Supreme Commander Talk

Next up in the lineup is the other giant, Thawing Glaciers.  This one has a lot of improvements over Liberiam Battles but ultimately fails for the same reasons.

As a brief overview, its a 6 player map in a 3v3 configuration.  Each side has 3 starting points on a plateau, with a large valley in the center dotted with pools.  There are a few mass points in the center valley, but most of it is concentrated near the 6 starting positions.   There are some small patchy forests but no sizable reclaimable mass deposits.

I’ll start with the positive.  The graphical feel of the map is quite bright and interesting.  Most of the ground is covered in snow, but there are patches of green forest, and the pools in the center valley really give the map the feeling of a world coming out of an ice age, with snow melting and trees growing again.

The 6-player 20×20 map is at least a step in the right direction from the 8 player Liberiam Battles.  There is a huge amount of mass points available but not quite as overwhelming of an amount.  There is some feel to the terrain, as the plateaus and central valley are mostly separated by a large cliff but there are some large passes that connect them.

The real reason the map fails comes down to size and sheer distance and empty space.  Seizing, building, protecting and attacking mass points is where much of the early excitement of the game is, but on a map this huge with so many mass points available raiding becomes a monotonous and painstaking task.  It can certainly be effective, but you will spend a lot of time watching your dots move across the central valley or in between starting positions. 

The relative lack of mass points in the center of the map, their vulnerability to attacks from all directions, and their isolation from the starting positions means that the only real ground worth holding is on the plateaus, and I think the map is worse because of it.  Having more mass points in the center would at least encourage some converging gamepay, but instead it becomes a battle of controlling the different remote starting positions.  Here is where the sheer distances in the map drag down the gameplay.  While fighting may be happening in multiple locations on the map, winning a victory in one location can take forever to exploit.  Actually putting pressure on your opponenents home base can once again easily take a half hour, and if your opponent is dug in it may take quite an effort to kill his commander.

If you draw this map, my recommendation once again is to heavily rely on air, especially air transport.  On a map this large you don’t need air superiority to do a combat drop, and using air transports to shuttle engineers around can save loads of time.  Get a T3 radar up quick to avoid your enemy dropping surprises on you, and to help with killing annoying raiding parties.  Try to get some light bots on your enemy’s plateau early on to kill some engineers and force your opponent to spend valuable time and units hunting them down.  Jesters are an absolute dream on this map, they are ideal for killing scattered engineers, mexes, and groups of T1 units unlucky enough not to have air support.  Whatever you do, make sure you concentrate as the game goes on and don’t let your resources get scattered all over the place.  If you have map control, use it to outproduce your enemy.  Make use of the new, much speedier experimentals to end the game early if you can.  Keep an eye on your enemy’s base and make sure you know if he starts cranking out an experimental or nukes so you can counter.

So in summary, I would rate this map only slightly above Liberiam Battles.  It has more going for it, but still fails in the end due to the sheer size and lack of any interesting gameplay elements.  It tends to have a slow start and a slow ending, and once again even a match against a player much weaker than you can still drag on and on.  Most games just never pick up any level of excitement in return for all the work you put into them.  If I could thumbs down a second map this would be it.  I can only imagine how much better this map would play if it were shrunk down to 15×15 size, cutting out a lot of the annoying empty space.

I really believe for a 20×20 ranked map to work there needs to be a fair amount of dead space around the edges pushing the starting points nearer to each other, and there needs to be a decisive feature in the center of the map worth controlling to encourage early action.  Emerald Crater is one of the best examples of this, and I hope we see that one on the roster again soon, as I have already had enough of both Liberiam Battles and Thawing Glaciers to last me the rest of my FA career.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 11:07 pm by Engineer and is filed under Maps. 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.