Supreme commander....

[hughperkins]

.... is over-hyped. I'm quite happy about that because it means TASpring still has a reason to exist

I had a vision of battles on a planet-wide scale, zooming in to specific ports, with battles taking place simultaneously across the planet. Sounded rather unbelievable, and apparently it was :-D

Supcom ressembles the original TA in gameplay, units, appearance. The scrollwheel zoom is neat, but nothing that doesnt work in Spring too.

When I zoom out with the scrollwheel I want my units to automatically be grouped into appropriate sized blobs, according to how far out Ive scrolled. I want an easy visual indication of the composition of each blob. I want to be able to easily select one or more units of a particular type from that blob.

I'd like not to have to micromanage quite so much.

Supcom is not revolutionary; it's barely even evolutionary. I'm quite happy with TASpring

[Zoombie]

And I disagree with you completely :D

To see why, simply read MY Suprime Commander thread. Huge battles, lots and lots of explosions, cool units and lots of zooming. Spring is still great, but SupCom is also great. There's room for two games in my heart!

[Zpock]

I also think Supcom is hyped. People talk about for example:

Huge maps
But really its just the units that are small. The 80km map is a ring of little islands in the middle. And I can't really tell any difference to the biggest TA maps (like yerrot mountains) that I never played anyway becouse their boring.

Many Units
Uhh, unit limits in games are just one variable that the developer can set as high as he wants, but usually puts it at a sane level with respect to computer performance and how easy it's to control masses of units. You could set the TA unit limit as high as you want with modding for a decade now. Supcoms performance sucks, and it's due to bad programming not amazing grapichs or physics (the physics in spring is better, look at bombs gonig straight down in supcom for example). The waypoint system is well done so you could say this helps control many units. But still large chunks of units tend to behave like a big mess. Formations arn't very good. The pathfinding might be good in supcom but with 100s of units it impossible for traditional pathfinding to be good enough even if well designed. Totalwar games with grouped units works much better in this area.

etc etc

[NOiZE]

Spring wins imo

[genblood]

SupCom is "OK"

Spring is just as good if not better is some areas. I figure in the
coming weeks Spring will get better and better ...

[pintle]

The preferance between supcom and spring seems to be very much down to taste, and in terms of game mechanics/engine possibilities, their seems to be a very marginal difference between the two.
I can download spring, for free, and play it on my 6 year old pc.

[Guessmyname]

We have two topics named "Supreme Commander"...

[Zoombie]

We have two topics named "Supreme Commander"...

One is the real thread. The other is an evil robot.

But...which one is it!

[KDR_11k]

We have two topics named "Supreme Commander"...

No, one is called "Suprime Commander"

[Zoombie]

That's the evil one. Wait...that's mine. Oh no!

[Lolsquad_Steven]

oh noes!

[Lolsquad_Steven]

It's all about the gameplay.

[Neuralize]

I tried going back to Spring, it's hard. Supreme Commander has many many little things about that make it excellent. I didn't learn of some of those things until I actually read the freaking manual. Like, the extra production bonus that occur when pairing different resource buildings together, Ferry assists (Many transport using the same ferry route), Factory Assisting (Factories mimic each other's build orders when told to assist), Formations are amazing, units will wait for each other and then fall into line. The balance is very different from any TASPRING mod, but that's cool, why would any of us want to play BA again? The commander upgrades themselves are very gnarly, I was a bit skeptical when I played a few games of the beta, but with the new minimalistic GUI, it's really hard for me to find anything terribly wrong with the game. I really can't wait to see what sort of units and mods start coming out, I've already coded a few hackjob mods that do some silly things, just to test the modding system a little.

[Zoombie]

Truth

I say all that AND I'd also like to say that the complaint "The maps aren't big, the units are small" is bunk. If you have a big map and you have BIG units...guess what: The units are still small by comparision! Its all about scale. And SupCom has a very excellent scale. Battleships are massive compaired to tanks, factories look the size they should be and, in general, the scale feels far more correct than, say, Starcraft, Warcraft, Comand and Conquer, Dawn of War...and so on.

[Guessmyname]

Actually, level one units are about half the size of the smallest footprint as far as I can tell, so the units are small too

[jackalope]

in supcom even if you have 100 units they will all wait and move in a fucked up spaced out way that makes them suck

[Zoombie]

Actually, level one units are about half the size of the smallest footprint as far as I can tell, so the units are small too

Whatever. They're just big enough for me...except for the infantry bots. The level one ones. I don't ever use those. Uselss things.

[Cabbage]

Sup Com is a pile of steaming horse effluent tbh. A waste of money tbh, the unit control is piss poor, no matter what people say (yes you get pretty waypoints etc). But when i give a unit an order, i expect it to do it asap, not sit there and wait to get killed, and giving orders to large groups of units is a joke, they move backwards half the bloody time and then end up moving out in a little streaming in an effort to see who can recive the most concentrated enemy firepower in the shortest space of time.

The physics engine is sub par, as someone said, bombers just look stupid when letting their loads off. The ai dosent seem to be able to understand that shallow hills tend to get in the way of projectiles and so sometimes you end up with units/defences pounding away at the ground. The terrain is non-deformable - i want huge craters, not a sodding decal that fades after 5 minutes.

I could go on for a long time, but all this has been said before.

Supcom is disappointment

[Neuralize]

Cabbage, if you're moving units in formation, then they will go backwards to get into formation, they wait for everyone to get together so they can move together, if you want units to move, then just move them normally.

[Zpock]

Todays bashing on supcom by me will be on their economy system.

Building metal makers + energy is more efficient then building lvl3 extractors (but maybe more tedious, haha). How stupid is that?

To me it's just a huge spamfest, who can print the most resources a la SM. Adjecency bonus... yes please I want to play sim city /sarcasm off...

Ok so the point is you get a tradeoff between all your stuff blowing up at the same time or getting a little more money faster. But this could have been introduced without a sh!tload of pointless microing if you just had 1 energy plant thats less efficient but dosn't chain blow. Then you build that one or the normal one, simple.

The only resources that matters in supcom are how much your patience and CPU can handle. You can double your economy in 3 minutes or something (havn't bothered to calc this heard someone say that). This means after 15-20 minutes competing players with small skill difference and some randomness thrown in will have likely drastically different economic size -> game decided (see nature of exponential functions).

I much prefer something along the lines of EE economy, where the actual fighting matters more, but I know many think differently.