Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

Multiple minimaps you could right click to any point on any planet at any time.

The game is just going to be separate square/rectangular maps at the end of the day. The round planets are just an optical illusion to make things more dramatic looking.

I still don't get why some people are reacting so surprised that anybody would think the TA interface was better than the Supreme Commander one. To me it seems normal. Very few other games have adopted strategic zoom.. I'm inclined to think they were sensible. TA is the best strategy game of all time and it's best with fixed zoom. I know, I've played TA Spring.

Sometimes I think battles were more fun to watch in TA. In SC you spend a lot of time zooming in/out and you don't see as much from the action. I liked the TA radar better than the SC one as well.

I'm not saying strategic zoom is bad, just saying that some aspects of fixed zoom are good.

if you are watching battles you are losing anyway.
Just watch the replay afterwards and move around in free-camera-mode.
Looks awesome.

Your confusing "cant zoom in to watch battles" with "can, but choose not to"

your saying 'i would prefer to be forced to stay in close so i can watch the battle, and multitask slower" with "I would pefer to have.. OPTIONS!!!"

Indeed; you yourself can simply not use the zoom if you so want to. I, and many others, do want to use the zoom (I love it!), so why not give us that option?

As mentioned before you couldn't play the SupCom games zoomed in because the minimap sucked and you couldn't use it for navigation.

I'd be open to the idea of you being able to play both ways. Of course if you could we'd soon see who was right about what's most efficient. It's just my opinion that had Supreme Commander given you the option to play it that way you would have been able to do both micro and macromanagement more efficiently. And you would have spent more time looking at action not icons.

Basically what xtf said more snappily than I could.

Do you even read any posts here in this thread? It was pointed out numerous times to you now, that the Supreme Commander minimap did in fact have more functionality than in Total Annihilation or any other 'classic' RTS.

Furthermore, the Minimap in Total Annihilation specifically sucked on big maps. Its size was fixed and on the really big maps all the little dots (with which you could not discern anything in the first place) clumped together, making it even harder to accurately aim for a viewport jump, or dragging the viewport on it (on the really big maps, the viewport's representation was like.. 10 by 6 pixels, or smaller, even if you had a fairly big resolution).

Yes you could. Dear lord. You are really not reading any posts here, do you? Or at least only very hastily skimming over everything. May be even purposefully, otherwise the truth might boggle your mind too much?

You have that option.

One of the things that was better in TA was the sound. It was far more immersive than in Supreme Commander. Also the big amount of wreckage flying around made it more immersive, imho. These are the things that would make me appreciate a battle more in TA than in the successors.

But otherwise, since the really big guns in Total Annihilation frequently overshot your viewport (unless you already had the screen and the power to view it in 1680x1050 or higher ), your appreciation of a big battle was often limited to individual skirmishes, without constantly moving the viewport around.

Yes to all what Spooky wrote...

Also, yes TA is/was an awesome game, played it for years back then.
Reinstalled it a few months ago to play it again. Uninstalled it immediately, why?
Simply SupCom ruined all other RTS games for me that do not come with StratZoom...
I did not miss StratZoom in 1997, it did not exist at that time, today I don't wanna play without it anymore.
I also remember being stressed a lot while playing TA, cause I had to move the map around like crazy to see or aim with the BigBertha certain targets, or to see the impact at least...

Yes TA was the best RTS 15 years ago and the fixed view worked well then, but we have the year 2012 now and have better options.

Yeah, same here. Any RTS (or games like Anno too) are excruciating to play without strategic zoom for me.

However, I do still enjoy Total Annihilation. Especially on high resolution displays. The first time you play it at 1920x1200 or higher, after only knowing for... maybe 1280x1024 max in the olden days... it was an eerily soothing experience for me.

Until I realized everything was harder to read, because it was so small, but it was still fun ;P.

Hey there are people like me who still use that resolution.
My plan to buy a new big screen is delayed now thanks to the kickstarter :/

I just tried it at 2560x1600 on a 30" screen.

The build buttons on the UI are like a quarter inch across.

Hehe yeah. When Stardock released Total Annihilation on Impulse two years ago, Frogboy also posted a 2560x1600 screenshot from his machine: http://draginol.stardock.net/images2009 ... mage_3.png ( http://forums.stardock.com/377352 )

I'll give up I'm sorry for not making total sense. I reinstalled Sup Com 2 to try and see. Yes, you can navigate by clicking the minimap but it doesn't work nearly as well as Total Annihilation. The mods may improve that but in the vanilla game it feels clunky. The interface wants you to zoom in and out and doesn't really encourage you to move around in 2 dimensions.

I'm pretty sure there are mods for Total Annihilation either out or in the works that make the minimap a bit bigger. Most people just pick a middle resolution like 1024 where you can see plenty and the minimap isn't tiny. Obviously I'm not advocating a tiny minimap.

I don't understand the hostility the OP is getting regarding zooming either. I've played SupCom and at first thought the zooming was unbelievably awesome. But over time I realized I was spending all of my time zoomed out to strategic view, because it was the only view that gave you all the information you needed.

The minimap in SupCom was terrible. Somehow the scale was so far off, that you couldn't identify moving units compared to the terrain. And its understandable that it was terrible; why worry about it when you have SUPER AWESOME STRATEGIC ZOOMING? Sigh. For some reason, the minimaps scale was a bit off; units were microscopic dots. And they often blended into the terrain such that you don't even notice large groups at times.

There were more than enough hotkeys to get around the problems, but they were still problems. Suppose I get a warning of combat. If I have a minimap, I can do a quick glance at it to see where the problem is, and decide the appropriate response (if any). Since its location is fixed, it was always easy to spot problems (in TA anyway). Using strategic zoom instead, sure there may be a hotkey to toggle in and out, but that changes the focus of the whole screen; you lose focus on the area you were working with (and it was probably important, otherwise you wouldn't have been zoomed in on it), and sometimes have to seek where the trouble is, even with rich feedback (oh, the combat is over there... wait, where is that in relation to where I was focused?). It doesn't take long, maybe only 1-2 seconds more, but it is a lot longer and less convenient than a minimap.

I don't have any problems if both are included in PA, provided they are both supported. The minimap in SupCom was bad enough that I used strategic zooming exclusively after I realized its problems. And once I used zooming exclusively, I was almost always zoomed out to the most strategic view, which reduced all units to icons.

That was not awesome.

It's not that you are not making sense, I understand what you are saying. But you bring up points that are not true (regarding SupCom) and all we do is try to convince you that the strategic zoom is in fact better or at least explain why we don't think, that a fixed zoom could possibly be better in any way.

What, exactly, does not work as well? Granted, I have never used the Minimap in Supreme Commander 2 (why would I, or anyone ;P), so I can't really say if it's any different than in Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance.

So modding TA to make the minimap better is ok, but for SupCom it's not? But maybe you didn't want to make that point anyway.

The minimap's resolution does not change with the game's resolution. The UI's resolution is always the same. It's always X by Y pixels. You don't see more by using a smaller resolution (like 1024x768). Only the pixels themselves get "bigger", because your monitor (or your GPU) scales them up to the native resolution of your monitor. But the amount of information that can be displayed in the minimap does not change, neither does it improve the accuracy at which you can use the minimap. Regardless of how low a resolution you pick, the minimap stays the same. And it is very small and very troublesome to use on big maps, since you cannot discern anything from the dots there, plus you often can't distinguish individual dots. And the representation of the viewport (which you want to drag around or quickly change) naturally gets small, the bigger the map is (unless you compensate with very high resolutions).

You are advocating the use of a fixed zoom together with a minimap and stating that this was a thing that is better in TA. And the minimap is tiny in TA, especially for big maps.

So? What are you saying? That you would rather have a view, that does not give you all the information? That you would rather have an interface, that deliberately gets in your way?

That is complete bullshit, sorry for being blunt. SupCom's minimap was a fully fledged viewport (with some reduced functionality), just like the main one that you use for everything, or everything else, depending on your 'style'. The scale is not off, it's exactly the same. The units were most certainly not microscopic dots, they got the same strategic icons like in the normal view.

If I was into StarCraft and I wanted to troll, I might come here and make a thread just like this.

This is complete nonsense. I stopped playing FA ranked about 150. And I played 75% of my time zoomed in. don’t blame the game for you making that choice.

The zoom made supcom the easiest RTS game to navigate in the history of gaming.

Sorry, you were clearly really, really bad at supcom.

Supcom’s UI made it the most efficient (efficiency versus effort) RTS yet made.

You are bad and wrong.

that was your choice ffs.

I will say that strat zoom was the single biggest technical challenge I've ever faced. The rendering stuff in TA was cake in comparison.

I'm also going to say that I rather like SupCom's strategic zoom. It gave you the flexibility to see the battles at exactly the scale that was most useful to you, rather than having to work with whatever scale the game allowed you to see at maximum. And as with others in this thread, I find that it tended to spoil other games a bit, for I kept hitting my head on their maximum zoom settings....

That said, there's rather more hostility to the idea of a fixed zoom in this thread than there needs to be. It's a cherished feature of SupCom, I understand that, but that doesn't mean that there needs to be aggressive defense of it. Instead, focus on the merits of the strategic zoom and let those carry the discussion forward.

And don't forget, there really are advantages to the fixed zoom from a technical perspective, as neutrino just pointed out.