tl;dr : The posted article has the main bits. Aside from that I feel the economy issues are mainly an interface issue. The rest is wait and see.
I guess the question is, if the demo isn't representative of the game, why release that demo.
Some folks actually play it for the single player campaign? Or for people to judge how it'll run on their machines.
edit: That path-finding video was pretty neat.
Then they couldn't release a campaign and skirmish mission? It has been done before. And it would have been a better move considering they made enough changes that fans are scratching their heads.
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edited February 2010
Damn it, I'm going to buy this game. I mean, what's $50 anyways? Besides money that could be used for things like food.
Plus, we already know that the stats for stuff in the SP will be different than the MP. So we don't even know how the stuff we have access to will actually stack up in the real version of the game :P
I do like the idea of minor and major experimentals though, gives you cool big units, do big damage, but can still be taken down by a bunch of smaller guys.
Okay, I've played the demo now, and honestly, it's doesn't seem like a bad game. It's a reasonable stab at an RTS. The issue I have with it, and than I'm guessing the issue that most other SupCom fans have with it, is simple - this is not Supreme Commander 2.
There are some defining concepts in Supreme Commander (and in Total Annihilation) that made the game different to every other run-of-the-mill RTS out there. For me they were as follows:
1. Scale
SupCom and TA maps were enormous. You could have big, sprawling bases or dozens of little outposts all over the place. The scale compared to any other RTS was incredible. To quote from Tom Francis in the link posted by subedii:
The biggest map is a remake of Seton's Clutch, for eight players - it's smaller, but still makes for some great games.
So the biggest map in the game is smaller than one of the large maps in SupCom. Yay.
2. Complex economy
In SupCom you had three tech-levels of mass extractor to work though, and knowing when and how to upgrade these was critical to keeping your economy running. In addition there were three tech-levels of power generator, and different strategies would require different combinations of each. The economy was so critically important that in some multiplayer games it could make sense to have just one player concentrate on this, and spend a large amount of their time ensuring that the mass and power flow smoothly to their teammates. Even in TA there were two tech levels of mass extractor and power gen.
Now you just drop your MEs and PGs down and, if you get short of resources, drop a few points into research. Yay.
3. Adjacency bonuses
When I heard about them adding this concept to Supreme Commander during development I loved it. TA didn't have it, but it's a fantastic idea. Do you cluster your buildings together to make them more efficient, or do you spread them out so they're less vulnerable to AoE weapons? Shield Generators were great, but a massive power drain unless you put Power Generators next to them - but Power Generators tended to be volatile, so could you really risk putting them on the front lines?
Now there's no adjacency, and Shield Generators are cheap enough and small enough that you can sprinkle them around your base like confetti without needing to worry about how efficient they are. Yay.
4. No up-front payments
Damn near every RTS has up-front payments. SupCom didn't. It helped distinguish SupCom from other games, and more critically than that, it just worked. It meant you could queue up as much as you wanted from the start of the game in the knowledge that nothing short of the construction units being killed would prevent it from happening sooner or later. Queue up too much simultaneously and your economy stalls. It required skill and forward planning to know what you could afford to queue up, and meant that you could start work on structures based on what your economy was going to be in the near future, not based on what it was right then.
Now everything has to be paid up-front. Yay.
5. Massive variety in build times
The most awesome structures and units in Supreme Commander could take more than 30 minutes or more to build. You'd have a fleet of engineers helping each other construct experimentals so that the build time was reduced to a reasonable length, but had to be careful not to add too many or again your economy would stall, as it would be highly unlikely you'd have the complete cost of the unit in reserve. That enormous cost and build time meant that units and structures such as these were a massive investment, and were suitably epic as a result. Total Annihilation was the same in this regard - a Krogoth was a huge investment.
Now experimentals take a couple of minutes to build. You can't have the 30 minute experimental any more because engineers can't help each other, so there's no way to reduce the construction time of anything (no, the pathetic reduction options in the research tree do not compare). Yay. Which leads me on to...
6. Experimentals that actually matter
In the second level of the demo you can build an experimental gunship. It takes, if I remember rightly, about 1 minute and 30 seconds to build, and costs about 350 mass and 2000 energy. By the end of the level I had a dozen of them. And I didn't care. I was being attacked by "FatBoy II" units (which someone else called FatBoy 0.1, I believe). And again, I didn't care. Experimentals in SupCom were scary. They mattered. If you saw a Seraphim Experimental Bomber, or a Ythotha, or a Mavor, or a Megalith, you couldn't just send a few units out and forget about it.
Now the word "experimental" is just slapped on anything to make it sound awesome, and it really isn't. These units don't deserve to be called experimentals.
I'm going to repeat what I said at the start of this post - Supreme Commander 2 doesn't seem like a bad game. I do like the research tree, and that my early units are weak but not obsolete cannon-fodder as soon as I "tech up". I like that it seems to run better on the same hardware. I like that the maps have more variety and definition. But I'm sorry to say that this is not a worthy sequel to Supreme Commander, or Total Annihilation. It takes the defining elements of those games and pushes them aside in favour of looking and playing more like every other generic RTS.
I don't doubt this will make it more accessible to new players. But it also makes it stand out less, appeal less to those who actually care about it. It has less to differentiate itself from other games. It feels like a money-grab, rather than an RTS made by people who actually care about making a worthy sequel to a well-respected game. And that, I think, is quite sad.
I'm actually very surprised at how many people have a problem with the adjacency bonuses going, they were pretty much the only thing I hated about SupCom 1. While SupCom was touted as being a spiritual successor to TA it was also touted as being about macro rather than micro. The adjacency bonuses just switched it from microing units to microing buildings =/
I found the demo to be acceptable, there were parts that I liked and parts that I didnt. That being said Im going to give the game the benefit of the doubt and buy it anyway (in part because I always regretted not getting involved in the multiplayer for the original SupCom).
Is there enough interest to set up a PA Steam group for multiplayer shennanigans?
6. Experimentals that actually matter
In the second level of the demo you can build an experimental gunship. It takes, if I remember rightly, about 1 minute and 30 seconds to build, and costs about 350 mass and 2000 energy. By the end of the level I had a dozen of them. And I didn't care. I was being attacked by "FatBoy II" units (which someone else called FatBoy 0.1, I believe). And again, I didn't care. Experimentals in SupCom were scary. They mattered. If you saw a Seraphim Experimental Bomber, or a Ythotha, or a Mavor, or a Megalith, you couldn't just send a few units out and forget about it.
Now the word "experimental" is just slapped on anything to make it sound awesome, and it really isn't. These units don't deserve to be called experimentals.
AFAIK there are now two kinds of experimentals, minor and major. The experimental gunship (and I think every experimental in the demo) is a minor experimental, the major experimentals are presumably the bigger pants-shitting units that you are thinking of.
For what its worth, I think some of the experimentals in the original were too powerful (The Mavor, Scathis, Paragon and the experimental bomber come to mind) because if a half decent player managed to build one then the game was over nine times out of ten. That doesnt seem to be the case in the sequel (Although the 'Noah' unit cannon looks ripe for abuse) which is a good thing as far as Im concerned.
I found the demo to be acceptable, there were parts that I liked and parts that I didnt. That being said Im going to give the game the benefit of the doubt and buy it anyway (in part because I always regretted not getting involved in the multiplayer for the original SupCom).
Is there enough interest to set up a PA Steam group for multiplayer shennanigans?
Hopefully, especially since I preordered it off steam for the exact same reason
AFAIK there are now two kinds of experimentals, minor and major. The experimental gunship (and I think every experimental in the demo) is a minor experimental, the major experimentals are presumably the bigger pants-shitting units that you are thinking of.
For what its worth, I think some of the experimentals in the original were too powerful (The Mavor, Scathis, Paragon and the experimental bomber come to mind) because if a half decent player managed to build one then the game was over nine times out of ten. That doesnt seem to be the case in the sequel (Although the 'Noah' unit cannon looks ripe for abuse) which is a good thing as far as Im concerned.
I get that, but that's why I linked point 6, the weak experimentals, with point 5, the lack of engineer-assist. The thing is that without engineer-assist, everything takes a set amount of time. You can reduce it slightly through the research tree, but building anything takes roughly the same amount of time regardless of how many resources you have or what research you've done. In SupCom you could, in theory, reduce build time to 1% of standard by having 99 extra engineers assist in construction, but for that to work you'd need a huge economy to back it up.
That's why it was balanced. Anyone could build those superunits, but try it without a hefty economy and it'll either cripple you or take forever. The job of the other player was to notice you were building that Mavor/Scathis/Paragon/experimental bomber and take it out before it was completed. Your job was to hide it or defend it until it was completed.
But with SupCom2, build times cannot be that long because there's no way to speed them up, regardless of how strong your economy is. Experimentals will have to be faster to construct, and if they're faster to construct they'll be weaker to compensate. That's what I mean when I say these units don't deserve to be called experimentals. Even the Monkeylord, the cheapest and least effective of the SupCom experimentals, often gave players reason to worry when it appeared on the battlefield. These so-called minor experimentals would barely justify being called Tech 3 by comparison.
I get that, but that's why I linked point 6, the weak experimentals, with point 5, the lack of engineer-assist.
...wait, there's no assisting? No wonder I couldn't get that working in the demo.
There is, it's just been limited to (AFAIK) 3 engineers per factory to cut down on the ludicrous engineer fleets you'd end up carting around. To be honest, I can only say I'm happy about that one. In SupCom 1, out of my unit cap the majority would be taken up by Pgens, Mass fabs and engineers engineers engineers.
I get that, but that's why I linked point 6, the weak experimentals, with point 5, the lack of engineer-assist.
...wait, there's no assisting? No wonder I couldn't get that working in the demo.
There is, it's just been limited to (AFAIK) 3 engineers per factory to cut down on the ludicrous engineer fleets you'd end up carting around. To be honest, I can only say I'm happy about that one. In SupCom 1, out of my unit cap the majority would be taken up by Pgens, Mass fabs and engineers engineers engineers.
I don't doubt this will make it more accessible to new players. But it also makes it stand out less, appeal less to those who actually care about it. It has less to differentiate itself from other games. It feels like a money-grab, rather than an RTS made by people who actually care about making a worthy sequel to a well-respected game. And that, I think, is quite sad.
I honestly couldn't agree more with your post, it basically mirrors how I feel. To me, it felt more like a somewhat mediocre mod for Starcraft or C&C rather than an actual full-blown game.
During the demo, I just kept catching myself thinking 'why did they change that?', 'where’s that feature gone?',‘why is the AI still daft as a brush?’ and the biggest one ‘why the fuck am I having to wait to queue things up?’. Christ, I even think the art style is slightly worse than the first one (the UEF. Ugh). Although, I will concede that from a graphics stand point, it does look quite pretty.
Man, I got over the up front costs after about 15 minutes of playing.
What does it feel like? It feels like a simplified SupCom, yeah. It also feels like they streamlined a lot of the useless stuff that was just there to brag. Condensed the unit lists a lot to just the roles you actually use, though I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with how much they did that to the Cybran.
And they managed to try and make the game more about combat, less about turtle up and build and experimental that would win the game. Now, I loved the turtle tastic gameplay of TA and SupCom, but this is just a slightly different direction.
Essentially it helps if you stop being married to the word "experimental" meaning "godlike engine of doom" and more "prototype unit." The core gameplay is covered by standard units. The advanced roles are filled by minor experimentals. It oddly works out for a faster paced game. And prebuilding/queueing a base up is pretty useless anyways. There aren't nearly as many things to build this time around at least on the maps we've seen, so building a base doesn't require a 25 minute long template out of the starting gate.
edit: honestly, this game is being prejudged as "it's not supcom 1!" which yeah, it's not supcom 1. Now let's sit down and decide if in it's own right it's a fun game, not crucify it for having the supcom name.
So you don't pay up front costs in those games? You don't research technologies?
are you even close to serious, the only even reasonable part of this is the resource thing
how the fuck does being able to research and upgrade your units make the gameplay anything like any other game, that is the dumbest argument
i can make my units better, abloo bloo, this game is like CnC
it does not handle or play anything like CnC or starcraft, and the upgrades you get access to in SupCom2 from what we've seen so far are not at all analogous to the kinds of upgrades you do in other games, nor are the resources used to get such upgrades at all similar
I don't know if I can justify spending 50 bucks on this if I have supcom 1. I might as well just replay that. I'm definitely not getting into the online mode in either games considering I have the starcraft 2 beta to keep me busy..
I don't get it. SupCom had some very unique features, so they stripped most of em away, generalised the hell out of the game and they still call it SupCom when it really isn't anymore.
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http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/supreme
I guess the question is, if the demo isn't representative of the game, why release that demo.
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Some folks actually play it for the single player campaign? Or for people to judge how it'll run on their machines.
edit: That path-finding video was pretty neat.
Why can't you call it SC2? That's the game's initials.
Because then Koreans will buy it and be disappointed.
Then they couldn't release a campaign and skirmish mission? It has been done before. And it would have been a better move considering they made enough changes that fans are scratching their heads.
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Even if that's the case, they also seem to be cheaper and seem to be built faster (especially the smaller ones). That's okay with me.
There are some defining concepts in Supreme Commander (and in Total Annihilation) that made the game different to every other run-of-the-mill RTS out there. For me they were as follows:
1. Scale
SupCom and TA maps were enormous. You could have big, sprawling bases or dozens of little outposts all over the place. The scale compared to any other RTS was incredible. To quote from Tom Francis in the link posted by subedii: So the biggest map in the game is smaller than one of the large maps in SupCom. Yay.
2. Complex economy
In SupCom you had three tech-levels of mass extractor to work though, and knowing when and how to upgrade these was critical to keeping your economy running. In addition there were three tech-levels of power generator, and different strategies would require different combinations of each. The economy was so critically important that in some multiplayer games it could make sense to have just one player concentrate on this, and spend a large amount of their time ensuring that the mass and power flow smoothly to their teammates. Even in TA there were two tech levels of mass extractor and power gen.
Now you just drop your MEs and PGs down and, if you get short of resources, drop a few points into research. Yay.
3. Adjacency bonuses
When I heard about them adding this concept to Supreme Commander during development I loved it. TA didn't have it, but it's a fantastic idea. Do you cluster your buildings together to make them more efficient, or do you spread them out so they're less vulnerable to AoE weapons? Shield Generators were great, but a massive power drain unless you put Power Generators next to them - but Power Generators tended to be volatile, so could you really risk putting them on the front lines?
Now there's no adjacency, and Shield Generators are cheap enough and small enough that you can sprinkle them around your base like confetti without needing to worry about how efficient they are. Yay.
4. No up-front payments
Damn near every RTS has up-front payments. SupCom didn't. It helped distinguish SupCom from other games, and more critically than that, it just worked. It meant you could queue up as much as you wanted from the start of the game in the knowledge that nothing short of the construction units being killed would prevent it from happening sooner or later. Queue up too much simultaneously and your economy stalls. It required skill and forward planning to know what you could afford to queue up, and meant that you could start work on structures based on what your economy was going to be in the near future, not based on what it was right then.
Now everything has to be paid up-front. Yay.
5. Massive variety in build times
The most awesome structures and units in Supreme Commander could take more than 30 minutes or more to build. You'd have a fleet of engineers helping each other construct experimentals so that the build time was reduced to a reasonable length, but had to be careful not to add too many or again your economy would stall, as it would be highly unlikely you'd have the complete cost of the unit in reserve. That enormous cost and build time meant that units and structures such as these were a massive investment, and were suitably epic as a result. Total Annihilation was the same in this regard - a Krogoth was a huge investment.
Now experimentals take a couple of minutes to build. You can't have the 30 minute experimental any more because engineers can't help each other, so there's no way to reduce the construction time of anything (no, the pathetic reduction options in the research tree do not compare). Yay. Which leads me on to...
6. Experimentals that actually matter
In the second level of the demo you can build an experimental gunship. It takes, if I remember rightly, about 1 minute and 30 seconds to build, and costs about 350 mass and 2000 energy. By the end of the level I had a dozen of them. And I didn't care. I was being attacked by "FatBoy II" units (which someone else called FatBoy 0.1, I believe). And again, I didn't care. Experimentals in SupCom were scary. They mattered. If you saw a Seraphim Experimental Bomber, or a Ythotha, or a Mavor, or a Megalith, you couldn't just send a few units out and forget about it.
Now the word "experimental" is just slapped on anything to make it sound awesome, and it really isn't. These units don't deserve to be called experimentals.
I'm going to repeat what I said at the start of this post - Supreme Commander 2 doesn't seem like a bad game. I do like the research tree, and that my early units are weak but not obsolete cannon-fodder as soon as I "tech up". I like that it seems to run better on the same hardware. I like that the maps have more variety and definition. But I'm sorry to say that this is not a worthy sequel to Supreme Commander, or Total Annihilation. It takes the defining elements of those games and pushes them aside in favour of looking and playing more like every other generic RTS.
I don't doubt this will make it more accessible to new players. But it also makes it stand out less, appeal less to those who actually care about it. It has less to differentiate itself from other games. It feels like a money-grab, rather than an RTS made by people who actually care about making a worthy sequel to a well-respected game. And that, I think, is quite sad.
I will continue to not know until there is some way to try the multiplayer out.
Failing that, I will not get this game. Until it hits the bargain bin, of course, which will be soon if it doesn't do well.
Is there enough interest to set up a PA Steam group for multiplayer shennanigans?
AFAIK there are now two kinds of experimentals, minor and major. The experimental gunship (and I think every experimental in the demo) is a minor experimental, the major experimentals are presumably the bigger pants-shitting units that you are thinking of.
For what its worth, I think some of the experimentals in the original were too powerful (The Mavor, Scathis, Paragon and the experimental bomber come to mind) because if a half decent player managed to build one then the game was over nine times out of ten. That doesnt seem to be the case in the sequel (Although the 'Noah' unit cannon looks ripe for abuse) which is a good thing as far as Im concerned.
Hopefully, especially since I preordered it off steam for the exact same reason
http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/play/68116/PC/Supreme-Commander-2/Trailer/Strategies-Technologies-Trailer/Flash-Video
And an interview and short video about the 360 version
http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/2537/TXB-Interview-Gas-Powered-Games-Chris-Taylor/p1/
http://movies.teamxbox.com/xbox360/supremecommander2/SC2_Xbox360_Controller_txbHD.wmv
I get that, but that's why I linked point 6, the weak experimentals, with point 5, the lack of engineer-assist. The thing is that without engineer-assist, everything takes a set amount of time. You can reduce it slightly through the research tree, but building anything takes roughly the same amount of time regardless of how many resources you have or what research you've done. In SupCom you could, in theory, reduce build time to 1% of standard by having 99 extra engineers assist in construction, but for that to work you'd need a huge economy to back it up.
That's why it was balanced. Anyone could build those superunits, but try it without a hefty economy and it'll either cripple you or take forever. The job of the other player was to notice you were building that Mavor/Scathis/Paragon/experimental bomber and take it out before it was completed. Your job was to hide it or defend it until it was completed.
But with SupCom2, build times cannot be that long because there's no way to speed them up, regardless of how strong your economy is. Experimentals will have to be faster to construct, and if they're faster to construct they'll be weaker to compensate. That's what I mean when I say these units don't deserve to be called experimentals. Even the Monkeylord, the cheapest and least effective of the SupCom experimentals, often gave players reason to worry when it appeared on the battlefield. These so-called minor experimentals would barely justify being called Tech 3 by comparison.
...wait, there's no assisting? No wonder I couldn't get that working in the demo.
I am making a group as we speak.
Here it is!
There is, it's just been limited to (AFAIK) 3 engineers per factory to cut down on the ludicrous engineer fleets you'd end up carting around. To be honest, I can only say I'm happy about that one. In SupCom 1, out of my unit cap the majority would be taken up by Pgens, Mass fabs and engineers engineers engineers.
We solve problems.
I honestly couldn't agree more with your post, it basically mirrors how I feel. To me, it felt more like a somewhat mediocre mod for Starcraft or C&C rather than an actual full-blown game.
During the demo, I just kept catching myself thinking 'why did they change that?', 'where’s that feature gone?', ‘why is the AI still daft as a brush?’ and the biggest one ‘why the fuck am I having to wait to queue things up?’. Christ, I even think the art style is slightly worse than the first one (the UEF. Ugh). Although, I will concede that from a graphics stand point, it does look quite pretty.
It's 1 step forward and about 4 back.
What does it feel like? It feels like a simplified SupCom, yeah. It also feels like they streamlined a lot of the useless stuff that was just there to brag. Condensed the unit lists a lot to just the roles you actually use, though I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with how much they did that to the Cybran.
And they managed to try and make the game more about combat, less about turtle up and build and experimental that would win the game. Now, I loved the turtle tastic gameplay of TA and SupCom, but this is just a slightly different direction.
Essentially it helps if you stop being married to the word "experimental" meaning "godlike engine of doom" and more "prototype unit." The core gameplay is covered by standard units. The advanced roles are filled by minor experimentals. It oddly works out for a faster paced game. And prebuilding/queueing a base up is pretty useless anyways. There aren't nearly as many things to build this time around at least on the maps we've seen, so building a base doesn't require a 25 minute long template out of the starting gate.
edit: honestly, this game is being prejudged as "it's not supcom 1!" which yeah, it's not supcom 1. Now let's sit down and decide if in it's own right it's a fun game, not crucify it for having the supcom name.
are you even close to serious, the only even reasonable part of this is the resource thing
how the fuck does being able to research and upgrade your units make the gameplay anything like any other game, that is the dumbest argument
i can make my units better, abloo bloo, this game is like CnC
it does not handle or play anything like CnC or starcraft, and the upgrades you get access to in SupCom2 from what we've seen so far are not at all analogous to the kinds of upgrades you do in other games, nor are the resources used to get such upgrades at all similar
I would love to know how seriously I take this
e; and I don't remember accusing anyone of taking this too seriously? So I'm not sure what that's about
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW