A midsummer night’s open thread
Phew, it’s been awhile since we had one of these here open threads. So here’s one. As usual, feel free to discuss just about anything in this here open thread, though, predictably, the conversation does mostly tend to gravitate towards Supreme Commander. If you want to talk about the work that this open thread is named after, please feel free. We could use some more Olde Discussion round these parts.
Oh, and as is customary, a poll, to get you started:
Loading …
July 18th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I played King Oberon once… in middle school for this play…
July 18th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
what is commander death nuke explosion damage now?
July 18th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Breezy: Cool, I played Bottom in elementary school. That was a hard play for grade schoolers to tackle, let me tell you …
theShiznit: It’s currently 4,000.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Yah, it was hard for me to tackle too. So many lines to memorize. (or at least it felt that way back then… i dont think its actually TOO large of a play at all.) I wanted to play Lysander
July 18th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
The only shakespeare i played in was the tempest. I was Prospero. My costume was an index card on a string that said “prospero”. Being a sorcerer wasn’t as fun as it seemed.
July 18th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Good solution would be in my opinion to make the ACU death sequence have a small delay before the actual 4k dmg death explosion. It would make it possible (in some situations) to move away with your commander from the core of the explosion and thus making forced draws less uncommon and harder to achieve.
Another upside is that this wouldn’t really affect other areas of the game that much compared to removing the death explosion altogether.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
if i had a gold dubloon for every time i tallied a whinge against supreme commander on this fair site I’d be a mighty rich sea captain.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Zordon: Aye, but that’s absolutely the nature of the game. Everything is far from perfect, and a fair bit of what humans talk about on a day-to-day basis is how to make stuff better. Get rid of that, and, well, it’d be a very pessimistic place indeed.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
perhabs the commander death nuke explosion damage should be in like 3 waves one doing 1500dmg then another 1500dmg then one doing 1000dmg that way if you are just in range of the boom you could get out of range before the 2nd or 3rd booms hit
July 18th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I propose either eleventy billion or threeve.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I think the damage should be 4000 in assassination games and much more (maybe 70000) in supremacy games. The 4000 damage is a good compromise for assassination/ranked games because it prevents most draws but still allows some chaos to discombobulate the uber-players :-)
As far as supremacy, I find the commander bomb to be a fascinating factor in the games, but it should be stronger, at least strong enough to take out a factory. I still remember a 2v2 open palms game in the beta. My partner had been taken out, and while I put up a valiant fight, I was a goner. The other player said something like “let’s finish this” so I knew he was coming for me with everything he had. I sent my commander straight into the gauntlet of his assault. I managed to take 2 monkeylords and some SABs when my commander went up. The other player was chagrined at the loss of a lot of his perfect assault force. I still lost handily but it satisfied my craving for revenge :-)
July 18th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I agree with a multi-stage ACU death-nuke. A 3k blast, a 1.5k, and a .75k, expanding radius on each blast, or some kind of ratioed damage. It kind of bothers me that explosions deal the same damage all the way out. I’d be for some kind of decreasing power, kind of like in real life. If this already does occur in SupCom, I apologize, I don’t remember seeing that behavior.
The Hyper Viper
July 18th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Comm blasts damage against other comm: 4,000
Afterwave to everything else: 70,000
July 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Stealth: Ooooh, I like that. It doesn’t change much of anything in 1v1 ranked games, but it has fun implications for 2v2 and 3v3 ranked, as well as any custom game with more than two players that isn’t set to assassination. It’d be easy to implement, too. The ACU already has an armor type different from all other units that has the attribute of taking zero damage from the overcharge weapon. It shouldn’t be too hard to make it take reduced damage from ACU death nukes as well.
July 18th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
The ACU death explosion should be enough to consume Siege Assault Bots (at a minimum) and yet remain below 10,000 hit points. I am thinking around 7,500 or so. It would be interesting if they could factor in a radiation from the nukes, so that it would deal additional (albeit minor) damage to anything that remains within the blast radius for an additional 30 seconds…
July 18th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
I think comms shouldn’t be super high target priority either (in addition to Stealth’s great idea). Having t1 units early in the game auto-target the high hp+regen ACU makes him too effective a meat shield, and forces other people to micromanage their forces. It also prevents you from dancing your units, since doing that and issuing attack orders against units other than the enemy commander becomes nearly impossible.
One thing I would add to Stealth’s idea is while the commander nuke should be 70k to everything besides the enemy ACU, you could probably go ahead and make it 0 to the enemy ACU. It seems like these two fixes would help make everyone happy.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:58 am
Stealth has the best idea. It prevents lame draw forcing for the most part but still lets the giant explosion kill things.
July 19th, 2007 at 1:26 am
You know - you could just make it that the commander further away from his original start point is declared the looser in any situation where both ACUs are destroyed within a moment of each other. You com bomb - you loose, and it is recorded as such.
July 19th, 2007 at 1:59 am
aw man, look on the other thread about this, i posted there without thinking and wrote “stealth’s idea” 2 hours before he did (i suggested only 30k damage to general units, but that difference is trivial to me).
but he posted on this thread and he gets the credit.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:04 am
Laconic Youth that will teach u this is the internet he he posts in the right spot gets the credit!!
July 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I’m very comfortable with the damage at 4k; there should be severe consequences to losing your Commander in battle. I could even handle it being higher - up to 10k, perhaps, because -
- one thing I’ve noticed about recent SupCom versus the beta - or TA, for that matter - is that it’s a lot easier to leave your Commander in your base just hanging around in later stages of the game. Back in the old days, you used to make heavy use of your Commander early on, but then move him away from your main base in later stages of the game; building a secondary or tertiary base, assisting outlying naval operations, or even just hiding him under water and leaving his cloak activated all the time. Now many players just leave him sitting around like a spare engineer; if he blows up along with the T3 resource farm he’s camping out at, it’s all the same. Losing the Commander in non-Assasination games shouldn’t be a game ender, but by the Lords of Kobol it should HURT.
July 19th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Saveau: Although, on the flip side, the more the commander explosion hurts in non-assassination games, the more easily he can be abused for com-bombing enemy bases. In Total Annihilation the commander was still the best unit all the way through the end of the game (go D-gun!), so you wouldn’t want to lose him. But in Supreme Commander, he just becomes more of a liability than an asset once siege bots start appearing (and just forget experimentals). So there is incentive to use him as a bomb.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Cyde Weys: I definitely agree that com-bombing should be discouraged, hence my capping suggested damage at 10k - the original 70k was quite excessive and made for some heartbreaking early game-enders even in Supremacy. I’d just like to see more of an incentive to defend the Commander in Supremacy mode rather than treat him - as it seems far too easy to do currently - as almost disposable.
And, yes; the D-gun was the shiznit. I’d love to see some enterprising group of souls turn out a TA mod for SupCom!
July 19th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
It’s fine as it is now imo.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
If the damage is too high in supremacy/annihilation games, then the only strategy I will use in those games is to comm bomb my opponent as soon as possible.
July 19th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I think that in issues that concern very large and drastic changes to gameplay mechanics, such as commander nuke damage and radius, We should NEVER discuss the implications the change would have on anything EXCEPT for ranked play, unless we also address ranked play. For instance, this thread shouldnt contain nearly as many posts regaurding annihilation/supremecy games as it does. And the posts that do include annihilation/supremecy should at least make some comment or thought on the effect it would have on ranked play, because the game should never ever be changed across the field just to benefit custom games.
July 19th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Whereas my thoughts run counter to that.
The majority of this issue comes from ranked plays, where people who somehow feel they were denied a win are lobbeying to have a change that affects all aspects of game play implemented to benefit their particular gameplay segment. I wonder how long SupCom would last if it was only possible to play it in a ranked game through GPGNet - I dont believe it would have the population to be a viable market.
IMHO, the only sensible way to judge what is a good and bad game change is to examine it from a game design perspective. Infurtunately I didn’t design the game so I can only make educated guesses as to what is a good change and what is not.
Still - my gut feeling is that the commander death explosion is important, but cant be so big as to force a draw easilly.
This ‘meta’ thinking is why the idea of changing the way the game assesses the winner/looser in event of simultaneous commander death may infact be a far better solution than changing the com death damage.
Still - what do I know - I am not hyper competitive by nature. I am not so adverse to loosing a game that I feel the need to try and enact sweeping changes to that games rules for my benefit. Imagine if olympic sports were subject to this sort of thing.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
“Imagine if olympic sports were subject to this sort of thing.” They are. For example, 3 point field goals in basketball werent always around. Another example, more recent (and more relating to my area of knowledge), olympic precision rifle shooting is an event in the summer olympics. Currently, there is a lot of support clothing worn, however, special shooting pants for the standing position are likely to no longer be legal by the 2012 olympics. It is a debate that is still being figured out, but some shooters want them to stay, and others want them to go.
anyways… yes, sweeping changes do happen in olympic sports. and other proffessional sports. Look at the changes in the NHL that happened a couple years ago also.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:04 am
And who decides the changes? The people that represent the officials of the sport. Players voice their opinion, but players play by the rules or get out.
July 20th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Breezy: “I think that in issues that concern very large and drastic changes to gameplay mechanics, such as commander nuke damage and radius, We should NEVER discuss the implications the change would have on anything EXCEPT for ranked play, unless we also address ranked play.”
Why?
“For instance, this thread shouldnt contain nearly as many posts regaurding annihilation/supremecy games as it does.”
Why?
“And the posts that do include annihilation/supremecy should at least make some comment or thought on the effect it would have on ranked play, because the game should never ever be changed across the field just to benefit custom games.”
Again, why?
Ranked play is no of great consequence to me, therefore I have no need to address it. If it is of importance to you, then you certainly should expound upon it at whatever length you feel is merited, but you cannot obligate others to constrain their comments according to your rules.
July 20th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I had no idea this website was called supcomrankedplaytalk.com Must have missed that.
The beauty of this game is that such issues as these, rather than requiring a sweeping change, can just be entered into a modification that allows the selection of whatever commander explosion criteria you choose to play with at the time. Want a D-gun? Check the box. Want no explosion or distance-lessened explosion? Check the box. Exclude Vulcans and Buzzsaws? Whoops, wrong game.
One of the big things we were told about this game from the beginning was how easy it would be to modify. If that is true, I’m surprised we haven’t seen all of these requests fulfilled already in an easy to select/deselect format. I would really like to truely customize a game to how I feel like playing at that point in time, and we don’t have that yet.
Then the only big issue left is what rules are standard for ranked play, and more than likely, they will be just what we have right now.
I think it would be a mistake to remove commander death damage. I don’t, however, think it would be a bad thing to have a nearby commander only take a portion of the full damage, say 2/3 or half. It makes sense that a commander would be somewhat resistant to the type of energy released when another commander goes up nearby. Even better though, is the idea of a slight delay between when a commander falls and when its core blows. Couple that with a damage value that drops over distance, and I think you’ve got a winner.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Laconic Youth: Don’t worry, it’s just an obvious idea, multiple people would of come up with it. :) Like Cyde mentioned, they already do this with the overcharge. Why not the blast as well?
I also agree with Gryphyn. It’s about time GPG releases mod tools or something for Supcom (hopefully by the time the expansion comes out :P) That way people can start modding in the things THEY want to see, kinda like in Spring and that extensible Lua stuff they got. They can make their own rules, own units, own EVERYTHING. Supcom needs to start opening up, so I can get a frickin’ TA mod for it already! ;D