Spring RTS Engine

What about supcom sucks? The standard balance.

So by the same reasoning, I could say "Spring sucks, I think XTA's unbalanced". I would be an ass-fool, but it would be as accurate as saying "Supcom sucks, the balance is awful".

Why does supcom not suck, in my opinion?
-Balance doesn't matter at all. Not a little. It's all highly moddable without difficulty.
-Even buggy and unbalanced as it is (was? new patch is out and I haven't played it yet), it's still fun to play with someone who doesn't exploit every glitch - same way as Spring's fun as long as nobody exploits FPS mode to shoot across the map and crap like that
-Adjacency system. It's the best "new" RTS idea I've seen in years.
-Multiplayer is very easy to get into. Start GPGNet, hit "find battle", within 30 seconds you're already issuing your first build orders
-Performance is NOT bad for a brand-new game on a brand-new engine with unique features and scale. Around the time TA came out, an average computer was like a Pentium 233mhz, and it performed horribly. Now, an average computer is a Pentium 2.33Ghz and yeah, Supcom performs pretty horribly on that. You need a good graphics card (which are already nearly within the price bracket I'd say is within almost anyone's grasp), and a dual-core CPU of any kind. But dual-core's been a long time coming and they're dirt cheap. My dual-core processor, which allows me to run SupCom at 50+ FPS in any situation, is worth $70-100 USD.

Game development has taken a turn for the worse in the last 10 years, and anyone who can't see that is blind. Publishers virtually never allow a game an adequate timeframe for proper testing. SupCom, afaik, had a 2-year dev cycle. That's about average length for your everyday modern Doom clone. Holy cow, how about STALKER? An excellent game, released with a large number of hideous bugs despite being released after a 6+ year development cycle. To say that you can come up with a game that is really unique and have it out the door within 2 years is just crazy.

Mainly just the first couple paragraphs is what I wanted to say. Supcom's got lots of flaws, and some of them are so jaw-dropping obvious I can't believe they got past alpha. But so did TA, and we're all here playing it 10 years later.

Holy changelog, batman!
http://forum.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=11126

uh...

where was it said here than SupCom sucked? The only problem I have with it is that my computer can't run it at all

Guessmyname wrote:uh...

where was it said here than SupCom sucked? The only problem I have with it is that my computer can't run it at all

Try with the new patch, it is suposed to help performance greatly.

Um, I haven't actually bought it

I tried it with the Demo

I say supcom sucks to atract more people to spring

Caydr wrote:What about supcom sucks? The standard balance.

So by the same reasoning, I could say "Spring sucks, I think XTA's unbalanced". I would be an ass-fool, but it would be as accurate as saying "Supcom sucks, the balance is awful".

Why does supcom not suck, in my opinion?
-Balance doesn't matter at all. Not a little. It's all highly moddable without difficulty.
-Even buggy and unbalanced as it is (was? new patch is out and I haven't played it yet), it's still fun to play with someone who doesn't exploit every glitch - same way as Spring's fun as long as nobody exploits FPS mode to shoot across the map and crap like that
-Adjacency system. It's the best "new" RTS idea I've seen in years.
http://forum.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=11126

The problem with "balance sucks but it dosn't matter cuz you can mod it"... 99% of games played are going to be with the standard stuff. Esp considering ranked games. Mods are for mucking about, for serious play the vanillla is it, and therefore it HAS TO BE GOOD.

Caydr wrote:Game development has taken a turn for the worse in the last 10 years, and anyone who can't see that is blind. Publishers virtually never allow a game an adequate timeframe for proper testing. SupCom, afaik, had a 2-year dev cycle. That's about average length for your everyday modern Doom clone. Holy cow, how about STALKER? An excellent game, released with a large number of hideous bugs despite being released after a 6+ year development cycle. To say that you can come up with a game that is really unique and have it out the door within 2 years is just crazy.

Excuses... No matter wich ones they don't make the game better.

Caydr wrote:Try with the new patch, it is suposed to help performance greatly.

People tend to see what they want to see. I'm skeptical about this, but it's interesting. The performance is the biggest problem with supcom. Supcom does not do one tiny bit more of physics calculations then TA, somewhat less then Spring actually, and the graphics are not amazing, their comparable to springs. Not to mention the pathfinding/unit ai really sucks in supcom... So there's no excuse for the crappy performance. If they did fix it however, it does improve supcoms image a lot in my mind.

I remember the Gamespy review of Earth 2160 complaining that all online players insist that you install the ReBa mod (rebalancing, it's REALLY necessary with this game). The reviewer said "I just want to play, not download esoteric mods!". Yeah except without that mod you'd lose from the get-go if you pick the wrong faction.

supcoms game element, ie, the reason you would buy it, sucked on release. it is however a flexible toolkit which can be used to make good mods.
It sucked because the balance is crazily flawed;
the balanced factions by giving them unit advantages imbalanced against other races, such as double reload time missle launcher or a tank that can hover over water.
atm there is no reason to play any faction except Aeon online because it is better than cybran and UEF in almost every way. 95% of supcom players play aeon because to play anything else is to lose nearly every game to auruoa rush (on maps with water).
an RTS relies on its balance and its feeling of fun. Supcom to me never felt "fun", it felt "epic". however, with its terrible balance (top heavy, higher techs beat lower techs for efficency so lower level units quickly become redunduant) as a game, its not much fun.
however, no doubts its a good modding toolkit.

Supreme commander brought strategy back to RTS.

with last patch i got ~ 50% better performance in supcom

and the new balance changes are good as far as i can tell after 1 week

it s worth a try

for the people who complained about the interface here is a very nice mod out
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0

So no metalmaker AI yet?

Even if it's balanced, isn't the unit selection a bit poor, especially for a supposedly strategic game?

Unfinished games for the win...

@kdr_11k
I think the unit selection in supcom is good... you don t need to micro the hell out of a unit... You don t need ultra fast response times... It depends a lot on the power your pc has, If it s slow the unit selection sucks.
@rattle
I don t agree I think it s finished and you can t blame gpg for this early release because it s the publisher who forces them to release it early.
There are always some people who have problems and complain in the forums.
@noize
I think there is a metalmaker Ai but only as a mod.

KDR_11k wrote:Even if it's balanced, isn't the unit selection a bit poor, especially for a supposedly strategic game?

Less units, more units that are actually used compared to your average RTS. There's still a lot I'd change, but it's well ahead of any competition. I think there's roughly, maybe, 25 ground units or so per side, another 15 aircraft, and 10 sea units, plus a handful of superweapons and a couple dozen buildings.

Compared with any other RTS besides TA, that's a LOT of units. But the difference with TA is, it needed mods just to have more than a dozen or so units for each side to ever be useful in a competitive game. SupCom isn't perfect here either, but it's much better than TA was.

Also remember that GPG and THQ are, at their core, designed to turn a profit. They cannot release a game with every conceivable feature, that would be a good one-hit-wonder, but with no financial longevity. SupCom has left the door open for expansions in many areas, which is a good thing from a money making point of view. And they need to make money in order to make more games and have a roof over their heads.

I never said supcom sucks, my comp just doesn't like it.

Spring is preferable because it acctually runs well.

havent we beaten this topic to death..?

It's not GPGs fault that the game sucks and they need roof/food

I don't buy games as charity lol.

THQ dosn't seem like a bad publisher to me either, lots of really good games have been made with them as publisher, that don't seem very rushed. Like company of heroes and dawn of war.

Fanger wrote:havent we beaten this topic to death..?

Nailing the corpse to a cross works well for another go

Supcom doesn't suck per se, it's just that Spring is 10x better and its price is unbeatable.