Supreme Commander Talk

Last night we played the 6-way FFA that I announced earlier in the week. The contestants were Grokmoo, Lefeu, Ftang, Maelos, Youkai, and myself. I had originally planned on having the match on Saltrock Colony, but allowed myself to be persuaded into holding the battle on The Scar instead. This ended up being a poor decision. Click on the thumbnail picture of The Scar to see a larger version in case you’ve never played it (and you probably haven’t, since it’s not in any of the ladder rotations):

The Scar is relatively low-mass, very constricted, and full of choke points. Games are almost doomed to reach the endgame and then be resolved — not even with experimentals (excluding the Mavor and Scathis) — but rather, with massed T3 artillery or nukes. The map isn’t very dynamic, and there aren’t really any good land battles, even at T3. It’s simply way too easy to turtle in, because attacks can only come from a few directions.

As for the battle itself: Lefeu skirmished with Ftang early on, forcing Ftang on the defensive. Ftang ended up dropping out of the game fairly on. I’m not sure what happened; maybe connection issues? Grokmoo tried attacking me with siege bots (and then later, two Galactic Colossi), but I staved off the attacks with an overwhelming number of T2 point defense turrets. Then I transported five SCUs near Maelos’ base and marched them in, killing his commander. His economy had been lagging behind the rest of us and he didn’t have any SCUs yet. Grokmoo was the next to go down. I completed a nuke launcher around the 35 minute mark and tried nuking Grokmoo, but was stymied by his anti-nuke. No matter. Lefeu soon attacked Grokmoo with a Scathis, and when the anti-nuke went down, I seized the opportunity and nuked him to oblivion. Then, I caught his fleeing commander with my strategic bombers.

Youkai was the next to go down. He got hit hard by Lefeu’s Scathises, and again, once the anti-nuke was taken out, I nuked him to oblivion, then took out his fleeing support commanders with strategic bombers (see the pattern here?). He actually successfully fled somewhere with his commander, but ended up bowing out after it was clear he was very far behind and we were experiencing some bad lag problems. So then it was down to just Lefeu and me.

That’s when I messed up. I had enough air superiority fighters and strategic bombers to take out two anti-nukes, but I only saw and attacked one, thus losing all of my air units without taking out enough of his anti-nukes to make a difference. So my nukes were destroyed by his anti-nukes. Meanwhile, he built three nuke launchers and took advantage of holes in my anti-nuke coverage and nuked me to oblivion, and thus, he won the game. I definitely could have played a lot better. I had scouted out his multiple nuke launchers early enough and should have paid more attention to my own anti-nuclear defenses.

Also, I had about 70 SCUs and a Galactic Colossus in formation at one point that would have easily won the game for me had I just marched them into his base; but I chickened out and fled when he tried nuking my units, even though, had I just split them up and sent them to attack from multiple paths through the middle, enough of them would have survived to still take out his base. The thing about SCUs is, they have a lot of health in relation to how much damage they do, so nothing can really stop them, not even other SCUs; they can simply march, en masse, into the enemy’s base, and then when the finally die, their explosions take out all of the buildings.

Ah well, the map wasn’t so good, but I still had fun battling it out with these guys. The next time we’re going to play a smaller, more intimate map; one like Saltrock Colony that delievers a rougher, more dynamic, early stage battle.

Download the replay of this match (v3223).

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 10:10 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays. 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.