Supreme Commander 2!

[theotherguy]

Wow. They really ****ed up this series. I am incredibly disappointed.

I only played one game, but here are my thoughts so far:

The good:

It runs much much better. This alone is an achievement. The engine is also superior, with better graphics, better pathfinding, etc. The UI and controls are also much better. Everything just feels cleaner. The factions are also better differentiated.

The bad:

Everything is SO MUCH SMALLER. The maps are smaller. The unit count is smaller. The number of buildings you can construct is smaller. Certain commands and strategic options have been removed entirely from the game, making the command set smaller. The game now feels like a toy.

The game also stinks of Square Enix's involvement. Units look ridiculous. They are completely out of proportion, move in stupid-looking ways, and generally feel toy-like. The units in the original Supreme Commander felt commanding, authoritative, and powerful. With these it feels like I'm playing with little plastic army men. These units resemble cartoon characters.

YOU HAVE TO ****ING RESEARCH THINGS NOW!!! What the hell!?! This alone completely destroys the Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander formula. You can build a grand total of three, count them, THREE factories, and TWO point defense structures. To access any more units/structures, you have to research them. How do you research? A building sits there and collects "research points" which you "spend" on a confusing and stupid looking research tree. Sound dumb? IT IS.

THEY REMOVED THE CONTINUOUS RESOURCE MODEL!!!. I swear to god. This was the only thing that made Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander interesting. Now, you simply stockpile resources, and then spend them like cold hard cash on units and structures. You can't build any structures, or any units, before you have the resources stockpiled!! This cripples the player so badly that I can hardly imagine how I am going to play this game. I can't set up pre-built strings of factories or defenses at all, because I can't afford them!! They even removed the ability to assist in building structures!

ITS NO LONGER FULLY SIMULATION BASED!!! Most of the weapons are hit/miss, rather than simulated projectiles. Aircraft now behave in the retarded way that aircraft in Starcraft behave. They sit there, floating in the air, until you give them a command, at which point they fly over to where the command was given and maybe do a few loops as the shoot at stuff. Transports no longer physically pick up units and carry them around. Units simply teleport into transports, and then teleport out of them, complete with cartoony teleportation effects.


Agh, its a good thing I wasn't anticipating this game. Good job GPG, good job Chris Taylor, you ****ed up the last remaining good RTS franchise and turned it into another starcraft clone.

 

[CyberPitz]

Yep.

Guy who doesn't play SC often, if ever, telling the guy who plays it all the time how the game is?

I don't get it. Just because you played it wrong doesn't mean that's how the game is

 

[63]

Guy who doesn't play SC often, if ever, telling the guy who plays it all the time how the game is?

I don't get it. Just because you played it wrong doesn't mean that's how the game is

I play SC1 23 hours a day.

HOUR 24 IS FOR GETTING RIPPED.

 

[CyberPitz]

HOLY SHI-!

 

[Hazar]

I just beat the campaign tonight and had fun playing through it all on hard. Still haven't done any skirmishes or multiplayer matches to see what the real balance is like though.

Wow. They really ****ed up this series. I am incredibly disappointed.

I only played one game, but here are my thoughts so far:

The good:

It runs much much better. This alone is an achievement. The engine is also superior, with better graphics, better pathfinding, etc. The UI and controls are also much better. Everything just feels cleaner. The factions are also better differentiated.

The bad:

Everything is SO MUCH SMALLER. The maps are smaller. The unit count is smaller. The number of buildings you can construct is smaller. Certain commands and strategic options have been removed entirely from the game, making the command set smaller. The game now feels like a toy.

The game also stinks of Square Enix's involvement. Units look ridiculous. They are completely out of proportion, move in stupid-looking ways, and generally feel toy-like. The units in the original Supreme Commander felt commanding, authoritative, and powerful. With these it feels like I'm playing with little plastic army men. These units resemble cartoon characters.

YOU HAVE TO ****ING RESEARCH THINGS NOW!!! What the hell!?! This alone completely destroys the Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander formula. You can build a grand total of three, count them, THREE factories, and TWO point defense structures. To access any more units/structures, you have to research them. How do you research? A building sits there and collects "research points" which you "spend" on a confusing and stupid looking research tree. Sound dumb? IT IS.

THEY REMOVED THE CONTINUOUS RESOURCE MODEL!!!. I swear to god. This was the only thing that made Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander interesting. Now, you simply stockpile resources, and then spend them like cold hard cash on units and structures. You can't build any structures, or any units, before you have the resources stockpiled!! This cripples the player so badly that I can hardly imagine how I am going to play this game. I can't set up pre-built strings of factories or defenses at all, because I can't afford them!! They even removed the ability to assist in building structures!

ITS NO LONGER FULLY SIMULATION BASED!!! Most of the weapons are hit/miss, rather than simulated projectiles. Aircraft now behave in the retarded way that aircraft in Starcraft behave. They sit there, floating in the air, until you give them a command, at which point they fly over to where the command was given and maybe do a few loops as the shoot at stuff. Transports no longer physically pick up units and carry them around. Units simply teleport into transports, and then teleport out of them, complete with cartoony teleportation effects.


Agh, its a good thing I wasn't anticipating this game. Good job GPG, good job Chris Taylor, you ****ed up the last remaining good RTS franchise and turned it into another starcraft clone.

I agree with most of what you've said but here are a few counter points.

The maps go up to 40x40 instead of 80x80 in this one but I really don't miss the biggest ones at all. They weren't ever played seriously and it took forever to get anywhere or actually kill someone without resorting to nuking them or something.

There are much fewer units in 2 which saddens me but I'm not sure what commands you're talking about that they removed (formation move? that was only useful to make your units not bunch up excessively which they've fixed anyways).

Not sure what you're on about the units looking ridiculous, they looked a bit ridiculous in the first one as well, big stompy robots are always fun imo.

As for the research system replacement, I have mixed feelings which I need to play more to resolve. On one hand I did like having the more units on the different tiers of technology but on the other I like having technology you've researched once be available for everything. It's certainly different but I'm not sure if I like it better or not than the old system. I am glad that they've changed it up though, I would rather them try something new and get it a bit wrong then just make the same game over and over.

The economic system I'm also on the fence about. It certainly makes the game much easier to play since you can't stall your economy and be stuck for a long time but in doing so it also takes all the challenge out of controlling your economy. There are a few bugs with the system I've noticed, the first being the aforementioned one of not being allowed to set up a queue of units till you have the resources and the second of not being allowed to build a structure on top of wreckage (which costs half as much I think) till you have the resources for the full priced structure. Also, in singleplayer it seemed very easily exploitable using the mass conversion, you can just build a lot of energy plants and a lot of mass converters if necessary and just spam the conversion button for essentially unlimited resources. I'm not sure if this works quite the same in mp. Hopefully they'll work these out soon as well as putting back in the factory assist back in which I used a lot.

The game is still fully simulation based, it's just that quite a lot of the projectiles now track their targets. I do wish they would ease up on that a bit, since now it's difficult to avoid shots by running around which was a bit of an advanced tactic in the first. I don't miss the air units having to land and having to refuel, the annoyingness of it outweighed the realistic cool factor of it.

Overall I do like the new stuff in the game and look forward to seeing how it plays in multiplayer but I fear they may have oversimplified it too much.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

One thing that has been left in though is the looping construction orders. As long as you can pay for each new unit, it will produce it. If you can't pay for the complete unit the factory wil temporarily pause production.

On the downside you can't assist one factory with another factory's build orders, it can only build its own orders.

Yeah, only having one level of Anti-Air and Artillery sucks ass.

On the plus side, this optimized engine feels a lot more suited for a mod of TA

There are much fewer units in 2 which saddens me but I'm not sure what commands you're talking about that they removed (formation move? that was only useful to make your units not bunch up excessively which they've fixed anyways).

Not to fussed about not having direct control of formations, but one thing I am ticked off about is not being able to point the directions I want the unit to move and halt in. If a vehicle has a slow wheel/turret turn rate then its possible to get flanked or snuck up from behind when it is given a stop command, but facing the wrong direction to where the enemy will be coming from.

The unit variety could of been expanded upon; ECM, ECCM or spoofer units would of been nice and heavy bombers with anti-personel gun similar to the phoenix in TA

 

[theotherguy]

Played several games today. Here is a list of the things that are missing:

Units:
1. Scouts of all kinds. (Air, land and sea. All gone.)
2. Bombers.
3. Cybran tanks.
4. T3 units.
5. Cruisers.
6. Submarines (with the exception of the kraken)


Structures:
1. T2 point defense.
2. T2 artillery.
3. T2 shields.
4. T2 missile defense.
5. Refueling pads.
6. Water-based point defense (AA and torpedo)
7. T2/T3 energy.
8. mass/energy storage.
9. T2/T3 radar.
10. walls.
11. Anti-nukes.
12. T3 AA
13. Jammers.

Gameplay features:
1. Giving multiple engineers the same build order.
2. Creating build templates.
3. Targeting the ground.
4. Building experimentals outside of factories.
5. Engineer chaining.
6. Shooting from transports.
7. Fuel.
8. Jamming.
9. Continuous resource model.
10. Formations.
11. Attack coordination.


Maps:
1. 80x80 maps.



This game is a mere shadow of what it once was. It is not a sequel. Its like they took a knife to the source code and cut out as much as they possibly could.

 

[theotherguy]

Also, experimentals are very weak and small. T3 artillery is weak and you can build hundreds of them on a dime. Fighter/bombers are huge, take like 2 hits to die, and are mostly useless versus AA. The same is true of the gunships. All units except experimentals get completely raped by T1 point defense (THE ONLY POINT DEFENSE IN THE GAME!!)

 

[theotherguy]

I take a few of those back. I was playing Cybran vs. Cybran matches (because cybrans are the coolest).

It turns out that UEF has subs, torpedo launchers, bombers, fighters, and T2 artillery, and the Cybrans don't.