Supreme Commander Talk

Supreme Commander 2 is in the mail! While waiting for its arrival, I’ve been keeping myself occupied with Forged Alliance, which I’ve never played through before. I’ve been playing the missions on hard as UEF and I just completed the fourth mission. Let me just say … wow. GPG was not kidding when they say that these missions are “Hard”.

The game was frantic from start to finish, with me surviving on a knife’s edge throughout. By the final phase of the mission, it was a race to rebuild my buildings as quickly as they were being taken out, thanks to the frequent attacks by experimental walkers and mobile artillery. I was caught woefully unprepared at the conclusion of the previous phase and I didn’t have any T3 point defense ready for the massive waves of enemies that I had no idea were going to be coming. I lost a good amount of my base, but survived thanks to all of those assistant commanders I had been building up to that point (thanks in equal parts to their resource generation, combat prowess, and rapid construction ability).

I finally managed to get an edge on my opponent by building one experimental walker of my own for each experimental corpse of the enemy that I was reclaiming, and then not letting mine die as quickly as his. By the very end of the survival phase I had actually started taking out the enemy’s bases with my surplus of walkers.

It was nice getting a chance to finally play around with Seraphim units (I captured some engineers early on in the game). Overall, it’s hard to say whether I like the Seraphim? The sniper bots are nice, but the T2 point defense seems underpowered (especially compared to the Aeon version). And the experimental walker — well, let’s just say, is it really all that different from the Colossus? The experimental bomber, on the other hand, is nifty.

Forged Alliance is reminding me all over again of why I loved Supreme Commander (and, by extension, Total Annihilation) in the first place. The pace of battle in this mission was furious, and I was glued to my computer screen for the duration. I was even downright antisocial to a guest that my friend had over (thanks, GPG), preferring to continue the game rather than talk with him. The time whizzed by, and at the very end I experienced the immense satisfaction of winning in the face of long odds, knowing that the enemy had thrown everything at me.

If Supreme Commander 2 is as fun as Forged Alliance is, then I’m going to love it, no matter what kinds of changes were made to the economy, the scale of the maps, or whatever else people are complaining about on the forums today. As I sit here and await the imminent arrival of my copy, all I can say is … here’s hoping.

Supreme Commander 2 was released yesterday! I’m curious to hear any first impressions. I don’t have the game yet (I’m quite busy at the moment), but I shall be getting it just as soon as I finish up Forged Alliance.

I figured that, in anticipation of Supreme Commander 2, I should finally get around to playing Forged Alliance, which I had put off for awhile (though Grokmoo’s played through it twice). My Supreme Commander skills were a bit more rusty than I had expected. It took me an hour and forty minutes to beat the first mission on hard. Granted, I was purposefully waiting around a lot to build up the perfect attack force — mobile factories, lots of battleships, dozens of gunships and air superiority fighters, dozens of Tech 3 land units, dozens of SCUs, etc. But it was fun. At this rate I’ll get through Forged Alliance before SupCom2 comes out.

The main reason I’m doing this is to have a good basis of comparison for SupCom2. I’ve heard rumors on the message boards that a lot of things are going to be different, including making the change to a pay-up-front economy a la most other RTSes. But to be able to understand the differences, I first have to establish a baseline. I imagine the first week post-release will be chock full of analyses of what’s been changed.

You can use the comments below to discuss the upcoming changes. Just remember though, everything may be speculative until we have proof otherwise — on March 2, of course.

Supreme Commander 2 is coming out on March 2. It’s already available for preorder at Amazon.

Needless to say, Grokmoo and I will be getting it and playing it. And … who knows, we might even write about it.

Let me know in the comments below if you plan on getting SupCom2. It’ll be fun to have some familiar faces to chat with and play against.

The development of Supreme Commander 2 has been announced. The unexpected part is that the series is switching from its former publisher, THQ, to Square Enix. Yes, that Square Enix, the ones that make Final Fantasy.

This sounds like it could be incredibly awesome, and I’m definitely looking forward to it. No release date is set yet and it’ll probably be a while, but who knows, maybe this blog will become active again with the release of SupCom2.

To the the readers loyal enough to SupComTalk to still be checking to updates to this very day: Rejoice! Grokmoo and I have started a new PC gaming blog called PC Game Fun Time. We’re hoping it’ll be exactly like SupComTalk in its prime (seeing as how much fun we had writing this blog), only because it’s focused on PC gaming in general and not one game in particular, we should be able to keep it going for a much longer time.

So head on over to the very first introductory post and get started. PC gaming is a wide world, and we’ll need suggestions on what to cover now more than ever.

Alrighty folks, so it’s been awhile since Grokmoo and I stopped playing Supreme Commander, but that doesn’t imply anything about you, the readers. If you’re reading this and you’ve ever played Supreme Commander, I want your input on the poll and in the comments if you feel like explaining your vote. Here’s my explanation (and wow, I can’t believe that was all the way back in August). If you haven’t ever played Supreme Commander, don’t bother with the poll, though if you want you can explain why you’re reading this blog at all in the comments below (hopefully it’s because of my witty writing!).

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Chris Taylor, game designer behind Supreme Commander (as if you didn’t already know that), believes that “secure computing” is the future of the PC gaming world. Now he’s not so naive as to think that DRM is the answer (because SecuROM, pretty much the best in the breed, is about as airtight as a shot-up sponge). When he says secure computing, he’s talking about playing games from a central server rather than on individual desktops.

Now there are all sorts of ways to interpret what he’s talking about, because the description given in the article is pretty vague, but I think what he wants is for essential parts of the game not to ship with the client whatsoever. The only way you’d be able to play is while in constant communication with the server. Think World of Warcraft: anyone can make copies the client, but to be able to play the game, you need to log in to one of the servers, which only accepts logins from accounts that are paying the monthly fee. Only Blizzard has the code that runs the servers, so no one can run their own pirate servers. World of Warcraft is thus effectively “secure computing” according to Chris Taylor’s concept.

Sure, it works for MMORPGs, because a central server is necessitated by the nature of the game, and users accept and understand it. But for other games, especially single player games? Are consumers really going to put up with an unnecessary net connection being required to play for no other reason than anti-piracy? That would ruin the experience on laptops, which many people use in situations where net access is not available (think airplanes, buses, or trains).

And this brings up another problem: the gaming company now has to run and maintain an unnecessary server farm to service all of the requests from people playing single player. Keep in mind that these servers won’t merely be doing verification or validation; if they were, you could either spoof a verification server that would always send back “OK”, or simply remove the verification code from the client executable. No, these servers need to be constantly running a critical part of the game that the client doesn’t have so there is no way the server can be excised from the loop. That’s not insignificant.

The nice thing about computer games as they are now is you can pretty much play them indefinitely, so long as you keep your compatible hardware in operating condition. Not too long ago I went back and dug out my old copy of Dune II (on floppy disks, no less), and played through the campaign for old time’s sake. Now imagine if that game had been programmed using the “secure computing” paradigm; what are the odds that, after all these years, those servers would still be running? Very slim! With this form of secure computing, the PC game purchasing experience isn’t like buying a game in the traditional sense; rather, it’s more like purchasing a license of the game that expires whenever the game’s publisher decides it no longer feels like running the server, or goes under.

If Total Annihilation had used secure computing, no one would be able to play it today, because Cavedog has long since gone belly-up.

I understand that copyright infringement is a big problem in the PC gaming world, but I don’t think that “secure computing” is the answer. It’s simply not fair to the consumer to make games require an online component for no other reason than to prevent unauthorized copying. That’s too punishing of the people who buy the game legally. Thus, I really think multiplayer games with value-added server components (think MMORPGs or matchmaking services like GPGnet) are the future of PC gaming. There’s simply no good way to make a single player game pirate-proof.

Update 2008-02-28: Version 2 of this post is now published on Cyde Weys Musings. Why did I modify it and post it elsewhere? Two posts for the price of 1.5, that’s why! Seriously though, I do discuss some solutions that would make the secured computing initiative more palatable to consumers, so Chris Taylor — go read that one too.

After just my first hour of playing Supreme Commander those many months ago, I knew strategic zoom was something amazing, and that it would revolutionize the real time strategy genre. The ability to fluidly zoom out and see the entire battlefield, then zoom back in just as quickly to a hot spot of interest, was such an enhancement to the gameplay that I couldn’t believe I had ever played RTSs without it. Try going back to an RTS that uses a minimap — you’ll see how agonizing it is, how much harder it is to marshal your forces on a grand scale. I also recall, within my very first hour of playing Supreme Commander, I vowed that I would never play another RTS that lacked strategic zoom ever again. So far I’ve made good on that vow. Thankfully, there’s Sins of a Solar Empire.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a 4X space game in the same vein of Masters of Orion or Galactic Civilizations, except instead of being turn-based, it’s real time, thus making it an RTS. I’ve only had a little bit of time with it so far, but Grokmoo has played it a lot more than I, and we both love it. One of its best features? Strategic zoom, naturally. I wouldn’t exactly call it a rip-off of Supreme Commander, as a lot of space games before Supreme Commander had maximal zoom capability. Of course, it’s much more of an accomplishment to do it in a game like Supreme Commander, because you have all the terrain to worry about; in a space game, the planets and such just scale smaller with distance, and the background (stars or whatever) can remain unchanged. But just because it isn’t as big of an achievement as Supreme Commander’s strategic zoom doesn’t mean that I appreciate it any less.

Strategic zoom is amazing. As Supreme Commander fans, we all know this. So it’s such a relief that it’s starting to pop up with regularity in other RTSs. Hopefully, within a few year’s time, it will be a standard feature of the genre. Any game lacking it would be judged an outright failure, much like how the ability to assign units to groups in RTSs and give them simultaneous orders obsoleted all RTSs before them. Unfortunately, StarCraft 2 looks it it’s going to heavily challenge my vow of not playing another RTS without strategic zoom. What in the hell was Blizzard thinking? They’re displaying the same short-sightedness as the stagecoach builders in the early 1900s who, after seeing the first automobiles, thought that they were nothing more than just a passing fad, and cheerily returned to strapping animals onto awkward wheeled wooden boxes. Once you see the future, how can you turn a blind eye? Strategic zoom is as transformative for RTSs as the automobile was for transportation, and we haven’t nearly seen the full ramifications of that sea change yet.

Well, my shortlived contribution to SupCom Talk is over, at least for now.  I realize this may be disappointing to some, but the truth is that writing regularly on a blog takes a fair amount of time and effort, and when you are one of the only people writing posts it becomes even more difficult to take the time to put out quality writing on a regular basis.  Having a kid recently has certainly cut down my available playing time as well.

However, all that said, the principle reason I have subsided in my writing is that I have gotten into the World of Warcraft lately.  Now I realize many people have strong feelings about this game, a lot of them negative.  I have played EVE Online before which is an extremely hardcore Sci Fi MMO and, while I greatly enjoyed it, it just didn’t fit my lifestyle.  WoW on the other hand is much more casual and, best of all, I got my wife into it too which means we can play together.  Now I don’t know how many of you are married, but I love my wife very much and she has always been very understanding of my gaming.  The ability to play a game with her is worth a lot to me as it is rare that we find a game we both like.  So with what limited gaming time I have now I primarily adventure with my wife around the World of Warcraft and to be honest I am loving it.

Now unlike Cyde Weys original departure post, I have not actually lost any interest in Supreme Commander.  The Forged Alliance expansion fixed any and all issues I had with the game, and I bought my new computer with Forged Alliance in mind.  Supreme Commander remains my RTS of choice, and I still get a game in every now and then.  It may very well be that I will start playing more often in the future, as I don’t see another RTS coming out that would pull me away from SupCom.  I’m basically just taking a break from the RTS genre in general when it comes to large commitments of my gaming time.

As for SupCom Talk, I sincerely hope it stays alive.  There is so little community for this great game and this blog has been a bastion of great discussion in the past.  I fully intend to keep my account on the blog and as future opportunities arrive I would greatly like to post again.  I’ll just have to wait and see.

So this isn’t really goodbye or anything, just an explanation for why I have stopped posting frequently after such a short time.  Hopefully you’ll see more posts and comments from me in the future, in the meantime I hope you are enjoying the great game that is Supreme Commander and that if you do take a break you will come back again down the road.  Also, anyone interested in contributing articles is welcome to let me know by posting a comment on the site and I will get in touch with you.