[SPOILERS]AMAGAWD SUPCOM BETA!

[Fanger]

TBH.. the only feature from Supcom.. that I really really wish we had in spring.. Is the ability to upgrade buildings.. that is a damn nifty little thing, I know its been done before, but for a TA style resource system, its just damn nifty...

and Yes, unless you run Supcom on the higher settings I looks about on par with spring, However it seems to me that given the numbers of people who can play Supcom on higher settings competitively, this is actually an issue, as most people probably cant.. Not to Mention that wonderous 50k unit cap, is a split per side, I suspect if you go try that your limited to roughly 5000 per player.. which is exactly the same as spring. I also wonder if anyone will ever get that high..

However Supcom is fun, if it ran better I would definately hae some fun playing it..

[Cabbage]

tbh 5000 units in an entire game is very unlikely to work, just under 1000 units bought my comp to it's knees, and it's by no means shabby... that's with most settingson full at 1280x1024.

In spring i can get to 4998 units (then it always crashes for some reason, and its actualy playable if i turn dynamic water etc off.

[Zpock]

How ironic, Spring is a technical masterpiece while supcom feels like it was made in visual basic by some 15year olds who just learned what programming is in school. There seems to be a bunch of ^2+ stuff running whiled and eating system resources unhindered like a starving elephant on christmas.

Here's my unofficial review of Supcom.
Performance 0/5.
Gameplay 1/5.
Sound 4/5.
Graphics 3/5.
Overall score, 2/5.

The only thing supcom is good for is making nice advertisement videos like the e3 one. But even the grapichs themselves as some have mentioned arn't really that cool. But generally the artwork is pretty good and feels smooth, so at least they have someone who knows what he's doing. For example the effects tech1 UEF bomber looks pretty good. Generally good weapons effects. The sound is pretty nice as well.

The unit designs in supcom mostly suck donkey balls and are very boring. It's like they thought, hey lets make a lvl2 missile tank for all 3 races, one AA flak lvl2 and lvl1, etc. Aeons dont have cloaking or folding weapons (wtf), etc etc. Some of the unit artwork is bad, such as the Tzar. A big flat donut with some boxes on the side and a really crappy overlay texture. I could make that in 2 minutes.

Aircraft fuel: the game will probably end a lot sooner then any of your aircraft running out of fuel. You can easily set up patrol routes from one side to the other of the map. Aircraft carriers have no use. They can't build planes, fuel isn't needed, and theres no nifty command for carriers to "attack this target with a sensible choice of planes from the cargo hold" wich should have been obviously included.

The UI as many have mentioned, sucks a lot. An overall crappy unsmooth overall feel is plagueing the game, and I seriously doubt they can wash it all away from beta->release. I suspect it's rotten from the core. This is not just concerning the UI, it's apparant in the performance and unit designs as well.

The gameplay seems like a big pile of suck. I'm personally not a big fan of the TA resource system itself. IMO, warcraft3 has the best resource system of any RTS game I have tried sofar. This is becouse I prefer well defined strict limits on how you expand economy and not just grows faster and faster. In WC3 you have 5 peons always harvesting the main resource, gold. Then depending on strategy a certain number of woodcutters. Then you have the choice of making 1 expansion with 5 more peons but this is well balanced strategically to not expanding, both are valid choices for winning.

Now concerning Supcom it does a bad job of implementing a unlimitedly growing economy as well, much worse then even TA. Metal makers seem much more efficient now, there's now 3 levels of extractor giving 2-6-18 metal compared to TA:s usual 2-6. Theres also 3 powerplant levels giving 20-500-2500 effectively removing the big difference between "solar age" and "fusion age" in TA, the economy growing in a smooth fullspeed exponential curve all the time instead. Then there's the adjecency bonuses, making 4 metal storages most notably making the lvl3 extractor extract a full 27 metal. Not to mention make metal makers totally ridiculous. There's also way too many metal patches on for example the e3 vid map, Setons Clutch. It's a huge micro pain in the ass building all the damn extractors and 4 metal storages on each spot on your side of that map. It's like a metal map, only more annoying since you can't just place all your extractors in neat lines but have to scroll around a lot when placing build orders. Then for good measure constructor spam is back in force, now with extra flashy effects like cybrans having little extra drones flying around. Just so the 50 or so constructors you will want around each factory can needlessly bring down performance even more.

Basically what supcom comes down to is who can most efficiently build up a monster economy and crush the other opponent with experimentals or maybe air swarms. AKA playing speed metal.

[ZellSF]

Basically what supcom comes down to is who can most efficiently build up a monster economy and crush the other opponent with experimentals or maybe air swarms. AKA playing speed metal.

I do wonder how you came to that conclusion when everyone else are still trying to figure out how to play the game.

Maybe by the same way people used to say porcers always won in TA, which we know today isn't the case.

[Zpock]

Basically what supcom comes down to is who can most efficiently build up a monster economy and crush the other opponent with experimentals or maybe air swarms. AKA playing speed metal.

I do wonder how you came to that conclusion when everyone else are still trying to figure out how to play the game.

Maybe by the same way people used to say porcers always won in TA, which we know today isn't the case.

You know there's this thing called math.

[ZellSF]

Basically what supcom comes down to is who can most efficiently build up a monster economy and crush the other opponent with experimentals or maybe air swarms. AKA playing speed metal.

I do wonder how you came to that conclusion when everyone else are still trying to figure out how to play the game.

Maybe by the same way people used to say porcers always won in TA, which we know today isn't the case.

You know there's this thing called math.

You know, there's a thing called logic.

[Zpock]

I do wonder how you came to that conclusion when everyone else are still trying to figure out how to play the game.

Maybe by the same way people used to say porcers always won in TA, which we know today isn't the case.

You know there's this thing called math.

You know, there's a thing called logic.

Yes and if you add these two together with reading whole posts and look at some basic numbers like the ones i posted (metal extractor and powerplant rates). You might also want a few others for a better analysis such as metal maker rates, and cost/buildtime for everyting. Then you will see that supcom economy grows in an even more exponential (snowballing) and fast way then typical TA economy. Then knowing that 2 exponential functions (2players economies) will as time goes on become more and more different, very fast in supcoms case, until one player crushes the other in speedmetal fashion.

[Comp1337]

The economy should be slowed WAAY down imo to reflect on the games scale. right now ti boils down to spamming. For some reason i liek it tho

[Muzic]

In its defence, all the screenshots bar the last seem to be taken on the lowest settings.

2 Understandable, its a shammeee they didnt give one to me ( cough 7900GTO ), think of all the pretty ingame screeennss....

[Neuralize]

So, does anyone else notice how fast supcom loads compared to spring?

No pathing, and load speeds are pretty much the same regardless of map size.

For anyone that needs a gui button to turn off their buildings, you can just hit z.

[ZellSF]

You know there's this thing called math.

You know, there's a thing called logic.

Yes and if you add these two together with reading whole posts and look at some basic numbers like the ones i posted (metal extractor and powerplant rates). You might also want a few others for a better analysis such as metal maker rates, and cost/buildtime for everyting. Then you will see that supcom economy grows in an even more exponential (snowballing) and fast way then typical TA economy. Then knowing that 2 exponential functions (2players economies) will as time goes on become more and more different, very fast in supcoms case, until one player crushes the other in speedmetal fashion.

What math and logic says matters less than how the game actually plays though. And how the game plays depends on the skill of both the players. Since no one actually really knows how to play the game yet...

[Tobi]

So, does anyone else notice how fast supcom loads compared to spring?

No pathing, and load speeds are pretty much the same regardless of map size.

For anyone that needs a gui button to turn off their buildings, you can just hit z.

Realize that it is A LOT bigger tho, so maybe they just included the pathing info in the maps and optimized the rest of the loading a little more then we (not) did.

[Zpock]

So, does anyone else notice how fast supcom loads compared to spring?

No pathing, and load speeds are pretty much the same regardless of map size.

For anyone that needs a gui button to turn off their buildings, you can just hit z.

Realize that it is A LOT bigger tho, so maybe they just included the pathing info in the maps and optimized the rest of the loading a little more then we (not) did.

Hmmm-... maybe the units are calculating paths on the fly? Explaining some (but only a little bit of) the huge slowness.

[jcnossen]

The current extreme slowness is most likely caused by debug information. A debug build of spring runs just as fast on my PC. Still, I don't know it's likely that 5000 units will run much better on supcom than it does on spring, let alone 50k.

[Theotherguy]

I've been playing it for the past couple of days.

At first I really, really hated it, mostly for the clunky interface and the lack of camera rotation, but now I'm starting to like it.

The AI is very tough. I am now finally just about as good as the AI, and I've turned it into a huge porc-fest, because neither of us can break each others lines, but just today I played as Cybran vs. Aeon and completley owned the AI using naval power.

Queing orders is very intuitive, and its nice to move them around.

What really frustrates me about this game is that the scale actually seems much smaller than TA. Why? Because there is nothing to reference, besides the trees, and you can't zoom in very far. It just feels like I'm playing with tiny units, and that superunits are "normal" size. What it desperatley needs is non-snapping camera rotation, and a camera style like the "FPS camera" in spring, and also a much smaller interface.

As for the preformance, it runs terribly slow after over 100 units get into the game, but I have read that this is due to a memory leak dealing with the sounds, and it runs much much better if I disable sound. You have to realize that its a very early beta, and that optomization has not quite happened yet. The game is very processor intensive, if only for the pathfinding and high unit counts.

Units seem far too fast. I think they were trying to compensate for the massive scale, but to me it just seems wrong that a submarine can turn on a dime and go about as fast as a tank, and that the bots practically sprint, their animations not matching up at all with their movement, making them look like they are floating.


I'm actually really starting to like this game, now that I've played as the cybrans. The cybrans are just damn cool, I'll have to admit.

overall it feels like a version of TA with larger maps and fewer units, so I really think this game would benifit from an AA style mod and hundreds more units, as well as some way to move the camera in a full-3d mode.

[NOiZE]

Having a really High end PC makes a HUGE difference

i upgraded my 3700+ to a X2 4600+ and i can play perfectly fine (with hundreds of units) on quite lowish settings, i could do better graphical settings if my card was a bit less sucky ( I have a X800GTO2) with X19XX series or the nvidia equivialent it should run quite nice on medium settings.

And the whining about the scale thats kinda being influenced by the low settings which ppl play with. This game is just too early for todays average computers IMO

[Felix the Cat]

and SupCom's unit limit is like 100 fold Spring's.

False, just because they have an option to allow 50k units doesn't mean that it would be anywhere near playable speed.

For the same reason we keep the spring limit at 5000 because at that point it's going all too slow anyway.

Also I don't think the terrain was bumpmapped, though maybe I had wrong settings...

Also, notice how even a 500 unit limit is more than sufficient for any reasonably good player to play.

Huge unit limits usually draw in porcer/"epic map" players/SpeedMetallers and other of their ilk.

[Shogoll]

Also I don't think the terrain was bumpmapped, though maybe I had wrong settings...

Pfft.

The terrain is Normal Mapped. Just play with the Highest Settings and a good graphic card. While my GFX card is getting out dated, (Geforce 6800 Ultra) I can run it on maximum Model and Texture detail, medium Shadows, and no AA. (AA Kills performance massively)

Almost all of the lag comes from the Processor, and the fact they made the AI bloody powerful. The AI is a spam machine, building crap loads of buildings, and bringing your CPU to it's knees. Playing on Multiplayer, I can easily push all my settings up to maximum and still keep a pretty good FPS, until every one starts with tons of units, at which point internet connection reality kicks in and lags everything.

It's truely a next generation game, you can't just say that Spring's detail is better, seeing as from what I know, Spring doesn't even support Bump Mapping, let alone normal mapping.

[Zoombie]

After reading Zpock's messege...I have to say one thing: "I dissagree"

I think Sup-Com is fun. Its that simple for me. Its fun, does it need to be anything else? Sure its unoptomized, the GUI needs a massive overhaul in its looks department (It is VERY usefull at the moment, despite uglyification) and the A.I is friggen hard at Easy, but I still enjoy it quite a big.

[jcnossen]

It's truely a next generation game, you can't just say that Spring's detail is better, seeing as from what I know, Spring doesn't even support Bump Mapping, let alone normal mapping.

Please... why does everyone think bump mapping and normal mapping are 2 different things?
Back in the days of riva tnt and voodoo cards bump mapping (if any) was implemented with fake techniques such as emboss mapping, but this hasn't been used for years.

Normal mapping is used to have access to the surface normal in the pixel shader, which is then used to do lighting computations with. In practice this means that that all shaders that do bumpmapping also do normalmapping.