f13.net

Somehow this game goes through beta and is now gold with me almost not hearing about it.

http://www.supremecommander.com/  Its a stupid flash site but it does have some unit pics up and the usual fluff-that-wont-matter-once-your-playing fallderall.  I'm excited, I have heard  :nda: that it is really good.  I wish I didn't suck so much at rts honestly but I will still pick this up because TA was fucking love.


(post 2100 yay me, ding-grats etc.  I'm dangerously close to hitting 3post/day again.....)

I'm not sure a high post count is a good thing. But congrats anyways! ;)

Edit: the game looks nice, reminds me of Ground Control a bit. But, I suck at RTS's too. I much prefer tactical than strategy games anyways.. now if someone could make a multiplayer game where you commanded a single unit with a single "strategic commander" to command you and your team mates - that would kick ass. Anyone? Bueller?

Oh sweet, just in time for my birthday. :D

I can't wait for this, even though it's going to make my rig implode. I loved TA back in the day, and I saw a rolling demo of this at AGC. Looked quite nice, although I have no idea how much hardware they were throwing at it.

That said, the part that really makes me happy? The fact that the battlefield is appropriately scaled so that you can have tactical nuclear weapons modeled properly. :D

And Yoru sure does love him some nukes.

*pew pew*

Anyway, yeah...looks interesting, especially the part of the video showcasing a combined-arms land assault, with formations and actual battle lines.

Tanks rolling through the countryside, as fighters and bombers zoom past overhead to plink the front of the enemy's line....Nice.

TA was fantastic.  I haven't played a RTS much in almost 5 years now... hope this delivers.

-Q

I'm not going to read the forums, I'm not going to read the forums, I'm not...

Anyway if they can have a boneyards-style matching system with a galactic war style campaign like TA did I'll be set for quite awhile.  Fuck MMO's its going to take another decade at best before they stop pissing on my dreams.

It shall kick mighty ass.  I also suck at RTS's (especially online) but I really enjoy the current gen RTS's.  I play a lot of Dawn of War/Dark Crusade to get the taste of MMO out of my mouth.

I have the large (293mb) version of the E3 trailer for Supreme Commander, and if watching it doesn't get you pumped up well.   :roll:    Sorry I don't have access to any place to host something that large for you guys.  You can probably Google and find it.

Just watched the 800xwhatever trailer.  I am now totally psyched -- it looks spectacular.  I'm hoping in addition to *looking* like TA+++ it also has similar UI improvements.   I haven't really played RTSes since 2000 or so when I stopped working for a company that had a bunch of StarCraft fans in the engineering team

I'm in agreement with Hoax.  This is far more exciting than any of the MMO stuff I've seen recently.
I hope the online play is decent.  I've only ever played RTSes on local networks in the past, but don't have housemates or coworkers to game with these days so I'm at the mercy of Internet play, I suppose.

Has anyone seen any decent reviews of this or more in depth information about the interface and gameplay?

-Q

There's an interview in a CGW issue last fall with Chris Whatshisname.  Sounds awesome, pretty sure you have not heard about it because it's a DX10-seller and is on the MS bandwagon.

Wait, what. It's DX10 only?

I don't think it's only, I just think it's going to be one of those that puts it to good use and makes it desirable, and it's going to be in a MS marketing push instead of just laying out there like BioShock.  It's appearance in the MS Pimp Rag lends itself to my pet theory, but who knows, I'm wrong a lot.  I think I have my tinfoil hat on.

I loved Total Annihilation, even moreso than Starcraft.  So Supreme Commander, a 'spiritual successor', definitely has my attention.  I'll at least want to try out the demo.  A pity I missed the Fileplanet beta.

I don't want to spoil your party, but I tried the beta (about 2ish months ago). It ran like shit (have a pretty decent rig) and played like shit, too. It had potential, maybe they managed to get it into shape for launch. I wouldn't be betting on it though, the game was in a pretty dreadful state back than.

How long ago was that?

Hmmm I don't really remember. I'm guessing somewhere between the beginning and the middle of December is when I tried it. Maybe end of November, beginning of December.

I can't comment on the gameplay but I would be suprised if it didn't run well since they've been doing a good job on the performance end of things with the Dungeon Siege series. On the other hand he went way over the top on TA:Kingdoms in terms of what the typical gaming rig could handle at that time so maybe he did the same with Supreme Commander.

It will probably run smoothly on a DX10 card, like the GF8800.  I'm only joking a little about that.  Too bad about that Vista thing that's cocking-up DX10.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=9196.0;attach=2382)

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12510

Oh man.  On some level I'm doing that every time I hear, "bad thing X happened to game-I-was-looking-forward-to Y"

Question for Wolf: Do you have a dual-core system? 

Supreme Commander is being advertised as a game that specifically takes advantage of one.

If you can (nda issues?), would you be so kind as to elaborate on this? I've been very, very quietly holding out for a good rts so i'd really like to know more.

Demo is out today (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/supremecommander/download.html?sid=6165437&om_act=convert&om_clk=newlyadded). Finding a decent download site, however, is a task I leave an exercise to the internet detectives.

I recommend http://files.filefront.com/Supreme%20Commander%20Demo/;6698411;;/fileinfo.html from Bluesnews list.

8 gigs HD space required.   For a demo.

I just deinstalled Vanguard, so I'm golden.

Wha...? The version I have only requires 2 gigs.

"Only".

Edit: Oh, the readme. I'm betting they just copied the game's system requirements.

Yeah, naively I was going by what the readme said.  Silly Murgos, no one reads readmes.

Demo available here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9327.0

Tried the demo today for a few hours. Very pretty although not having real tutorials in the demo (just a link to some webpages) wasn't a good move. Fortunately the gameplay is very very very VERY VERY VERY similar to Total Annihilation. Really, it's just TA with some balance changes, a cleanup of the unit list, and a significantly upgraded graphics engine/UI.

Going to have to see if it actually runs on my home PC though.

Edit: Works fine on my home PC, which is just barely better than the recommended specs, although I did dial down the Shiny before trying. (Shadows, antialiasing, a Jedi needs not these things.)

I tried one more game against the AI (skirmish) and did fine with a very simple techrush strategy. They claim 250 units in the interstitial screen, so I'm guessing quite a few are missing from the demo. Tried the first campaign mission. It wants to be Starcraft really really bad. :| Right down to the format of the briefing and the mid-game "new objective" banter.

No multiplayer in the demo, which is disappointing. Also disappointing are the very annoying "buy me!" interstitials, which consist of 2 pages (which are displayed for 5 seconds minimum, then go away with a keypress) that show up after EVERY game and on quitting. Same two pages as well. I think there's another campaign mission or two left in the demo, so I'll check that out tomorrow or something.

I enjoyed TA quite a bit, so I'll probably pick this up on or shortly after release, especially since we have some RTS nuts around the office. It could make for some fun after-hours action.

I agree that not including some sort of instruction was bad.  The tutorial pages did not load for me, but I only tried once.  Looks like it could be a lot of fun, or it might make me reinstall StarCraft.  It's a toss-up.

The mission briefings and mid-mission objectives definitely reminded me of Starcraft, but with better graphics.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game did NOT feel like Starcraft.

Mostly, I was bored.  My units felt very disposable.  And aircraft take too long to build.

Oh, and screens that say "buy me" and won't go away for 5 seconds....REALLY MAKE ME ANGRY.

I mean, I almost certainly wasn't going to buy it anway...but having to wait and press a key twice just to quit?  Not cool.

EDIT:  Demo with no tutorial mode? WTF were they thinking?  I love tutorials.  They tell me exactly how stupid you think the players are.  And sometimes, I learn things :S

Your units ARE disposable. The Tech3 nuclear bomber takes a while, but the tech1/tech2 ones seemed to be pretty speedy for me. And the nuke bomber... uh, it drops a nuke that decimates a huge area. There's a reason it has a 40 minute base construction time.

Did you make spare engineers and assign them to assist your factories? Each additional builder adds its resource-allocation speed to the construction of whatever it's attached to. Add your commander and some tech3 builders for some fast, fast construction.

Like I said, it's just like TA.

I never played TA. ~shrug~

I couldn't figure how to upgrade my tech levels.

I didn't know about engineers helping factories.

Please refer to earlier comment about LACK OF TUTORIAL.

Oh, and I was bored.

I did like the partially correct military symbology on the units when you zoom all the way out, though.

Whoever thought that displaying the "viewport" as a rectangle was a good idea needs to have his head examined. Anybody know if I can shuffle the interface elements around so I can actually see "up" and "down" equally as well as I can see "left" and "right"? Also, my unit assignment keys don't seem to be working (CTRL-1, etc.). Anybody else have that same problem?

CTRL+1 and so on were working fine for me last night. I had my swarms keyed all the way through 6.

Hey just FYI there is a demo out for SC now. You can download it at Fileplanet, or your site of choice. (Fileplanet sucks)

Woot, First post!

Awesome.

Wolf is a dirty rat who still hasn't answered my question. Also, i'll be trying to get a playtest of this tonight/tomorrow and try to do a short overview.

 :cthulu:

Whats with the evil squid?

And you dare call our lord and savior Cthulhu an "evil squid"? 

Meh, Sorry on both counts. This is why I stick to lurking.

It's OK.  Consider yourself properly initiated.   Now you've got your embarrassing screw up out of the way.

Oh I'm sure I'll manage more of them, no worries there.
Oh and my impressions on the demo. Might as well put something on topic.
In a word, Unimpressed. Skip the rest if you like.

1 My computer falls somewhere in the middle of min/recommended sys specs. C2D E6400,  1.25Gig RAM, 9800Pro 128MB and while it runs fine zoomed all the way out, at that point your just playing green dots vs red dots. Zooming in on anything but the smallest battles kills my FPS. I doubt many people will be playing anything larger then 2v2 for a couple years. Baring them having some monster 4grand rig.
2 For how poorly it runs it's not very graphically impressive. While it's not ugly by any means it's all fairly bland and generic. Nothing like say WH:DoW which oozes personality, and is easy on the eyes.
Beyond that the AI for my units was rather lacking, and I saw nothing in the interface that seemed particularly innovative to me. I only played one mission and one skirmish so I need to give it some more time before I pass final judgment, but first impressions are not good.

A 128 MB 9800pro is no longer middle of the line.  I think 9800 pro's are getting on toward 4 years old now so its actually quite near the bottom.  A cheap bottom run 100 buck card will probably quadruple your video card performance at this point.

With regards to bases :

A dozen+ factories, loads of power generators, convertors and mines, swarms of engineers building items or assisting factories. I used to have 50 tech 3 flying engineers on 1 hotkey to build things in Spring and TA.

Yeah, once the AI reaches the 'end game' set of tech3 stuff, it just keeps cranking out ion generators and t3 mass convertors until it runs out of space, leading to a slowly escalating mass tide of t2/t3 units. I discovered this in my first game when I left the AI alone for far too long because I wanted to play with the nukes.

Which are shiny but mostly useless toys, especially compared to the artillery you could've built with the same resources.

Gah, i keep trying to sit down and write something, but i can't get past how bad the interface is.

/sadf

Based on the demo...

Skirmish sucks.

Campaign might be ok.


The game mechanics rely on scripted events or variations in the units available to each side in order to make one match different to another, and to make the solution to each game different.

Skirimish is going to be yet another excericise in solving the build order.

My only problem with the interface was that it's too hard to identify units unless you are either zoomed right in, or zoomed out to the point that they become icons.

I liked the fact that they had built the game to work with huge numbers of units, and not wussed out and said...


WTF is a command point?


/sigh

This is a problem; I sort-of solved it by turning on the UI option to always show the unit icons. Makes things a little messy (especially once you get seas of units, or, as I prefer to call them "goonswarms"), but a lot easier to tell where your tank battalion is.

Goonswarms...lol. Literally. Good thing I was not drinking Dr. Pepper at the time, or I might have really hurt my nose. I think I'm actually going to start using that one.


Unrelated, but the new Berries and Cream? It's actually pretty good, but a tad on the foamy side.

My gripes:
1. Hard to identify units.
2. Ferry mode still needs improvement. When I select a bunch of transports and make a ferry route, I wan't one rout. Now I have to micromanage feeding units to every single transport, which way too much micro.


PS. What is this tiny red circle you get when placinga rtillery?

First of all I think map resources should be more sought after, as it is now, it's a nice boost the first couple of minutes, but after that you simply don't care about them. There's no reason to try and defend/capture resources.

Secondly, the move speed of units is way to slow. It takes for ever to rally my troops to the enemy. Getting some engineers near the enemies base and start production is almost required on the larger maps it seems.

Thirdly, as stated, there's nothing really that stands out. Wasn't this supposed to be the game where unit size would grow enormously? I was under the impression that this would be a type of teching war game, which I would've found way more intresting than what it currently is. Units doesn't seem to offer even close to the tactical diversity seen in for example Starcraft or Warcraft. And the diffrent factions is mostly just a difference in modells apart from the experimental units.

Just looking around it seems like they more or less expect the modding community to fix up it's short comings since it seems highly customizeable. Final verdict, over hyped.

DISCLAIMER: I've only played a bunch of skirmish maps, single player campaigns don't intrest me much in RTS games  :-P

Bought this.


It's total shit.

I concur. Sort of.

Sairon put it best.

Map resources are basicly useless. Once you enter t3 you have all the resources you need.

The whole game is SLOW. There are three options in multiplayer - standart speed, "adjustable" and fast. The fast one is x4 and is ridicolously fast. The standart one is too slow. We couldn't get adjustable to work. It starts at standart speed and we couldn't figure out how to increase it. x2 should be fine. The other problem with movement speed is that units are just... clumsy. No other way to put it. They bump into each other, they stop and wait and than go and the units they just let go by them stop to wait for them... the pathfinding is just awful. I built the Sacred Attack Bot of Doom and Mega PWN and it was letting other units pass before it and stuff.

The problem with big units is that you can zoom out so far out that they just look like normal units. If the camera was set or there was a maximum zoom out level you could really see how big they are.

The Balance of the game is lacking (mind you, these are impressions out of 7-8 multiplayer games). Air gets wtfpwn'd way to easy. It's powerful but if you have "some" AA you'll own any air unit so bad it's not funny (that includes the big fat experimental tier flyer). Ground is ok. Water is overpowered. Every game where one of us built havy water, they won. The battleship is almost impossible to kill. It degraded to a point where we just built two mega fleets and just engaged them somwhere :)

I normally hate singleplayer RTS camapigns, but this one is actually good. It's probably what will keep me playing the game for a bit longer. It has a decent story and nice CG movies.

I think the game is summed up perfectly in the line that ended our last multiplayer session: "Wanna play Dark Crusade?".

I am amazed that the team that brought us TA can try and make and RTS that is actually worse than TA.

The Interface is horrible.  The units are slow.  Which makes the maps too large.  Turtling is unbelievably cheap and easy.  Which makes missions to root out the base horrid.  The Interface is horrible.  The Enemy commanders have a habit of going nova when they take the slightest damage, thus wrecking everything.  I would imagine in MP that it's too easy to wander your commander into an enemy base and nuke him as a fuck you.  The Interface is horrible.

The zoom feature is fucked as well, since one scroll, two scrolls and you're looking at Icons.  Honestly, this is not what we were promised.  The Interface is horrible.  The camera features are really really bad, since you can't even view the thing the way you want to.  Also, apart from suicide rushes, the Commander seems terribly underpowered.  The TA Commanders could wreck everything with D-Guns of death and I LIKED that.  It didn't cheapen the game, because if you overextended your commander, you got fucked.  The resource system is fucking stupid in that it seems just not to matter and the jump from No Resources to THE WORLD AT YOUR FEET is far too easy to make.  The Interface is horrible.

I'm going to play this some more, but I think it's massively failed the 30 minute test.  And the Two Hour Test.  And the Four Hour Test.  And The Interface is horrible.

:(

:(

Guess I'm going to pass on this one then; Jade Empire PC in a week anyway, and Eve is heating back up.

Is it my imperssion, or spider in the demo is mega-frickin overpowered?
BS might be hard to kill, but it doesn't just move through your entire T3 base like it didn't existed.

I just had defense outpost so tough it survived everything CPU threw at me for 1 hour, then it got wiped by a spider in about 15 seconds. Then I used mine to wipe entire CPU base. Any way to kill it?

The green team has a robot who's pretty much the same, it doesn't have the long range attack of the spider, but on the other hand it has 350k hp instead of the spiders 60k. I don't know about the spider, but the weak spot of the robot is air.

I have to say after playing the shit out of the demo I meant to come post here but I was out of town all weekend and only had a chance to check in briefly.

I ran into such huge and obvious bugs in the Demo that there is no way I'll buy the game until I've seen at least one major patch released.  Units not understanding there was true LoS was game-breaking.  The bad pathing and air units retardation when it came to using the landing pads were big turn offs as well.  Everything else that people have griped about here I can tolerate, knowing from original TA multiplayer that the game will evolve into something very complex and fun.  But there was just a bit too large of a dose of stupid "where was the QA" type shit in that demo and I doubt that the retail game was any different.

I really have to wonder about the SUPER hype machine that surrounded this, what the fuck version were those PC "journalists" playing?  Surely not the one the demo was based on?

Well then.  Good thing I'm too strapped to afford spending 50 bones in recreational money on this game.  Bummer though about the game itself.

I think everyone needs to accept that there's simply no such thing as Journalistic integrity in the Games Industry.  I can't believe any reviewer liked this trash.  But then, I said the same thing about C&C Generals, which was about as offensive a game as I could imagine in every way possible.

I played the first mission for the 5th time last night and after having finally beaten the commander, the application paused itself and froze.

There doesn't appear to have been any autosaving when the map enlarges.

Please, Don't Buy This Game.  It's a POS.

1up gave it a 7, which is the lowest review I've seen. 1up is the only site I even take half-seriously for reviews.

I know it made back to back covers on PCGAMER, I think Schild should burn someone in effigy and post a video.

I don't get that game. My Sacred Bot (Aeons super ground unit) just killed 3 (yes THREE!) Spider Bots (Cibrans super ground unitS) without going under half Health. At the same time. Whatever else I said was right - Air is way too easy to counter, water wins you games :)

Oh, Oh. Another good one. I had a weak defence line one game, like 5-6 t2 point defence turrets and a single t3 shield generator and they almost killed a Spider Bot (it was under 30%) before its super weapon activated and pwned them. It was comedy fucking gold listening to my mate on teamspeak "Come on motherfucker. COME ON MOTHERFUCKER. ACTIVATE. YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME. ACTIVATE. AHHAHAHAHHA YES"

UI sucks too much.

Someone needs to mod the shit out of it. As it stands, sucks.

Next.

There's a fair chance I might lift the EA ban for the new C&C though. Ironically, C&C Red Alert - I think - was the last EA game I bought.

I guess that's the whole "We sim accuracy isntead of chancetables" things. Once I had my  100% spider bot pwned by 30% spider - it somehow missed on first 2 seconds of lazzzer.

I'm playing the demo and is anyone else having an issue where when you are building units they just go take off across the map as soon as they are built?  Am I missing something?  Sometimes I set a way point and they will go there first but often as not they will just zoom off.  Sometimes I can find them again when the map expands and sometimes they are just gone (presumably because they got to close to the bad guys)

Aside from that there are so many interface issues that it makes the game tedious to play.  Also, not a big fan of Zerg rush ftw style play which seems to be the main strength of this game.

Yes, I had the same damn problem with the rush to whatthefuckever as soon as they were built.

Really annoying.

Funny, I heard a lot of hype for this and was all happy to get the chance to beta it.

It sucked.

But base defences own everything that isn't a mega-spider-of-ultimate-laser-doom.

I've played it quite a lot vs my friends and it's pretty entertaining in fact, could be partly because I win even 1on5 consistently  :-D.

Anyway, build order is super important, the reason for me winning all the time is because I can balance expansion vs  resource intake. Also, strategic bombers are KING. They're fast, unaffected by terrain, and buildings in this game goes down to fast. Add to this the fact that most buildings causes chain reactions when they explode. Often the opponents leave some part of their base undefended when they expand, if I get 1 bomb away from a tech 3 strategic bomber it's worth the build cost of it.

There's only 1 tactic which I've lost to so far, and that is the "rush with the commander to the enemy base". I don't know what fucking retard thought it was a good idea to make the commander go nuclear when it dies. He's totally worthless beyond the first couple of seconds, so the natural thing to do is to just place him in the middle of the enemy base. You can't fucking defend against it, there's no way. The commander has way to much hp early game to be taken down before he can position himself in your base.

I used that occasionally as a comedy option in TA. It's rare to get sufficient air defenses built in the first few minutes, so what you do is build an air transport, pick up your commander and drop him right in the middle of their base. You and the target both get decapitated when one of you goes nuclear - game over if decapitation is the winning condition. If they had a few AA guns, then it's even better, since units inside transports get destroyed when the transport gets destroyed.. hovering bomb of doom. :)

Not sure if it still works in SupCom, though.