Supreme Commander Demo released!

[Hawkwings]

Nah, you rarely see nukes when you play good people. Unless they're both pretty evenly matched, then the nukes might start flying. I get the feeling people were so focused on nukes because finally, they've got part of the scale that they're supposed to have. They're still too small though .

Besides, you build big things like those with subcommanders!

[Darth Garden Gnome]

Oh, I had two subcommanders, plus my commander, plus like fifteen engineers on that piece. It just wasn't happenin'.

[Hawkwings]

For one, nukes take a long time to build. Also, did you have enough resources? Things take REALLY long to build if you're out of resources. And Nuke silos aren't exactly known for their resource-friendlyness

[Darth Garden Gnome]

The whole "oh man you have negative mass" thing might have been the reason it was taking so long. I don't know where the hell you're supposed to find it--I had T3 mass extractors on all of my side of the map, and I had surplus energy so up go the fabricators... you need a fuckload of mass to get that shit going.

[Shinova]

I dunno, but for me, with six engineers assisting a nuke launcher, nukes didn't take that long to build. I can almost swear it was less than 5 minutes per nuke.


The Mavor, now, THAT takes a long time to build (at least in the beta). The build time listed in the UI was like 500+ minutes or something.

But with good reason since it's basically an artillery cannon with apparently infinite range.

[Hawkwings]

It's a rapid-fire 100km range sniper rifle with a shell that penetrates shields and it super-accurate. There's no defense against it.

How many fabricators did you have? I find 40-50 fabs are good for just about anything I want to build.

[Darth Garden Gnome]

Jesus. I'm havin' a hard time wrapping my brain around the scale of this thing. Back to the drawing board...

[Darth Wong]

Well, I finally played this game and actually took the time to build all of the advanced units instead of running in there on a mission to take out his Command unit.

Whoop-de-doo, the units are cool (my boys were practically drooling over the giant spider and giant beetle), but the whole process of constructing them is nothing more than tedium. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the Total War style of games, but I just don't have much patience for sitting there watching a status bar slowly tick toward 100%.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

Oh, I had two subcommanders, plus my commander, plus like fifteen engineers on that piece. It just wasn't happenin'.

Not sure if you've found this out yet but if you invest in resource allocation upgrades for each subcommander, you can dramatically increase your resources. They become walking resource generators and completely cover their own expenses when they're building. Grab 10 or more of these and you can build nukes and experimentals in two to three minutes each. It only takes a while to get the first few going but after that, the collective resources from all the subcommanders make conventional resource generating buildings obsolete.

[InnocentBystander]

I find its easiest to have some engineers out in the field on patrol gathering resources, a smallish crew building frontline defenses, and the rest set up on an amazingly long build queue. The one problem is that you can't really queue up engineers to assist with extractor upgrades; that would make my day.

[Darth Garden Gnome]

Not sure if you've found this out yet but if you invest in resource allocation upgrades for each subcommander, you can dramatically increase your resources.

Good to know!

Also, holy shit there's a reason it takes forever to get nukes up. It's end game if one land in the opponent's base.

[KrauserKrauser]

I only got to play the beginnings of a quick skirmish before I had to go to work, but I got two impressions from my limited play time:

#1: My computer sucks, i'm lucky to be able to play this at the lowest levels

#2: The GUI for this game is horrible. Needs a complete overhaul. Restricting my viewing area? No thanks, get rid of that.

[Vympel]

Man, I'm way too busy playing System Shock, Medieval 2, and Oblivion to install this. Is it worth the time, or should I just mooch off my brother when he gets the full version?

[Darth Wong]

To be honest, unless you have a hard-on for really cool giant units that you can't make until you've been playing the game for at least an hour, it's not worth the bother. There is precisely nothing new in this game, in terms of actual gameplay. And it is totally devoid of personality.

Mind you, the really cool giant units are good enough for my boys to be excited about the game and that's fine for them, but you're an adult and a seasoned gamer and I can't see anything about this game which would do much for you.

[Admiral Valdemar]

And besides, there's always the trusty Krog in TA, so towering machines of instant death have been done and done with style.

[Shinova]

It's a rapid-fire 100km range sniper rifle with a shell that penetrates shields and it super-accurate. There's no defense against it.

How many fabricators did you have? I find 40-50 fabs are good for just about anything I want to build.

I didn't count exactly how many fabs I had, but it was enough for a 550-ish mass income.

This was my latest game in the beta rather than the demo however; I don't think the demo map has the space to build that many fabs without sticking them all together in one group. I built buttloads of engineers early on, then several land factories and surrounded each with at least eight T3 engineers, and then had ten or eleven T3 engineers going around building T3 power gens and mass fabs. I had other groups of T3 engineers making miscellaneous defenses, assisting air and naval factories and so on. The nuke launcher had ten T3 engineers assisting it and it was building nukes pretty quickly. It took much longer to build the launcher in the first place.

[Ypoknons]

To be honest, unless you have a hard-on for really cool giant units that you can't make until you've been playing the game for at least an hour, it's not worth the bother. There is precisely nothing new in this game, in terms of actual gameplay. And it is totally devoid of personality.

I think in the case of the original Total Annihilation, what made it special for me is the simple scale of the game. Instead of a war with 10 tanks, you could really have 50 tanks (just on one screen) and infantry, air and artillery support - that made it come closer to a "Total War for the modern era." I wonder if Supreme Commander can provider the same thing, either out of the box or modded.

[Darth Wong]

You can have 50 tanks onscreen no problem, but the game chugs. Mind you, Generals allowed that too. The only thing I see about this game which is unusual is the fact that you can zoom out so far. And the lack of a personality is a real annoyance.

I really think that future RTS games should give the individual units more personality and initiative. Units screaming for help and spewing expletives onto the comm channel when you leave them hanging out to dry, for example. Idle units asking for permission to assist comrades who are under fire. Units which retreat without orders when they're about to be overrun. That sort of thing is what I think of when I think of "next generation RTS", not just the same goddamned thing in higher-resolution.

[Raj Ahten]

You can have 50 tanks onscreen no problem, but the game chugs. Mind you, Generals allowed that too. The only thing I see about this game which is unusual is the fact that you can zoom out so far. And the lack of a personality is a real annoyance.

I really think that future RTS games should give the individual units more personality and initiative. Units screaming for help and spewing expletives onto the comm channel when you leave them hanging out to dry, for example. Idle units asking for permission to assist comrades who are under fire. Units which retreat without orders when they're about to be overrun. That sort of thing is what I think of when I think of "next generation RTS", not just the same goddamned thing in higher-resolution.

Yeah, I'd kill for better AI over graphics any day. I'd be perfectly happy to run with even original Command and Conquer graphics if my units did the kinds of things Darth Wong just described.

[Shinova]

If you like more a more personal involvement I guess you can always play Company of Heroes or some other smaller-scale RTS, or a more turn-based kind like the total war series.

It eventually boils down to what kind of game you like to play.


EDIT: I couldn't play with old CnC graphics. I've been spoiled too much.

[DocHorror]

As much as I was looking forward to this game I'm rather disapointed by the Demo. I played the Beta a bit, so I got to try out the other two races & the superweapons.

For me, the main issues are that the game has NO personality or charm to it & that the races seem way too similar. Perhaps DoW spoiled me but I like a bit of feedback from my troops. Christ, even Z, back in the day, had better unit interactions & responses than SC.

The Zoom is nice, but once you factor in the size of buildings & the need to build more & more to meet resouce needs then you soon start to run out of space & play the game purely via icons at max zoom.

Oh & the UI is terrible. On of the worst I've seen since Dark Colony.

Theres also little things that irritate me, like how even the smallest nippy units seem to have a lag when you give them orders. I know their supposed to be over-comming intera, but it makes it torturous to send groups of bots off.

[Admiral Valdemar]

You can have 50 tanks onscreen no problem, but the game chugs. Mind you, Generals allowed that too. The only thing I see about this game which is unusual is the fact that you can zoom out so far. And the lack of a personality is a real annoyance.

I really think that future RTS games should give the individual units more personality and initiative. Units screaming for help and spewing expletives onto the comm channel when you leave them hanging out to dry, for example. Idle units asking for permission to assist comrades who are under fire. Units which retreat without orders when they're about to be overrun. That sort of thing is what I think of when I think of "next generation RTS", not just the same goddamned thing in higher-resolution.

Yeah, I'd kill for better AI over graphics any day. I'd be perfectly happy to run with even original Command and Conquer graphics if my units did the kinds of things Darth Wong just described.

AI will always lag behind shiny shiny goodness. Why do you think FPS games are so bloody common? It's much easier to give someone the same old experience, but with more polygons shifted on screen, than to give them something original and ingenious. Until processors improve and AI coding gets some new direction, you're stuck with the general mediocre outline following CPU opponents of old, with maybe one or two nice tricks that look good at E3, though are soon worked around.

True learning AI is what we need. A dumb opponent that is easily trounced, yet, learns from mistakes would be something of a godsend to the gaming world. Imaging it. You use whatever tactic or stratagem you use as a standard MO against human players, only to find the AI matches this or even predicts it from previous battles and counters it! You could plug this baby into any RTS and watch as even the classic C&C:RA becomes a whole new game, simply down to having a super efficient learning intelligence behind the wheel.

That would be the coming of age of computer games. So long as the military keeps that software out of their defence computers. No point having your C&C save game go all Skynet on you.

[HSRTG]

EDIT: I couldn't play with old CnC graphics. I've been spoiled too much.

I could, so long as the interface was upgraded.

[Covenant]

EDIT: I couldn't play with old CnC graphics. I've been spoiled too much.

I could, so long as the interface was upgraded.

Same with Starcraft. Though I'm no fanboy, it's still fun, and I wish the menu bar didn't take up half of the screen, literally!

[Pint0 Xtreme]

Why anybody would expect some kind of engaging personality in this game is beyond me. This is essentially Total Annihilation 2 after all. It's based on the same selling points: Big battles with large numbers of faceless robots and big nukes but now with massive maps. After watching trailers, anybody can tell this isn't going to be CoH on a widescale. Even I didn't expect the mission briefings to be anything but similar to TA's old mission briefings.

As for the UI, I'm playing at a high resolution so it doesn't really bother me. But when I play on my brother's computer, I can see why it bothers some people. And the framerate was also marginally tolerable on his machine as well. This game requires some serious hardware to run.