f13.net

No.

Really there isn't much more to say.  This shit is not fun.  Nothing about it is even a little bit fun.  You still get to build huge amounts of units, you can still zoom in and out a ton and the combat is still more detailed then most rts but this demo is not fun.  I guess I'll go into a little bit of detail, they got some really shitty story in my Total Annihilation this time around.  Constantly a talking head wearing a really stupid outfit with an even more stupid name pops up and babbles about some shit you really don't care about.  Really really bad stuff.  Also the missions, if you can call them that, suck balls.  The unit types are so limited and the rock-paper-scissors is so over pronounced that it all felt cheap and lame, the missions drag on and on so that there is more time for floating heads to say really stupid shit.

Yuck.  SupCom 1 went from must buy to eww thanks to an incredibly buggy beta and it looks like these guys have done it again.  I want to want this franchise truly I do but their attention to certain details and their grasp on what is fun seems to be fucking terrible.  Learn to make a first impression ffs.  A demo should blow me away and then the full game might disappoint but any game with a demo this bad has some real retards at the helm and I can only assume the total effort is fucked.

Verdict:  Stay the fuck away this isn't worth the bandwidth or the HD space.

These games have *never* had a worthwhile single player experience - does the demo have multiplayer?

Nope.  Not even a skirmish mode against AI.  Always a good sign when a company is too scared to show you the best parts of their game.

Thanks again for saving me some time and money.

Not hugely suprised.  The SC games just aren't successors to TA mantle.

 :oh_i_see:

TA was a piece of shit in single player too, though. The value was all in the multiplayer, and my (admittedly limited) experience with multiplayer SupCom was pretty decent I thought.

I hope you aren't grouping "These games" as the RTS genre...

Why?  The RTS genre has always been about the multiplayer, at least it has for me.  Sure, some have passable single player campaigns, but I'd hardly say thats the draw of the genre.

I'm speaking specifically of the Total Annihilation->Supreme Commander ones.

Just because you only play RTS games for multiplayer doesn't mean there haven't been RTS games with very rich stories and a good SP campaign.

I have several friends that DO buy RTS games for the SP campaigns and not multiplayer.

I was responding to Ingmar because I was concerned he was making the sweeping statement that RTS games don't have solid stories...which is crap (for the record I do agree with you Ingmar, TA and SC have had complete shit stories). 

Dawn of War, and to a lesser extend, Dawn of War 2 have both had very solid stories attached to their campaigns.  And while it was fairly simple at the time, Starcraft also had a very solid story/world attached to it, not to mention Warcraft which is an INCREDIBLE rich world and story associated with it.

The whole RTS genre had its inception in good story, from the original C&C and Dune, IIRC. Multiplayer was not an afterthought, of course.

Speaking as someone who played, and enjoyed the first supreme commander, and who has a buddy that LOVES this game.

This series was never really for anyone but hard core MASSIVE NUMBERS RTS players that have the multi screens to play it on. This isn't a casual RTS by any means, its also not my personal favorite after being exposed to the "Smaller amounts, better AI" style brought to us by Company of heroes or Dawn of war.

This is a RTS fans RTS. Its meant to be played by those that love the "thousands of units" game play, its also a heavily tournament game. The single player game in this series is NOT where its design points were put, this series was never about story as other RTS are, its CnC x 100 and set on 11. You will need a beefy machine to run it in multi-player  (up to 8 players on a huge map with terrain deformation, trees, physics, and thousands of units and buildings. And thats just with no battles going on)

Yes, exactly, and that's how it has been going back to TA. Massive, frame-rate crippling robot armies marching to their doom is the draw.

Some, like that. The fact it does what it does, and plays from a tech standpoint, is impressive. It does eat hardware for breakfast, it was supposed to. If you have issues running this with one person, you are not the target for it. The "strategic zoom" feature is not just nifty, it was downright required.

This series, as the title implies is about HUGE NUMBERS of AI dumb units and multiplayer matches. Its a niche flavor of RTS. If you were looking for story, this is not the title to look at, it was never intended to be so.

I know the niche, this one does an awful job of it.  The balance is fucking awful, the experimentals they let you build are fucking stupid.  The rock-paper-scissors of every unit is terrible.  The research system is not my favorite.  But yes, if you release a demo where all the details (including cut scenes and story) are so fucking awful you aren't good at your job and I'm going to assume your awful at all parts of it.

I play RTS for the stories and single player skirmish. I played Homeworld II online a bit (won every single game I played, for the record) and did some skirmishes against some RL friends but other than that I can count the online multiplayer rts games I have played on one hand.

I enjoyed Sup coms story. It wasn't deep but it didn't need to be. If people focus totally on multiplayer they are missing a large part of the point and the enjoyment these games give. I would bet safe money that vastly more people play RTS singleplayer than multiplayer, and in my experiance companies that focus totally on multiplayer to carry their games tend to deliver a flawed and soulless product.

I'll download the demo of this and give my verdict tomorrow.

{Edit} Found out its possible to unlock the units disabled in the demo

http://member.square-enix.com/na/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=472

I'm surprised that anyone plays RTS games in single-player. To me single player in RTS games has always been awful across the board. You either get endless variations on the same "build up your base and fight the computer" setup that might as well be a skirmish mode, or a level where you don't have a base and the core mechanics of just the combat get exposed as flimsy and not terribly exciting without the base and resource aspects.

To me single player in an RTS game has always been a practice mode for multiplayer, nothing more. Even going back to the days of original C&C and the like. Different strokes for different folks I guess.


How can you possibly judge balance given a few hours with a single player demo? Competitive games often take months if not years for game balance to become a known commodity. I've been playing a lot of Dawn of War recently, a game that is years old, and there is still no real consensus around balance and matchups.

I haven't played SupCom2 yet but judging the balance of any competitive multiplayer game based on single player seems ludicrous. It's like playing SF4 and claiming that Seth is the best character because he kicked your ass in arcade mode.

I found that I'm not very good in RTS games, preferring a more slow and deliberate style of play rather than a frenzied zerg rush. For this reason, I don't MP in RTS. I also don't enjoy the genre enough to want to improve my RTS e-peen.

Having said that, I have played, enjoyed and completed a few RTS games in SP mode, so that is actually where the appeal lies for some of us.

Yeah, the Dawn of War games and particularly the Warcraft/Starcraft ones have worthwhile single player experiences. Expecting that from SupCom 2 given the history of the series (including the TA games) is asking for disappointment though.

I don't know if you are talking about dawn of war 2 or not but I find the single player to be terrible.  Its like a terrible rpg, almost no rts elements.

SupCom is/was the only RTS to offer that large a scale in a raw strat. design.  There is no rock-paper-scissors or dice roll in an encounter; you either have the better unit, have more numbers, have the better formation, or you're dead.  That simple. Errr, not simple really.

I do know there's nothing else out there right now like it on that scale.  (shrug)  It's worth the purchase just for that if you're a strat. or RTS fan.  Definitely more of a competitive game rather than an entertaining one.  It CAN get downright grinworthy in huge engagements though, assuming you have the system to run it.  Dont touch it w/o multi-threading.  Dual-mon helps but only if you can get the cursor to not scroll to the other monitor. (my biggest gripe)

Yah, I used to be a SupCom fanboy and even I wasnt dumb enough to try this single-player demo.  You're just setting yourself up for disappointment unless you approach it from a purely factfinding/practice POV.  Also, when the game releases and the ladders open up it's better if no one's had a lot of MP experience beforehand.

Played it.

The economy has been greatly simplified.. or to put it another way "dumbed down" One of the things about supcom is that you could set factories on infinite loop f you had the income to handle that and then be able to go Zap Branigan without having to micromanage unit construction as much. With this you pay for stuff at the point of purchase ,so you have to keep going back to your factories to queue up more units.

Also shooting does not seem to cost energy like before, so Building that big gun and firing it wont run the risk of shutting down your base defenses like before. The research system is a bit wtf, The unit balance is too Rock paper scissors alright, which does stick in my craw.

That said the voice acting seems to be reasonable, and the campaign looks like it could be relaxing and fun. I'll probably pick it up if I need an RTS fix in the next month or 2, but I wont rush out and buy it.

In short, its a lesser game than supcom, simplified in bad ways that I suspect have more to do with enebeling it to be played easier on the Xbox rather than real gameplay concerns. But I'll probably still pick it up.

I really wish the demo had some multiplayer capabilities. Even extremely limited and dumbed down capabilities.

I've only managed to play about an hour of the demo, and like Sir T is saying, it does seem alot more simplified.
I'm not surprised by this due to the statement that they wanted to make SubCom 2 more arcade like in playstyle, and because SquareEnix is publishing it.

SquareEnix is an odd publisher that I love and hate alot. After the FF7 port I've noticed ever PC title they have put out tends to have a high level of polish. The games they put out tend to look wonderful and then run amazingly smooth for the level of pretty and polish they pack in. But then the game itself lacks fun somehow despite touching on it.

They tend to leave me with a feeling of "this could almost be fun, but"

I thought it was fun, though the AI at least in the demo cheats like nobody's business.

The cybran unit list seems really bare, but the main change seems to be tons of cheap simplistic units from basic construction, and having minor experimentals be squad firepower. I sort of like the change.

I don't mind an AI cheating as such as it compensates for the AIs deficiencies. The AI cheated outrageously in the first Civilization game and nobody complained. That game is still held as a classic.

In this case at least in the second demo mission, the AI had full map visibility. Easy enough to prove by making any air experimental. The second it pops out of the oven, you'll have 10 fighters beeline from his base and stick to it like glue. Wait a bit, pop another one out, same deal. If it lives through it, he'll keep sending 10 fighters directly at it wherever you put it. Kinda disappointing (and predictable.)

Not sure why you would play VS the AI in any RTS that isn't CoH or WH. Anyway, lets not forget though, that one of the AI settings in the last SC was (after hard) "Cheater". When playing multi-player, we would occasionally need a 4th so we used the AI.

One of the skirmish settings in sc2 is cheater too. And I'll just echo what i saw on stardocks forujs, playing skirmish against the ai,you don't have to deal with people on the internet

Anyway, got it yesterday. When i installed it, steam set about updating it, a process that took 7 hours of downloading shit. And there seemed to be no way of telling steam to stop that and letting me play the goddam game. For all i know, the dvd didn't have all the game files and it had to dl it all. its graphically better than the demo.

Oh and i hate steam