Supreme Commander Talk

If you followed the many previews and interviews involving SupCom before it came out, you probably remember a feature that was touted by Chris Taylor several times: the ability of troops to fire out of transports. You may also remember that it was planned for mobile shield generators to function while in transport, as well. This second feature got the axe for obvious balance reasons. Imagine trying to fight several 3000 hit point gunships at only tech 2! I can just imagine almost every game being a race to build tech 2 gunships and mobile shield generators. The only hope for stopping them would be hordes of interceptors, with the hope that some of them would get shots off while inside the mobile shield.

However, the troops firing feature still works, and can be very useful in the right hands. I tested what can and can’t be done, and was able to use both Aeon and Cybran tech 1 transports filled with troops as gunships. The Aeon transports, in particular, were very effective, as they are smaller and harder to hit than the other factions’ transports, and can do quite a bit of damage when loaded with Flare tech 1 assault bots. Strangely, I was unable to get any of the UEF tech 1 units to fire out of the transports, thus leaving that faction out of this little tactic.

What made me remember this little gem, you ask? Why watching a sweet replay involving some top ranked players, of course! In this match, played on Open Palms, the two Commanders actually play very similar games. However, player FunkOff gains a distinct advantage by attacking his opponent with the aforementioned “tech 1 gunships”, as well as good old tech 1 bombers. Being mostly unprepared for this, Ftang is forced to abandon his forward fire base, and shortly thereafter, loses his Commander.

I’m not sure how well this tactic will work against a prepared player. Even tech 1 anti-air can do plenty of damage quickly to essentially stationary targets, and interceptors can certainly take down transports very quickly. Gaining and maintaining air superiority with plenty of interceptors is thus probably key to using this tactic effectively.

Download the replay of this game.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 12:33 pm by Grokmoo and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays, 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.