Supreme Commander Forged Alliance - THQ - PC

[schild]

From Bhodi:
So, it's an RTS. It's also a standalone expansion. It's pretty. The GUI's been upgraded from the original and now is fairly usable. You've got no mini map, but you can zoom all the way out with the mousewheel. This is the coolest and only unique feature of this game.

There was some sort of plot but I blinked during the 15 second galactic history lesson that you get when hit new campaign. It was full of dates and acronyms and a wall of text. It seemed to be something like "our generic galactic empire #1 is fighting galactic empire #2 that is totally mean and kicking our ass". The game starts with the enemy empire surprise-attacking you so that's how you know they are bad. Maybe if I had played the main game I'd have more of a clue but I simply can't bring myself to care.

There are three sub-peoples who are allied with you. Blues are your standard space coalition, greens are some sort of religious cult, and reds seem to be some sort of reformed evil. I picked them. I just pretend that I'm Harkonnen.

But wait, before you go thinking that there is nothing that sets this game apart... there is a twist. Your primary resources are power generated from buildings and mass sucked from ground deposits. They come in at a rate of units per second and, because someone decided you aren't doing enough micromanagement, you have a cap on how much power and mass you can store for future use. This means that 99% of the time you'll have way more than you need or be completely out of one and trying to stop or pause construction to divert your build energy to that crucial gun placement. Sorry, you can't. Pause construction I mean.

You've got 3 levels of tech/units. You've got your long range shooties, your short range shooties, your anti-air shooties, your flying shooties, and your boat shooties. You've got "experimental" shooties which are just your super strong units that take a long time to build. Most of your good shooties can't cross water, so you've got transport ships made of tissue paper to try and ferry them where you need to be. This is made hard by the fact that air is ridiculously strong.

People say the AI was harder but I don't see it. Turtle, build up units, win. Mission diversity is limited to "kill the base over there" where sometimes you have to cross water to get to it.

This game is crap and brings nothing to the RTS genre except a bit of shiny.

-

Don't buy it.

[sidereal]

But wait, before you go thinking that there is nothing that sets this game apart... there is a twist. Your primary resources are power generated from buildings and mass sucked from ground deposits.

Total victory

[Megrim]

I picked them. I just pretend that I'm Harkonnen.

I love you.

[Mrbloodworth]

I have to say, there are quite a few things wrong in this review... However, I have spent a lot of time with the game and i understand this is supposed to be a "feet wet" level of a review process.

Are we allowed to submit second opinions? Some of the error could have been avoided by reading some of the manual.

[schild]

If you have a second opinion, post it here. But someone who's spent enough time with a game to get past the "shitty parts" isn't quite understanding But Is It Fun.

Also, Supreme Commander was universally panned - so you're pretty much the anomaly.

[Hoax]

I do think he's not getting a core concept, the resource management part of Total Annihilation is brutal on a newbie to the franchise but smart people should be able to handle it.  Firstly, bullshit you can't pause production, you can and you sometimes have to in order to keep more important shit running if one of your outlying resource points gets knocked out.  Also this is a franchise where you will often have groups of resource buildings hotkeyed over units.  That's the way it is & it certainly adds something (something many do not want I suppose) to the rts genre.  Its hardly the only thing they add / do differently but its a substantial new challenge.

I'll admit though, there was so much incredibly wrong with Supreme Commander's OB experience that I never came close to buying it.  I was considering the purchase after hearing this xpack had fixed stuff.

[bhodi]

There may have been a way to pause, just as there was probably a plot somewhere -- it just wasn't readily apparent and not even the 30m long tutorial took me through how to do it.

I was using a tiny bit of hyperbole on the resource management front; You do end up with more than you can use most of the time, though. The balance-your-resources minigame simply doesn't add any enjoyment to an altogether bland experience. There were no distinguishing factors between the different factions, the units, nothing. The only thing I thought was cool are the base-sized shield generators, and those are more cool in the shiny than the tactical department.

I could list all the things that were wrong and sucked about it, from the fact that they mix right and left click to do confirms, their code for loading stuff into transports is utter garbage, stuff like that, but why bother. All you need to know is:

Don't buy it.

[geldonyetich2]

Maybe I'm not that good at identifying a bad game sometimes.  However, there's such a thing as being bad at identifying a good game, too.  By calling Supreme Commander crap, you've crossed that line.

I'm pretty sick of RTS in general, but even I can tell that Supreme Commander is an extremely well built and executed example of the genre.  Forged Alliance basically improves Supreme Commander, mostly through minor re-balancing and the addition of more AI modes (because I hear the new fourth side doesn't play significantly different from the other three).

[bhodi]

OK, I'll bite just this once.

It's only a good game in that it's pretty and doesn't crash when run. It's 'well executed' in the fact that it's obviously an RTS without a GUI that make you want to gouge your eyes out (like the non-expansion one). If you know RTSes, you can pretty much skip the tutorial. There's nothing in this game that is going to surprise you or challenge you in the least.

It has no real story, no distinguishing features between the different factions/races/whatever, the same damned units that you'd come to expect from every RTS that has ever come out, ever, since dune 2. There's no variation in missions, no cohesiveness to the main storyline at all.

A flash game could have brought just as many gameplay elements. There's simply nothing there. There's not even any micromanagement since you just walk your units around and they fire automatically at anything inside their weapon's radius. The game simply lacks any sort of personality, any soul, any uniqueness that wouldl let this game could leave it's mark mark on a genre which is already filled to bursting. The fact is, the only thing I could single out as inventive is the no-minimap battlefield zoom. Which I ALSO put in the review.

It may be well executed, but it's still a well executed pile of crap. I pretty much told you everything you needed to know in the first review -- pretty but overly shallow with no redeeming features except that it runs (if you have a computer well enough to run it). Don't buy it.

[geldonyetich2]

Question:

Did you notice you could set up building massive death fortresses in advance by holding own the shift key? 

I thought that was a pretty distinguishing feature, but I didn't see it in your review, and it might explain why you think it's overly micromanagement heavy.

[bhodi]

Yes, just like you have been able to queue buildings for years and years. In fact, I pretty much assumed you could from the start since they were built exactly like buildings, from the SCV totally unique builder unit. That's the best of your distinguishing features? <sigh>

It's like you are fixing on words instead of the overall tone of my post. My problem with the game is not that it is overly micromanagement intensive. You can feel free to disagree by posting a differing opinion here instead of trying to change my mind. Don't bother, the game's already uninstalled. There are too many good and interesting games to bother with a mediocre one.

[Hoax]

I'll give you $10 + shipping for your copies...   

4 serious

[geldonyetich2]

I can see where you're coming from when you say Supreme Commander: Forge Alliance doesn't seem particularly new and interesting.  The three sides' personality really isn't there, either, aside from perhaps the giant experimental units.  Still, I hesitate to say it's a bad RTS game - it's a very powerful and effective RTS game.  It just isn't particularly original. 

If it stands apart in any particular way, it's just that Supreme Commander, like Total Annihilation before it, is balanced entirely around the concept of extreme overkill.  You can cue up massive structures to built ahead of time (which is actually a fairly unusual feature in the RTS I've played - units sure, but buildings not so much), but that's only part of it.  The whole thing is geared to facility ease of scraping together a whole lot of resources (you can raise those resource caps by building containers btw) and plowing them out to build hundreds of units.  Provided your CPU can handle it (and few can yet) you can literally have thousands of units fighting it out in Supreme Commander at once.  It really is a RTS for power gamers, not neccessarily those looking for something different.

I haven't seen a really novel RTS since Perimeter.

[bhodi]

Do you even read my review? You're just saying everything I already said, only with more words. And then saying it's a GOOD thing.

I said "Turtle, build up units, win". If you think that sort of system is challenging, fun and rewarding, spending 3 hours hoarding resources and then washing over them with 3x their units, well, sorry.

I don't.

If you don't have anything new to say, other than "you disagree with what I think is fun", just go away. You were told you could post your own refuting review if you wanted, so either do it or stop cluttering the thread.

Haox: No thanks :)