Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

Strategic zoom was and is an incredible feature of SupCom. It made its way into other games like R.U.S.E., which is worth looking at for inspiration because of how it combines the units in easy-to-distinguish stacks as you change zoom levels.

This said, you do lose something by being zoomed out all the time. I found TA maps to be more beautiful (especially with the incredible fan-made tilesets such as Atlantis) than Supcom maps that looked bland zoomed-in.

I think PA with its multiple windows approach could easily let you use one window as minimap (actually probably two, one for solar system view and one for planet surface view) and the rest of your screen(s) for zoomed-in gameplay, if you so desire.

Pretty much agree with you on everything here.
By the way, point 1 and 2 are actually related. In TA, you had more incentive to spread as the game went on. As you spread, you got more units, got closer to your enemy, had more resources, and it was worth it even if you lost some units construction units along the way. As a result, bases would cover most of the map no matter how big it was, meaning people where always next to each other and could always get units to attack quickly.

This is where I have to both disagree and agree (though only on 1 tiny point). Most of this is pretty wrong. I loved TA far more than SupCom, but the strategic zoom was just plane awesome, efficient, and useful.

The only thing I hated about the zoom was how small it made the game feel. Everyone keeps talking about how epic SupCom is, but as I've said before, SupCom felt like the battle of ants, TA the battle of tanks. Only thing that needs fixing with the zoom is to keep it from destroying the feeling of your army being big. This will be especially important with there being several planets and all. A tank is mighty small compared to the vast reaches of outer space

Completely agree. Added to the epic feeling of TA too.

I don't think I've ever seen a game other than TA that all this mattered so much on (some games have artificial stat changes based on height, mos do nothing at all; plus most rts games have units shooting though walls). This was even further emphasized by wreckage, as small passages could quickly get clogged up and you had to either clean them up, or find another path. Of course, friendly fire made this matter EVEN more. I really wish more games would make terrain matter more.




P.S. This thread got HUGE in one day!

Not having strategic zoom would literally be game-breaking for me. I can't play a game without it without giving up five minutes later in a flurry of swearwords.

I got to a ranking of 150ish (I forget the number exactly) in SupCom 1 it wasn't THAT hard. I also zoomed in quite a bit. However as I said when you saw videos of people at the tournaments QuadV were filming everybody was zoomed out 90% of the time. These were people in the top 20 rankings I'm talking about.

QFT everything theavatarofwar just said.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. This is not something that "TA did well that SupCom didn't" by default.

QFT - quoted for truth: It's not the truth what theavatarofwar said. He was making statements about the minimap of Supreme Commander that were completely false. As were you . But it seems you are still not acknowledging that.

The better players do it all like this, because it is more efficient to play zoomed out than to play zoomed in.
You have a better view of everything, hence it is easier to control multiple battles at once.

You did very well. The zoom in supcom is so good, that I never really got into playing TA:Spring, cause its zoom is just soo bad in comparison xD

Pathfinding and scalability weren't ?
I can still remember a local network game with one of my friends, both of us having quad core / 8800GTX & plenty of ram (well ok 32bits game, so limited to 3,x gigs) and after having spammed huge amount of units, the game was incredibly slowing down, and none of our own 4 cores was stuck [No AI at all engaged in the game].
Not to mention all these units that did not respond anymore ...
Don't get me wrong, Supcom/FA is an amazing RTS with huge inovations, but i hope all these anoying issues are old hitstories with P.A.

I know that strat zoom is technically challenging, many of my friends who used to code were building prototypes of such feature and did not manage to figure out how you could do this so smoothly

You should be sorry indeed.
Why can't you accept that some people consider the SC minimap to be less than perfect?
For example, being a fully fledged viewport is a downside to me, I kept zooming the minimap while I didn't intent to do so.

BTW, nobody is arguing for strategic zoom not to be supported.

It's 4gb on an 64bit OS.

I completely agree with OP.

For me, the strategic zoom in SupCom simply detached me from the immersion. I ended up looking at icons, and it sucked! It was funny, because it sounded great in theory. It just wasn't.

Well, for me, and many others, it was awesome! I loved staring at the whole map, watching battles unfold, and zooming in here and there! It really gave me the feeling that I was actually a commander.

But hey, if it isn't your taste, simply don't zoom that far out. But give us - the vast majority, I'd say (?) - the option of strategic zoom. Why not?

I am pointing out statements by those people that simply aren't the truth. Just to reiterate, theavatarofwar was stating

Twice even:

None of this is true. The scale is not off and even if he thinks that, he must think that the scale in the main view must be "off" too. Units were not microscopic dots, they had the same strategic icon as in the main viewport. Maybe he means something completely different, but he would have to explain that in more detail then.

molloy hasn't explained yet, what exactly he didn't like in Supreme Commander's minimap. He only claims, that it does not work as good as in Total Annihilation. The things you can do in Total Annihilation with the minimap (and that he likes to do, per his description) is: instantly switching to another part of the map and/or quickly dragging the viewport, and doing this constantly, which is more efficient to him. Other features of TA's minimap are, that you can see friendly and enemy units as dots there plus you can even issue attack orders there (may be even move orders? I don't quite remember). These are things that do not work any less good in the default Supreme Commander minimap, than they do in Total Annihilation. If he claims it does, he should specify as to what that exactly is, otherwise we can only guess.

That is exactly what the OP is arguing. He lists three main points that he thinks Total Annihilation did better than Supreme Commander and thus he would like this to be considered for Planetary Annihilation as well. His third point is, that the fixed perspective of Total Annihilation is better than the strategic zoom in Supreme Commander. He complains, that if you have strategic zoom available, like you do in Supreme Commander, you spend all the time zooming around, which he thinks is less efficient. He also complains, that you spent most of the time in strategic view, where you only see icons. Even though all this is optional of course.

I still dont get this point.
Why dont you just zoom in, if you want to see stuff close up?
You are not forced to be zoomed out.

You're missing the point. And you're basically saying people not liking the SC zoom/minimap are wrong. Instead, it's more productice asking them what exactly they didn't like about the minimap.
I for example think the cartographic style of the SC minimap isn't as clean as the TA one.

No, it's not. You're the one saying he's implying strategic zoom shouldn't be supported.
Even if he would be, just pointing out that others do like strategic zoom and that both options aren't mutually exclusive would be much nicer.

Give us strategic zoom or give yourselves death.

Yes he is, but it's more complicated than that, What Spooky is saying that they are wrong about WHY they don't like the SupCom Minimap. The SupCom minimap has the same features as pretty much any other minimap you care to name with a few extra to boot, the issue is that people are saying that it is missing features and that's why they don't like it, so they are wrong about it's features.

Imagine I tell you that eating Peaches causes heartburn, but you know for a fact that the reason that happens to me is because I always dip my peaches in hot sauce. You then try to explain to me it's not the peaches but the hot sauce that's causing the heartburn, but I'm adamant it's the Peaches.

Mike

I found strategic zoom VERY useful, intuitive, and efficient, but the following two comments are pretty stupid.

If you want to have a competitive game, you HAD to use the stragetic zoom. Maybe not ALL the time like some people are saying, but much of it. If you chose not to, you where at a disadvantage. That's not a feasible choice, more of a "do I want to handicap myself?" one.

That's not what I was saying at all. I was replying to specific points that these two brought up. Do you seriously not agree, that theavatarofwar is either making stuff up or confusing it with something else? (In case you played Supreme Commander as well.)

molloy himself only said that "it doesn't work well" without ever telling what exactly does not work well.

I did...

viewtopic.php?p=525005#p525005

I don't expect to get an answer though, he pretty much ignored most of my postings before as well. Or at least hasn't replied to them specifically.

It wasn't mutually exclusive in Supreme Commander either, but he hated the Strategic Zoom there. Well then let's simply ask him . @molloy: do you want Strategic Zoom to be present in Planetary Annihilation or not? Or more specifically, do you prefer for it not to be present there in the first place?

If, for him, it boils down to how well the minimap works in Planetary Annihilation, assuming there will be a minimap in the first place, I am fearing that he will have a hard time there as well. It's not exactly clear how a minimap should work in a game like Planetary Annihilation. Not only would you have to map the sphere to a 2D shape, but there could be potentially many planets on which you need to control units. There is some discussion going on about this in one or two other threads.

yes you *had* to use it, because it is more efficient.
The whole idea of TA/SupCom/PA is to give the player the most efficient interface possible.
That is one of the foundations of the whole thing, that separate it from games like starcraft that limit the players interface on purpose.

Honestly, if you want to have a competitive game you should not care about graphical stuff anyway.
From the perspective of a competitive player you could just play with symbols-only.
People who end up watching battles instead of giving more commands are usually not very competitive.

Okay I think we all know that strategic zoom is going to be in the game regardless of what anyone says.

Let's get the discussion away from strategic zoom and back to the things that worked better in Total Annihilation than Supreme Commander.

I definitely liked how Total Annihilation was slower paced, it gave you more time to coordinate battles. There wil be a tendency for people to exclusively use air if taking ground is too slow, but balancing air and fixing pathfinding can help prevent this. Having watched some competitive replays, it also seemed like the battles were constantly happening and in flux, with the advantage passing from one player to the other, and back. Supreme Commander was more of a game about attack-wait-attack, with the battles being much larger but also much more concentrated (boring) and over much quicker.

I never disagreed with that, just with the fact that you say they had a choice. No, they didn't have a realistic choice in whether to use the zoom or not. Just a choice of whether to be handicapped to play without it or not.

So PLEASE don't say that to people every time they say they didn't like the zoom. Just stick to the "it's more efficient" argument.