StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Nobody made one, so I did. None of that demo discussion here!

Ironically, I have to say the full version is far and away more fun than the demo. Even playing the same map, with the flexibility of more setup options and the more polished AI it's almost a different game. I can even beat the AI on medium, with for an RTS failure like myself is pretty funny.

However, I have some questions. How does queuing targets for the tac launchers work? I queued up a typical 'kill all AA' set, but the tac launcher fired all five of it's missile at the same AA site, which had been killed by the first one. Also, is there any way to find out it's ammo status without mousing over the actual building?

The patch notes for 3217 say there's a 'minimalist UI' and that you 'press +' to activate it. This doesn't work for me.

Is the AI really stupid or really clever? I've noticed several times the AI has abandoned attacks or gone from aggressive to turtling in response to losing.

In the games I played with Alyeska we found that 2x Challenge AI is too easy to be at while a single Supreme AI is a bit too hard, though it can be done (Alyeska managed it later in another multiplayer game with another player).

Intelligence- I've seen some indications of it- they'll try flanking attacks around your defence lines- ie. sending super units under water to come up right in the middle of your base rather than marching them straight at you. Which can be pretty exciting.

It's a lot less boring than I found the demo- I can't imagine bothering with single player though.

I really like the Aeons- the Galactic Colossus rules (though the Czar sucks) and the Submersible Battleship is pretty sweet.

I'm not too impressed by the Cybrans- the Monkey Lord dies so easy to the Galactic Colossus. The UEF are pretty cool though their superunits aren't as unconventional.

I've been playing a few skirmishes against increasing enemies, and yeah 2x Challenge is too easy even for me. I haven't tried a single 'hard' AI though. I can't be assed playing the 'campaign'. Through bad luck with 'random' I haven't used the Aeon at all yet, and I much prefer UEF to Cybrans.

Stark wrote: However, I have some questions. How does queuing targets for the tac launchers work? I queued up a typical 'kill all AA' set, but the tac launcher fired all five of it's missile at the same AA site, which had been killed by the first one. Also, is there any way to find out it's ammo status without mousing over the actual building?

The patch notes for 3217 say there's a 'minimalist UI' and that you 'press +' to activate it. This doesn't work for me.

Alas there doesn't seem to be a way to find out ammo status without mousing over. On the other hand, if you have six or more t3 engineers assisting it the missiles build very quickly so you almost don't have to worry about ammo. But yes, I do wish there was an easy way to know.

Now, just shift-click the launch button or "L" and it should do what you want it to do. Otherwise, I'm not sure what's going on.

As for the different UIs, Alt-down or Alt-up (arrow keys) will cycle through the different uis. And the 3220 patch removes the securom protection and improves the minimalist ui slightly.

Vympel wrote:I'm not too impressed by the Cybrans- the Monkey Lord dies so easy to the Galactic Colossus. The UEF are pretty cool though their superunits aren't as unconventional.

Monkeylords are meant to assault bases rather than go up against GCs. Pretty much anything land-based dies in a split-second to the GC anyway.


UEF superunits not unconventional? I dunno, the Mavor seems pretty unconventional to me.

Thanks for the new thread, Stark.

I just picked up Retail after finally giving the Skirmish in the demo a try. Hot damn, how much nostalgia can I feel in one epic slugfest?

I really hope someone bashes together Core/Arm for SC. Not because I hate change, but because it's been so long since I've crushed an Arm base.

Also, I need to add the old music to the new music rotation as well.

Shinova wrote:As for the different UIs, Alt-down or Alt-up (arrow keys) will cycle through the different uis. And the 3220 patch removes the securom protection and improves the minimalist ui slightly.

Awesome, thanks for this. I must have read the manual and patch notes half a dozen times looking for that. The minimalist UI is the win, by the way.

The Galactic Collosus is nice, but it has no defense against airborne superunits, long ranged units, and waterborne units while it's on the bottom. It can smash a base like no other, take out any other superunit at short range, and kill regular units with the best of them, while the Monkeylord is more well-rounded. It can't stand up to the GC, but it can still trash a base, dish out moderate damage at long range, light damage against air units, and at least defend itself while submerged. I tend to like the GC better because it's stronger in a frontal assault and lots of air superiority fighters can take down a CZAR or similar GC-killer in fairly short order, and a submersible battleship can escort it while it's underwater, but it's nice not to have to worry as much about backup. The mobile factory is nice for long ranged firepower, but I haven't had a chance to see how it compares to the GC and Monkeylord in a fight. I imagine that it could kill GC's easily simply by staying out of range and pounding them to death.

The other superunits are kind of 'meh'. The submersible battleship really doesn't have much more firepower or HP than a regular battleship, the CZAR goes down way too fast to aerial defenses, and the Experimental Gunship lacks the CZAR's offensive punch. The rapid fire artillery piece sucks up too much juice to be worth it, better to just build a bunch of heavy artillery pieces. And I don't even remember the UEF's other two superunits, but I remember one of them was basically just a nuke-lobber. Not too impressive, all around.

Matthew likes the retail SC game better than I do. Both of my boys love the huge superunits. Me, I'm too old to get off on size-compensatory computer game avatars and I don't like the way they're so dominant. For that matter, I don't like the way the tech level jumps are so huge in general.

Having said that, I would like to point out that my boys have tried many combinations of superunits. A Fatboy will indeed kill a Galactic Colossus fairly easily, especially if it uses terrain to its advantage. But if you put a Fatboy and a GC on a flat plain and march the GC toward the Fatboy with no other maneuvering or strategy, the GC will get in range of the Fatboy and crush it before it goes down to the Fatboy's gunnery barrage.

To be honest, my boys seem to enjoy the game most when they play against each other and declare a temporary opening truce, because it takes so long to make units that are worth a damn, and T1 unit rushes are just annoying. It's too bad the game didn't include such a feature, the way Rise of Nations does.

PS. One very nice thing about this game: you can install it on two PCs on the same LAN with the same CDKey and they will play multiplayer against each other without complaint.

One thing I've noticed in the games I've played so far is that the AI doesn't seem to bother too much with the adjacency system. Whereas I am painstakingly cueing up Energy Storage around my T3 power plant, (and metal storage around my metal fabricators, and so forth) the AI just plonks them down without any particular concern for adjacency.

Is adjacency worth the time to cue up and organize, or are you better off just buidling the primary mass/power producers and moving on?

I would give you an answer but I find that I lose patience with the hardcore micromanagement of this game before that kind of optimization becomes an issue. Just look at the fucking tactical cruise missile launchers; those things are a diehard micromanager's dream weapon but I have better things to do than click furiously on a bunch of launchers to tell them what to fucking do. You can't even put the goddamned things on autofire; they just sit there unless you tell them to shoot at something.

The Monkeylord is also way faster than the GC and is stealthed.

30k energy worth of t3 gens can be built up to support a scathis (the rapid-fire mobile artillery) and one can take down much of a base in a few minutes. I'm sure several t3 artillery would work too for purely base offense, although the reason why Scathis can be better is that in the time an artillery piece fires again the enemy base's shields could've recharged, and during the time the shields are down t3 artillery can only get in one shot, unlike the Scathis which can put in many shots during that time.

One use where the Scathis is clearly good is in base defense. Use it like a poor-man's Vulcan or Buzzsaw.


The other two UEF experimentals you're thinking of are the Atlantis and the Mavor. The Atlantis, aside from being a submersible aircraft carrier, also has a torpedo attack that can one-shot anything cruiser-class and below and kill anything above that in pretty short order (does about 2400 damage per second). One-on-on the Atlantis will pwn the Tempest (Aeon submersible battleship)

The Mavor is the UEF strategic artillery. It takes 330-ish minutes to build with a single T3 engineer, but with a fully-upgraded ACU and about twenty or thirty T3 engineers you can build one in about...... 20-ish minutes or less, I think. Its range completely encompasses any 40km and smaller map and covers half of a 81-km map, does 22,000 damage per shot, is insanely accurate, and can fire a shot every eight seconds (practically rapid-fire compared to normal t3 artillery). It is arguably the single deadliest unit in the whole game.


For everyone, here's a really useful database:

http://147.28.0.58/supcom/unit_list/r3217

Vympel wrote:One thing I've noticed in the games I've played so far is that the AI doesn't seem to bother too much with the adjacency system. Whereas I am painstakingly cueing up Energy Storage around my T3 power plant, (and metal storage around my metal fabricators, and so forth) the AI just plonks them down without any particular concern for adjacency.

Is adjacency worth the time to cue up and organize, or are you better off just buidling the primary mass/power producers and moving on?

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic. ... +resources


To sum up, it's not worth it to try to surround every mass fab or gen with storage. You're better off putting down more mass fabs and gens. Saves on the unit cap.



EDIT: On a more general note, support commanders are very, very good. Can serve as a combat engineer building stealthed artillery bases and such, or can be purely combat-based and add significant punch to any attacking force.

The problem with the Mavor is the incredibly long construction time unless you have 20 support commanders making the thing. That's a general problem with a lot of the top-level structures and units; one has to expect a long game if he's planning to use this fancy hardware, because it takes a long time to build all of that shit.

The Mavor's incredibly long contruction time is justifiable since it's so powerful. As for everything else, some people like it some people don't.

Vympel wrote:I'm not too impressed by the Cybrans- the Monkey Lord dies so easy to the Galactic Colossus.

The Monkeylord builds a helluva lot quicker than the Colossus, though.

Uraniun235 wrote:

Vympel wrote:I'm not too impressed by the Cybrans- the Monkey Lord dies so easy to the Galactic Colossus.

The Monkeylord builds a helluva lot quicker than the Colossus, though.

Given enough engineers, anything builds helluva quick.

The Monkeylord has plenty of other advantages over the GC.

Well, what you do to solve that build fast problem is to build like 4 quantum gateways, spam out sub-commanders, and give them all resource allocation. Once you've got 30 or so, you've got a mobile economy that can spit out super-units like nobody's business

Course, that takes a while. And forget about attacking during that time.

Regarding adjacency, the best way apparently is to build separate clusters of 1 T3 power gen, and 2 T3 mass gens. It will produce net mass, and very slight net energy. Make sure you have extra power generators for shields and building and whatnot.

Of course, you can go with the farm approach, where you build a single gigantic field of T3 resource buildings and sprinkle in shields and AA. By sprinkle I mean liberally sprinkle.

When I'm not completely strapped for space, I put mines in this fashion:

I've never had a problem with T1 unit rushes. The air units are shot down easily enough, and land rushes are stopped pretty much cold by a few laser towers, which none of the T1 land units outrange. The only T1 units I use are the anti-air to move around and protect spread-out assets and bombers to harass the enemy's far flung mineral extractors. You can also get to T2 pretty quick, and a few T2 units and defenses will shred any T1 army. If you set all your engineers to help the factories crank out T2 units (especially gunships), you might be able to take down the enemy, but I usually continue to use them for harassment and destruction of extractors while I upgrade my own extractors and fortify. Then I upgrade to T3 and start spamming T3 power and mass fabs while I put up heavy shield generators and SAM sites left, right and center. The SAM's and shields will fend off an aerial attack, while a ground attack can be dealt with using gunships and strategic bombers, since there aren't really any effective land-based anti-air units to stop them. Then I get some support commanders and start cranking out superunits and go for the kill. If the first 1-2 superunits backed up by whatever army I have lying around doesn't do the job, then I build some more while I work on a nuke launcher. If they do a good job fortifying their base, the superunits by themselves might not cut it, but you can usually use the superunit to take out their strategic defense and then nuke them. I'm sure other people have better strategies, but that one's at least good enough for a Supreme AI, if not a veteran player.

Stark wrote:

Shinova wrote:As for the different UIs, Alt-down or Alt-up (arrow keys) will cycle through the different uis. And the 3220 patch removes the securom protection and improves the minimalist ui slightly.

Awesome, thanks for this. I must have read the manual and patch notes half a dozen times looking for that. The minimalist UI is the win, by the way.

Is it me or do you loose the minimap if you use the minimalist UI?

Run supcom with "/map perftest" in the command line and the game will load an automated performance test (lots of units and fighting goes on) and will give you a SupComMark score, and write a more detailed log file, with info such as min, max, and average FPS and such.

My score was like -2541, and my fps was horrid.

wautd wrote:Is it me or do you loose the minimap if you use the minimalist UI?

Yeah, you lose the minimap. Who cares? I haven't checked to see if the 'toggle minimap' button is hidden somewhere (like the UI overlays), but frankly I can live without the silly minimap.

Darth Wong wrote:I would give you an answer but I find that I lose patience with the hardcore micromanagement of this game before that kind of optimization becomes an issue. Just look at the fucking tactical cruise missile launchers; those things are a diehard micromanager's dream weapon but I have better things to do than click furiously on a bunch of launchers to tell them what to fucking do. You can't even put the goddamned things on autofire; they just sit there unless you tell them to shoot at something.

There is a mod for that; MOD: Auto Tactical Launchers.

Shinova wrote:Run supcom with "/map perftest" in the command line and the game will load an automated performance test (lots of units and fighting goes on) and will give you a SupComMark score, and write a more detailed log file, with info such as min, max, and average FPS and such.

My score was like -2541, and my fps was horrid.

SupComMark (sim) : 8155
SupComMark (render) : 7038
SupComMark (composite) : 15192
(Note: SupComMark scores represent overall system performance. Higher is better.)

SupComMark (sim) : 0.0
SupComMark (render) : 79.0
SupComMark (composite) : 79.0
(Note: SupComMark scores represent overall system performance. Lower is better.)

Compared to you two, my score seems... normal?