Why big maps don’t work
As we have discussed previously on the site, the current game mechanics of Supreme Commander don’t really allow for proper battles at very large scales. In principle, fleets of battleships could engage each other or enemy bases, since individual battleships are such massive, powerful units. However, on large maps, it is just not efficient for huge land-based armies to engage. Instead, it is much more efficient to just build defenses and expand your economy as quickly as possible, thus getting to the game ender type units more quickly than someone who wastes resources on attacks that are bound to fail.
However, even if the game mechanics were to change substantially, I don’t think that play on very large maps will ever be really viable. Even if all the players had monster computers that could handle several thousand unit armies clashing over hundreds of square kilometers, this sort of battle just wouldn’t be all that fun. If units were made to move at semi-realistic speeds, it would just take too long for such battles to take place. Players would realistically”dig in” as much as possible, which would likely turn the game into a World-War I style trench war.
If you somehow adjusted the mechanics to prevent this, you would still be faced with a larger problem. Why would players want to fight over such large scales in the first place? If the player’s ultimate goal is to attack the enemy’s relatively small base, then you would expect forces to concentrate, in an effort to just break through a portion of the enemy lines. It seems unlikely that players would ever go to the trouble of fortifying tens or hundreds of kilometers of land just to have their lines broken at a point.
One reason for this is that SupCom is designed so that players can rapidly build new forces. This is a necessity, since a real time game that only allowed you to build forces at a realistic rate would take far, far to long to be any fun at all. Since players can reinforce themselves so quickly, it makes more sense to try and respond to any attacks as they come, and then build reinforcements as necessary.
All in all, I really do not see a way around it. A real time strategy game that is even remotely similar to SupCom will probably never feature battles at the epic scales many of us would like to see.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Mass fabs and the RAS upgrade play a pretty big role in this. Someone suggested a mod that didn’t have those things in it a while ago, would be interesting to try out.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Hmm. I am not sure I agree with you on this. On larger maps you do have more opportunity to tower up or “turtle” your main base simply because of the availability of more resources. But going totaly defensive is imho no more viable than on small maps. In fact I think it is even less so, because you won’t be getting control of that much of the map with T2 artillery and TML’s.
Instread of being a fight to get into the enemies base, larger maps almost always begin as fights for resources. In a good game on say, Open Palms, there is constant back and forth as you take land, your opponent takes it back, you fortify this position, he sneaks in and attacks your mexes at some other position etc. That is where I have lotsa fun on big maps because they are constant struggles.
Compare that to Winter’s Duel : you both attack with comms initialy but as soon as you both get up some PD it is just a rush to T2 or bombing raids. Big maps are more interesting because no single PD at a chokepoint will govern your attacks. I prefer larger maps.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I’d love larger maps too if I could play them, TA proved that larger maps can be as much fun as medium/small maps. You’re facing dilemmas like trying to set up multiple scattered bases or putting everything into one spot, both approaches that have their disadvantages.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I agree with Ryuken that TA did prove that largescale maps can be as much fun as medium/small maps. In TA, there were massive maps (metal heck, for instance), which provided very large areas to fight over. The players engaged in battles all over the map and I feel that TA was setup in a better way for base expansion. I’m not sure why, since i havent played in years upon years, but i particularly remember having bases that cover large portions of the map, with factory upon factory and generators and units everywhere, until finally one side is able to push the way through the formation and make a strategic strike into a key base. TA rivals any rts made, but supcom is giving it a good run I think. Once our mod community kicks into full gear and these bugs are ironed out, Supcom should provide the largescale battles we strive for (someday)
May 30th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
TA’s large battles worked quite well because there was little teching, and alot of incenstive to expand. Even if the map was huge the player who turtled would get annihilated by the person who tried to grab tons of territory. You should see the scale of the battles TAG_Rock and 325 used to get up to on Painted Desert. There was one particularly famous one that went on for over 5 hours. It was eventually decided by a bajillion artillery installations but there was a constant stream of offensive units flowing between bases and little in the way of fixed defenses.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Supreme Commanders 4 tech levels. I’d rather you only had to tech once, the t2 defences weren’t nearly as powerful, and controlling map territory would be vital. That way the games economy would be dependant on your map control. At the moment once the game gets to T3 it gets pretty pointless controlling the map, you can lose all your outlying bases and just sit back with defences and Fusions/MassFabs.
It’s early days though. TA’s gameplay evolved over a very long period of time. And I like the differences in SupCom. I spent 10 years playing TA so it’s time for something new. We’ll have to see what happens after the addon pack comes out. TA’s large maps didn’t really come into their own until the game was out a few years. And it took very talented players to work out how to play them. Noobs never touched them so they were only played by the minority.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
I agree completely with the OP (I was going to write something like this eventually too). Big maps just don’t work in this game. GPG may have hoped they would, but the sad fact is they don’t. I even attempted a T1 battle on a 20×20 map once and it took ages for them to reach the other side. Ever since then I have never built a single T1 ground unit except for engineers on 20×20 maps and I refuse to play anything larger. It’s silly to do otherwise. Even if the other guy “rushes” T1 or T2 units to your base, by that time you can at least have T2 tanks and PDs up, if not siege bots and heavy shields.
If mexes and fabs didn’t exist beyond T2 then I think there’d be bigger battles. At the moment the game basically tells you turtle up and concentrate on nothing but resources for the first 20 minutes on large maps. Between SCU RAS and T3 fabs, why the hell would you walk or fly an engineer out to the middle for a measily +2, +6, or +12 mass? It’s pointless. Thus, large maps turn into an economic race because whoever can reach the big units – siege bots, strat bombers, T3 artillery, nukes, etc. – first will probably be the one to win.
I bought this game when it came out, and as I’ve played and learned the economic portion of it has become more and more important while my playtime has steadily gone down because of it. I don’t want to play SimCity, and that’s pretty much what the game is at this point. The interesting tier levels – 1 and 2 – aren’t used enough. Once the game hits T3 it just gets dumb and it’s no more about control but economy. Even on small maps T1 and T2 don’t play a big role – T1 is there to allow you to grab early mexes. T2 is there because…? You need time to upgrade a few extractors to T2 to support T3? The PDs? I don’t really know. Then you’re at T3, everything prior becomes useless except for PDs, and the game gets dumb. All the kewl strategies like flying in engineers or tanks become worthless and it’s all about artillery, siege bots, and experimentals.
I’ve only played two ranked games since April 14th; that’s how little draw the game has for me right now because of the economic portion. Even the “big” patch didn’t instill any interest in me because I realized all it did was make T1 even less of a factor than it was. Looks like I’ll be converting to Starcraft 2 when it comes out and in the meantime I’m looking for some other RTS and playing more UT2004. The more I’ve played SupCom the more it’s let me down. D:
May 30th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
classic groupthink.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
yes currently the only point to playing on a giant map is if you want the effect of playing several smaller games back to back, in the sense that due to the scale of the map, forward bases scale to be essentially full-size bases and combat is done at a full scale over each quadrant, yet also it is necessary to manage over the entire map as well. Almost too much.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
That is why Mavors are such a problem in long big map games.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Also, there are possible solutions like teleporting gateways and things like that. But with the way the game is currently, playing UEF and spamming resources/fatboys/SCUs/anti air/Mavors is the way to go
May 30th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Wah wah wah this game doesn’t quite fit my expectations, Im gonna go play generic game number 4 million.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Grokmoo should add a qualification to his post: he is a fan of maximizing the number of units participating in a battle. Sadly, his computer may not be able to handle high numbers of units.
There is one feature from TA that is absent in SupCom: the ability to set build limits to each unit in the multiplayer setup screen. Games could be made as interesting as you wish. Things like tech 3 power generators, SCUs, or just resource allocation upgrades can be disabled a priori. Should the feature be implemented, there should also be an option to disable siege bots, for example, for all factions.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
“Wah wah wah this game doesn’t quite fit my expectations, Im gonna go play generic game number 4 million.”
Quit being a worthless troll. I’ll take a “generic” game with depth over a unique one where near mindless spam (eco or otherwise) will rule the day. I gave SupCom more than its fair shot – three months, which is longer than I play most random games I try – but I haven’t had any desire to play it recently. I’m not even an RTS player so the fact that I even bought the game says something. I thought the game had potential, and still do, actually, but GPG doesn’t seem to have realized that potential yet. They told us it was epic in scale, but really, it’s just epic in economy and the fact that most of the maps are too big to be played properly given how the game is currently set up.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
starcraft has depth? click click click the individual units special abilities in turn, click click click. near mindless spam? zerg? ive seen countless strategies play out, replay vault it yourself to see the diversity, oh this feature isnt available in starcraft. guess we’ll just have to accept the current conventional argument then. I agree an expansion pack and some more UI work to improve the large game is needed, but it isn’t that terrible. or have I just been having fun for no reason?
May 31st, 2007 at 8:42 am
lol yeah people definitly spam in starcraft expecially High Templars UGH! Supcom is getting better and I am confident that It will continue to do so. We just need a map editor like on warcraft 3 that would own!
May 31st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Do not agree with you dude, we i and many friends had a lot of fun on 80*80 maps during a 2v2 or 3v3 ………..Much more time to prepare defense, much more strategies… simply a lack of maps.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:01 pm
What about a 4v4? That would use alot of the terrain
June 1st, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Seton’s rocks! Big scale wars are very fun, tech 1 units are made so fast by tech 3 factories that they do not become obsolete, you can swarm the outer branches of their base expansion with 50 T1 and T2 units while building up your sledgehammer attack of SAB’s and Experimentals. This may not appeal to people with the need for instant gratification (you mentiom not being a fan of RTS’) but there is a lot of surgical strikes and planning that can only take place on these large maps.
Zerg rushing is fun, but then so is slowly grinding your enemy to dust with surgical bombing runs and stealth forward bases.
We are all entitled to our opinions, some want instant gratification, others want a slow build up to a nutcracker suite! Variety is the spice of life.
p.s. maybe edit the title with “In my opinion” o_0
666
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Transports are your friends on big maps. There is no way to control all that territory, so setting up forward bases, and dropping in loads of troops close to the enemy is very effective.
Controlling a lot of mexes is still important in big maps, as it takes far less engineers to upgrade mexes than building mass fabs, and this allows people who upgrade mexes and hold territory to do very well, as they are able to expand their resources faster.
I totally disagree. Big maps may not have the t1 spam/rush potential as small maps, but they make up for it with the host of abilities to expand and perform sneak attacks, and set up forward bases, and open up a lot of strategiest that would never work on a smaller map.
August 14th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
“starcraft has depth? click click click the individual units special abilities in turn, click click click. near mindless spam? zerg? ive seen countless strategies play out, replay vault it yourself to see the diversity, oh this feature isnt available in starcraft. guess we’ll just have to accept the current conventional argument then. I agree an expansion pack and some more UI work to improve the large game is needed, but it isn’t that terrible. or have I just been having fun for no reason?”
It always amuses me how TA/SupCom fans are filled with so much hate towards Starcraft. Sounds like you need to play it some more, and yes, it is extremely deep :)
August 26th, 2007 at 6:27 am
Well it’s also kind of amusing how Starcraft fans always go on and on about how deep the game is, but I haven’t personally witnessed any of them playing the standard maps that shipped with the game. There always seems to be some kind of game mechanic mod like huge resources or other things.
What I’m really trying to say is that I think Starcraft _became_ deep, but it sure didn’t feel that way when it first came out. And I think that Supcom will go through a similar evolution. There are probably some game mechanics that need adjusting, and every time they add something new some of the players are going to freak out. But I think it’s got staying power.
It’s become pretty clear that there are some players that want to play the game a specific way (full-rush, fast-paced, t1 twitch-click battles), and other players want to play the game a different way (no rush, long build-up, max-tech battles). And the two seem to complain about the other a lot :-) But I think it’s great that both playstyles can have fun with this game.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:00 am
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