Planetary Annihilation (Incoming Moon Drops!)

[AF]

Oh I know that, I said so in the post, it's a little amusing watching the moon pass infront of the camera while zoomed out as a basic polygon

[Johannes]

So does the alpha at all touch on the Planetary stuff yet, moving between planets, firing between them, etc.? Or just a TA-like with a weird-shaped map for now?

[scifi]

Ive been a critic of the game, but this just took epic proportions of WTF.

The 95 dolar tier gave acess to the alpha and some bonus stuff, why on earth would they charge less for alpha acess afterwards.. it would be unfair to someone who suported the game on kickstarter.

I dont see any money grab atempt, or anything of the sort.

Now in terms of gameplay, its a unfinished supcom. Still im actualy suprised the sphere maps arent that bad, and with a few adjustments to the FOV, i can see it working quite well.

Im yet to see the so called "TA" gameplay they wanted to create. I also havent seen any non generic unit that specialises on a given role.

Not to mention the unit tiers are very very similar to supcom.

[LordMuffe]

So does the alpha at all touch on the Planetary stuff yet, moving between planets, firing between them, etc.? Or just a TA-like with a weird-shaped map for now?

at the moment its just one planet you can play on.

Someone please explain this "its closer to supcom than TA" stuff to me.

I don´t see it. Scale-wise? Huge TA maps although spawned huge bases and armies. Tech tiers? They are like in TA: new fab-builder builds advanced fab-version.

[scifi]

Someone please explain this "its closer to supcom than TA" stuff to me.

In TA the Tier 1 kbot lab has units like the flea, jethro, rocko, pewee, and hammer, all of these units are usefull in a tier 1 figth, and each and every one of those has a interesting role to play.

You make fleas to raid, pewees for a more advanced form of raiding and map control, etc.

In Supcom, tier 1 figths were all about spaming cheap raiders and sometimes some AA. The rest of the time you would be better off going for a tier 2 lab and now the same thing happens again spam that 1 type unit.
How interesting is that compared to TA.

What i experienced from PA, were the same uninteresting tiers of units that supcom had, i saw no scout raiding, no unit diversity, just mindless macro.

On the ven side you have units like janus, levelers witch specialise on what i call "counter" play, PA has none of that yet.

[PicassoCT]

I think the scale prohibits intensive micro somewhat.. you cant battle at 3 places at the same time and still have a sc-like unit diversity.
The one crucial ressource (player attention) is allready at a breaking point at that moment.

[Anarchid]

mindless....
macro

[AF]

mindless.. micro...

If we take those 50 units and assume its actually a a very large unit that has a few holes in it, one can start to draw comparisons. Any argument for micro usually indicates a lack of imagination or skill in large numbers. It suggests the way macro is played, can only be done one way, in the same way it's silly to think micro is just launching 2 units towards eachother and hoping your unit was better and won.

Planet wise you can zoom out to a planetary view, and zoom into other celestial bodies, but there's no mechanism for launching your units onto them yet. So there are units and buildings missing.

This is why you're all stupid for going supcom this and macro micro that. You can criticize the gameplay of a game that doesn't even have structure collisions, where most of the units havent been added yet, and a lot of things just plain dont work.

If you still insist, go build a vehicle lab in the middle of an ocean and watch what happens when it builds. I sincerely doubt they intend for every unit and structure to be amphibious

[LordMuffe]

thx scifi, that makes sense.

Although, SupCom had that problem only for the landfbas. Air- and Sea fabs had t1-units, which did things t2 and t3 couldn´t do.

As far as PA, they may change it up later in development. And if that doesn´t happen, i´m quite hopeful for the moding possibilities.

Besides the "Game", i think that the engine itself will be worth the kick starter-investment.

[Johannes]

I think the scale prohibits intensive micro somewhat.. you cant battle at 3 places at the same time and still have a sc-like unit diversity.
The one crucial ressource (player attention) is allready at a breaking point at that moment.

It's no problem unless possibly because have spherical maps where it takes many seconds to move from battle to battle. SC, TA, about every good RTS, is bound to have battles at 3 or more locations at once now and then. You'll control them worse than a single battle sure, but same goes for your opponent.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Supcom's biggest problem was and is the constant 500 ms delay.
Imagine each time you are playing spring against someone, you play as if you both were located on the other side of the earth from the server hosting the game.
for some reason they could not make a system where pings of all players in game are checked and than the delay set to some number that is a bit higher.
I guess this was all done so as to not have separate servers for players in different regions of the world?
The result was a game that feels very unresponsive.

[scifi]

Supcom's biggest problem was and is the constant 500 ms delay.
Imagine each time you are playing spring against someone, you play as if you both were located on the other side of the earth from the server hosting the game.
for some reason they could not make a system where pings of all players in game are checked and than the delay set to some number that is a bit higher.
I guess this was all done so as to not have separate servers for players in different regions of the world?
The result was a game that feels very unresponsive.

supcom 2 was responsive, it failed ;/

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Supcom 2 was a horrible experiment.
TA economy style gone...some silly research...

[PauloMorfeo]

Supcom 2 was a horrible experiment.
TA economy style gone...

I remember I sent them an email complaining about that, also stating that that economy model (spending as soon as it went into the queue and not allowing queueing into the future) was not worthy of the name Supreme Commander.

They must have had a tide of such complaints. If I remember correctly, they eventually patched the game into not spending the resources when something goes into the queue. It will still pull from the pool all the resources needed for the particular construction as soon as it starts (constructions never stall), but only upon construction start.

Funny thing, can't even remember whether I finished the campaign or not...

[scifi]

Yeah gameplay wise it sucked, but the game was polished and graficaly sound. Pathfinding worked quite well.

[AF]

Supreme commander 2s campaign was abysmal in comparison to Forged alliance and supcom 1, and the ending was quite simply pathetic

[zwzsg]

SupCom 1 campaign bored me by the time I reached the first Cybran mission. I prefered the SupCom 2 campaign. Maybe the underlying story and writing was lot more cheesy in SupCom2, but the mission themselves, ingame I mean, was at least more varied and interesting.

That said, I didn't finish either.

[PicassoCT]

pre-storyarcoital ejectile dysfunction.. would the gentleman may-be interested in a dramapenispump? Its the old story problem- you need insane people to make that stuff really intersting, the intense moodswings, from hate to laughter, from happyness to murder, are something that screams "Boderliner not wanted, to work seperate from the rest of the company on a storyline, that doesent suck, but sucks inwards.."
somewhere in hollywood they must have found out, that all the psycho-wrecks are good for something at last

[scifi]

pre-storyarcoital ejectile dysfunction.. would the gentleman may-be interested in a dramapenispump? Its the old story problem- you need insane people to make that stuff really intersting, the intense moodswings, from hate to laughter, from happyness to murder, are something that screams "Boderliner not wanted, to work seperate from the rest of the company on a storyline, that doesent suck, but sucks inwards.."
somewhere in hollywood they must have found out, that all the psycho-wrecks are good for something at last

I can agree 100% with that, a bit of madness on a racional story, then add a bit of comedy voila

[PauloMorfeo]

Are you(plural) talking about how Hollywood is pumping out new movies out of its production line? 'Cause you sound like you are talking about how good stories need to be made, yet you explain how clichet stories are pumped out. What you described sounded a lot like The Expendables.

Inception, Schindler's List and Amnesia: The Dark Descent have no comedy, no laughters, no mood swings - they're just dark and creepy from start to finish.