Supreme Commander Talk

Veterancy had the potential to impact gameplay in Supreme Commander, but unfortunately, it was “play balanced” out to the point of utter meaningless. Back in Total Annihilation, units received veteran status after five kills, and they became noticeably better. Artillery would shoot more accurately, tanks would deal more damage (I think), etc. It made it worth it to keep units around. However, Supreme Commander has changed up the veterancy formula, and not in a good way.

The units database has all of the information one could possibly want about unit statistics. It tells you how many hit points each unit has, how fast it can move, how much damage its crash deals when falling from the sky, what degrees of freedom (both rotation and pitch) its turrets have, and oh yeah, what its veterancy levels are and what effects they have. Let’s take a look at a few representative units to see how the veterancy formula is skewed to the point of meaninglessness.

Let’s take a look at the Cybran Torpedo Bomber. The number of kills required for its veterancy levels are 15, 30, 75, 150, and 300. That’s right, just to attain the first veterancy level a torpedo bomber has to score fifteen kills. Nevermind how unlikely that is; most torpedo bombers don’t even get a single kill, because they are typically used en masse against larger, more expensive, high-value targets, such as capital ships, submersed experimental units, commanders, etc. And even assuming somehow that you managed to rack up 300 kills on a torpedo bomber, here are the benefits it’d get: a 50% increase in maximum health, repair of 1 hit point per second, and an increase in Damage Per Second (here on out referred to as DPS) of 49%. That’s it! For 300 kills! For a “measly” 15 kills, an accomplishment in its own right that is never likely to happen in a real game, the bonus is just a pathetic 25% increase in DPS.

The mech marine has similarly ridiculous veterancy requirements. It needs five kills just to increase its DPS by 27%! After 5 more kills, it gains an additional 18 hit points. Wow, I’m sure that’ll blow the enemies away. Also, look at the Aeon tech 3 artillery. It needs 100 kills just to reach its second veterancy level, and the reward is a completely useful 1000 hit point boost. Yay! At 250 kills its DPS is boosted by a total of 50% (25% coming from veterancy level 1). At veterancy level 5, which requires a whopping 1000 kills, the reward is … a repair of 2 hit points per second. Hey, if I manage to get 1000 kills out of an artillery, each shell should impact with a nuclear explosion. Not this utterly useless trivial hit point repair.

This pattern repeats across all of the units. The veterancy levels are universally set way too high, to the point that most units will never even see their first veterancy level in any real game. There are only three kinds of rewards: hit point boost, automatic repair, and damage boost, and they are given out uniformly to all units, even when it is nonsensical to do so. Why does artillery need more hit points or a repair rate? Are those extra 1000 hit points really going to prevent it from taken out by a strategic bomber? No way.

So the sad but necessary advice to all of you players out there is to simply ignore the unit kill counts and veterancy levels. They’re meaningless. They’ve been “play balanced” out of the equation.

Not that they can’t be fixed, of course, and I really hope that a future patch does address this issue. I would like to see veterancy level kill requirements cut across the board, probably by a factor of five to ten. Make the veterancy levels actually achievable in real games. And make the veterancy awards relevant to the unit types. Veteran artillery should be significantly more accurate; it doesn’t need automatic repair. If a mech marine manages to kill five enemies it deserves a many-fold increase in its hit points, not a measly 26%. Veteran units could have the effectiveness of their abilities increase; for instance, a high-level Galactic Colossus veteran could vacuum up enemy units more often and from farther away. I really wonder what the play balancers were thinking when they nerfed veterancy into oblivion. It needs to be fixed and it needs to actually have an impact on the game, so that it’s really worth saving your units and gaining them experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:50 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Strategy. Keywords: Tags: artillery, kill count, mech marine, nerf, play balance, Strategy, Supreme Commander, torpedo bomber, Total Annihilation, veteran, veterancy. 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.