Frenetic Friday open thread
What’s on your mind? Have a lot of SupComming planned for tonight? It’s the weekend! And if you find yourself getting slightly bored of Supreme Commander, I highly recommend that you try playing some of the custom maps like Supreme Art of Defense and Zone Control. They’re like playing entirely different games. I just wish we had automatic map downloading in custom games. These maps aren’t even half a megabyte in size and could easily be auto-downloaded in the blink of an eye, leading to a lot more people being able to play them, but alas, anyone who wants to play them has to first go to The Vault and find and download them (sometimes a tricky proposition). What do you say GPG, can you please add an auto-map-downloading feature like StarCraft has had for the better part of a decade now?
June 15th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I’ll probably be playing some Art of Defense this weekend, after hearing so many good things about it (sounds sorta like those old Starship Troopers maps in Starcraft, they were awesome). Also I’m closely watching the 2v2 ladder thing, if they fix the horrible match-up problems I’ll be all over it.
What’s on my mind is the usual: next patch, and what it’ll have. I’m not satisfied with the current balance of air in this game. Gemini is still a joke, ASFs still don’t have a viable mobile counter, strat bombers have been upgraded indirectly, etc, all the stuff that’s been done to death about that subject.
I’m also wondering what they are going to do about the Battleship SMD thing… it’s probably one of the most most awesome mistakes that they’ve ever made, and I think it’ll be a tragedy if they patch it out.
I’m also a little bit concerned about the role of T1 land now that T2 has been buffed for a while. T1 really isn’t a match for T2 anymore, it becomes obsolete pretty quickly. I’d like to see it used for more than early raiding, but I geuss in the end it isn’t important since T2 + T3 combined arms armies are pretty fun.
Finally, T1 sub spam disturbs me, because it essentially means you never have a really sweet clash of navies, just an underwater slugfest that means the winner parks Destroyers on your coastline. Yawn.
That’s all I’ve got.
June 15th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Yeah, I think submarines need to be made more expensive, or something. The way any sea maps work these days is that all players spam submarines as quickly as possible. Submarines kill each other, and eventually, one player establishes sea dominance by virtue of having more submarines (or managing his better). So he kills all of his opponent’s sea factories and everything else that tries to step foot into the water. Then he just upgrades a sea factory or two to tech 2, builds destroyers, and uses them to bombard the other player to death from the water.
Torpedo bombers are pretty much the only counter to this strategy, but they don’t work too well because interceptors are really cheap, and even in a large battle between equal sized forces of interceptors, one side’s can stay alive long enough to target and take out all of the torpedo bombers.
June 15th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I know i’ll be hitting it tonight!
June 15th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Hmmm Supreme art of defence has problems…. Pokie managed to park 40 bobs(cybran scu with regen upgrade)+6 mls+ 20 soul rippers at unit spawn…. I don’t care how much stronger the units get they are not getting past that.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I would be so much nicer and easier if there was auto-download of some kind. Heck, do it through the Vault instead of having it pull from one or another player that already has it. Its one of those basic things about an RTS that we now expect.
June 15th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Haven’t had much of an impulse to play SupCom lately, so I’ll be playing UT2004 and Rise of Nations. I just got RoN from GameStop for $5 and I’ve only done the tutorials stuff, but it already seems much more difficult than SupCom. There’s like a million things you have to keep track of, something like seven tech levels, and not really any automation. D:
June 15th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Party. It’s Saturday
June 15th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
@T2A`
RoN is a pretty nice RTS. I don’t like how you’re pretty much tied down regarding base expansion. I do really like the economic system and the teching system. It’s not as daunting as it sounds, although throughout the whole game you’ve got to keep going back to your library and remembering to keep upgrading. The biggest flaw I see in the game is the ridiculous lack of oil toward the end of the game. Aircraft behavior ticked me off too.
June 15th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Interceptor:
Those are interesting points. From what I can tell those are the only major balance issues left with Supcom right? I’m sure ASF will be fixed, and Battleship SMD stuff will be properly dealt with…
As for T1, I don’t know if you’re suppose to use them once you get into T3. I mean, if you need those, your opponent probably has T2 defenses up, and T1 is eaten alive by that :P I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that though. Of course, if you don’t have the economy set up for T2+, your T1 could help hold out some small waves from your opponent.
As for subs, I did notice this when I played in the campaign. It seemed the best way to take out those huge battleships was with a simple pack (15+) of subs. I think an easy fix for that is to get the ship (I can’t remember which one) that has its own torpedos/depth charges and beef it up a bit (to make it almost like a T2PD against T1 units). That way you’re navy would have to have a mixture of the two to defend against T1 subs, and your opponent wouldn’t spam as much subs either, but start using the surface ships as well.
June 15th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
First of all i should mention i just found this site yesterday so i haven’t posted here before (been playing supcom on and off since multi beta).
Regarding subs I like to rush Cybran destroyers anyway (walking destroyers are still the coolest thing in the game), and though they take a lot of resources they perform very well against subs. if you have a destroyer and a sub, the destroyer will hit torpedoes while your sub takes out the opponents.
my complaints are minor:
I havent found a way to manipulate the size of windows on GPGnet, like the custom game lobby, which never allows enough space to read map names and game titles. I agree the lack of autodownloading is pretty outstanding: i play a lot of shooters on steam, and that seems pretty standard for them.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Party is right! I just passed my engineering exams! Failed every course I’ve done in past few years. Great to finally find something I can do.
When I’m fully qualified I’ll head over to NZ. Keri will give me a job based on my superlative Total Annihilation knowlege.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
ok my comments for a friday (saturday my time)
FIGHTERS need to be fixed…. T1 needs to be scaled back JUST a bit
T3 fighters need to WORK!!! and NOT fly @ full speed all the time!!! need to be able to SLOW down!!! also ive seen a mod that added afterburners to them… that i thought was a nice idea… (more like REAL fighters) but thats up to the old guys @ GPG net to decide
Finaly id LIKE to see some sort of LAND based defence against subs
Something that fires a ‘torpedo shell’ that launchs out then hits the water as a torpedo and can hit subs that have blockaded u in OR take out destroyers that are sitting @ max range (or @ ur coast)
thats all id like done oh and the age old complaint of more T3 units
June 16th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Ah Good on you Molloy. Congrats. Hey yeah, come on down here, Core Electrical need a bun runner & smoke-oh maker. :P
(for non Kiwi speakers, a bun runner is someone to goto the cake shop, Smoke-ohs are morning & afternoon breaks)
June 16th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I was hoping that meant I get to sit on my buns and smoke cigarettes. That’s an area I’ve got extensive experience in.