Supreme Commander vs Total Annihilation

Zillah

So, I started playing Total Annihilation about five years ago. I fell in love with it almost straight away and played a huge amount of skirmishes/multiplayer games. In my opinion it is one of the most well designed and enjoyable games out there, from any era. The resources system was elegant and worked well, the sheer freedom of techniques and strategy was phenomenal, and the interface/controls efficient enough to allow a comfortable interaction with such ridiculously complex gameplay.

And so I was very excited when I heard about Supreme Commander. I looked forward to it greatly for years and got it as soon as I could.

And yet I can't help but feel a little dissappointed. Supreme Commander of course looks beautiful, that undenyable. But the cost, I feel, is a dinstinct drop in scale and ease of use. There were some cool innovations, such as the continuous beam weapons, automatic air transports, AI that can effectively use Nukes (which they never did in TA), upgradeable commanders, support commanders, energy shields and teleportation.

And yet, even with all that I can't help but feel that the ideal combination would be Total Annihilation with its own versions of those innovations, the 3D interface and shiney bits and bobs really aren't worth it...I don't actually care very much what my tanks look like individually when I'm directing 80 of them from a point of view half a mile above the battlefield.

Also, I can't help but feel that the Tier 4 super-units ruin the late game, where its a race to make a mega-robot sooner than your opponent, rather than actually having to fight a huge battle its more a matter of trumping your opponent with some overpowered units. Although I must admit I haven't had the chance to play Supreme Commander in multiplayer.

Illuvatar

I haven't played Supreme Commander but I have played Total Annihilation and it is still one of my favorite games for the PC.

Zillah

Oh right. For anyone who is confused, Supreme Commander is essentially Total Annihilation 2.

Nietzschean

And this really belongs in the strategy board where SupCom has been discussed quite a bit...


but regardless, i'd suggest you play online before you really comment on it. As like TA its real strengths lie in multiplayer. Personally i recon the interface is an excellent innovation over other current designs. The game has the ability to have even more units than were in TA, bigger maps. More scope....

If you have played online you'll see that Exp units while are a big strategic asset are by no means game winners, T3 armies by enlarge are the main force in late stage play.Getting a single exp far earlier than your opponent has the defenses to deal with it is obviously a problem but its very well balanced, if they can have a ML or a fatboy then you should have 70 - 100 t3 bots which will easily mill through one...

Zillah

Nietzschean wrote:

And this really belongs in the strategy board where SupCom has been discussed quite a bit...

Whoops

madrab

Nietzschean wrote:

And this really belongs in the strategy board where SupCom has been discussed quite a bit...

Not at all, its a game in the games forum, perfectly fine


anyway yeah the super units do kinnda spoil the fun (but my luk usually has me dead before i get level 3 stuff!)

Zillah

Nietzschean wrote:

The game has the ability to have even more units than were in TA, bigger maps. More scope....

Perhaps in theory, but we'll need PCs from a decade in the future if we're gonna match the scale we can run TA at now

Pugsley

Zillah wrote:

Perhaps in theory, but we'll need PCs from a decade in the future if we're gonna match the scale we can run TA at now

When TA was released the top end maps in that were beyond concieving aswell, the largest maps werent even touched until after core contingency was out, then it started to become practical to play the super large maps, in a year or 2 PC's will have caught up with Sup Cm and you will be seeing 81x81 maps being played Im sure.

For the record, loved TA, and I think that SupCom does the game justice as a successor.

BLITZ_Molloy

You can't talk about balance if you haven't played the game in multiplayer! You can beat the hardest AI on Open Palms in 3 minutes by building nothing but light attack units. Supreme Commander, much like TA is all about the multiplayer.

I played TA online for 8 years and used to review all the games for the TA Demo review site. It was incredibly good. Peoples strategies and approaches to different maps kept changing throughout the games long life. And that's without any patches or balance changes.

I've been plugging away at Supreme Commander for a couple of months. Managed to get myself to around 350 in the world rankings, and 4 in Ireland. Really, it isn't about racing to tech 4 stuff at all.

You look at most high level games and they mostly usually pick Aeon, build tons of t1 Auora tanks and get a pretty big battle going. And they use interceptors to gain air control, bomb the **** out of the guys energy and overwhelm him with tanks, and maybe a commander rush. On small maps you can rush right over and overcharge his factories. You can get killed doing that unless you balance it nicely with tanks and planes so it's not like it's a no risk situation either. It can backfire on you big time.

If the game is very evenly matched then they tech to t2, build a couple of engineers and then go straight to tech 3 and build siege bots. Those are absolute monsters. Usually if you can get 3 or 4 of them out before your enemy gets to t3 he's toast.

In the very occasional situation where the t3 bots don't win the game they build a ton of support commanders. Those things have an absolute ton of armour and you can march them into your opponents base and they'll explode nicely ****ing up his production. Allowing your to get ahead in the economy race and build more t3 siege bots and SCU's and win the match.

Another common late game ending is taking out the commander with strategic bombers.

But you very rarely see t4 experimentals coming into the equation outside of free for alls. Where you'd expect a more defensive, cagey kind of game. This is how it should be. If every ranked game took more than an hour you'd soon get pissed off with it.

If there's anything wrong with the balance at the moment it's that tech 2 units are largely redundant. It doesn't take much more time/mass to get to t3 and siege bots are so powerful you really want to get those out of the factory as quickly as possible.

Another issue is that once you've lost air control the opponent can put interceptors on patrol round your air factory and it's very hard to get control back. The fixed t1 anti air turrets for UEF and Aeon can't hit ****. The Cybran one is the only one that works well. Thus it's quite easy to rush people with planes and cause them all sorts of havock until they get to t2 and build some mobile anti air vehicles.

There's a new patch coming out in less than a month. GPG are saying they've given the engine a huge rewrite to try and optimise it. They're promising much improved performance. There are also going to be balance changes, new ladder stuff, a third party map vault. Lots of good stuff.

If you like multiplayer games I can't recommend it enough. The only thing I'd say is it's incredibly hard. Much more complex than Total Annihilation in my opinion. Trying to play it at a high level is incredibly stressful. You've got to manage air, ground, economy, teching up and all kinds of things at the same time. It's very intensive. TA was similar but the air control wasn't such a big factor, the economy was simpler and the teching non existent. So you could just get on with managing the expansion and the battles. Supreme Commander has alot more going on in my opinion.

Smellyirishman

madrab wrote:

anyway yeah the super units do kinnda spoil the fun

I think it's the imbalance between tech2 and tech3 that spoils the fun. Super units are cool, but only a few of them; Monkeylords and Fatboys are especially cool, anything Aeon is ugly (maybe not colossus), everything else isn't useful. I am hoping they put some more effort into the Experimentals in an expansion.

Like others I loved TA and I feel the Sup Com does a great job as successor, definitely wasn't a let down thank goodness.

_CreeD_

They're different games. And the TA we know and love now is a far cry from the original release, they spent a long time patching and rebalancing (aswell as the obligatory new units). The single biggest thing keeping me away from playing it more right now is the movement-freeze bug, when things start getting busy some of your units will just stop responding. I recently upgraded from a single core 3800 to an Opteron Dual core running at 2.65Ghz and while the frame rate stays reasonable some of my units just stop and pause for minutes at a time for no reason - the AI units keep moving so it's not a lack of CPU horsepower. I've seen some similar posts on the forum. Hopefully the patch will resolve it. Anyway once they get those kind of bugs ironed out I think it'll get a much wider audience and outgrow TA.

BLITZ_Molloy

The path finding still needs alot of work alright. The units all get stuck on each other and trickle to the attack location. So much for smoothly coordinated attacks.

GPG seem to be quite committed to improving the game though so at least there's some hope it'll be tweaked.

Here's a video of a recent LAN taking place in the UK. Pretty good commentary as well.
http://i30.multiplay.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=78&Itemid=121

_CreeD_

Yup I have faith they'll update it.
It's not just units getting the way though. I've had super units like the GC or Atlantis out in the open, nothing even nearby and they pause every time I give them a movement order, there's no point even trying to redirect their attack path in the middle of an enemy cluster as once I change anything they pause to think about it...meanwhile the AI's units are still working fine and pounding the unit to hell...kinda annoying. It really needs a lot of optimising. I was reading some of the posts on how sound is slowing it down and some of the guys have debugged it and shown the engine makes 1000s of calls to non-existent reg. keys. for audio alone. Just a wee bit sloppy, leaves plenty of room for improvement at least.

Zillah

Yup, I get the exact same freeze problem occasionally. I also have single core. Game itself runs fine, FPS is no problem, animations, graphics etc are grand, its just that for some reason unit start taking several minutes to actually receive command orders.


Excellent post btw Molloy.