Wallapalooza
Walls frequently get the shaft from Supreme Commander players. This is a shame, because walls are such useful, under-appreciated units. Let’s take an in-depth look at walls.
First of all, it’s important to note that walls are very, very cheap. Each wall section only costs 2 mass and 10 energy (and counts as one-tenth of a unit). That’s nothing. An Aurora, by contrast, costs 52 mass and 260 energy (and has thirteen times the build time), and an Aeon tech 1 point defense costs a whopping 250 mass and and 2000 energy. That means you could build 120 wall segments for less than the cost of one tech 1 point defense. And walls go up nearly instantaneously. Since they’re so cheap, and basically free, they should be used even if they only offer up a little bit of advantage, right? Except that walls can oftentimes offer up not just a little advantage but a great one.
Walls have 4,000 HP. That’s a lot, especially in contrast to how much they cost and how long it takes to build them. Each hit point on an Aeon tech 1 point defense costs 0.294 mass. By contrast, each hit point on a wall section costs 0.0005 mass. Clearly, simply in terms of efficiency, you’d much rather have your walls taking the damage than your point defenses. And luckily, this is an option.
Most tech 1 units (artillery excluded) fire in fairly low arcs. Just put up five wall sections around a tech 1 point defense in the direction that the enemies are coming from and most tech 1 shots will be absorbed by the walls. This makes a huge difference in terms of how many units your turret will kill, how long it survives, and how much bang for the buck you’ll get on its resource costs. Ideally, you should wrap every point defense building in walls. The only problem is that this requires the free time to micromanage all of the wall construction, and time itself is a resource you may be running low on in competitive multiplayer battles. It might only be worth it to, say, micromanage the construction of walls on your first few pivotal turrets, and then just forget about it later. Using walls around turrets becomes less important later in the game, when the resources invested into each individual turret are no longer a large percentage of your economy.
So far I’ve talked about one use of walls, which was absorbing fire against high-value targets using low-value targets. But there’s another, more obvious use for walls, that hopefully everyone is capable of figuring out on their own. Walls stop units from being able to pass through them. It’s really that simple. Enemies will be forced to either destroy them while under fire, which takes awhile, or use engineers, mantises, or harbingers to reclaim them. Either way, they’re not trivial to get around (well, except for harbingers). And why is stopping enemy units from walking through important?
Simply, you don’t care about defending your defenses for their own sakes. The whole point of your defenses is to protect your base. The most effective attacks (and how all of the good players are attacking) involve sending a swarm of units at the enemy, past their defenses, and into the vulnerable underbelly consisting of the economic buildings and factories inside of their base. Walls will stop the swarms on the outside of your base and give your units and turrets a good amount of time to pummel them into wreckage. I know, multiplayer games can get very hectic, and you frequently forget about lots of things that bring you further from playing the optimal game. But please don’t let forgetting about walls be one of them.
Every time you see enemy units waltzing through your base and destroying your buildings, think to yourself, “Damn, I should’ve built walls.” Every time you see your flimsy point defense turrets being taken out like little more than paper tigers by tech 1 swarms, think to yourself, “Damn, I should’ve built walls.” Every time you see a monkeylord waltzing through your base disintegrating all of your buildings, think to yourself, “Damn …”
Okay, so walls aren’t a cure-all. But they are damn good, and they are being overlooked by too many players. Don’t forget about walls. They’re basically free in terms of resource costs; the only thing to worry about is that each ten wall sections count as one against your unit limit, so it is possible to go overboard and build too many walls. But I’ve never seen that happen in competitive multiplayer. It’s a lot riskier to build too few walls than too many. I hope you’ve enjoyed this treatise on walls, and I hope we see tech 2 walls in the form of a downloadable unit like we did with Total Annihilation soon. Because we need something to keep those icky spiderbots out.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Mantises cannot reclaim, Cybrans aren’t that overpowered :P
I have to say, though I’ve never played TA, SupCom has the best implementation of walls I’ve ever seen in an RTS. Most games walls are 2 shots from any artillery unit and they’re gone, but in SupCom, they can actually survive. The cost of walls really makes em worthwhile too. When I actually manage to remember to use walls, I love em!
April 13th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Nice tactical post! =)
Now if only we had (official GPG) airborne engineers to help build walls more effectively and save-able/loadable/selectable/rotatable construction blueprints so we could place “pre-fab” defensive blueprints for an engineer to build. For example the T1PD with 5 wall sections in front of it.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Monkeylords can’t walk over walls??
April 13th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
This is something that build mode would particularly handy for. It would allow you to put up your walls and PD groups with less time spent micromanaging.
Remember: B starts build mode, clicking the “Build Mode” button in the middle-top of your screen exits build mode.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
ivan: Monkeylords can walk over walls, hence why you wouldn’t be thinking “Damn, I should’ve built walls”, but rather, simply, “Damn …”
April 13th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
good monkeylord humor ;)
April 13th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Monkeylord humor is absolutely the best kind of humor. Accept no substitutes!
April 13th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Monkeylords will destroy the walls as they walk through them. This means the smaller units, like SAB’s, can walk through the wall after the monkeylord goes through. The monkeylord doesn’t have to shoot them, it can just walk through. I suspect the fatboy can do the same.
April 13th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Fatboys can go through walls, but they don’t destroy them.
Galactic Colossi destroy walls as they walk, but don’t always clear a path through a line of walls two walls thick.
April 13th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Nevermind colossi or monkeylords, all that you need to get through some walls are harbingers. It’s quite ridiculous actually, and a bit unbalanced that the other factions’ siege assault bots lack that ability. It really is quite amazing that a single siege bot can absorb more than one wall segment per segment and quickly create a passage into the enemy’s base.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Whats the difference with build mode and normally building other than hotkeys?
April 13th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I know as I get better at this game I’m finding less and less time for things like walls. I’m usually going for an air rush (unless they’re Cybran) with my 2nd factory. So I’m managing my expansion with engineers, attacking various places with tanks, perhaps rushing with my comm, upgrading my economy while trying to manage my combination of interceptors and bombers to take out his engineers and energy.
Somethings got to give! All these things are much more important than defence. If you concentrate on defence you die. I’d rather 4 tanks than 1 PD that may never be used. There’s always something important for your engineer to be doing so walls tend to get forgotten.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Good point, in many games you simply never get defenses because there isn’t the time, nor the spare resources. But in some games you do end up building defenses, and in those games, you should build walls to go along with them.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Molloy, if you’re building PD that may never be used, then you’re building them in the wrong places.
April 13th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I will definatley keep this in mind next time I build early point defence.
April 13th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
In Total Annihilation, I never ended up using the walls, mostly because they came later in life and I had already built a strategy that did not include them. However when first starting with SupCom, I couldn’t help but notice them and use them, as you have said, they really are a nothing thing to build, that turn out to help a great deal. All you need is one engineer to constantly build walls, it really doesn’t take that much micro managing wither, in the early throws of the game you sit around a bit waiting for things to get to get built, or at least I do, so why not just set up a large build order for this engineer, consisting of walls, walls and more walls. If your unit limit is approaching, cntrl-k the walls that were ineffective.
A good idea I had about walls is, instead of a higher tec wall, make the walls stackable, maybe five high. Surly a higher wall would be more likely to stop a monkey lord. Of course this may be less useful as protecting your point defenses, as it would stop fire from both sides. But as a unit stopper it would be great.
April 13th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
*imagines gunships running into 1000 walls stacked ontop of eachother* Now that would be awesome.
April 13th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
That would be an awesome idea for a new unit … an experimental stratospheric wall. It would stick up so high into the air that planes would fly into it and die.
April 13th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Maybe have it be invisible to everything but omni?
April 13th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I also thought that a water wall would be good as well, one that sits just above the surface and extends down to the sea floor. Maybe ships without torpedoes could only destroy the top of the wall and could then get through, but the wall would still keep subs out, until torpedoes distroy the wall at their level, or the sub surfaces.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
@Will (Green) — you can also hit the escape key and that will get you out of Build Mode.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Well it depends on your style of playing. If you are making massive armies and you left little space to let them through then it wont benefit you because it would take forever and instead of the enemy handling lots at a time they will get your bots 1 by 1.
If you turtle this could come to your advantage because it slows them down considerably since they have to fit around 50-80 units through your maze. In this case it could stall them enough for a come back. But if you are playing a map like sult’s clutch and the middle man just plainly made a wall with a small opening in the middle. Might as well just build some transports and transport them there. I like the t2 shields better in the case of aggressive mode because you get protection from air and ground which is a plus and your units can move through easily with ought a hassle unless you spammed point defenses. The down side is that the shield can only last so long till it gives which could be easily taken out with mobile artillery
April 25th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
This is what I like to do. Most of the time PD outrange ground units. So on maps with choke points or any place to stop enemies with small amounts of defences you can build 5-10 pd and put walls far enough forward so that the enemy cant get close enough to fire but is in range of your pd. Instead of surrounding your pd to stop the shots hitting your buildings, stop the enemy shooting at them altogether. They probably could stop out of range of your pd and start shooting the walls but it will take a while. If you have some artillary or nearby bombers/gunships to harass the enemy if they try to destroy the walls you can easily hold off a large ground force with minimal defences. This will obviously not work if the enemy has a lot of artillary but it will stop massive amounts of tanks/sab from running past your defences. Also put up some shields and a lot of t1 pd and maybe another layer of walls a bit closer and it is a nightmare to break through with ground units. Put a 3rd layer of walls behind for extra annoyance. The enemy finally breaks through your shielded pd only to get blocked by a wall. You send in some gunships/bombers to finish them off. And even if they are aeon and use harbingers, even it is slows them down by only 5 seconds and you only kill 1 or 2 units before they breach the wall it still cost you considerably less to put it there than it did for him to make the 1 or 2 units.
Obviously the problem with walls is that they block your troops too but there is 2 options there. you can ctrl-k walls to let your units through or you can ferry them over. This can be useful for counter attacks from areas your enemy wont expect it.