Supreme Commander Talk

It’s been a little while since we’ve taken an in-depth look at a replay between two top-ranked players, so let’s do another one. This ranked 1v1 match takes place between Sir Loui (”Sir_Loui”), currently ranked #1 on the ladder, and Cauldron (”Cauldr0n”), currently ranked #9, on the map Sentry Point, with both people playing as Cybrans. Cauldron starts in the northwest and Sir Loui is in the northeast, leaving the southern base position unoccupied and rife for fighting over. But before we begin, you may want to download the replay of this match (v3251).

Both players get off to a typical dual-land-factory start. Cauldron, however, immediately puts many engineers to work reclaiming the surrounding landscape, while Sir Loui takes the more traditional route of building plants on his hydrocarbon deposits. Cauldron’s strategy pays off and he pulls ahead in score at around three minutes after being behind for the whole beginning of the game. At around five minutes in, Sir Loui, realizing he’s losing the ground war, builds a ghetto gunship (a tech 1 transport loaded up with six T1 light assault bots). He uses it to devastating effect to clean out Cauldron’s army to the south. Cauldron hurriedly switches over to building Sky Slammers.

Six minutes in and still nobody has managed to claim any of the southern territory’s resources for their own, though Sir Loui’s army is besting Cauldron’s in the middle north. Bother players have upgraded a land factory to tech 2 by seven minutes in, and the tech 2 units start making their appearance on the battlefield. Sir Loui builds another ghetto gunship and again uses it to devastating effect, but at around nine minutes in, Cauldron is definitely in control. His tech 2 army overruns his opponent’s army and he has some units controlling the southern area of the map, where he is starting to build mass extractors.

One thing that’s important to point out is that, at ten minutes in, there is only one upgraded mass extractor on the entire map, and it belongs to Sir Loui. This is markedly different from most games I end up playing where many mass extractors get upgraded before then, but then again, in a really competitive match against a really tough opponent, the margins of spare resources available to spend on non-military ends are very slim indeed. In the south, Cauldron does a very good job of toggling his Sky Slammers to fire at ground units. You rarely ever see this ability used, and many players probably don’t even know about this capability.

Sir Loui tries building a defensive wall in the north region with his commander, but it is quickly overrun, and he is forced to flee. This is very risky play right here; I personally don’t send my commander to the front lines past the tenth minute of the game, because the risk of getting taken out by tactical missile launchers or unit swarms is too great. From here on out the tech 2 fighting is fast and furious, with Cauldron repeatedly attacking and only being repelled on the very doorstep of Sir Loui’s base, thus allowing him to take out many outlying resources. This extended tech 2 battle is something you never would have seen before the patch.

Sir Loui is doing a great job of keeping his units in fighting formation, while Cauldron’s units are tending to stream in a few at a time and getting slaughtered. Cauldron is not getting nearly the value out of his army that he should be getting. At eighteen and a half minutes into the game Sir Loui finally makes his first serious assault, and within a minute, Cauldron’s commander is dead. Cauldron wasted too many units in futile assaults against Sir Loui, while Sir Loui was building up his army the whole time until he had an overpowering force. Cauldron also futilely tried to build some Cerebus point defenses as Sir Loui’s forces crashed down upon him (a valiant effort), but it is too late (and it doesn’t help that they seem to spend most of their time shooting into the ground either).

Despite controlling two-thirds of the map for the majority of the game, Cauldron falls behind economically and eventually loses the game because he is putting all of his resources into small attacking forces that just get nonchalantly tossed into Sir Loui’s meat-grinder, while Sir Loui fights more defensively, buffs up his economy better, and only goes on the offensive when he has an overwhelming force. Sir Loui made good use of ghetto gunships, something we didn’t see from Cauldron at all. Sir Loui also made better use of tech 2 units, using a mix of tanks and mobile missile launchers, while Cauldron uses pure tanks, and loses effectiveness for it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 7:40 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays, Strategy. 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.