Supreme Commander Talk

Supreme Commander’s User Interface (UI) is really easy and efficient to use, once you get the hang of it. However, there are a number of tricks that are not intuitively obvious, which many people may not know about. Here is a list of a few that I know of:

1. Formations. I can’t imagine playing this game without these. With a group of units selected, right click and hold, and then drag in the direction you want your units to face. You will see an outline of what the formation will look like. While holding, you can left click to cycle through several different formations.
2. Ferrying. This one took me a little while to figure out, but it is actually quite easy and very useful. Select a single transport, and move it to where you want the ferry to pick up units. Now, click the ferry button, and then click where you want the ferry to drop off units. Now, you can select units and right click on the ferry icon underneath your transport to get them to load up. You can also select other transports and have them assist the ferrying transport. With 10 or more transports on a ferry route, you can move even large forces quickly.
3. Artillery ranges. This one is really simple. When you select a piece of artillery, the solid inner ring is actually the minimum distance the artillery can shoot. This can lead to confusion, especially with tech 3 artillery on the small maps, where you actually can’t see the dashed maximum range circle because it is so huge (about 20 km).
4. Moving queued up buildings and patrol routes. If you hold down shift with a construction unit selected, you can see all the buildings you have ordered it to construct. Using left click, you can drag around already placed structures. Also, you can drag around already placed patrol points in the same manner.
5. Pause and Repeat buttons. For all the factories, there are buttons underneath the tech level buttons for pause and repeat. Using repeat, you can queue up a small force (for example, 3 tanks, 1 aa piece and an artillery piece) and have the same set of units built over and over. This allows you to easily produce a balanced force. The pause button allows you to order a factory to halt production, which is very useful when you are in a resource crunch, but don’t want to lose your queued up units.

There are quite a few other tricks, which I’ll post later. These should probably give most people something to play around with for a while though.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 2:00 pm by Grokmoo and is filed under Strategy. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.