Supreme Commander: Phantom

[Uraniun235]

I was introduced by some goons to a special scenario map for Supreme Commander, called Phantom. Basically, everyone starts off allied with everyone else, and the objective is to kill the Phantom. At eight minutes, the computer tells you whether or not you are the Phantom.

The Phantom has a key advantage: he gets additional resources equivalent to 50% of all the other players' resources. However, if the Phantom spends too much too quickly, it becomes obvious that he has an economic advantage, so he has to spend carefully in order to conceal his advantage.

The ultimate goal for the Phantom is to mislead the others into attacking each other such that he can strike and kill everyone else. This actually happened pretty well in the game that I played - we had all become convinced that someone else was the Phantom (to be fair he had like a dozen fuckerbees so it was a little understandable) and we started attacking him, only for the real Phantom to let loose an attack of his own once we had devastated the faux-Phantom.

It's a pretty fun variant on the usual gameplay, although one thing it could probably really use is a time limit - otherwise, it's possible for everyone to max out their tech tree and have a full array of weapons, at which point it becomes nigh-impossible to single out the Phantom based on spending and everyone sits around waiting for someone to make a move. Also if it goes too long the chances of a crash increase - just as the Phantom unleashed a nuclear attack that would have likely secured his victory, the game crashed on everyone.

Another aspect that was implemented when we played that likely helped a lot was limiting the unit count to 250 each. This allowed people's computers to keep up, especially as everyone maxed out their unit limits, and also prevented people from simply spamming a titanic amount of tech-1 units (or worse, point defense).

Overall fun. The map we played was Phantom Sung Island, version 1... I'm told that version 2 is horribly broken. Fortunately you can download earlier versions. I haven't played the other Phantom maps yet nor heard things about them so I can't say if they work or not. Sung Island has five player slots, and the other two have six. I suspect they all have to be filled but I'm not sure on that.

[ThatGuyFromThatPlace]

Phantom is a gametype that' been around since Starcraft, quite fun, though it seems that in SupCom it might be more difficult to tell the Phantom from a very good resource manager without a stupid unbalancing number of advantages (unless everyone playing is of pretty high caliber)

[Stark]

Or you could play Defcon am i rite?

[Uraniun235]

Phantom is a gametype that' been around since Starcraft, quite fun, though it seems that in SupCom it might be more difficult to tell the Phantom from a very good resource manager without a stupid unbalancing number of advantages (unless everyone playing is of pretty high caliber)

It can be for sure, although with Allied mode on, you can see precisely how many resource structures everyone else has and of what tech level.

Also thanks for the heads-up, I haven't played much Starcraft at all so I didn't know it debuted there.

Or you could play Defcon am i rite?

Not quite. In Diplomacy everyone's on the same playing field, and the alliance just falls apart; the objective is purely to have the most survivors at the end of the game. In Phantom, if the Phantom reveals themselves, everyone's just going to dogpile on the Phantom because the objective is to kill the Phantom.

[Shinova]

Can you see what everyone is doing or is everyone's fog-of-war re-instated once the time limit passes?

[Stark]

Or you could play Defcon am i rite?

Not quite. In Diplomacy everyone's on the same playing field, and the alliance just falls apart; the objective is purely to have the most survivors at the end of the game. In Phantom, if the Phantom reveals themselves, everyone's just going to dogpile on the Phantom because the objective is to kill the Phantom.

I hear what you're saying, but the way the alliance falls apart is due to the same intriguing and doublecrosses as I'd expect take place in Phantom. But let's face it, it's vector graphics, so nobody cares.

[Uraniun235]

Can you see what everyone is doing or is everyone's fog-of-war re-instated once the time limit passes?

You can see what everyone else is doing as long as you're allied to them, even after the eight-minute mark.