Most fun things I ever did in TA involved air transports. My friends and I used to LAN play TA all the time. One game my friend was just finished building a factory, and I had an air transport fly in and pick his commander up, and hover over some lava with it, just dangling there. He wasn't happy.
Grabbing the enemy commander with a transport in TA while he was building was the funniest thing I think I've ever seen in an online game. Then you could just fly that thing over his base and make it self-detonate.
Man SupComm what a game. It was really great when you played against people who understood the doctrine harass early, harass often. Like a game of chess and ro-sham-bo combined.
I never really got into the online, although that's something I was planning on fixing this time around.
I did like setting up an 8 player FFA with the bots and leaving it to see what would happen. Well, I guess technically it was 7 bots since you had to have at least 1 human player, and I just allied to one of the bots and parked my ACU in its base.
Although coming back and looking at the replay, most of the time the game crashed about an hour in from pure strain.
subedii on
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Most fun things I ever did in TA involved air transports. My friends and I used to LAN play TA all the time. One game my friend was just finished building a factory, and I had an air transport fly in and pick his commander up, and hover over some lava with it, just dangling there. He wasn't happy.
Grabbing the enemy commander with a transport in TA while he was building was the funniest thing I think I've ever seen in an online game. Then you could just fly that thing over his base and make it self-detonate.
It's funnier to leave it. It makes them afraid to build any anti-air near it because they think you'll relent eventually and give them their commander back. They sit there, longingly looking at their commander meters above the ground.
Because all I do is sit behind my allies and build huge lines of artillery
Haha, that's not a bad way to play.
I was big into TA and when SupCom first came out I played it hard with the OffTopic.com crew. Homan (later known as Unconquerable, #1 in SupCom) was in that crew and him and I defined the T1 swarm play style that came about in beta. I got sick of it because I felt it was leaving out 90% of the game in favor of a 'quick win' and went back to casual play after a big run with him in the 2v2 bracket. He went on to further refine that play style with a few others in the SupCom community.
While I appreciate the skill involved in hyper aggressive low tier swarm tactics, I still feel the game is at its best when we're playing with a full deck. That doesn't just mean letting the game get to late tier. It means getting to late tier and NOT massing a huge swarm of UEF T3 gunships or T3 bombers.
It means building an actual combined army and having fun with it, even if it's not as powerful as massing the current imbalanced T3 unit.
I love setting up ferry points with my T3 transports and flying swarms of T3 assault bots around the map. Almost more than nuking people. T3 transport planes are probably my favorite change from TA.
Support ACUs were my favorite part of SupCom, even if they weren't implemented all that well. I liked how an army of them was completely different depending on which faction you played.
Anyway, let's keep this thread updated with the people who are going to get into this. If we get enough PA'ers interested in stacked comp stomping (in the AI's favor) or gentlemanly team and FFA games, I'll be down for it.
I'd be down for some comp stomping but that's about it, I'm a pretty casual player and I'll never be able to beat the computer on my own on any difficulty higher than easy so I won't even bother playing other humans online.
Played a 4 player FFA on strip mine the other day with 3 Adaptive AIs. I got my impenetrable fortress all rigged up, repelling waves of attackers, I even got to make my "production facility" (Alternately known as the bankruptcy plant) where you surround 4 air factories with engineering stations. I keep hearing "Strategic launch detected" and watching the trail of the nuke through the fog of war. I had enough strategic defenses that I wasn't too worried.
Until the waves of enemies abruptly stopped.
That's okay, that green guy has been trying to nuke everybody, I'm sure all the AI's just turned on green to eliminate the immediate threat, right? .....right?
I take a few spy planes around to the other enemy bases, but find only smoldering ruins lining massive craters. Green (Adaptive Seraphim) already has engineers claiming the mass extraction points that used to be in the enemy base. Spy planes head to green and reveal just how much shit is about to hit the fan, two experimental bombers, two T3 artilleries turning to acquire my base, an experimental walker, an experimental missile launcher, and another experimental missile launcher at 90%. My God. Frantically, I spin up production on T3 bombers, massing 12, I sent them to knock out that missile launcher before it realizes what's happenin-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. The bombers arrive, do their prerequisite first run where they all miss horribly (I call it the calibration pass / warning shot pass), and as they turn they are all knocked out of the sky.
The enemy airborne super-nuke is intercepted as it bears down on my production facility, hopefully I can hold out be-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. SHIT. The artillery starts to hammer my defensive line, all my overlapping shields are failing. I build about 20 spyplanes and then start pumping out strat bombers. My strategic missile defenses are exhausted in the face of the super nuke which takes two to kill it, I hope I don't h-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. FLY! Fly! Get clear of the blast zone! The spy planes tear into the enemy base as AA rounds lace the air. The bombers soar in unchallenged and make their calibration pass. The second experimental launcher is at 98%, and now the ACU is helping...
the acu...
BOMBERS! NEW ORDERS! Hit that ACU!
The bombs are released as the super-nuke atomizes my base, my defensive fortresses are desperately trying to fend off the rain of tech 3 artillery but failing, I see a horde of diamond-shaped radar returns marching in formation to my lines with my own experimental walker making a beeline to intercept. The enemy ACU takes 20-something bombs straight to the face and goes nuclear, takes the experimental facility with it and a load of ground forces, SUCCESS! They loop around and, taking advantage of the ACU's detonation effect on shields, pound the experimental launcher into scrap. Not a single bomber made it home that day, but as I looked back at my own base at the 99% complete experimental missile launcher I have been secretly building, I know that their sacrifice was worth it.
Most fun things I ever did in TA involved air transports.
I loved doing coordinated air drops. Make a token scout plane, queue up orders to a ton of air transports to pick up a sumo, follow the scout plane, then drop the sumo off at the enemy base (each at a different spot). Self-destruct the scout plane and off they go! (Usually I'd have a flock of bombers carpet bomb the base seconds beforehand to soften air defenses).
wonderpug on
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
Pick up the enemy's commander
Detonate the air transport
Zen Vulgarity on
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
Damn it, I don't have time to play SupCom2! Damn it I don't!
What have they done to streamline the economy? My biggest pet peeve with the first one is that if you screw up your economy within the first 30 seconds of gameplay, it's a uphill battle from there on out.
I think that you no longer have to worry about storage and you pay for things in one lump sum "up front." So it's no longer really about the rates or being able to sustain a rate while you build things.
I can already foresee my rage as I put my up-front payment on an experimental as a crashing tech 1 scout plane smashes into it, destroying it
Damn it, I don't have time to play SupCom2! Damn it I don't!
What have they done to streamline the economy? My biggest pet peeve with the first one is that if you screw up your economy within the first 30 seconds of gameplay, it's a uphill battle from there on out.
I know the feeling, SupCom 2 and Chaos Rising are both coming out in the same month, I'm not sure which one I'm going to be playing.
From what I've heard about the economy stuff, they're basically trying to streamline the game, make it a bit faster to get going. No more adjacency bonuses for a start, those were always a bit fiddly. I can't remember the details but the PC Gamer review mentioned something about the game being a bit more streamlined.
Main change is the tech trees and the reduced unit counts. Instead of three tech levels, you've got research, with different trees for land, sea, air and ACU (and structures I think?). So basically instead of your T1 tanks being outdated once you get to T2, instead you research upgrades to damage and armour, and other additions like maybe adding a missile rack onto them for AA support. You also unlock new units and experimentals by investing in those trees.
You gain research points by building research centres, and by fighting. I don't know the specifics. In any case it means that you can now focus your efforts on specifically making a superior air force, or ground force.
Other than that, I don't know too much about the economy model itself. They've talked a fair amount about avoiding those situations where your economy "stalls", which is what I think you're referring to. So if they've managed that, that's a good thing.
EDIT: Also what RussianFrank said. No more buildings to "store" resources, and you pay for units up-front instead of having them deducted from your income over time. It's meant to make things more scrutable.
I've always wanted to get two of my friends to play with me so one could amass a land army the likes of which have never been seen, with the other building an equally impressive navy while I swarmed the skies with bombers and fighters.
But nobody wants to play it.
Incidentally, they're trying to differentiate the sides more, so Aeon don't even have a navy anymore. Most of their land units are hovercraft anyway, though I suspect they wouldn't stand up to a proper fleet on their own.
I can't wait to look at a large Aeon hovecraft army speeding along the water towards me only for a giant kraken to surface in their ranks and fuck them up proper. It will look...glorious.
Docshifty on
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
So this is tangentially related, but very relevant. It's a half hour interview with Chris Taylor and Mike Capps (Epic) about what it means to be an indie developer, and what the challenges are. Pretty sobering to hear some of it, but also a lot of optimism and plenty of humour on Chris Taylor's part. Well worth a watch.
Independent in this context doesn't mean "small", it means that they run their own company and aren't in control of the publishers, and you're largely financing your own projects. You get more context in the interview, they talk a bit about how the publishing model is changing and everything's going DD, which could mean that publishers are out in about 15 years or so.
It's a half hour interview with Chris Taylor and Mike Capps (Epic) about what it means to be an independent developer, and what the challenges are. Pretty sobering to hear some of it, but also a lot of optimism and plenty of humour on Chris Taylor's part. Well worth a watch.
Posts
Grabbing the enemy commander with a transport in TA while he was building was the funniest thing I think I've ever seen in an online game. Then you could just fly that thing over his base and make it self-detonate.
I never really got into the online, although that's something I was planning on fixing this time around.
I did like setting up an 8 player FFA with the bots and leaving it to see what would happen. Well, I guess technically it was 7 bots since you had to have at least 1 human player, and I just allied to one of the bots and parked my ACU in its base.
Although coming back and looking at the replay, most of the time the game crashed about an hour in from pure strain.
It's funnier to leave it. It makes them afraid to build any anti-air near it because they think you'll relent eventually and give them their commander back. They sit there, longingly looking at their commander meters above the ground.
No matter how hard I try, I just can't stick to my plan of only buying games on Steam when they go on sale. Oh well, at least I saved five bucks.
Haha, that's not a bad way to play.
I was big into TA and when SupCom first came out I played it hard with the OffTopic.com crew. Homan (later known as Unconquerable, #1 in SupCom) was in that crew and him and I defined the T1 swarm play style that came about in beta. I got sick of it because I felt it was leaving out 90% of the game in favor of a 'quick win' and went back to casual play after a big run with him in the 2v2 bracket. He went on to further refine that play style with a few others in the SupCom community.
While I appreciate the skill involved in hyper aggressive low tier swarm tactics, I still feel the game is at its best when we're playing with a full deck. That doesn't just mean letting the game get to late tier. It means getting to late tier and NOT massing a huge swarm of UEF T3 gunships or T3 bombers.
It means building an actual combined army and having fun with it, even if it's not as powerful as massing the current imbalanced T3 unit.
It's the boring way to play.
Until the waves of enemies abruptly stopped.
That's okay, that green guy has been trying to nuke everybody, I'm sure all the AI's just turned on green to eliminate the immediate threat, right? .....right?
I take a few spy planes around to the other enemy bases, but find only smoldering ruins lining massive craters. Green (Adaptive Seraphim) already has engineers claiming the mass extraction points that used to be in the enemy base. Spy planes head to green and reveal just how much shit is about to hit the fan, two experimental bombers, two T3 artilleries turning to acquire my base, an experimental walker, an experimental missile launcher, and another experimental missile launcher at 90%. My God. Frantically, I spin up production on T3 bombers, massing 12, I sent them to knock out that missile launcher before it realizes what's happenin-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. The bombers arrive, do their prerequisite first run where they all miss horribly (I call it the calibration pass / warning shot pass), and as they turn they are all knocked out of the sky.
The enemy airborne super-nuke is intercepted as it bears down on my production facility, hopefully I can hold out be-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. SHIT. The artillery starts to hammer my defensive line, all my overlapping shields are failing. I build about 20 spyplanes and then start pumping out strat bombers. My strategic missile defenses are exhausted in the face of the super nuke which takes two to kill it, I hope I don't h-STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED. FLY! Fly! Get clear of the blast zone! The spy planes tear into the enemy base as AA rounds lace the air. The bombers soar in unchallenged and make their calibration pass. The second experimental launcher is at 98%, and now the ACU is helping...
the acu...
BOMBERS! NEW ORDERS! Hit that ACU!
The bombs are released as the super-nuke atomizes my base, my defensive fortresses are desperately trying to fend off the rain of tech 3 artillery but failing, I see a horde of diamond-shaped radar returns marching in formation to my lines with my own experimental walker making a beeline to intercept. The enemy ACU takes 20-something bombs straight to the face and goes nuclear, takes the experimental facility with it and a load of ground forces, SUCCESS! They loop around and, taking advantage of the ACU's detonation effect on shields, pound the experimental launcher into scrap. Not a single bomber made it home that day, but as I looked back at my own base at the 99% complete experimental missile launcher I have been secretly building, I know that their sacrifice was worth it.
I loved doing coordinated air drops. Make a token scout plane, queue up orders to a ton of air transports to pick up a sumo, follow the scout plane, then drop the sumo off at the enemy base (each at a different spot). Self-destruct the scout plane and off they go! (Usually I'd have a flock of bombers carpet bomb the base seconds beforehand to soften air defenses).
Detonate the air transport
What have they done to streamline the economy? My biggest pet peeve with the first one is that if you screw up your economy within the first 30 seconds of gameplay, it's a uphill battle from there on out.
I can already foresee my rage as I put my up-front payment on an experimental as a crashing tech 1 scout plane smashes into it, destroying it
I know the feeling, SupCom 2 and Chaos Rising are both coming out in the same month, I'm not sure which one I'm going to be playing.
From what I've heard about the economy stuff, they're basically trying to streamline the game, make it a bit faster to get going. No more adjacency bonuses for a start, those were always a bit fiddly. I can't remember the details but the PC Gamer review mentioned something about the game being a bit more streamlined.
Main change is the tech trees and the reduced unit counts. Instead of three tech levels, you've got research, with different trees for land, sea, air and ACU (and structures I think?). So basically instead of your T1 tanks being outdated once you get to T2, instead you research upgrades to damage and armour, and other additions like maybe adding a missile rack onto them for AA support. You also unlock new units and experimentals by investing in those trees.
You gain research points by building research centres, and by fighting. I don't know the specifics. In any case it means that you can now focus your efforts on specifically making a superior air force, or ground force.
Other than that, I don't know too much about the economy model itself. They've talked a fair amount about avoiding those situations where your economy "stalls", which is what I think you're referring to. So if they've managed that, that's a good thing.
EDIT: Also what RussianFrank said. No more buildings to "store" resources, and you pay for units up-front instead of having them deducted from your income over time. It's meant to make things more scrutable.
But nobody wants to play it.
My wallet, it burns.
Well that's obvious.
"Strategic Launch Detected [Supreme Commander 2]"
Or something along those lines. Unless you want to save that one for release day. Then something like "Experimental at 95% completion" maybe?
I HATE building the mavor. Man it uses so much resources.
http://g4tv.com/videos/44302/DICE-2010-Hot-Topics-Indie-Games/?quality=hd
And since it was BotP'd:
http://g4tv.com/videos/44302/DICE-2010-Hot-Topics-Indie-Games/?quality=hd
It's a half hour interview with Chris Taylor and Mike Capps (Epic) about what it means to be an independent developer, and what the challenges are. Pretty sobering to hear some of it, but also a lot of optimism and plenty of humour on Chris Taylor's part. Well worth a watch.