- Jun 3, 2011
- 14,037
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i've put off playing Supcom2 for years because of the absolutely horrid reviews i'd read;
then one day i found myself bored with Minecraft, too tired for quakelive, and too good at Forged Alliance, and i popped in a copy i had lying about.
So, i like Supreme Commander 2. i might say i like ti even more than SupCom.
The game is structured so that two players are pretty much always equal. in SupCom, you could reclaim more mass from a battle near your base than you'd get from five minutes of mass extraction. in SupCom 2, you might reclaim a couple hundred points, surely an advantage, but nothing game-breaking.
Also, in SupCom, it was possible to deviate enormously from what your opponent was doing; you could concentrate on mass production, or spam units, or tech up, or turtle, you could have 10 engineers on one factory, or have ten factories.
SupCom 2 has a more "chessboard" like approach; your opponent is doing exactly what you are doing, so small changes will dictate the result of the game.
The unit automation is much better. In a RTS game, this is no small thing.
They also made away with the "unit keeps shooting at the ground", exagerated 3d map issues that SupCom had, so using the battle map (lowest map zoom) is now a viable way to conduct your battles.
Unit balance is .. weird.
SupCom had the same units for all 3 races; SupCom 2 has actual differences. It's actually a part of the game to have one race with stronger land units, and so forth. The game lets you know right away that you need to understand what each race's units do, and if this seems like blasphemy, remember what RTS games were back when? You don't send you NOD light tanks to fight GDI's medium tanks.
Experimentals are more balanced now, in my opinion.
in SupCom, if you saw a Galactic Colossus already halfway across the map, and you didn't already own a fleet of nuke bombers, your game was over. There was a lot of randomness involved in planning a defence, given how expensive everything was. Nuke defence? kills your economy. Shields? Kills you economy. Nuke bombers? kills.. you get my drift.
Even building a Fatboy could take 300 mass per second or more.
Also, experimentals are much less powerful and can be killed by a sizable force of regular units.
Regular units .. there's only about four of them. You will start building your tech 1 tank right away, then you keep building them for the rest of the game.
What you will do is, you have research points, your classic RPG upgrades.
Was this the "dumbing down" everybody spoke of?
Considering that research stations are very expensive, and that mass extractors are about as expensive as a factory, you are making quite an investment when building one.
SupCom 2 can have real economy stalling, which imho, is a important factor in gameplay.
In SupCom, you could be in the red with energy and mass, and slowly but steadily, you would still build whatever you were trying to. SupCom 2 is not like that, you pay upfront for everything, so if all your "money" is going on tanks, you'll never manage to build that one more mass extractor.
And this si why i think SupCom 2 is maybe, just maybe, better than SupCom 1.
In SupCom, mass extractors (map control points) were soon useless - you built mass fabricators and tech 3 power reactors to fuel your economy; the "send the harvester in enemy territory to extract Tiberium" gameplay element is rendered obsolete, taking away a great source of challenge and enjoyment.
In SupCom 2, there is no such thing. You *must* control the map. You must also play to your strengths and fear the enemy's, and you can't have everything at once.
That's it. I give SupCom 2 a 8/10, and suggest you try it. Its great for beginners, but it's the veterans that will love it the most, if they manage to do away with their preconceptions of what a good RTS should be.
then one day i found myself bored with Minecraft, too tired for quakelive, and too good at Forged Alliance, and i popped in a copy i had lying about.
So, i like Supreme Commander 2. i might say i like ti even more than SupCom.
The game is structured so that two players are pretty much always equal. in SupCom, you could reclaim more mass from a battle near your base than you'd get from five minutes of mass extraction. in SupCom 2, you might reclaim a couple hundred points, surely an advantage, but nothing game-breaking.
Also, in SupCom, it was possible to deviate enormously from what your opponent was doing; you could concentrate on mass production, or spam units, or tech up, or turtle, you could have 10 engineers on one factory, or have ten factories.
SupCom 2 has a more "chessboard" like approach; your opponent is doing exactly what you are doing, so small changes will dictate the result of the game.
The unit automation is much better. In a RTS game, this is no small thing.
They also made away with the "unit keeps shooting at the ground", exagerated 3d map issues that SupCom had, so using the battle map (lowest map zoom) is now a viable way to conduct your battles.
Unit balance is .. weird.
SupCom had the same units for all 3 races; SupCom 2 has actual differences. It's actually a part of the game to have one race with stronger land units, and so forth. The game lets you know right away that you need to understand what each race's units do, and if this seems like blasphemy, remember what RTS games were back when? You don't send you NOD light tanks to fight GDI's medium tanks.
Experimentals are more balanced now, in my opinion.
in SupCom, if you saw a Galactic Colossus already halfway across the map, and you didn't already own a fleet of nuke bombers, your game was over. There was a lot of randomness involved in planning a defence, given how expensive everything was. Nuke defence? kills your economy. Shields? Kills you economy. Nuke bombers? kills.. you get my drift.
Even building a Fatboy could take 300 mass per second or more.
Also, experimentals are much less powerful and can be killed by a sizable force of regular units.
Regular units .. there's only about four of them. You will start building your tech 1 tank right away, then you keep building them for the rest of the game.
What you will do is, you have research points, your classic RPG upgrades.
Was this the "dumbing down" everybody spoke of?
Considering that research stations are very expensive, and that mass extractors are about as expensive as a factory, you are making quite an investment when building one.
SupCom 2 can have real economy stalling, which imho, is a important factor in gameplay.
In SupCom, you could be in the red with energy and mass, and slowly but steadily, you would still build whatever you were trying to. SupCom 2 is not like that, you pay upfront for everything, so if all your "money" is going on tanks, you'll never manage to build that one more mass extractor.
And this si why i think SupCom 2 is maybe, just maybe, better than SupCom 1.
In SupCom, mass extractors (map control points) were soon useless - you built mass fabricators and tech 3 power reactors to fuel your economy; the "send the harvester in enemy territory to extract Tiberium" gameplay element is rendered obsolete, taking away a great source of challenge and enjoyment.
In SupCom 2, there is no such thing. You *must* control the map. You must also play to your strengths and fear the enemy's, and you can't have everything at once.
That's it. I give SupCom 2 a 8/10, and suggest you try it. Its great for beginners, but it's the veterans that will love it the most, if they manage to do away with their preconceptions of what a good RTS should be.
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