zoom, in my opinion, is one of the greatest features of SC. You can't easily manage 300+ unit armies with a traditional 3d RTS view; I find large armies difficult enough to control with the limited zoom out in games such as Warcraft III. When you learn to manage the symbols effectively, traditional RTS views will seem weak and uninformative. I agree that I was taken aback at first by the simplicity of the interface; icons flying around is far from the most cutting-edge graphics money can buy. However, the game is about controlling and managing units effectively, not being pretty, and in that regard, SC is a total success. Plus, once you get good at efficiently managing units, you'll have more than enough opportunities to zoom in and enjoy the carnage your units will cause.

Finally, resources are far from unlimited. While some dislike the ability to just "create" basically your own resource deposits from fabricators and power plants, the truth is that a larger economy has its drawbacks. Not only does it require a high initial investment which your opponents may have instead invested in the army now pounding your base to rubble, but their volatility makes them a tempting and vulnerable target. Expansion of economy, while certainly faster and more free than in traditional resource-based games, often requires strategy and creativity far beyond the obvious.

OP: I don't know if you played Forged Alliance yet, but it addresses some of your concerns. It adds a bloom render and some higher end graphics features, and the movement AI is much improved. Plus, there is additional diversity added to the four races. At the end of the day though, it just seems like SC is not the kind of game you'd enjoy.

Woooh!

Also, the aurora will always beat a striker given radar or LoS as it can just back up and use its superior range. But it is slower and weaker.

 

[shadowofthesun]

Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte

Woooh!

Also, the aurora will always beat a striker given radar or LoS as it can just back up and use its superior range. But it is slower and weaker.

Of course you're right- I should have made myself clearer, I meant that in a head to head engagement where the two units are exchanging hits. Realistically, the Aurora has numerous tactical advantages that will give it an edge.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: EvilComputer92

Originally posted by: skace

Originally posted by: Inspector Jihad
TA owns starcraft in every way possible

Not even close. Not in game play, not in the number of people who played it, not in balance, not in art, not in game polish, not in story.

TA was great for it's time, but comparing it to Starcraft is asking for it to lose.

The only ones I can concede to Starcraft are number of people who played it and story. Gameplay, balance, and polish were all done far better by TA. I can't even begin to list the innovations that TA brought to RTS. 3D gameplay, a unique resource system, battles on a scale previously unheard of and a massive unit and structure count which allowed hundreds of strategies, all of which could be countered.

I concur; we also have to remember that TA was released a full year before SC, yet it had many features that Starcraft did not. Let's go over some of those

- Why do all units in SC need to stop before they can fire? Even air units had to stop in midair in order to do anything. TA allowed any unit to fire at any time, so long as its torso can twist toward the enemy. And those Phoenix bombers were probably the first (and only) bomber-type aircraft that has been done right in any RTS

- Spider tanks. Enough said

- Sea battles. Enough said

- Terrain features that are not only deformable, but are actually useful! If you need a quick boost of energy or metal, you can send out a builder to gather metal from nearby rocks or energy from nearby foliage. You could also choose to destroy these resources if they provided a better path to your enemy, or perhaps if you just wanted to deprive your opponent of these luxuries. Starcraft had no terrain features that were useful or usable in any way except for its archaic resource gathering scheme.

- Superweapons were done better in TA. You have nukes and the Big Bertha style cannons. Both sides get them. For whatever reason only the Terrans had nuclear weapons, and they were extremely limited. Neither of the other sides really had any sort of equivalent... I'm not saying this is a balance issue, but I am suggesting that superweapons have helped to define the RTS genre, and they provide a sort of extra last resort type of fun (woot Iron Curtain, woot Ion Cannon).

- I'm of the firm opinion that the Zerg have always been overpowered with respect to the other factions, but maybe that's just me. If you take two opponents of perfectly equal tactical skill and micromanagement ability and make one a Zerg and the other a Terran/Protoss on any sort of map (limited or infinite resources), the Zerg player should come out ahead on average. The units are weaker, but there's something seriously screwed up about being able to always, indefinitely out build your opponent. Also, hydralisks were way overpowered back when I played Starcraft (for the 3 or so years after it came out). They were cheap as hell but did a good deal of damage and had great range. Three hydralisks could take out one battlecruiser. Chew on that for a second, and consider the difference in cost/resource cap

- TA did away with the archaic system of annoying harvester resource collection. Somehow this system has persisted to this day in all of Blizzard's titles. Tactical location resource management (a la Total Annihilation and the Dawn of War series) makes a lot more sense and is a lot more fun. I guess that's just opinion though - I believe a Starcraft with resource points instead of ridiculous harvesting operations would have been a better game.

- The art was definitely better. Graphically it was a more impressive game despite being a year older.

- The engine was approximately the same as far as stability goes - Starcraft artificially enforced a maximum unit cap for each map so that its engine could never see huge loads. The only time I ever found the TA engine to lag was with a full sized map using one of the big 3rd party unit packs that included missile launchers that effectively covered the screen in projectiles. The only time I got the TA engine to hiccup was during a particularly big battle with numerous nuclear missiles and full fleets of bombers attacking each base (in addition to several Vulcans going off, the multi-cannon Big Berthas) while a full land war was being fought in the middle of the map. Such a scenario is literally impossible in Starcraft - you'll find that each map has a maximum number of units that is applied to ALL PLAYERS (it's in the 100s at least). When I played it was rare to reach this cap, but it was certainly annoying.

- I'm not sure how you can argue that TA is less balanced than Starcraft. As you've pointed out, each side is nearly identical. You can't get more balanced than that. That is the definition of balance. It provides less variety, but it is one way to achieve balance.

- As for polish, the game was released in a near-perfect state. It required very few updates, and the fanbase wasn't required for any of this. In fact, the only contribution made by the fanbase was an unlimited number of different maps and unit packs. The same can't be said of Starcraft, which is now on 1.15.2 as of January 2008. Also, while the map editor of Starcraft was fairly useful and straightforward to use, Total Annihilation was much easier to mod (I have worked on both)

The problem TA had was multiplayer - the multiplayer it had was poor, and then Cavedog went bankrupt, thus leaving multiplayer to services like Microsoft Gaming Zone, which wasn't a good alternative. I suspect this was a major contribution to the game's unpopularity. Otherwise, it stands alongside Starcraft as having weathered the test of time.

The Starcraft story was definitely better than TA. There was a lot of potential for the TA storyline to be incredible, but alas it was only average.

That said, Supreme Commander sucked and I'm really looking forward to Starcraft 2, which I will love regardless of any other factors because it will continue one of my favorite storylines in modern media.

 

[vshah]

i guarantee that if you played against some of the higher ranked players on the ladders, you would get totally ripped apart if you focused only on resources and spamming units.