Gameplay SupCom2 vs PA

If it was so easy, why wasnt it changed already?
We are in Beta and this will be completely game changing. Its like starting all over again one month before release? Is this realistic and possible?

They didn't say that the scale can be changed that easily. In fact it was quite the opposite, to my surprise. They however also stated that they do want to work on it and they have changed the size of the t2 tank in one of the latest patches. (Yes, one single unit :/)
I would not say that the game is especially balanced anyway right now, even though it "works" already for early to mid game 1v1. Also I am not quite sure how much the scale would influence balance.

Personally I don't feel the scale is such a big problem in PA anyway. Yes units are pretty big compared to mountains. But compared to the whole planet they really are not that big. My personal "biggest" problems in SupCom2 were the broken economy system, tech tree and too expensive expansion (that one was the worst). All these things are no problems in PA.

Take a look here on my feedback about the scale.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...nce-but-how-its-done.52718/page-4#post-804915
I compare the current game to the renders.
As well as how it work work based on the flowfield stuff.

I think we can all agree that there is no better place to start.

Actually scale makes a big impact on any game, tanks will take longer to arrive to the enmy, ACU, will have to see and reac to any avancing armies, even on the oceans you cound have nice naval wars, and orbital units will be a chalange to move and fire... since that is the concept of an RTS the chalange of a battle.

Playing a game from a god perpective and moving units than travel around the works in seconds instead of minutes, sounds to me like a rush game... not epic

I don't think the "scale" necessarily is connected to how long travel time is. You could get longer travel time by just increasing map size or by making all units slower. It would probably not solve the problem that people like bhaal or zock have with the game.

Also words like "epic" or "strategy" are horribly overused. I always sigh when I read how somebody tries to justify things with them.

Another thing to remember, the planets we're playing on are really small. Like, really really small.

Scale does have to do with speed, a huge unit that takes 10 steps, it will take the same unit at 1:16 scale more then 20 steps to reach the same length at the same animation speed.

I know the maps are small, but it's hard to play a game where units are the size of mountains and one naval yard takes is the size of a lake.

Just to clear one thing, i don't compare PA with SupCom2, that would be comapring apples to potatoes, i do compare it to TA, i play TA on lan games with normal to very big maps, and the scale and speed of units makes a game more appealing for epic battles, and having tiers or advance stages for building advance buildings makes the game play evolutionary.

oops. wrong thread.

Thank you everyone for driving home the scale issue.

I heard them say on a webcast that they can "easily" change unit scale or planet scale. To a couple posters' points, it just looks flippin' silly to have tanks bigger than trees or even mountains. The units currently look too big for their environment, just like they did in supcom2. It kills the realism. Seatons games in FA were realistic looking. I think having the game look realistic (yes I know we are talking bots in the future) is real important for visually enjoying the thing. Might as well just toss the trees out with the bathwater if we aren't going to make things look realistic. Being able to zoom all the way in to see action on a specific unit remains important as well as zooming out to a strategic view. But units need to look like they belong on the planet we are fighting on, not like a bad chapter from Gulliver's Travels.

I think one prob w Supcom2 was that you couldn't quite zoom out far enough to get a nice distant view of the units without being in strategic view. You were always kinda stuck a little too close to the units.

What about pulling out a pixel ruler and check to see how big things were in FA and use that as a guideline?
Or even better, take ratios from real life tanks & planes & trees & boulders and work off that? That wouldn't be too tough. I'm picturing T1 through T2 should be similar to modern day stuff. Then it goes on to massive size after that.

I keep posting this video because I think it explains it brilliantly.



aldawile, I know what you are trying to get at when you use the term "realistic".

When we people say "realistic" in a game setting such as this, it doesn't mean it means it gives you enough cohesive immersion to suspend disbelief.


What people are trying to say is that the big robots on small flat planets breaks the aesthetic of "countless armies clashing over a million worlds".

i should kill you where you stand.

But seriously, i think supcom 2 did what c&c, red alert, and sc2 did. Only starcraft was successful, and that was because they were designed like that from getco, while the others were honestly fine staying the course but instead became immitation abominations. Supcom2 was more disgusting than c&c 3, but less than 4.

Anyway, so far the game couldn't be played with unit color covering more land than it does. No single conflict games here.

Instead of basic and advanced, how about we call the two "trendy and frinty", or whatever Starbucks calls their coffee sizes.

Because people don't like small or large, so we can call it large and extra large. Then to be more ambiguous, you can say multipurpose and specialized. At the end of the day, it won't matter.

We are not doing repeats of units between tiers, that's a success. We don't need to call it something technical and difficult in light of that, nobody can argue you can use only t2 units and win a game, your units will never get into strike position without constant production and use of t1. That is a success, we fixed t2 and t1, so why not call them t2 and t1.

T = Tier

T1 = Things commander can build
T2 = Basic factory units
T3 = Advanced factory units
T4 = Things only an Advanced fabber can build (Orbital, nukes, etc).

It's still a Tier tree.

You can label things like that. But that's not what it's actually called. And that's also the first time I've heard T4.

Uber's official terms for everything is basic and advanced.

That's all I'm trying to say here.

Uber is trying to separate themselves from older games with different terminology. Previously people kept on getting hung up on T1-T2-T3 with a direct correlation to how things were in other games, like SupCom. So to set PA apart and to get people to stop trying to directly compare PA to SupCom the official names are Basic and Advanced.

You never heard T4 hehe lol what rts player are you (joking)

T1 Tech1 ,mostly zergling units ,you can rush units or any other option you find usefull (drops)
T2 Tech 2 ,mostly press or defence in many rush T1(tech 1) units,or any other situation you have good use to the T2
T2 Tech 3 ,mostly advanced units that can crush your economy or large armys ,with T1 units or T2 units or other base stuffs that you can drop them,you can make use off the T3 advanced engeniers.

All off the T1,T2,T3 are use by all options you can find in battle ,since all games and players play diferent,so you have to be flexible to how you will use them ,with your economy.


Now for yor question ,that you never heard T4:

(Experimental units T4) are the biggest, strongest and most effective units in Supreme Commander. They play a very large part in the appeal to the game, giving players the possibility of creating weapons to crush opposing armies, on a scale they had never before seen.

They are incredibly powerful, and most have a mix of abilities that make them even more effective on the battlefield. Each faction has three experimental units, and they constitute some of the major faction differences. The Forged Alliance expansion adds one experimental unit to each faction, plus the threeSeraphim ones.

Experimental units are often considered "Tech 4". They are constructed not by factories but by tech 3 engineers, SCUs, and upgraded ACUs. The resource requirements for experimental units are extreme, so there must be a robust economy available to support the construction. They also take so much time to construct that a single engineer should never be used to construct them. Instead, as large a group as possible should be used to accelerate the construction.

Obvius you wont find nothing, off this beautiful T4 stuffs on PA.

T4= Godzilla. (krogoth)

This is actually a good example of "EPIC" that we were talking about earlier. One of the great features of FA was that you could build armies of T1-2 with a few T3 units call em what you will, but the concept is as Katherine stated... some great for scouting or harrass even in late game (nothing worse than a few T1's running around beating up your metal extractors) while others are the bulk or your army and a few others the expensive powerhouse brutes in your army (expensive and more rare).

And then... you could build Godzilla. A behemoth that could single handedly destroy an entire army. EPIC. Yep, that's epic. But the best part was if you had a whole pile of t3 bombers or gunships you could eat that bastard and serve him to his commander for lunch. Hence balance survives. Because Mr Krogoth still needs support just like all the other t4 units.

And as Culverin aludes, it really doesn't matter what you call stuff... there's an addictive quality to leveling up. Calling it tiers is convenient. SupCom2 actually tried to make "all units significant in the game" even if T1 via upgrades. That was a mistake. Cheap units are cheap. Expensive are not. And grandiose earthshaking Godzillas are expensive as all get out and if you have the econ to build one, then you deserve to win.

SupCom2 nerfed the experimentals making them dime a dozen and that worked against the epic-ness of the game.

Building game enders doesn't sound like "epic". Epic to me is the ability to wage war for hours, making every unit count, from scout units to massive ones, I play TAESC over lan with 3 or 5 more guys, we have gone for epic battles, were game enders cost so much that slows your economy, leaving you defenseless for a long time.

Having big units call it advance, super advance, tier 4, level 4 or what ever, its good but if the game itself doesn't have a solution or way to send hordes of units and be able to at least stop it or hurt it enought to defende againts it it just makes you want to camp, power build and go for that unit... makes it a one track game not "epic"

By "Tiers" I mean things that have a prerequisite.
The high the tier, the more of a chain of prerequisites there are.
Ex. You can't just jump to building Orbital.

Uber has stated by Basic and Advanced is supposed to be the same power.
Yet even with an incomplete roster, we are seeing a serious imbalance of Advanced (Tier 2) and Basic (Tier 1) units and buildings. The Mex, energy and turrets are all stronger at Tier 2.

They have already deviated from their stated design. I wonder if they will reign this back in as the new units start coming online. Or if they have decided to change the design policy.
We shall see.

A few direct upgrades aren't bad as inherently their cost balances their build time as an investment costing one a period of weakness.

This balances mexes if they raise metal from t1 mex a bit and increase cost of t2 mex a bit.

They are taking levelers a new direction.

Ask for other t2, they don't repeat. Try to rush t2 and then from that point on only build t2. Even self destruct every t1 fabber and factory. You won't win. T2 is hallow. It lacks meat, speed, and several vital roles. If you got off planet, you might still lose only building t2, but even then if you win via halley, you wouldn't have won if unit canons were ingame along with other large number unit exodus type of things.

T2 takes credit for winning a game, because it secures the kill. T1 played the game though, it played it beginning to end. People keep t1 factories queued with units as they micro orbital expansions.

As far as scale, Total Annihilation still takes the cake. Shore vs Shore was one of my favorite maps, it was great fun to have a friendly 2 hour build timer. We would stack our defenses, build a massive economy and throw armies at each other. Something cool 12 buzzsaws cutting down the enemy airforce before it even hits your AA net.

In an RPS scale really amounts to the time it takes to play through each match. Just like any RTS there are good rush players but my experience with Total Annihilation was that rushing wasn't efficient. There were a couple reasons for this. The first being that on most maps by the time your units got to the enemy base they were adequately prepared to repel a sizable force. The second being that if you committed your resources to a rush battle and your forces are repelled you are at an economic disadvantage.

Total Annihilation, to me still represents the best choice of units and scale. Planetary Annihilation certainly falls short on scale. Even the large planets get cramped. Perhaps I'm from an old school breed of gamer but I do miss being able to give march orders, go make something to eat, take a dump and come back to find my army is still only half way to the goal. I find the gameplay is far to quick in PA. I miss issuing hundreds of build orders for hours of building in realtime.

My gameplay could be classified as isolationist turtle. I prefer to build a small base and expand outward slowly after I've ensured that I can control the territory I have. This play style works in TA/SC/SC2 but not PA. The reason for that is lack of moho metal makers. PA forces you to be expansionist, or run on a stalled economy. In online games of PA I am frequently overrun in the early game, so I hope the issue of mass creation is addressed in some way. If I want to play a rush game, I still play Red Alert.