TR Forums

Krogoth wrote:

Supreme Commander 2 = Son, I am disappoint...

Ha ha, this is exactly how I feel about my son's current enjoyment of the SupCom2 demo. I grabbed it just to see and I think with my having played so many of these, I see it through a lens of "meh", and he's like "wow, this is awesome!". I don't want to crap on his enjoyment of a game demo, but there are better RTS games out there for him to experience.

Note: We play SC1 and Sins via LAN together, I'm trying to raise him right

In other news, I've been playing PC games for a long long time, and you know how some franchises you just miss somehow? The TA and CnC series, I missed them completely. I'd like to grab them cheap from digital distro, but there are so many; if I was to play one from each series, which were "the best"?

emkubed wrote:

The TA and CnC series, I missed them completely. I'd like to grab them cheap from digital distro, but there are so many; if I was to play one from each series, which were "the best"?

I really didn't like any of C&C; although Dune 2000 was fun. But I see that it scored pretty badly in the reviews.

emkubed wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

Supreme Commander 2 = Son, I am disappoint...

Ha ha, this is exactly how I feel about my son's current enjoyment of the SupCom2 demo. I grabbed it just to see and I think with my having played so many of these, I see it through a lens of "meh", and he's like "wow, this is awesome!". I don't want to crap on his enjoyment of a game demo, but there are better RTS games out there for him to experience.

Note: We play SC1 and Sins via LAN together, I'm trying to raise him right

In other news, I've been playing PC games for a long long time, and you know how some franchises you just miss somehow? The TA and CnC series, I missed them completely. I'd like to grab them cheap from digital distro, but there are so many; if I was to play one from each series, which were "the best"?

You can get the older ones completely free by downloading them directly from EA. They have given away C&C 1, C&C Tiberian Sun, and C&C Red Alert 1.

You would probably be best off buying a boxed copy of one of the newer ones because it doesn't really seem to be hitting its market value on digital distribution. You could pick up the first decade pack, which includes all of the C&C games up to Generals. That means that you're missing Red Alert 3 and Tiberium Wars. If you haven't played them before then you might not find the older ones that much fun. The controls are a little awkward compared to modern RTS games.

I'd recommend that you get C&C 3 Tiberium Wars.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

Supreme Commander 2 = Son, I am disappoint.

The game has been consolized so severely that is hardly a RTS anymore. It is just another crappy Blizzard-style RTT clone. The units and their bright, colorful textures scream Legos. The soundtrack is completely lame.

Starcraft II and C&C 4 are going to rape Supreme Commander 2 back into oblivion.

Not worth $5 for this budget bin driver.

Yes, and no. It does seem a little dumbed down, and nerfed for noobs. But I only played the demo.
SupCom2 is nothing like a blizzard clone, that comment is extremely laughable. wow. Seriously, everything is different.
The graphics are nice, everything runs smooth, none of the horrible bugs that plagued supcom1/FA.

Now starcraft 2, and Diablo3 are going to be crappy blizzard clones. They both look absolutely terrible from the video's I've seen.
Warcraft3, WOW, and blizz-activision have destroyed the games.
Starcraft2 is half a game to sell you expansions, no lan, plus the gameplay is probably gonna be like warcraft3.
Even if the gameplay is starcraft-esque, that's still terrible. Starcraft itself had too many problems that need to be fixed.
SupCom is the true answer to the modern PC RTS, new RTS need to clone it, and not starcraft.

Supreme Commander II is GPG's take on Blizzard RTS style formula!

You need to spend down payment for units/buildings
Research trees that is comprise of generic unit stat upgrades and special ability unlocks
Laughably small maps
Limited army selection
Experimentals = T3 units
Air units hover and have no fuel requirements
Non-upgradeable economy
ACU can't cross deep water! = LAME!

Sorry, it feels, smells, looks like a Blizzard RTS clone.

GPG took out what made Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation so distinctive from most other RTS games.

Supreme Commander 2 = An epic failure, that die-hard Supreme Commander I fans will recon out of existence.

For once I'm glad to see some agreement here. I was actually half expecting this to be a good game once I heard they fixed all the performance issues with the first one. After all, IMO, that was all that was holding the game back.

I played three games of it and while it ran flawlessly, as it should, it's a PoS. It plays like Command and Conquer, which I don't say lightly. The entire game has been dumbed down and they attempted to turn it into a half-baked version of a normal RTS. IF they just put the new pathfinding and performance tweaks into the first one I would've loved it to death, but they didn't. They somehow felt the need to aim it at a completely different group of people and in doing so accomplished absolutely nothing.

The research trees are all half-baked and ill thought out. They're pretty much all mirrors for all three races with things slightly shifted around and different super units. The experimentals are all pretty laughable now, instead of being epic units of doom they were in the first one. The fatboy2 is a PoS and looks even worse then it performs on the battlefield. Pullinsmash, WTF?!?! AC1000?!!?! They're all terrible designs and poorly thought out.

The only thing worse then the experimentals that lack creativity is the game balance. So... whose bright idea was it to limit sensors to 1/4th the map, yet you can teleport a galactic colossus across the entire map using a teleporter? Or the noah cannon that simply lets you shoot units across the map, anywhere, at anytime. This completely undermines any strategic value of making defense when someone can just drop **** tons of guys in the middle of your base - or just a colossus. So it's just a huge race to build the first experimental or nuke and obliterate someone elses base without blinking a eye - alah Command and Conquer style.

Then there is the units, oh the units. Remember that Sup Com 1 had a bristling selection of units? While the cheap ones were just fodder later on, numbers has a quality unlike anything else. Thats what made the whole idea of supreme commander 1 so awesome, just epicly huge battles. Nope, all gone, it makes it feel like what relic did with dawn of war 2. They completely gutted everything that made the game fun in order to fit it into some predetermined mold that all RTS's should share and in effect ruined the **** game.

The idea of research isn't even new either. The first one had research only it was in a different form. You researched by teching up and unlocking new units as well as upgrading your commander. Pretty straight forward and simple, right?


I thought RTS's would be the one safe haven from the grasp of the nubby joysticks, seeing as even if it was consolized it would still suck because of that. I guess I was wrong. This will be another flop that will be blamed on software piracy instead of the incompetency and greediness of the developer and/or publisher. Seriously, first game with better performance and they would've had a winner... Just like all they really had to do with dawn of war 2 was update the graphics.

I think the dearth of good games will last a lot longer then six years at this pace. At least starcraft 2 will just be starcraft with better graphics and I can enjoy that, even if it's not actually a new game (yes I've seen and played the beta and it's no different then what I've been saying for years). Curiously I wonder why it's taking so long just to make that?

And yes, if this post seems very heated, I did at one time enjoy computer games immensely. That ended around 2004/5ish. Now all I do is play WoW and I actually half thought about buying MW2 because there wasn't anything better to do and that... that is a very sad thing.

The research trees are all half-baked and ill thought out. They're pretty much all mirrors for all three races with things slightly shifted around and different super units.

To be fair, this is true of the first as well.

Aye, the races weren't very differentiated in the first, but I think the teching up 'research' was better then the build more buildings to get research points 'research'.

The new system almost reminds me of the way rise of legends works, only that was infinitely more streamlined and fit the game it was in, among other things.

I just played it.
I am so pissed right now.

This game shouldn't have been called supreme commander. It's so greatly different that it should have been named something else. How disappointing. Performance is the only thing that's more enjoyable about the game.

mph_Ragnarok wrote:

I just played it.
I am so pissed right now.

Yep, that's what I said about it.

**REMOVED**

I think the only people left playing RTS games are hardcore. You have to have a discrete GPU to play any recent RTS, so only people who buy GPUs can play them.

Something told me I should have tried the demo first...

I picked up SupCom:FA a while back for cheap, but have only recently started playing it. I've had a ton of fun with this successor to TA, so I figured I'd get the sequel. Some of the worst money I've spent.

/fume

playing through supreme commander (original) on my computer now.. so far no crashes. yay.

The tragedy of SupCom 1 and FA is that the pathfinding design sucks down massive CPU power all on one thread. So the big scenarios that you can create will never run fast enough to be enjoyable, particularly with the AI involved.

SupCom 2 has the same problem for the most part but their flowfield design is a little better. Apparently Kings & Castles has a major step forward in pathfinding performance but I'm not sure if that's ever coming at this point.

I say they open source their Moho engine so people can improve SupCom 1/FA. GPG is never going to touch them again and it's depressing.

Also SupCom/FA would not cleanup after it self. You would have to kill off a full AI before there was an improvement in performance. Even with just one building or unit left there was little improvement on CPU usage. The longer the game the worse it got.

There was a lot of work that they never finished.

tfp wrote:

There was a lot of work that they never finished.

And that's why I skipped SupCom2. I LOVED SupCom and FA, but it ran (and probably continues to run) only vaguely well on my system that I wasn't about to give them more money. It was poorly optimized to be sure.

Maybe another 5 years from now we'll all have a PC that can run it well enough...

For those that skipped SupCom2, it really is worth giving the game a try. It has been in a number of Steam sales for a song...and is really a decent deal at the $15 full price. The Infinite War Battle Pack (aka DLC) is worth it as well. (Original game + DLC was about $6 total for both in the last Steam sale.)

It is not the same system as SupCom1. I don't like it as well as the predecessor which stood out from the field of RTS games with a distinct economic system. Once you get that out of your system, it is better balanced and has better scale that many other current RTS titles. Once you get used to the tactical level of zoom it is very hard to go back to something like Starcraft II's 1990's era super zoomed in view.

Pathfinding and unit grouping does suck a bit if you let the system handle everything, but a little judicious use of forced (ctrl) move and waypoints makes things much better.

SupCom2 is a much maligned game that really is worth looking at in its own right. It is not really, except in terms of story, a sequel to SupCom1 or Forged Alliance. If you give it a look from the perspective of an RTS game, then it is a worthy addition to the genre.

Anything from the Core 2 era onwards will run any size game...unless you get a very long (45 min-1 hr) game just fine. Long games with mass conversion can bog down systems. And the delayed rush games do often turn into this...and so should be avoided in general.