Supreme Commander Talk

Good day, I’m Testudaphobia. Along with Grokmoo and CydeWeys, I attended the University of Maryland, and was a roommate of Grokmoo. Do not fear-it is unlikely SupComTalk will be saturated with any more current or former Maryland students. I’m a brand new SupCom player. After taking over a week to select components, my parts arrived at the end of last week and I was playing a campaign by late Saturday. I was still following SupCom since its release, however, and have been commenting on SupComTalk stories as ivan. As it turns out, my timing was perfect for the patch release.

I apologize to readers (and to CydeWeys in advance) for the short post that lacked a proper introduction. However, I was rather irate at the time, and my mood and time constraints precluded a coherent post. At this stage in my development, my initial build order is 2 mass extractors, 3 power generators, a land factory, which is repeated once. In this particular ranked game on Open Palms, however, I held the caps lock key instead of the shift key, and was too busily placing structures and deciding where to send my commander to notice I was not, in fact, queuing orders. A land factory was constructed during the commotion, thereby draining my energy and delaying implementation of proper strategy for approximately 2 minutes.

My ill mood was not entirely due to pressing the wrong key. Once my economy was under reasonable control, I sent out some scouts and discovered with glee that my opponent, Crusader666, chose to avoid any of the forward resource clusters. Radar revealed that he had built a wall around the entrance to his spawn point, and I naturally assumed that such a line was adequately guarded with point defense towers. However, had I scouted properly (by sending a land scout directly into his base) I would have found that not a single combat unit or structure had been constructed. By this point I had about a dozen Tech 1 tanks and artillery not doing much of anything. These units could have caused some serious damage to his base, especially since the first units Crusader666 built were Tech 2 anti-air vehicles.

My third mistake (or second tactical mistake) was in not upgrading my factories fast enough. Mass was pouring in after I secured three of the four resource clusters and was upgrading extractors in earnest. I should have been able to reach Tech 3 rather quickly and begin pumping out Siege Bots at this point, but I lingered too long at Tech 2. Moreover, I failed to adequately scout (again), thus I missed that my opponent, even in his isolationist state, had upgraded a factory and was building Siege Bots before I reached Tech 2.

The final lapse was in leaving my commander at my forward base too long. I was feeling that it was too late in the game and that I should pull him back, when at about 20 minutes my opponent spotted my commander with an air scout and dispatched a squad of about 10 Siege Bots. Game over.

A situation that should never happen: an uncovered Commander at the front lines.

Victory would have been possible, despite the early critical error, had I upheld 3 dogmas of ranked play in SupCom: scouting, attack pressure, and mass utilization without prejudice.

Download the replay of this match (v3251).

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 12:57 am by Testudaphobia and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays, Strategy. Keywords: Tags: aggressive, intelligence, Multiplayer, replay, scouting, Strategy, Supreme Commander, upgrade. 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.