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So it's on sale for 3.74 on Steam, with the expansion 'Infinite war battle pack' for 2.49.(Previous is in US dollars) For a long-time red alert fan, is it worth the five bucks?

Eh, for that cheap, maybe, but honestly I vastly prefer the first game.

Like White Haven said, the first game is really where it (was) at. But I'm really a TA fan at heart and find SupCom 2 to be a particular brand of heresy.

Is your internet connection solid enough to download the demo? It's really the first two tutorial missions, but it might get you a better feel for the game.

I have both, and Sup Com 1 is the better as far as strategy goes. The second is faster paced, but its combat is at a much smaller scale, its tech layout is really just annoying, and once someone makes a single experimental gantry, experimentals dominate the game. And nukes are practically useless except as defensive missiles, due to the greater ease of building anti-nukes and greater difficulty of building enough nukes to get past defenses. The new resource system is also a huge constraint, since it requires you have enough res in stock to start building. And they got rid of ACU upgrades aside from tech, and completely removed SACUs.

If it's only for a few dollars, it'd be worth it. It's fun enough, but much too repetitive in nature.

Supreme Commander 2 DOES have merit. It still has interesting counter mechanics, viable resource mechanics that make terrain control important and some neat gimmicks to play with. Some things were also legitimately improved compared to the first game.

However, the first game is vastly superior in nearly ever aspect.
It has better looking graphics.
It has a greater unit variety, especially for sea and air units.
It's resource system is more complex and strategic.
It has much more strategic options.
It's games are more epic in scale.

I see a lot of merit in SC2. Removing the uselessness of lower-tier units was a good choice, especially for non-land units. However, the research-system was not very well implemented - along with the changes in the resource-system it destroyed a lot of the merit the game had. This really made SC2 a rather unremarkable game compared to the first one.

Since it is that cheap, you might as well give it a shot. I highly recommend the first one, but the second one is easier to get into and more close to C&C-style games than the first one.

The "improvements" SC2 brings are not worth the loss of the elements that made Supreme Commander truly Supreme Commander.

The PC Gamer review really hit the nail on the head:

[Supreme Commander 2 is] a game that solved the accessibility issues of the first game, bought primarily by people who didn’t want them solved.

adam_grif wrote:The PC Gamer review really hit the nail on the head:

[Supreme Commander 2 is] a game that solved the accessibility issues of the first game, bought primarily by people who didn’t want them solved.

Which, as i said, doesn't mean that SC 2 is a bad game by itself. It is a rather well-made, still somewhat intersting game. It simply doesn't contain many of the gameplay elements that made the first game interesting, and is by itself nothing special.

It's a case of making a sequel that doesn't appeal to the audience that the first one was a hit with. It'd be like if they followed up a dark revenge thriller with a light hearted buddy cop movie. Maybe it's still good, but even so it's going to piss many of the fans of the original off.

In this case, the things they changed were arguably the biggest draws of the original game, and without those things it's just a mediocre SciFi flavored RTS.

They could have just named it Star Commander or some such instead of using the SC/TA heritage as a way to grab some quick cash. Then no one would have problem with it because as a RTS game SC2 is not too shabby compared to what has been released in past 2 years.

SirNitram wrote:So it's on sale for 3.74 on Steam, with the expansion 'Infinite war battle pack' for 2.49.(Previous is in US dollars) For a long-time red alert fan, is it worth the five bucks?

Honestly, even for that cheap I wouldn't bother. Like others have said, SupCom1 and SupCom:FA are far better in nearly every respect. SupCom1 was among the last hurrahs for truly epic-scale RTS gameplay where you could feasibly have battles involving over 1000 units, and it managed to be well balanced and engaging. SupCom2 took that away and followed the rest of the industry into the world of smaller battles and fewer units.

I have SupCom, SupCom:FA, and SupCom2. I still go back and play SupCom:FA, and I never ever feel the urge to reinstall SupCom2. There are other games that do the small-scale RTS formula far better (like Starcraft 2). When I want to play SupCom, I want a massive, large-scale, epic battle, and SupCom2 just doesn't deliver. I don't think I'd even play it for free.

I got so frustrated playing SupCom 2 that I gave up in about mission 3. The one with the fatboys that you don't control. I wouldn't willingly touch it again.

BTW you don't get automatic mass-makers anymore: now you have to clock on a button to get one to make mass one time.

Can I make a slight hijack here? I used to play TA, C&C, Red Alert and RA2 like a maniac. But I have been away from the PC games for about eight years. What is a decent RTS game these days for someone who loved those games? I've come to understand that most games released in this genre today are crap. Is Supreme Commander anything like TA?

cosmicalstorm wrote:Can I make a slight hijack here? I used to play TA, C&C, Red Alert and RA2 like a maniac. But I have been away from the PC games for about eight years. What is a decent RTS game these days for someone who loved those games? I've come to understand that most games released in this genre today are crap. Is Supreme Commander anything like TA?

Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance are TA reborn. Get them both, though if you can only get one, get the former.

Dave wrote:

cosmicalstorm wrote:Can I make a slight hijack here? I used to play TA, C&C, Red Alert and RA2 like a maniac. But I have been away from the PC games for about eight years. What is a decent RTS game these days for someone who loved those games? I've come to understand that most games released in this genre today are crap. Is Supreme Commander anything like TA?

Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance are TA reborn. Get them both, though if you can only get one, get the former.

I second Dave's recomendations, though if you've enjoyed the RA series you may enjoy RA3, though it can get a bit silly in terms of the ridiculous micromanagment with speical abilties it can encourage at times.

cosmicalstorm wrote:Can I make a slight hijack here? I used to play TA, C&C, Red Alert and RA2 like a maniac. But I have been away from the PC games for about eight years. What is a decent RTS game these days for someone who loved those games? I've come to understand that most games released in this genre today are crap. Is Supreme Commander anything like TA?

SC 1 is very much like TA, yes. You've go the tech levels, the resource collection, the commander, the epic strategic scale etc. Of course it's all updated to modern graphics - and mostimportantly to me it has strategic zoom, a feature i am REALLY missing in every other RTS (you can zoom out seamlessly so that you can see any portion of the map, including the whole map, and you get unit-denominating strategic icons to boot).

If you were a TA-fan, you practically HAVE to get Supreme Commander and it's add-on, Forged Alliance. If you can't spare those few bucks, there are several rebuilds of TA based on the spring-engine. Those are pretty good as well, but i prefer SC.