Supreme Commander Talk

Yesterday, CydeWeys and I had the opportunity to participate in a nice 2v2 ranked game on Emerald Crater. The game highlighted both the strengths and current weaknesses of 2v2 ranked play in SupCom.

The first thing we noticed when loading up the game was that the 2v2 matching system does not really work smoothly. The first attempt we had at connecting failed, with the game launching and then immediately hanging on one of the connection screens. On our second attempt, we waited several minutes to find a match, but then eventually did get into the game.

Upon entering the game, we were greeted with the sight of a map neither of us has much experience on: Emerald Crater. While I had a rather low opinion of this map coming into the game, I have to admit that the match we played raised my view of it. The map is a little big, even for a 2v2, but it is very open, and so not very turtle friendly.

The match itself played out quite favorably for us. I chose to play Aeon, and Cyde played as Cybran. Our opponents were achdam, who played UEF, and LarsMix, who played Aeon. Very early on, Cyde went for a bomber rush, which was very effective against achdam, who lost the majority of his power grid in the attacks and was thus severely set back. Meanwhile, I concentrated mainly on using tech 1 tanks to harass the center of the map, and also on grabbing the resources in the corners of the map.

Lars had a tactic of his own for securing the corners, which involved building a land factory at each one. This was quite effective, and he was able to secure most of the corner mass deposits. However, by this point in the match it didn’t really matter, as both Cyde and I had upgraded our economies much more quickly than our opponents, and were heavily outscoring them.

There was a small scare for me, when I got tech 2 radar up just in time to see a sizable attack of tech 1 units coming in on my flanks. Also at about this time, Cyde had to scramble to build a tech 3 SAM site to stop a bomber attack. We were both able to protect our respective bases, however, and then we began to pump out siege bots. With initially about half a dozen siege bots and many tech 1 units, I made the journey to LarsMix’s base, and completely overran it. LarsMix tried to run his commander to one of his corner bases, but I chased him down with siege bots and destroyed him.

After that, Cyde and I managed to coordinate fairly effectively a three pronged attack against achdam’s base, with a total of about 25 or 30 siege bots. He had huge numbers of units (mostly tech 1) protecting his base, but Cyde’s prong attacked his exposed underbelly, and managed to take out his commander for the win.

Notwithstanding the connection issues, which were rather minor, it was a good game. Although we did outclass our opponents a bit by the end, it was a fairly interesting match. Hopefully, CydeWeys and I will play plenty more 2v2s, especially once the patch comes out.

Download the replay of this match here. (Check it out soon, as the replay will probably be rendered unusable with the patch on Wednesday!)

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 1:30 pm by Grokmoo and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays, Strategy. Keywords: Tags: 2v2, Emerald Crater, Multiplayer, rankings, Strategy, Supreme Commander. 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.