Supreme Commander Talk

I recently found an excellent replay on the vault showing a 1v1 match between two excellent, big name players in the SupCom community: Unconquerable and TheLittleOne. The match is played on Theta Passage, and it highlights many of the strategies now being used by top players on small maps. It is of course also very exciting and is ultimately decided by a very narrow margin. Unconquerable plays as Cybran, and the TheLittleOne plays as Aeon.

The match opens with both players employing slight variants on the now standard early hydrocarbon build order. If you don’t know what this is, watch the replay, but it basically involves forgoing many T1 power plants and instead rushing your hydrocarbon plant with your first engineer and ACU. Unconq gains a slight early lead here by getting his first factory done a bit earlier than LittleOne. This enables him to finish his hydrocarbon plant slightly sooner, and thus begin work on his second factory.

Both players engage in T1 skirmishing, with Unconq showing off how T1 light assault bots can easily take on T1 tanks with a little micromanagement. Unconq also chooses to go for an early T2 factory. While his first factory continues to pump out light assault bots and land scouts, Unconq brings his second factory up to T2, finishing the upgrade aroung 4:15. While this is not really that early for a T2 rush, it does strike a good balance between getting to T2 quickly and maintaining a strong early economy.

The early T2 factory also gives Unconq a strong air defense. Although he has no air factory for quite a while, as soon as he sees an air threat he just builds a T2 mobile AA unit. Although not as mobile as a good fighter screen, this provides adequate defense and easily wards off any serious damage from LittleOne’s early ghetto gunship attack. The ghetto gunship is not useless to LittleOne, however, as it is invaluable in defending against Unconq’s first few T2 tanks.

By about 6:20 in, both players are playing with essentially the same base: a T1 land factory, a T2 land factory, and a T1 air factory. Unconq, however, is in a better economic position, having built on his own half of the mass spots, as well as the two in the upper left corner of the map. Both players upgrade a small number of extractors, but then go heavy into mass fabricators. Neither player builds the efficient but very vulnerable mass fab / T1 power gen grids, but they both do lay out their mass fabs in easy to lay out but also easy to destroy lines.

What follows is a good amount of T2 skirmishing, with both players quickly amassing moderately sized T2 armies. LittleOne walks his ACU south into Unconq’s half of the map, but is forced to retreat fairly quickly, as he is soon threatened with T2 tanks and mobile missile launchers. Unconq overextends himself a bit in his attempt to kill LittleOne at this point, as LittleOne’s commander and own T2 units destroy most of Unconq’s army. However, LittleOne’s commander is damaged fairly heavily, and is thus forced to withdraw to his own base.

With only a few T2 units remaining on the field, Unconq makes a somewhat risky move in beginning the upgrade of his T2 land factory to T3. LittleOne is not in a strong enough position to press the attack, however, and Unconq is able to hit T3 at 12:40 into the game. His first few siege bots roll off the line quickly, but LittleOne has already begun to fortify his position with T2 point defense. He has also built several T2 power plants, and so is in a strong economic position, even though Unconq controls more of the map at this point.

Both players now focus heavily on upgrading economy, but Unconq continues harassment by taking out lines of LittleOne’s mass fabs with bomber attacks, and later, siege bots. LittleOne waits until 19:30 to upgrade his land factory to T3, mostly because he is busily spamming T2 power and T1 mass fabricators. This doesn’t really hurt him, as he and Unconq both start building T3 economy at around 20:00 in. At this point, LittleOne’s base is heavily defended with T2 point defense, which allows him to stop Unconq’s siege bots fairly easily. In contrast, Unconq’s base is largely undefended on the ground.

Unconq has clear air superiority, and attempts to capitalize on it by upgrading his air factory to T3 and building strategic bombers. However, LittleOne responds with SAM sites, and so Unconq quickly gives up this line of attack. LittleOne is also amassing a sizable army of siege bots. He begins to move against Unconq’s essentially undefended base, but Unconq is able to quickly respond by having hordes of engineers rapidly churn out T2 point defense. Even though he only had a couple finished by the time LittleOne’s dozen or so siege bots arrive, he is able to build them very quickly, easily stopping LittleOne’s attack, even though LittleOne also sends in his fully upgraded combat ACU.

Unconq now begins to make use of T2 stationary artillery, a rarity in these sorts of matches. He pumps basically his entire now sizable economy into their production, and rapidly churns out lines of artillery. LittleOne is now in serious trouble from the ever-increasing artillery bombardment, and after a second large siege bot attack fails, it looks like it might be over for LittleOne.

However, he is not out of the fight yet. Refocusing his production, LittleOne rapidly gains air superiority and launches a sizable ACU assassination attempt at Unconq’s largerly undefended commander. Unconq narrowly survives the first wave, but LittleOne keeps the pressure on with additional attacks, even as his base is now taking heavy damage from Unconq’s arrays of T2 artillery. Unconq wisely puts his commander under a shield which he rapidly upgrades, however, and he is able to shrug off LittleOne’s next attack.

With the core of his base now essentially gone, LittleOne certainly cannot survive for very long. In a last ditch attempt, he sends his ACU on a transport at the northern part of Unconq’s base. Unconq has almost no stationary AA defending this part of his base, and with his commander right there and low on hit points from the previous attacks, it is very close. The ACU does not get a chance to land, but Unconq’s ACU is in its explosion radius. However, LittleOne is literally about 3 seconds too late, as the Cybran commander’s 15 hp/second regeneration has brought it up to just over what Unconq needed to win. When the ACU explosion goes off, Unconq survives with just 41 hit points immediately after the explosion.

Thus, even though Unconq was clearly dominating the overall war at the end, the match was perilously close to a draw. This match also had a number of other interesting characteristics. For one, there was plenty of action at all three tech levels, with T1 in fact being the least utilized. This is a good indication that the balance changes over the last few patches have really helped overall gameplay. Also, Unconquerable has showed us that even playing as Cybran, the faction with the weakest artillery, a T2 artillery bombardment can still be deadly. Finally, even though this match went on for almost 40 minutes, there was nary a single SCU built. While the SCU RAS upgrade is the way to go if you want to get a tremendous economy, T3 mass fabricators and power plants are actually more efficient if you don’t factor in their vulnerability and the space they take up.

Download the replay of this match (v3255).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 1:42 pm by Grokmoo and is filed under Multiplayer, Replays. Keywords: Tags: 1v1, Multiplayer, ranked, Strategy, Supreme Commander, Theta Passage. 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.