So, Supreme Commander

I was looking for a nice multilayer strategy game to play with friends and I heard that Supreme Commander had some nice macromanagement and tactical opportunities, so I thought I should give it a try. We will probably use hamachi. Any warnings/recommendations?


I was just wandering if we should play the original Supreme Commander or the expansion. Which has better mods, maps, balance? I've also read the expansion's battles have a faster phase, whatever that means. So, if I am looking for a more complex gameplay is the original game better?

Also, what is the better way to learn how to play the game before multilayer- the reviews said that the campaign is shit from a tactical perspective because you unlock higher tier units in the end. So is skirmish against AI the way to go, or jumping to multiplayer after the tutorial is fine? I am asking because every review out there talks about a steep learning curve or something. Is that, like, doing the tutorial these days or there is really much to the game?

 

Get Forged Alliance, play few skirmish games first to get a grip on how economy works. If you played Total Annihilation before you should be fine though.

 

What about the original, is Forged Alliance better?
It seems that nukes are better in the original and almost useless in Forged Alliance which is quite a bummer.
I've also read that the original game is quite unstable, which is a deal breaker as every session is much longer than the average RTS.

 

Nevermind, the nukes are not useless, the review was shitty. Should've known.
FA it is.

 

This isn't true unless you play on really big maps, and then the game falls apart anyway as aircraft pretty much dominate. I haven't played many multiplayer games of FA, but none of them crashed and they all ended not long after T3 bots were rolling out, some sooner.

Of course, the game certainly can go for a long time, but usually someone will close the deal with T3.

 

Supreme Commander is a very slow game. Even a "quick" game is liable to take an hour or two, mostly due to huge map sizes and slow movement speeds. Although it's heavily inspired by Total Annihilation, it lacks a lot of those micro-level decisions you make that keep you interested moment-to-moment - too much of the game takes place zoomed out, issuing batch orders, setting up patrol routes and queuing up dozens of actions. I feel like they took the "it's strategic!" thing a bit too close to heart - while it's definitely a great strategy game in a lot of ways, it's not a *fun game* outright either.

I never played Forged Alliance, but everything I heard about it suggested it improved the game a lot, so you'll probably want to go with it.

Still, you might actually want to try SupCom 2 instead. It's dirt cheap when it comes on sale from time to time, and although the story stuff is pants, skirmish mode is good fun. It's a smaller-scale, faster game closer to StarCraft than Total Annihilation, but in my opinion is more fun, more responsive and has a better UI. So much time in the first game is spent just waiting to build stuff that it gets kinda old quickly.

Also not sure if it's just me, but the first game doesn't play well with Windows 7. It has some sort of memory leak or something, where the framerate tanks after about 20-30 minutes of gameplay, and after a while your units become extremely unresponsive and slow to execute orders.

 

It's true that the game is very slow-paced especially compared to other, newer RTS games, so if that's not your thing, stay clear. The gameplay is rewarding and strategic though, and the command and building systems are still the best of any game I've seen. You can basically queue up your whole base before ever finishing the first building. Also factories work together and engineers can help them and each other speed up production etc. So if you want something with longer-term planning and a bit of thinking, it's awesome, but if you consider the "olololol APM micro-macro [insert other buzzwords as needed] EXXXTREME" button-mashers like Starcraft or C&C3 to be strategy games, you probably won't like this.

One great thing about SupCom is that it's the only fairly recent game I know of that has proper multi-monitor support, i.e. it doesn't just stretch the main display across 2 physical monitors using Eyefinity and claim an extra feature. The second display is used to show a different view of the map which can be independently zoomed, moved etc. so you can keep an eye on 2 things at once.

A weakpoint I'd say is the superweapons. They take ENORMOUS resources and time to build (you'll need literally an army of engineers and a whole cluster of level 3 powerplants and resource buildings to get one done in reasonable time) and pretty fragile when completed. The exception to this rule would be nukes. They actually pack quite a punch unlike eg. Starcrap or C&C where a nuke does about the same damage as lighting a fart. Apart from nukes, the Monkeylord (a giant robot spider with a fricken' laser beam on top) is probably the best but even that gets destroyed pretty easily by a group of small units.

Where I have to disagree with sea however, is Supreme Commander 2. It's utter and complete shyte in every aspect whatsoever. It's the Dragon Age 2 of RTS games basically. Compared to the first game, it has worse graphics, fewer units types, gameplay is dumbed waaaaaaaaay the hell down and it's crawling with more bugs than a Vietnamese whorehouse. I also never had any problems running the 1st game in Windows XP, Vista or 7 (In fact I find it rock solid) so I can't comment on that. Also never played the expansion, but then I loved the game as is.

 

What the fuck is this bullshit.

 

Fair enough. Truth be told I don't actually think it's a better *strategy game* or even an excellent example of the genre (I'd take StarCraft II, Company of Heroes, Dawn of War etc. over it any day, and older games over those still), however, I still prefer it to the original game because of its faster pace and better UI. Supreme Commander absolutely nails the strategy stuff, but as I said, at a certain point I'm sitting there waiting for 15 minutes while my units move across the map, and I suddenly go "why the hell am I playing this game?

 

Well you do have time acceleration/adjustable game speed which helps a lot. I never really played it multiplayer though, where I guess that's not an option.

Edit: Agreed on COH though, that was probably the best real time strategy I've ever played. Still the best AI, interface ,graphics and "realism without being too real" (if that makes sense.)

 

Best AI? COH?

Best AI has to go to Supreme Commander 2. Despite all its other issues, it has some damn fine skirmish AI. In fact, if you're playing Supreme Commander 1 go look up the "Sorian AI mod". Improves it quite a bit. They apparently hired that guy to do the AI in supcom2.

 

Because the game is simple as fuck, even a dog could play it.

 

Not quite. The AI will do shit like probe your base for weak points to attack and try to outmaneuver you, using dropships to avoid natural barriers if needed.

 

Yeah, the Monkey Lord is worth building (he is the cheapest experimental) but I agree it's pretty hard to make a case for any of them over T3 bots. The biggest difference in Forged Alliance is mass extractors provide 50% more mass, which ups the important of map control a little as the extractors are relatively better than fabricators.

 

I've only played Forged Alliance. The multiplayer games I've played almost always end up in an experimental units war, without anything between the beginning and the end game, which makes the game boring: at some point the player who manages to build experimentals faster wins, and there's usually only two or so experimentals per player on the map at the same time, and everyone is avoiding building anything else. So, you may want to exclude experimentals from your games to get more interesting game play. I would also exclude nukes and possibly aircraft (at least tech 3 bombers, but you'd need a mod if you wanted to exclude ONLY tech 3 bombers and no other aircraft).

 

Remember to learn about adjacency bonuses. Makes base building more fun:

http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/Adjacency_bonus

 

I've never had that happen in any game, it only seems likely between two very passive players.

 

The experts games I've joined as a noob are always like that. It takes a few minutes for them to crank out the first experimental when that's the only thing they focus on. But yeah, it will probably be different if you're playing noob games with your friends.

 

Size of map, Nomask Alt?

 

Regardless of map size, how are you supposed to protect all your economy when you have 1 or 2 units total? "Experts" my ass.

 

How do you protect anything from an experimental without having an experimental yourself? You would have to have every single unit defending, attacking the experimental at the same time, and even then it would be a doomed battle if as little time had passed as does in expert games before the first experimental comes to ravage your base. You simply get more out of your resources if you use them to build an experimental rather than tier three units. That's why they do it.

 

Unless the map was 81x81 kilometers I doubt you couldn't just bomb the crap out of him with T1/2 bombers or drop tanks+arty near it fast enough. Oh sure, you can turtle up. But you can't have PD/AA/shields around every damn mass extractor now can you? And if the attacking player keeps the pressure he'll force you to turtle more delaying your experimental. While he can just claim every mass extractor around and beat you with a better economy.

 

Go play some team games and see how that goes. Seton's Clutch is one map where the scenario I outlined happens every time. You could try that.

 

Team games are a totally different scenario in almost any RTS, it's way easier to turtle.