Supreme Commander comes out 02/20

[Ragnoros]

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!

[Trippy]

Awesome.

[Megrim]

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.

[Rasix]

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!

 

[Ragnoros]

Whats with the evil squid?

[Rasix]

Whats with the evil squid?

Demo available here:

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

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!

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

[Ragnoros]

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

[Rasix]

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.

[Ragnoros]

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.

[Murgos]

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.

[penfold]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

[Megrim]

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

/sadf

[eldaec]

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...

uh, you can only build 20 because.... um.... command points! yeah, command points

WTF is a command point?

SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP

/sigh

[Yoru]

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.

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.

[Strazos]

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.

[JoeTF]

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?

[Sairon]

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 

[Ironwood]

Bought this.


It's total shit.

[Wolf]

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?".

[Ironwood]

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.

:(

[Yoru]

:(

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

[JoeTF]

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?

[Sairon]

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.

[Hoax]

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?

[Flood]

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.

[Ironwood]

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Hoax]

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

[Wolf]

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"

[schild]

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.

[JoeTF]

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.

[Murgos]

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.

[Xerapis]

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.

[JoeTF]

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