How many of you are still playing Supreme Commander?
Alrighty folks, so it’s been awhile since Grokmoo and I stopped playing Supreme Commander, but that doesn’t imply anything about you, the readers. If you’re reading this and you’ve ever played Supreme Commander, I want your input on the poll and in the comments if you feel like explaining your vote. Here’s my explanation (and wow, I can’t believe that was all the way back in August). If you haven’t ever played Supreme Commander, don’t bother with the poll, though if you want you can explain why you’re reading this blog at all in the comments below (hopefully it’s because of my witty writing!).
Loading ...
March 5th, 2008 at 12:29 am
I just thought I’d ask this, but do you mean supreme commander in general (including forged alliance) or do you mean stock SupCom?
If you’re including Forged Alliance, I play pretty much every day (or at least every other day) with the same group of friends against random people, but if you mean just stock, I don’t play it at all.
And… your witty writing is the main reason for reading this blog.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:36 am
I’m done with it.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:29 am
im trying to but so far its more of a lack of time…..
i havent realy played FA since i bought it direct from the US so i could play it sooner!!!
just no TIME!!!
anyone know of a way to dispose of work+wife & kids?
then id have free time!!!
March 5th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
“anyone know of a way to dispose of work+wife & kids?”
Easy. Just play FA all day, every day.
March 5th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
FA or Vanilla?
March 5th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
The supcom community is slowly fading away
March 5th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Falco64: Well, Forged Alliance is an expansion for Supreme Commander, and its full title is “Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance”, so it definitely counts when I’m asking whether you’re still playing SupCom.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I kind of get the feeling that Total Annihilation had a lot more staying power than SupCom does. Anyone have an idea why? There are lots of possibilities. Maybe it was more revolutionary, or maybe it was simply a better game for its time. The RTS market has also expanded significantly since then.
March 5th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
WoW. That game fucked everything up for all PC games. That and SupCom doesn’t run very well on the average computer.
Haven’t played FA online yet and I want to, but I’m not sure I want to enough, you know? I was very big on vanilla for four months but then it just got to be too much and I stopped. Too much repetition (same build order over and over and over) and too much focus on economy. So, I voted for “Never, but I may yet play again.”
At the same time, I haven’t been playing any games very much, so I’m sure my lack of SupCom playing is just following from that. Most of my gaming time since Christmas has been spent in single-player games, and that does include FA’s campaign. :P
March 6th, 2008 at 6:17 am
What I miss in FA when compared to TA is, that the games length are so short. In TA we started a game, it could last for hours. In FA a game rarely goes over the one hour mark. Nevertheless I expect to play FA for the next um decade. Can’t really wait for really huge maps and 10000 units :)
March 6th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Cyde Weys: Four words: Total Annihilation Total Conversion.
T2A`: Oh shush. Go play online and have fun.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:32 am
FA is the greatest RTS released yet. Anyone suggesting TA is as good as it obviously hasn’t played TA in a long time. They’re incomparable. Really want the experimentals expansion they keep rumouring. damn it, publish demigod already so you get the cash to act like GPG again. You know support, it was good.
On a bit of a sidenote I have a gripe i wanta get off my chest.
I just diffed the changes between 1.5.3598 and 1.5.3599 total of about 20 lines of code changed. Don’t fall for TCC’s BS, theres gotta be a reason, and I wish they’d respect us enough to let us in on it. It’s just laughable when you tell people it costs at least $10000 a bugfix, get fucked TCC, tell us the truth, or say nothing. I don’t want to hear anymore obvious lies. It makes me doubt everything you’re saying.
March 7th, 2008 at 4:17 am
proof in the pudding: (this is all changes to text under gamedata, excluding strings_db, which is 2.5meg big with 3 minor changes, and formats real bad)
I’m hoping those memory allocation bugs were a cunt.
http://lighternetworks.com/~buf/fadiff/
March 7th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Purpose…. that is why the FA/Supcom is fading away. Unlike MMORPGs and games with RPG type elements, people nowadays seem to need a REASON or a goal to play games. For me atleast it really goes a long way. Like I played Call of Duty 4 religously for 2weeks JUST to reach lvl 55 and get all the weapons and bonuses. But now, because I play World of Warcraft, it’s really hard to find time for other games that seem to only be to play, get better, and be better than other people. Theres no real feeling of reward for time spent playing.
Unfortunately this is how most games go for me, I always end up thinking “Yea but I could’ve just spent that 2hrs in Eye of The Storm, or farming primal fires”… Although Call of Duty 4 gets played quite frequently, but that game is just perfect… I try to play FA as much as I can, but it really feels like a time sink. It’s also difficult because when I do get into I feel like I’m a worse player than most people, and thats discouraging. Games that don’t reward you for your time, and don’t give the average player and tangible satisfaction will in the end be left to the hardcore players.
I loved TA, and I really wanted to see this game be as great, and I think it has achieved that, but the gaming industry has changed a lot in the past 11 years. *maybe 12 now since TA came out. I think if they could add some sort of team system, something that gives you a REASON to fight and battle others then I would definitely play more.
I believe it was TA, I’m not 100% sure, but it used to have a sort of battle map, and you had to go and fight on the specific planets to help take back that planet for your team. If they could set up some sort of team element where each member when they sign up is given a chance to choose a team then you could fight over territory on a planetary map, that would for sure bring me back. Having a reason to fight will always be a big draw for me. This is all just my opinion though, so I’m sure many other people have other thoughts on how they would like their games.
I’d like to note that it is obvious that other people have different opinions from my own, because I cannot play single player games if I have an available internet connection. However, if I do not have an available internet connect I will play them gladly, and just as much as I do the multiplayer games when I have an internet connect. Why is this? because I enjoy the REAL PLAYER aspect of multiplayer games. I like knowing that there is a thought process going into the actions of the other characters in the game, especially in combat.
Thanks for reading.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Played SC several times a week since beta (November 2006). Been playing Forged Alliance several times a week since it came out (November 2007). The game is great fun and I intend to keep playing for quite some time. Can’t comprehend how anyone could play any other RTS after experiencing strategic zoom and the powerful controls implented in SupCom/FA.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
People have spent the last 10 years on every TA forum making self important “I’m leaving. This game is dead. You guys are losers etc.” posts every couple of months. And the funny thing is most of them come back after another couple of months and start playing again. There are 30 or 40 people on Warzone playing TA most weekends.
People are going to be writing eulogies for SupCom for the next few years but people are going to keep playing it. I’m having a bit of a break from it at the moment but I keep tabs on it. I just don’t really have the time to get myself back up to a competitive level. I’m going to get stuck back into ranked matches at some point soon because they’re still a real buzz. The game balance is alot better now than it was when I was playing alot last summer too so there’s plenty to enjoy there.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Oh, BTW. I still play TA online on a regular basis. It’s just as good as Supreme Commander, in a different way. In fact, the demos are probably more entertaining. I don’t miss the strategic zoom at all. Moving about by clicking on the minimap does much the same thing. I actually wish you could navigate the Supreme Commander map like that because it’s faster than zooming out, moving and zooming in again. Not as elegant, but faster.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
what do you mean by the demos are probably more entertaining?
You can’t click on the minimap in supcom to move camera? weird
March 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I play it every now and then, like once every few days, however I have recently moved far away from geekdom/hardcore gamerdom :P I don’t really game much at all now, I only do it when a friend of mine feels like playing, so I’ll play while talking to him (This is games in general by the way) :)
March 12th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
7% of the people who responded to the poll will never play Supcom again but they still voted in the poll at a website dedicated to the game? Odd.
I for one voted “Rarely”, as I still play every week or two with another friend. We group up online and play 2v2 pick-up games on smaller maps, its actually a lot of fun. Most of the rest of my time is spent on World of Warcraft (my wife and I are still going, we are Lvl 47s now) and my true love, strategy boardgames.
I think Supcom is here to stay as a niche game in the RTS world, there really is nothing else out there like it. As systems get better it will be easier to play it and it will have a cult following at least. However once Starcraft II comes out it will get lost in the noise so I don’t think it has much of a shot to come back into the limelight. I will certainly stay faithful to SupCom:FA as my RTS of choice for the forseeable future.
March 13th, 2008 at 2:28 am
I haven’t played any games since uni resumed, but if I did, sup com would be high on my list. Still, I voted ‘Never, but I may yet play again’.
March 13th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
When I say the demos are probably more entertaining I mean they games are better to watch. Now I’m probably a bit of a freak about these things, but I enjoy watching pros play each other even more than I do actually playing myself. Despite the revisions made to SupCom to make it more aggressive it’s still a much slower game than Total Annihilation, especially in the early stages making it more fun to spectate.
March 16th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
watch smaller maps. its usually a commander-dance-fest. its funny if you imagine the commanders doin the moonwalk.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
well i finaly found time and started playing again… first its great to find that most pplz have upgraded their machines…. BUT in saying that ive found there is allways one wanker that wants to join a 8 player game and bring the speed down to -5 GRRR!!!
April 1st, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I just started playing again with some p33ps through the LAN thing. Oddly enough you don’t have to be on LAN to do it. In our 2v2 games my team has yet to lose. :-)
I srsly doubt I’ll ever go back to GPGnet for ranked games, though. D:
April 17th, 2008 at 9:52 am
i dunno what it was but it doesnt have the staying power TA does. cant really define what except maybe for the fact it doesnt have the core in it
April 18th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
i just started palying again,but i’m trying to beat all campaigns on hard at the moment.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Where’s the ‘FA is x1000 better so I’m playing it’
Hell 95% of GPGnet community is on FA.
Cyde, you should really check how FA plays dude, your gonna get hooked again.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
TA had a certain magic which is still hard to nail down. In my opinion it may have been the first video game to ever display what I personally regard as *true* strategy, or strategic depth. I have many issues with Supcom/Forged Alliance, but it’s possible that a strong community can pull it back from entering the ‘cult’ status. In fact, we could learn from the past – the gradual decline of the TA community (and it’s amazing comeback). What I mean is the 3rd party mod community. TA had an amazing community, small but tight. However it lacked one thing – an ‘unofficial-official’ 3.2 patch. Many attempts were tried, the best being Switeck’s Bugfix (IMO). That was, frankly, the 3.2 patch that was never released by Cavedog. Yet it never took off as a standard as say… the TA Recorder did. I believe that it may have come too late and too many people got used to the ‘buggy’ vanilla TA (the Warzone/PhW guys still play it like that!) and ignored the bugfix version entirely. Madness!
Take Core for example… they just were’nt used, at all. That is a pretty MAJOR balance issue, that would never wash by today’s standard! I’m not even going to get into the hundreds of general bugs and issues. Forged Alliance suffers much less than TA did back in the day and still has a thriving community. We need to keep it that way. We need to gather around a 3d party community and come up with some kind of optional but standard ‘unofficial’ gameplay/balance patch which the top players use. Perhaps when this new French site goes online with their own ranking system something like this will emerge.
Sorry to go on. If any of you are interested, check out my TA/RTS gaming rant at http://tabugfix.wordpress.com !!
May 8th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I rescently gave SupCom another try.
.
But i was very disappointed that even with the 30 patches…
the games still runs poorly on my good system (in other word: runs every other game on the planet)
.
.
Multiplayer games on large maps (with the scale the game was intended for). Still de-sync 50% of the time.
.
I just doesn’t work good enough.
.
I played some skirmishes against some AI’s to satisfy my SupCom needs … it’s such a good game…
but the way the multiplayer backoffice works… we’re confined to playing C&C3 sized maps.
Because the large maps are unplayable because the system can’t handle it and because the games desync.
And what’s the point of playing a game designed for large scale battles on a small 10×10 or 20×20 map.
We want those fucking 80×80 or even larger maps. That’s war… that takes true strategic planning.
Not this bullshit tactical spam war Supcom players are fighting now.
.
Now I know when they released the game… they said it was a game for future hardware.
But they have to face that was a huge mistake… by the time the hardware meets this requirements.
SupCom will be catching a lot of dust on all our shelves. The fact that this supcom-enthousiastics blog is not updated
speaks for itself. The poll speaks parts of books. They gambled and lost.
.
I was and am so in love with the idea behind this game. But it just doesn’t work.
Don’t get me wrong… I fucking love this game. More’s the pitty !
May 19th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Fing0lfin: there’s a good reason that people on Warzone don’t play TA with bugfix. It isn’t madness. Switech’s fixes in many cases don’t really improve the balance. Example: once the pelican bug is removed it becomes largely useless, whereas with when it was broken it was nicely balanced against the Crusader. It was never overpowered in the first place so nerfing just adds one more unit to the game that’s utterly pointless.
Switech really should have acknoweleged he needed to do a rebalance mod, not just a bug fix. The bug fix didn’t play better than OTA so why would anybody feel compelled to play it.
The other mods definately didn’t play as well as OTA. That’s why the standard stayed. They all had major issues. Personally I think I have a good concept for a mod but at this point nobodys going to play it.
June 7th, 2008 at 8:50 am
lol I haven’t played this game in over a year now. Since realizing SupCom was a pay beta for Forged Alliance, I decided I’m not going to get suckered into paying twice for a game so I stopped playing SupCom around this time last year and never looked back, ignoring FA and everything else. It had a lot of potential but they went about it poorly, leaving the fanbase to develop vital parts like the GUI and the AI. Oh well.
And Chris Taylor’s smoking crack if he thinks “secure computing” is the future of gaming. Devs want more and more control over their customers’ computers. That’s ridiculous and only encourages people to pirate software. I don’t, but I share the feelings that drive a lot to do so – namely backlash at devs that want to control what you paid to own a copy of. It’s a really obnoxious stance the devs take. They should be serving the customer, not the other way around. They don’t understand their place in the market economy and such arrogance it only hurts them in the end. So I just don’t buy their goods, and unlike pirates, I just have to do without. Guess it works out well that I don’t have so much time for gaming anymore.
World In Conflict was the only RTS I’ve purchased in the interim and wow that was done VERY well and the dev support for the community is top notch. If I had time to play an RTS game, it would be WiC over SupCom any day.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Wake… I’m SO quoting you for truth…
Supcom was indeed a pay beta for Forged Alliance and I feel assraped by Gaspowered Games.
I will NOT EVER buy any of their games no matter how awesome they are.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Well, I started playing more recently because some friends bought it, though they got one of those Gold Editions with FA. I’m stuck waiting for FA to drop in price because I’m not paying 60% for only about 25% more content then Supcom. Anyone got a CD key they don’t want? :D
July 1st, 2008 at 8:16 am
I agree. World in Conflict is pretty fun. I played that to death with one of my buddies right before I left the States.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
I still play it. I don’t have a wife or kids, and my girlfriend see each other infrequently. I have some time to kill between the grind of daily life and i like to keep my mind active. Supreme commander being one of the great strategy games of modern times, I love to play it with friends. More than that though, I love to watch the replays of the great online players. Seeing the clever, evolving strategies and cunning tactics involved in great games is very rewarding.
On copy protection, I’m rather a fan of Stardock’s gamers bill of rights, and find that their approach to Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilisations 2. Sure, people can pirate games, but they’ll be missing out on online multiplayer play AND critical bugfixes if they do this. By securing the game patching system, they’ve given a great incentive to buy their game. If you’ve tried it, and you like it, and you want it to run properly, you buy it! How much more simple can it get?
November 24th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Totally agree with “Wake”: SupCom was a pay beta for Forged Alliance… => Ass Raped -> So I didnt bought FA.
But SupCom vanilla is enough to have fun so i still play it a lot !
;-)