Five-player free-for-all at sea
I just finished watching a ridiculous replay that pits five of Supreme Commander’s best players against each other on a large naval map. Here’s my extensive overview of the game. Before you begin reading this, though, you might want to download the replay.
The map has six main islands arranged in a circle around the outer rim of the map. Outside of them are twelve smaller islands, and inside, six smaller islands. The inside islands were never used. The outside islands were used when players’ primary bases were destroyed. Here are the starting positions and factions, working from the top and proceeding clockwise:
- Mentel - Aeon
- unoccupied
- RapierX - Aeon
- Unconquerable - UEF
- DeadLegion - UEF
- Ar-Bee - UEF
Beginning of the game
The game starts, with everyone doing the usual beginning-of-game thing. Since it is a free-for-all, people concentrate more on building themselves up than trying to take others down, at least in the beginning.
RapierX and Unconquerable spar over the sixth unoccupied island, but nobody ends up getting it yet. Mentel comes in with a destroyer and wipes out most of Unconquerable’s expansion base on the island. Mentel then gets quite the large fleet, and nearly pounds Unconquerable into submission on his main island. Meanwhile, DeadLegion air-lifts a bunch of Tech 3 siege bots onto Mentel’s island, causing significant losses through friendly fire by Mentel’s Tech 2 point defenses. The assault is quickly taken down, but after a lot of damage is taken. Then, Ar-Bee then makes his move and attacks Mentel’s island with his fleet (including a battleship), and kills all of Mentel’s naval factories.
Unconquerable is nearly defeated, but ends up repelling Mentel’s attack, after heavy losses, with judicious use of heavy shields and some Tech 3 gunships to kill the destroyers. Ar-Bee keeps working on the battleships and soon has three of them pounding away at Mentel’s island, turning the whole western part of it into rubbish heap. Mentel temporarily holds off the assault with a line of heavy shield generators down the midsection of his island.
Meanwhile, RapierX has built himself quite a large fleet and is busy dotting his entire island with heavy shield generators. DeadLegion is building a Tech 3 heavy artillery installation. Ar-Bee starts working on a Fatboy and his first fusion reactor (it probably wasn’t a good idea to wait so long to start one, as his shields are flickering terribly). Unconquerable is still rebuilding, but isn’t putting nearly enough priority on reclaiming the three mass spots on his island that were destroyed by Mentel’s bombardment.
Suddenly, a huge explosion on Mentel’s island just 28 minutes into the game! Mentel’s Commander is taken down, and because this is assassination, he loses! I didn’t actually catch what killed him though (I wish playback had rewind functionality). It looked like his commander was on the edge of the island for some reason? I guess he got hit by Ar-Bee’s battleships. It’s too bad, too, because Mentel had just successfully air-dropped four upgraded Support Commanders onto Unconquerable’s island, which would’ve made for a great battle.
Midgame
At 30 minutes, Unconquerable finishes his first Fatboy. Wonder what he’s going to use it for? RapierX is working on an anti-nuke: a smart decision. Ar-Bee sends his fleet, which now has four battleships in it, south, to attack DeadLegion. He also walks a Support Commander along the bottom of the ocean to claim Mentel’s now-abandoned island. C’mon man, use a transport!
DeadLegion attacks Ar-Bee’s fleet with all of his Broadswords, but doesn’t even manage to take out one battleship. This is bad news for DeadLegion. He does have a heavy artillery that is up and running and pounding Ar-Bee’s island, but the destruction is too slow (and the accuracy too off), that unless he gets really lucky and snipes Ar-Bee’s commander, he’s toast.
Ar-Bee starts focus firing with his battleships on DeadLegion’s Tech 3 air factories. He really doesn’t want to deal with more Broadswords. Ar-Bee completes a Fatboy at his base and sends it lumbering off towards DeadLegion’s base. Meanwhile, RapierX and Unconquerable have been left in temporary peace. Unconquerable finishes off his Fatboy and starts work on a Mavor, while RapierX is making an absolutely colossal naval fleet.
At 34 minutes into the game, it’s really not looking good for DeadLegion. Ar-Bee’s battleships have just taken out his Tech 3 heavy artillery and about half of his base. He really should have invested more resources into shields and island defenses before going for that artillery. His island was lightly defended and easily taken out by naval bombardment.
Ar-Bee is using focus fire with his battleships very effectively to pinpoint the buildings that he knows need to be destroyed first. Also, with four battleships firing away, they easily cut through the sole remaining shield that DeadLegion has. DeadLegion flees the island with his Commander and Support Commanders. He realizes he’s lost it. But he won’t have much of a chance to get reestablished elsewhere. Ar-Bee should have set up a submarine blockade to prevent anything from fleeing from the island.
DeadLegion air-drops his few remaining siege bots onto Ar-Bee’s island, but inflicts only minimal casualties. RapierX has finally consolidated his position on the original unoccupied island, while Ar-Bee is busy taking over Mentel’s vacated island. And that’s it for DeadLegion’s base. At 38 minutes, Ar-Bee has encircled it with his fleet and is pulverizing the few remaining buildings. DeadLegion manages to get his engineers safely off the island before the encirclement, however.
DeadLegion starts building naval factories in the far northeastern corner of the map. I wonder what he’s doing? Without land-based resources he won’t be able to really build anything. Two of his surviving Support Commanders do have the resources upgrade, though, so he’s still in the game, just base-less.
Meahwile, Unconquerable has been heavily teching-up on his island. Despite not really getting many kills, he’s in the points lead, and his resource flow puts him far above any of the other players. He has three Fatboys defending his island, which is good, because Ar-Bee’s fleet, which now has six battleships, turns towards his island. RapierX, meanwhile, sends out his fleet to attack Ar-Bee, but curiously, RapierX doesn’t have many battleships in his fleet.
The battle between Ar-Bee and Unconquerable is on! Unconquerable’s Fatboys prove surprisingly ineffective against the battleships, as one is destroyed and one forced to flee underwater. Ar-Bee’s navy, meanwhile, takes considerably damage from Unconquerable’s sueprior air force, which uses air superiority fighters to establish dominance over Ar-Bee’s interceptors and Broadswords to take out some of the battleships. Ar-Bee’s Fatboy tries to make landfall but is quickly destroyed.
Unconquerable’s island takes a pounding from Ar-Bee’s three remaining battleships, which are finally whittled away using air power. He should have sent in more cruisers. RapierX’s fleet begins heavily bombarding Ar-Bee’s inadequately protected island (too bad Ar-Bee sent his fleet off to Unconquerable to die). DeadLegion is making a comeback, and has secured the northeasternmost two small islands and has cloaked them with stealth field generators.
Ar-Bee sends all of his support commanders into the water and starts reclaiming RapierX’s fleet, causing him to withdraw somewhat! This is a strategy I’ve never seen before. RapierX has a good-sized submarine blockade, but each Support Commander has 20,000 hit points, and each submarine is reclaimed in less than a second. This could get ugly. Suddenly, four of RapierX’s CZARs loom over Ar-Bee’s island! Where did these come from?! I totally missed it. He also has a submersible aircraft carrier on the way.
The CZARs, in formation, sweep across the island once, then twice, their ID4 rays at full power. That’s it; the island is gone. What an impressive way to clear an island. I bet Ar-Bee is kicking himself for not building more SAM missile launchers. However, RapierX’s celebration is short-lived, as Unconquerable’s considerable air force comes out and starts molesting him. And Ar-Bee’s support commanders have managed to reclaim a considerable number of boats.
Unconquerable has over two dozen support commanders assisting a Tech 3 naval yard, pumping out battleships at ridiculous rates. DeadLegion has been rebuilding his forces nicely, and has 13 naval yards pumping out a fleet, and is also working on building a nuke. RapierX is forced to withdraw his fleet to defend his home island before he has totally destroyed Ar-Bee, as Unconquerable’s fleet begins bombarding RapierX’s home island.
At this point I’m getting slightly confused, because RapierX has submersible aircraft carriers, which are a UEF unit, and submersible battleships, which are an Aeon unit. I guess somewhere during all of the combat RapierX managed to get his hands on a UEF engineer. This is a big advantage for him. Unconquerable is trying to use his torpedo bombers to take out RapierX’s submersible aircraft carriers, which he’s basically using like advanced submarines, but the torpedos simply aren’t doing enough damage to the 65,000 hit point monstrosities.
Meanwhile, Ar-Bee is rebuilding on Mentel’s old island and DeadLegion has recovered quite nicely. DeadLegion discovers Ar-Bee’s new island with his submarine fleet and prepares to send out something to wipe him out. Unconquerable finally prioritizes finishing up his Mavor, putting about a dozen support commanders on it. Unconquerable’s continual bombardment of RapierX’s island wears down his shields, and a volley gets through and destroys the Mavor that he had under development.
Endgame
At one hour and four minutes into the game, the first nuke is fired. DeadLegion targets Unconquerable’s island, but he has an anti-nuke. Another nuke is fired, and immediately over a dozen of Unconquerable’s support commanders go into action, assisting his anti-nuke building. DeadLegion’s second nuke impacts Ar-Bee’s island, destroying most of it. Meanwhile, one of his battleships is pounding on the remnants, including Ar-Bee’s fleeing commander.
The third nuke is sent against Unconquerable’s island, but it is easily repelled. Unconquerable’s battleships have continued to punish RapierX’s island, which is now also coming under devastating fire from Unconquerable’s Mavor. RapierX is losing.
Ar-Bee has basically given up and has turned all of his buildings off except a Tech 1 aircraft factory which he is using to build scouts, presumably to see what’s going on in the rest of the map. His role is now little more than spectator. DeadLegion’s submarines encircle his island, cutting off escape.
Suddenly, the nukes really start going wild. It’s Armageddon day. DeadLegion has three nukes in the air enroute to Unconquerable’s island, while Unconquerable retaliates with his newly-minted nuke launcher. Maybe he should do some scouting and re-prioritize his Mavor to take out DeadLegion’s nuke launcher? RapierX is temporarily out of the fight. Ar-bee is permanently taken out of the fight, as DeadLegion’s battleship finally takes out his commander. Now there are just three combatants left.
But wait, Unconquerable’s nuke is heading towards RapierX’s island! It doesn’t look like he realizes who’s nuking him! Unconquerable’s anti-nuke malfunctions somehow, and DeadLegion’s third nuke gets through, detonating on the northern end of Unconquerable’s island. This was just bad targetting on his part; there’s nothing there! Had he aimed at the middle of the island, Unconquerable would be dead now. Unconquerable is definitely waking up and I think he’ll be building another anti-nuke very shortly.
DeadLegion fires another nuke, this time taking out RapierX’s expansion island (the one island that was initially left unoccupied). DeadLegion sends his submarine wolfpack at Unconquerable, but they are heavily harassed by Unconquerable’s multitude of torpedo bombers, and none of the submarines end up causing any real damage. Unconquerable’s Mavor continues cleaning up RapierX’s main island.
Now this is bizarre. Unconquerable fires off a nuke at the southern portion of Ar-Bee’s deserted main island. But there’s nothing there to hit whatsoever. There isn’t even anything within 10 or 15km. It’s an utter waste of a nuke, and Unconquerable should definitely be scouting out his targets rather than blindly firing off his nukes. It’s clear he still doesn’t know where DeadLegion is launching all of his nukes from. Unconquerable finally sends out scout planes, but only after wasting a nuke.
Unconquerable’s battleship bombardment apparently took out RapierX’s anti-nuke, because Unconquerable’s next nuke detonates square in the center of RapierX’s island, taking out most of it. Combine this with DeadLegion’s earlier nuking of RapierX’s expansion island and RapierX is in grave peril indeed. At 75 minutes into the game, Unconquerable’s second Mavor comes online. He also fires two more nukes, which take out most of RapierX’s shipyards, and curiously, a part of his fleet. This last nuke was poorly targetted, and would’ve done significantly more damage if fired at RapierX’s remaining small island. Unconquerable really needs to do more scouting. He has scouted out all of the main islands and verified that they are deserted, but he still hasn’t found DeadLegion’s small bases in the northeastern part.
Unconquerable nukes the middle of the ocean, killing nothing. It’s really becoming questionable how he’s using these things. If he had just spent 1/1000th of the resources on scouting as he has on these nukes he’d have won the game already. A bunch more nukes go flying. Unconquerable takes out a few more of RapierX’s buildings and part of his wolfpack, while DeadLegion tries to nuke Unconquerable’s battleship fleet, but largely misses. Nukes are basically flying continuously at this point and it’s hard to keep track of them. Unconquerable has three Mavors up and running and is working on a fourth. Now, if he’d just scout out DeadLegion’s base he would win the game. RapierX has nearly been eliminated, and just has a small single-mass-point island remaining that is incredibly vulnerable to being nuked, if only someone scouted it out.
A nuke strikes the western edge of Unconquerable’s island, taking out the strategic missile defense he had just completed and was trying to build the first anti-nuke in. Unconquerable realized he was vulnerable before he was hit, but didn’t take care of it soon enough. RapierX’s final island is finally nuked, and now he’s only left with his fleet and his fleeing commander and support commanders. Unconquerable is finally using strategic bombers, and uses them to take out the remnants of RapierX’s fleet, which were sent on a suicide attack against Unconquerable’s base.
Unconquerable’s score is now in the ten million range, almost three times his closest competitor’s. Unconquerable finally finds RapierX’s commander, which had fled to the southeast corner of the map, and takes him out with torpedo bombers. It’s now down to just two players. I still don’t think Unconquerable has realized where DeadLegion’s base is. But when he does, four Mavors are going to firing relentlessly upon it. It’s only a matter of time.
At 90 minutes, Unconquerable’s planes finally find DeadLegion’s two bases. The end is near. Immediately the nukes and artillery shells start flying. It only takes a few minutes.
There’s a large explosion at the southeast corner of Unconquerable’s main island. I can’t tell if it’s DeadLegion’s commander exploding during a suicide attack, or if a nuke found its mark, but immediately the message comes up that DeadLegion’s commander has been destroyed and that he has lost. That’s it; game over at 93 minutes. Unconquerable comes back from a rather bad drubbing early on to win the entire game.
Lessons learned:
- Scouting is absolutely essential. In Unconquerable had just done a little bit more scouting the game would’ve been over a lot sooner.
- Experimental units (besides the Mavor) are mostly useless on a large naval map. The Fatboy (or crawling battleship) is no doubt good on land maps, but against real floating battleships it can’t hold its own. It’s even outranged by the real deal.
- Battleships rule the seas. The most effective base-destroying attacks were carried out by battleship bombardment.
- Torpedo bombers really aren’t that effective, especially against naval units with tens of thousands of hit points, but you don’t have a choice. No other air unit can hit submerged units. So you have to hold your nose and just use lots of them.
- Strategic bombers were underused and could have done a lot of damage against some of the bases, which weren’t guarded very heavily against air units.
- The Mavor is ridiculously effective on larger maps, even moreso than nukes. You can stave off nukes with anti-nukes. No shield can hold up against even a single Mavor, however.
- Enemies that are merely down-and-out aren’t yet defeated. It’s worth the extra time and resources to make sure someone is completely defeated, rather than just temporarily set back.
March 11th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
“At one hour and four minutes into the game, the first nuke is fired. DeadLegion targets Unconquerable’s island, but he has an anti-nuke. ” Actually he didnt, he built it while the missile was in route, completed a missile JUST before the nuke would land. He escaped death by mere seconds :).
“I can’t tell if it’s DeadLegion’s commander exploding during a suicide attack”
It was, :).
“Now this is bizarre. Unconquerable fires off a nuke at the southern portion of Ar-Bee’s deserted main island. But there’s nothing there to hit whatsoever” It was bazzare as ar-bee was listed as defeated. However if you switch to unconqs view you can see some ghost radar signatures of buildings there.
“and none of the submarines end up causing any real damage. Unconquerable’s Mavor continues cleaning up RapierX’s main island”
I told them to attack his t3 sea factory, but due to some strange reason the sub torpedoes went through the lab and circled aruond over and over….. I finally surfaced the subs to use their deck gun but the dps was too little to significantly damage the lab before the torp bombers took them out.
” Unconquerable’s anti-nuke malfunctions somehow, and DeadLegion’s third nuke gets through, detonating on the northern end of Unconquerable’s island.”
It didnt malfunction, i launched the nuke just outside the defense radius of the anti nuke. And it took out 4 massfabs.
“Meanwhile, one of his battleships is pounding on the remnants, including DeadLegion’s fleeing commander.” You mean Ar-Bee’s fleeing commander.
“At this point I’m getting slightly confused, because RapierX has submersible aircraft carriers, which are a UEF unit, and submersible battleships, which are an Aeon unit. I guess somewhere during all of the combat RapierX managed to get his hands on a UEF engineer. ” He captured Unconq’s land fac on the unoccupied Island.
Just some clarification on some of the goings on, pretty good overview of the match however.
March 11th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for the comments. I’ve fixed the part about Ar-Bee’s fleeing commander, because that was just me mistakenly using the wrong name. I don’t want to change anything else, though, as I want to keep an accurate record of what I saw first-time through the replay, even though some of it was confused or wrong (I had no idea about the false radar signatures Unconq saw, for instance). People can always read your clarifications and see what actually went on, from someone who was there. There’s a lot of replay there to watch, and it’s easy to miss stuff. Unfortunately, since you can’t rewind something, once you’ve missed it, you have to start over the entire thing from scratch, which I wasn’t prepared to do!
I noticed RapierX using a lot of experimentals, including submersible battleships, submersible aircraft carriers, and CZARs. I’m just wondering how effective they were though. The experimental naval units just seem to be bested by plain old battleships. Were I playing that game, I would’ve gone for standard battleships, nukes, and Mavors. I just don’t think most of the experimentals that were brought out contributed enough to the fight to make them worth it.
March 11th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
They weren’t worth it. I’d have been better off getting more battleships/subs out really.
March 11th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Well the atlantas has torpedoes which it can use to attack battleships with impuntinty (as long as you keep them underwater), battleships do not have any anti-sub armaments. He definatly had the oppurtunity to go on the offense with those ships but he didnt.
March 11th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
RapierX: Ah well, lessons learned, right? I would’ve made the same mistake you did. The best naval strategy really just seems to be mass-produced battleships and submarines (and maybe cruisers for air defense if you don’t have lots of fighters). I just wish there was an advanced sub in SupCom like there is in Total Annihilation (it was named the Leviathan I think?).
The islands on this map are small enough that they can be completely annihilated by naval units. So control the seas, and you win. Ironically enough, after watching this replay and writing the summary, the next ranked game I played was on the exact same map. I mass-produced battleships and destroyers and utterly owned him. I have to thank you guys for your replay, otherwise I wouldn’t have known the optimal naval strategy.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
The fatboy Unconquerable had parked just off Rapier’s shore won him that sea battle, honestly - it was taking out every ship that approached, while the battleships were focusing on punching through Rapier’s shields to the nearly completed Mavor. There’s a reason Rapier risked his commander to blow it away with an OP shot.
The two fatboys on the west end of Unconquerable’s island actually did quite a bit of damage to Ar-Bee’s fleet - yes, one was blown up while the other went underwater to start harrassing the battleships with torpedoes, but they gave Unconqerable timeenough to get enough Broadswords up and running to blunt the attack. The Fatboy on the east end chewed Ar-Bee’s Fatboy up and spit it out once it came out of the water.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Oh, nearly forgot - the nukes into the water that you were calling terrible moves - to me, they looked like he was trying to nuke that sub pack.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Haha, someone noticed my OCing of the fatboy. That thing was owning me so bad.
March 11th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
A few points that were missed in the overview:
I cringed seeing Ar-Bee’s support commander, having taken Mental’s island, just sit there basically until Ar-Bee lost his own island. Also, Ar-Bee started building Mass Extractors once his primary base was down - this is a mistake - he should have been reclaiming the wreckage of Mental’s and consolidating on the island.
Also, cringed at RapierX’s Atlantis subs on the surface being pounded by battleships in late game - keep them toggled underwater.
I wouldn’t say Fatboys are worse against battleships - they fire a lot faster than a battleship and so deal more damage. Battleships just need to stay in the 600 m radius around the Fatboy where the battleship can hit it, but the Fatboy doesn’t have the range (around 2 km away).
One of the nukes launched by DeadLegion, that hit Unconq’s North Western side, was very lucky - Unconq had a group of support commanders huddled together near there, and the nuke managed to destroy all of them with the final damage shockwave.
Final Czar in the attack from RapierX could have taken Ar-Bee’s commander early - too bad they can’t see underwater!
Great replay all in all.
March 11th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Wow, I had noticed that Fatboy chewing up his ships, but I didn’t notice that it was taken out by a Commander’s overcharge. Gutsy move. I’m wondering why it couldn’t just be taken out with battleships though? Battleships do out-range it.
March 12th, 2007 at 2:46 am
My guess would be that he was kind of worried about the 5 battleships that were sitting there shelling his island and any passing ships - any battleship coming close enough to shoot at the fatboy also had to get in range of the fleet.
March 12th, 2007 at 11:58 am
“One of the nukes launched by DeadLegion, that hit Unconq’s North Western side, was very lucky - Unconq had a group of support commanders huddled together near there, and the nuke managed to destroy all of them with the final damage shockwave.” Protip here - identify where the enemy anti nuke is, select a t3 engineer, or SCU and click the strategic missile defense icon and hover it over the enemy anti nuke. You can see its exact range that way and fire the nuke outside of its range and let the shockwave do the work.
March 12th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Excellent tip DeadLegion, I was wondering how you were calculating what counted as just outside range; were you estimating? But your tip makes so much more sense. Get the exact range in-game by using a template on the actual unit. Brilliant.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Nice summary of the match, will definately watch it.
Just one tip for wouldbe (anti-)nukers:
Some factions can build Strategic defence missile launchers on water aswell, to protect your precious naval base and fleet.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:21 am
I feel really bad for the factions that can’t build anti-nukes on water (I forget which one(s) those are). That’s a rather bad disadvantage on a naval base. It’d probably be a good idea to build an anti-nuke to cover the rally point where your fleet gathers after construction. Otherwise your developing fleet would always be getting nuked back to the stone age.
Unrelated to the discussion at hand, but Stonager is clearly the best name for a nuke launcher ever.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I was under the impression that all factions could build anti-nukes on water. Thinking about it, though, the Aeon ABM silo’s icon is all green, so I would be that they can’t.
Also, this text bx behaves very, very badly in IE on this machine. It resizes horizontally every time I type a character.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Wow, I see what you mean, it does look really silly in Internet Explorer. I’ll take a look at what’s going on and see what’s causing it. None of us noticed it because we all use Firefox, which doesn’t have these issues.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I use Fx2 at home and on my laptop, but I’m on a school machine with only IE6. I’m trying to get used to looking at the preview to check for typos.
March 13th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
As you can see in the replay though, nukes fired at fleets generally can easily be avoided by just changing your fleets direction/speed. So anti nuke on water is only useful in the fact that it can prevent static buildings from being destroyed by nukes. But you can just build them close enough to shore if you are of a different faction.