Those are tactical decisions rather than strategic, in my view

That distinction is a really deep concept, but I do agree that CoH was very limited. Supposedly you're fighting in WW2, and you've got 5 infantry squads vs 7 infantry squads? Sounds more like the battle of Granada to me...

400 vs 400 seems more of an actual war, although in that case you typically just send in units and hope yours are stronger than the other guy's.

Still, pretty excited about SC, although I would really like to see a demo...

Creston

* REMOVED *
This comment was deleted on Jan 18, 22:45.

I was on the beta for a very, very short time and was massively disappointed (and I was a major TA fan). I feel like the game lacks the style TA had in spades and the grand strategic zoom-out feature only serves to distance you from what's going on on the screen instead of making you feel a part of it. I'm predicting some very average reviews for this one.

Folks if your gonna post your spec at least include ram. Last I checked ya needed it to run games. Unless it's a EA computer then it runs on the souls of developers

cliffnotes: fun and different gameplay, but that also makes it hard to play initially.

The beta is fun but is does take some getting used to. With most RTS the resources are relatively of static - you currently have $x so can buy so much unit y. In SupCom it's more like a flow - the amount of mass and energy you're generating per second determines the amount of constructing you can do each second. Of course there is storage, but this is more like a buffer to even out the flows and make it a bit easier.

There's also a lot more going on, forget micro'ing a couple of tanks, with this you throw around groups of 15+ little units. You still micro your construction bots to an extent, and when you get the BIG units they're worth micro'ing, but generally this is *strategy*, not unit babysitting.

The beta still has a few balance issues, but to me they seem like easy adjustments required.

The units, hmm. Initially they are really small, and even some of the biggest units arent that cool - the monkeylord (spiderbot in a lot of the screenshots) being a notable exception.

Performance does suck on my 3700+ AMD & 7800GTX (2v2 I have to set the minimum cap, 250 units each), but generally little optimising is done on betas so I expect significantly better on retail. People with core duo's seem to find it great already though.

I'm buying it.
This comment was edited on Jan 18, 17:34.

What the fuck are you smoking? Your basic infantry has the ability to destroy the biggest tanks in the game if you equip them with RPGS and flank. You clearly did not play this game well enough.

I had forgotten about the upgrading, that and the resource points were strategic elements. But my point was that the gameplay was highly tactical as opposed to strategic. Its scale and design (rightly) prevented it from being so. It was, as you say, about flanking and pinning units down. It was about manually throwing grenades. It was about taking a village one house at a time, according to whether it contained a sniper or a Panzerschrek unit. Those are tactical decisions rather than strategic, in my view.

Intelligence about the enemy was pretty irrelevant in multiplayer CoH - each side played to their strengths rather than identifying and countering the specific threat (with the possible exception of entrenched units as above). Fights were between a tank and a unit of troops (or another tank). The landscape rarely provided any sort of gameplay opportunities, in terms of funelling players through chokepoints, capturing high ground, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I loved CoH. It was excellent and the best tactical RTS I've played in a very long time. But it's in the C&C:G mold rather than the TA mold.

This comment was edited on Jan 18, 17:34.

COH was great, but hardly strategic.

What the fuck are you smoking? Your basic infantry has the ability to destroy the biggest tanks in the game if you equip them with RPGS and flank. You clearly did not play this game well enough.

Anyways, it is going to be very tough to get me to stop playing Dark Crusade. Awakened Monolith? Siege bot. Awakened Monolith... siege bot.... hmmmmm.

------
"Oh how awful. Did he at least die peacefully? To shreds you say. Well, how's his wife holding up? To shreds you say."

Looking forward to this one. Haven't played decent strategy in a while. COH was great, but hardly strategic.

Yeah, I beta tested it for awhile with my friend. Lot's of fun, brings me back to the good ol' days of Total Annihilation.

It chugged on my system, and for good reason. I have an Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB of ram, and an ATI Radeon X800XT 256MB.

Had to put my settings at all low detail + 1024x768.

It ran well, up until where my friend and I were pumping out like 5-6 Tier 1 bots every 15 seconds or so. We had about 400+ units on screen at one point...vveeerrryyy cool, I must say.

PS: Zero crashes, at that!

This comment was edited on Jan 18, 13:22.

I played a beta with A.I. Skirmish mode and while i agree with some of the posts here, Im not having a problems running the game at all with all bell & whistles cranked to max.
It ran well on my old system AMD64 3800x2 with 7800 agp card, and it runs great on my new system Intel E6600 with
a 8800gts card.

I did have the old system overclocked to 4400 X2 speeds so that may attribute to it runing smooth on that machine,
Another thing is the super weapons are still vulnerable, you have to just keep your commander away from them and always have a backup energy and supply source.

I still even play TA with the Spring mod its all in 3D and very great job was done on it. close to what we have here in SC almost.
I cant wait till release with the DX10 patch this should be nice indeed.

This comment was edited on Jan 18, 13:20.

Ok in SC there are tiers.

Best analogy I can give ya is simular to cars.
Tier 1 are your common everyday Hondas
Tier 2 would be your SUV's
Tier 3's would be your Abrahm Battle Tanks.
The Higher the rank the more resources and time the unit needs to be built but once it does watch out. You end up with a Godzilla unit

As for Star Trek Legacy. Beth really showed it colors with it's release and pulled a 'Kotor 2' in my opinion. Console game that works fine for the 360, but was rushed/ported to the PC for holiday sales. Nuff Said.

Thumbler how much Ram ya running on your rig? I've got the same except with a 6800 GT OC. I was in the beta but didn't play much of it. I useually don't play RTS games MP wise.

Not entirely related, but this reminds me of Spellforce 2. Not that it's unusual... even the first RTS, as soon as you could make the big guns, that's all you needed. But anyhow; in Spellforce 2, you would eventually get to a point where you could make a Titan (only 1 at a time I believe), but it was a massive creature, both in size and strength, that'd you'd just ignore all your other non-hero units and run around with this bad boy kicking some serious ass : ) Good times : )

That sounds a lot like Supreme commander, once you hit tier 3 on any factory, Ground/Air/Sea, the engineer can start making super units which demolish everything. They are 1 man armies in every respect. Some of them were less than impressive while others where walking nightmares. This is kind of the backbone of this game, get an econmy running and defended long enough to build one of these things they just send it towards the enemy.

I want to see what the final version does to the balance between the techs.

I have been in the beta, and the game brings my comp to its needs. It is not so much vid card contrained as it is CPU and memory contrained. That AI takes its toll, especially on larger maps.

I am a big TA fan, and I have been waiting for a sequel to TA ever since Chris Taylor left Cavedog. IMO, Supreme Commander is as fun to play as TA was.

You cannot make anything fool-proof. The fools are too inventive

GW: Tr Gandhi (Ranger), Shiva Sung (Monk), Mangal Pandey (Necromancer), Rana Pratap Singh (Warrior), Boddhi Satwa (Ritualist)

The seige bot is so powerful that once you can make this unit you need almost nothing else.

Thanks for the info...

Not entirely related, but this reminds me of Spellforce 2. Not that it's unusual... even the first RTS, as soon as you could make the big guns, that's all you needed. But anyhow; in Spellforce 2, you would eventually get to a point where you could make a Titan (only 1 at a time I believe), but it was a massive creature, both in size and strength, that'd you'd just ignore all your other non-hero units and run around with this bad boy kicking some serious ass : ) Good times : )

That game needs to hurry up and release an expansion...

Anyways... Supreme Commander... A month away... Here's hoping I don't start hyping : ) I expect I'll grab it launch day, even without a demo, for no more than nastalgia. I can do this because of all the money I save playing massives : ) And so few games came out in 2006 that weren't shit...

-Alamar

This comment was edited on Jan 18, 12:40.

Mind offering up some info on what you mean by T2/T3? We talking tech trees? Unit upgrades?

-Alamar

Each factory you can build, Air, land and Sea, can be upgraded to produce more powerful units. They start at tech 1 by default and you can upgrade them to tech 2 and tech 3. You immediately get the option of building more powerful tech 2 units from each structure afer you do this.

In tech 1 aircraft are useful but in no way something that you need to be very worried about.

In tech 2 you get a more powerful air transport, a gunship and a torpedo bomber. The gunship is INCREDIBLY powerful against ground targets because it can hover around them and fire continuously. (And it's a flying TANK) A horde of these ships can easily move in over a moderately defended base and either survive long enough to destroy the AA defenses or do a suicide mission to kill the commander.

It is defendable but it's often very easy to find a back door into the base and basically end the game with a mass attack of gunships.

At tech 3 for the Land factory you get 3 units to build, the engineer, the siege bot, and mobile artillery. The seige bot is so powerful that once you can make this unit you need almost nothing else. It doesn't counter the big super weapons but it's still one of those units you just put on auto repeat and then the game is basically everyone pushing the same units at each other. I think each side has their own version but they are all essentially big bullet magnets that do lots of damage.

legacy is a piece of crap. If u get 10 mins of fun out of it count yourself lucky

See how it fares on gamerankings.com before deciding. ST:Legacy seems to have gotten what it deserved there for being released in the state it was in.

EDIT: to clarify, ST:L got a shitty rating on gamerankings.com.. what it deserved.
This comment was edited on Jan 18, 12:16.

Originally posted by I"HadTooMuchVodka"gor...

CJ_Parker, did you miss the open MP beta that has been going on for months now? If so, that's really kind of too bad for you

What "open" beta? What the hell kinda drugs are you on, dude? Straight from the official Supreme Commander website...

A limited amount of beta slots are available.

You know what "limited" means, right? Well, that's too bad for you that you can't read, huh?
Besides, I want a single player demo. I don't really give a shit about multiplayer.

Less vodka for you, Igor...

----------------------------
*** Born to troll ***

I agree with CJ_Parker; need a demo with SP skirmish mode before I'll commit cash to this one.

As for the MP open beta... I don't play with the unwashed masses. Me and Sartre were on the same wavelength.

they don't seem to be doing a demo. last game I wanted that pulled that trick was star trek : legacy.
What twats. They just lost a day 1 sale. I've seen a lot of mocked-up, heavily staged screenshots of this game, but I want to give it a try before they get my cash.