Supreme Commander Talk

With the recent fiasco about the instant upgrade bug, some rather severe imbalances in the legitimate use of the Aeon engineers sacrifice ability have also come to light. Basically, it is in general much, much cheaper than other methods to upgrade the Aeon ACU and SCUs by using the ‘Sacrifice’ ability of all Aeon engineers. In some cases, the energy cost of the upgrade will be orders of magnitude cheaper when using Sacrifice.

There are several ways in which this ability can be exploited. A player who builds many engineers and uses Sacrifice can get resource allocation upgrades on SCUs substantially quicker, thus allowing them to expand their economy more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. In particular, the energy cost of getting an RAS upgrade using 8 T2 engineers is about 8000 energy. Compare this to the 300,000 energy cost of the upgrade through standard construction methods. Clearly, this makes it very feasible to get your first RAS upgraded SCU well before you have the normally required power grid.

A more devious trick involves the SCU teleportation upgrade. For a measly two SCUs (with the Sacrifice upgrade, which is dirt cheap), a player can upgrade a third SCU with the teleportation upgrade, which is normally extremely expensive and not seen until the very late game. Combine this with some combat upgrades, and a reasonably skilled player could easily assassinate the enemy commander with perhaps one or two SCUs well before it would normally be possible. Even against a Cybran player, the use of some T3 scout planes to get some temporary omni would render the Cybran cloak ineffective.

The next use of Sacrifice is one that those of you who play ranked games will likely be interested in. By pumping out 20 T1 engineers and sacrificing them all at once on an Aeon ACU, a player can gain access to the Heat Sink upgrade comfortably within 10 minutes on most maps. This is essentially an instant win in many situations, as it allows your ACU to do seven times the damage it could do otherwise. A heat sink upgraded ACU will chew through an unupgraded ACU with hitpoints to spare in a few seconds. Also, the Crysalis Beam Augmentation, which is even cheaper, would allow your ACU to outrange the enemy ACU. One could conceivably kill an enemy ACU without it being able to get in a single shot in its defense.

The use of Sacrifice to get the Heat Sink upgrade seemed particularly nasty to me, so I made up a quick replay of myself taking out the AI on Winter Duel in about 7 minutes. Keep in mind this was only my first attempt, and it is certainly possible to get the upgrade much faster. Download the replay here. (v3251)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 6:52 pm by Grokmoo 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.