Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

I don’t get why people assume because they play a certain way that’s the only way the game was played. The requirement for zooming out in supcom2 was little different to FA, and you didn’t need to play zoomed out to be “serious” at FA, sheesh!

utter nonsense. i mean you had to USE the zoom sure, but certainly didnt need to play "much of the game" zoomed out.

Ever watch any pros play? As someone said before, they spent 90% of the game zoomed out. Of course, if you weren't a pro, you are right, it mattered much less.

Seriously, how can so many of you be fans of the strategic zoom i SC. Every friend I have that have played both games, hated that feature. We always ended up playing TA instead, even to this very day, one of the reasons being the sucky strategic zoom in SC.

A quick pitch to the developers... Please allow a fullscreen "mini"map og dual monitor setups, it is quite nice to have your second monitor dedicated to map.

Both myself and my padawan beat “pros” (of which there were really none in FA). I used zoom for intel and navigation, and I suspect I’d smash the arse of any of the people in here complaining about having to play zoomed out all the time. it. wasn't. necessary.

your friends are clearly idiots.

You can do that in supcom, just enable the 2nd monitor in the options and zoom all the way out using the handy strategic zoom feature.

Or just press "Split" on your keyboard to split your main view in two, or ctrl+split for the same on your 2nd monitor so you can have a minimap of your base for more detailed zooming if you need to be able to distinguish units besides them being red dots. Getting the point yet?

You're entitled to your opinion, but it would flat out NOT work in a game with multiple planets, and no minimap could cover the entire play field. So please calm down and think about it?

Have just overflow the thread, but a "Yes! No! Yes! No!" discussion about the Strategic Zoom?... over several sites? :lol:


However, just some things that I think (played it really a long time) supcom made wrong:

-Pathfinding: Once you try to move more than 50 land units at once, it takes ages before they start to move.

-Faction diversity: The units looked different, but the factions didn't actually played different. However it is not going to be a problem in PA.

-Tech redundancy: The units on the several tech levels almost always had counterparts with the same roles on the other levels. For example once you get to the tech 2 tanks, you stop building the tech 1 tanks, because the t2 tanks just do everything better.

-Com sniping: Especially in Forged Alliance teamgames this is the cancer that kills all the fun, to many air units (actually almost every air unit) were good in sniping the commander, it wasn't even hard to accomplish.

-Air: Despite it was incredible easy to snipe commanders with it, it was also generally really strong in Forged Alliance and could stand on its own. In lategame air was just insanely op. I would like to see that it takes more of a supportive role in PA, like bombing runs to crush enemy unit concentrations or to hold a line until your land units arrive.

-Lategame Commander: In the early game of Forged Alliance you have extremly cool commander fights, with a reasonable amount of micro involved. But in the mid and lategame you usually move your commander under shields, because of the insanely amount of good sniping tools. But also because you don't really had strong lategame upgrades, so your commander simply couldn't compete with lategame units. I would like to see such lategame upgrades for the commander in Planetary Annihilation. Those lategame upgrades could define the commander role new, like to an extremly offensive or defensive acu or to support your units better, just things to adapt it to your tactic/playstyle.

This post is so ridiculous it literally makes me sad. Strategic zoom is a beautiful thing. I am a fairly serious supcom2 player and I play pretty well zoomed out most of the time, definitely towards the strategic icons more than seeing the actual units or health bars, except in the case of mobile arty which is probably the most intense micro in sc2 along with acu+tank gameplay in close 1v1 games.

I never liked the splitscreen feature, and it was kind of useless to me. Never really tried it though. With multiple battlefields I can imagine splitting the screen would be a must though (1 window/split for each planet?).

I played TA pretty much only on the radar map when I played it (which was a long time ago), and it was not great. The radar map was small and stuck in the corner. Strategic zoom merged that radar map with the main view, and is my single most cherished feature of the supcom series, along with realistic shot simulation and queuing orders (the shift overlay).

Removing or not fully implementing any of those 3 features would make me lose all interest in this game, personally.

P.S. As people already mentioned, all supcoms also had a minimap, so if you didn't want to use strategic zoom you didn't have to. The minimap functioned almost exactly like the minimap in TA. I play with the minimap on, but I find it mostly useless.

For someone complaining about a thread going off-topic, you're not doing a very good job of keeping it on topic. This thread's title "Is things TA did well that SupCom didn't", yet this is mainly a list of things that were exactly the same in TA.

Also: Complaining about Com sniping in SupCom is like complaining about "King sniping" in chess. The objective of the game is to destroy your opponent's commander. If you leave an opening that allows your opponent to do this without destroying your army first, you deserve to lose.

Why must this thread degrade into insults?

That's pretty much impossible. The only thing you could have done from the minimap in TA was issue movement/attack orders. You couldn't select units unless you wanted to do so one by one (and likely select the wrong ones) which would be useless when you had hundreds of them, you couldn't build buildings there, you couldn't tell what an army was mostly made up of, and it didn't always even provide enough terrain info to tell you all the strategic points.

I have nothing vs zoom other than it killing the feeling of the game being "epic" (ants are NOT epic). In fact, it was really good in my opinion and should definitely be in this game, but please don't make things up about TA. There is no way you could have played TA mostly by radar. It's not just improbable, it's impossible.

If only there was some way of calling a stupid person stupid without it being insulting.

That's what I meant, attack orders, not selection. I'd do eco and selection on the main view, but attacking pretty much exclusively on the radar. From what I remember buildings on radar weren't visible on the main view, so you were pretty much forced to use radar to get the max range out of your units. I'm not sure if patches made radar buildings exposed on the main view later (or maybe community patches did). I think I played the latest official patch. And I remember that was annoying because the radar was small .

I didn't play online though, and I'm talking about something which happened 7 or more years ago, I don't even remember with clarity. I just remember that when I attacked stuff it was almost only on the radar. I also spammed fidos a lot, I remember that... not much else XD .

I'm not complaining about sniping commanders generally, it was just far to easy in Forged Alliance. In chess you don't have aircrafts which fly over all your pawns and hit the king in the face.

However, I'm sorry for beeing constructive while slightly offtopic, let me correct myself:

omg!! OP are you stu... not so intelligent?!?

Are you sure you didn't mean some other game? 90% of the units, while the units filled the same role, they did so differently, name a unit type and chances are I can lay out for you how they worked differently.

Mike

KNIGHTS! :lol: Or how about rooks or bishops and the queen? They can snipe from pretty far :mrgreen: . (in all seriousness comparing RTS to chess is kind of a flawed analogy from the beginning so it's kinda stupid to do :roll: )

Also about factions, how about making different models for the same units, and making the shots energy/plasma/laser-looking ("different"!) but dealing the same DPS and with the same range? That's kinda what supcom2 did . You pretty much have a basic assault bot, tank, MML, and arty unit for every faction (except cybrans, y u no tank) and even though they look different they have the same DPS (with some very minor and somewhat insignificant differences like illuminate and UEF can have more range than cybran because of research, etc.).

You're answer:

:lol:

Though in all honestly, I'm not talking about being politically correct sort of not insulting, but just being more open to stupid ideas (which can sometimes turn out to be cool).

Then again, we could have just had 50 people quote point 3 and just say "No". I'm sure that would probably have been more insulting than saying he is stupid though.

I must admit that I only played the SupCom2 demo.
But I did play Total Annihilation and I think the scale worked really good. Better than SupCom, and certainly far better than SupCom2.
I keep my position and I would trust the success of TA over the failure of SupCom2.
Btw, of course your units should look like ants when in a solar system view

On HUGE planets? I think your entire base might look like 1 ant.

Regardless, I'll wait and see how they deal with this. I'll be in the beta, so if I don't like something, I'll try and see if I can't get them to improve it

Of course Don't misinterpret my message. I don't say that units should never look like ants.

Btw, you're right about waiting. Units scale on the trailer seems right to me. I'm optimist that Uber will get things right, even perhaps in an unattended view.