Supreme Commander

[Chaotic42]

I'm really picky about games. There are *very* few that impress me. Supreme Commander is one of them. If you enjoyed Total Annihilation, you will love this game. It's literally what my friends and I used to say should be in TA2. It's just excellent.

The automation that you can create is wonderful, and the graphics are awesome. You really have to see it. My friend and I played on the same team against two comptuers (on the same team). He had one monitor on his own units and the other one monitoring my base or the current battlefield. Makes me want to drop $600 on another monitor.

Anyway, since this is a sub forum, I thought I'd leave you with a sub pic. Yes, you can choose surface mode or submerged mode. The story behind the picture is that the computer closest to my friend was going nuts building naval units. While doing a raid, I found that it was building a super-battleship. My friend and I both went after the shipyard, but it was too late. The Yamato II was at sea. It proceded to obliterate my friend's costal regions and fended off his barage of torpedo planes. Finally I decided to sneak some subs up a narrow, shallow river that ran around his main base. Guess what I found...?

Pic: http://www.bigplasticfork.org/supcomsub.jpg

It's a truly awesome game. Well worth the $50.

[NeonSamurai]

Ya i like it, though it has had a shaky launch and is extremely hardware intensive. It has also been a shaky launch there are a couple of different crash/bsod/reboot bugs. A suspected memory leak or 2, and other problems.

Hopefully though they will get fixed soon :)

[Chaotic42]

Ya i like it, though it has had a shaky launch and is extremely hardware intensive. It has also been a shaky launch there are a couple of different crash/bsod/reboot bugs. A suspected memory leak or 2, and other problems.

Hopefully though they will get fixed soon :)

Smooth as silk here. No bugs or anything. My friend running it on XP has had some issues too, but here on Vista it's smooth.

[Sledge_57]

Ya i like it, though it has had a shaky launch and is extremely hardware intensive. It has also been a shaky launch there are a couple of different crash/bsod/reboot bugs. A suspected memory leak or 2, and other problems.

Hopefully though they will get fixed soon :)

Smooth as silk here. No bugs or anything. My friend running it on XP has had some issues too, but here on Vista it's smooth.

Same here (on XP though), I'm just getting started but it's pretty KOOL , having a good system is a must tho........

[Dowly]

I liked the Total Annihilation back in the day, and I really wanted to like this one too. But it just misses the feel that TA had, it´s not a bad game, but it feels alittle flat to me.

[Safe-Keeper]

Both my brothers, as well as my cousin, own this game. I didn't like it, though, mostly because I played it MP with my brother without having played the tutorial first, and it was not intuitive. Not only was the resource/power management pretty different from what I'm used to (which is not a bad thing), but there were no tool-tips or other info on how to handle my economy. Really fun when you don't have the option to read the manual or play the tutorial:-?.

I got into it in the end, but it still does not appeal to me. I don't like the looks of the vehicles anyhow, or how you end up with giant robots fighting each others like in some Japanese manga movie. It just isn't my type of game.

[flintlock]

/deleted

[tycho102]

I've been playing it a lot more than I should be this weekend. I'll weigh in.

The transports. F*ck yes. All you do is select all the units you want to move, the transports you want to move them, and just click on a destination. The transport(s) will make as many return runs as needed. You can also have them ferry units straight out of the factories. There's some kind of "ferry" system, but it's just as easy to select the units and the transports. The transport system is awesome -- they will even start at the units furthest from the destination while the rest of the group continues onward, making subsequent transport runs that much shorter. The transport system alone makes this game like gamer pornography.

Each mission is massive. The map expands after a sub-objective, and you may find your main base under attack from a previously "secure-because-it-is-against-the-map-border" side.

Aircraft patrols. You can setup a bomber patrol over enemies and they'll just bomb the hell out of everything.

Base construction is intricate, and that is a understatement. I should say convoluted. You want to mesh energy generators around structures to get maximum efficiency, while using the minimum number of energy generators because too many will go to waste (not to mention the time to build them).

The wide variety in time compression. You can slow it waaaaay down, and speed it way the heck up. I have found one significant strategy is to hold just short of completing a sub-objective -- effectively pausing the attack. Use as much time as needed to shore up defenses, build and upgrade, then destroy the final enemy structure (I usually leave a power generator or something like that). Just queue up a bunch of build orders for your factories and engineers, then crank up the time compression to maximum. One of the best uses for this is to upgrade your APU since it will take hundreds of thousands of resource units.

Usually get some kind of clue as to which way the map will expand, but not always.

It's significantly different than other RTS's. It feels more like a "simulation" rather than one of the "arcade" real-time-strategy (such as Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer).

A little bit short on storyline but the missions are intense. I never played the first two in the series -- although I do believe I have Total Annhilation 2 saved back somewhere right next to all the other games I haven't gotten a chance to play.

The patch gives a huge boost to performance. I'm playing on a Athlon XP @ 2600mhz with a Radeon 850PE. Low or medium detail works fine for me because I usually play at reduced speed. It's the processor that causes a few pauses (less than 5 seconds) during major events such as shooting down a laden enemy transport.

[jumpy]

I'm really enthused about this game (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=104997), being a long standing fan of TA.

At last... :cool:

Though with every game there's a few little problems which some seem to have issues with.
For me though it amounts to a few small changes in the way the game is:
1) Togling the military and intel buttons on and off for everything is all very well and good but it would be great if there was a third setting which would just show those overlays for the unit(s) that you had currently selected.
2) Strategic missile launchers take waaaay too long to construct even when assisting with 10+ t3 engineers. They only hold 5 missiles per structure. Bummer. In TA you could build as many as 25 or 50 missiles per launcher (the same applies to defense missile launchers)... I like my nuclear winters to go off with more of an extended bang and less of a meek pop :yep:
3) Some of the experimental units are pretty unballanced. Bring back Krogoth, I say. :lol:

I look forwards to a lively modding community, both for new maps and units.

I used to play TA quite a bit, but since then there has never been an RTS game that I was seriously interested in until now.

In a few weeks some friends and I will be playing this one online; perhaps there will be enough folk here who might fancy a bash at this aswell?

[NeonSamurai]

1) yep absolutly, trying to figure out the range of some weapons is a royal pain with out moving them far from everything else. Sensor range though i belive shows when you select the unit by default.

2) i dont mind the super weapons (nukes and artillery) taking a long time as they are pretty damn powerfull when used right. In tandem its very easy to obliterate the enemy base in a few minutes (artillery to kill the nuke defences, followed immediatly by nukes)

3) personaly im not overly happy with the experimentals, i think there should have been more of them to balance things out. Some of them are near useless (like the uef strategic artillery. sure its damn powerfull, but it takes forever to build, is ultra expensive and is very easy to counter if you have a teleporting scu available)

Transports are great though i wish there were large oceanic transports that could carry a small army (sort of like aircraft carriers for aircraft). Ferrying is also invaluable for moving lots of prebuilt vehicles as you can just select the vehicles and click on the ferry point.

As for base building, actualy ive found its not very intricate. The reason is there isnt much point in interlinking stuff in the long run, especialy with a unit cap of 500 or less. Sure you can save a bit of power, get a bit more mass for the energy, but the numbers are minimal, and once you hit tech 3 its very easy to get all the mass and energy you will ever possibly need. Also with unit caps its often better just to build alot of t3 energy and mass generators and a couple of storage facilities. So other then wraping some of the mass extractors with mass storage, and the same for energy. why bother interlinking.

Oh also if you wana get the most bang for the unit buck, scu's with the resource allocation system are the way to go. Though not cheap, they produce almost as much as a t3 energy and a t3 mass generator, they can defend themselves, are tough, and can be moved around easily, and they can build at tech 3 level. They are ideal for base relocating as you can blow up your old base and quickly get reestablished.

[Respenus]

I have only played the demo and I must say I like the Cybrans. And I have been waiting for such nuke effect for ages. If I hadn't already ordered SH4, this would be the game I would buy.

Imagine 2 monitors to play with. Heaven!

[Chaotic42]

I've got some screenshots here: http://www.bigplasticfork.org/chaotic42/supcom/