From someone who loved supcom.. and stronghold

First off, this whole thing is awesome.

I bought supreme commender: Forged alliance some time ago, played it a lot, still check in often in FAF for a friendly game fix. I also loved a game called stronghold 2 for some reason, it just kept me interested for longer than usual. Now the reason i bring stronghold 2 up is because i see a scary trend whit game these days; Most of them get dumbed down.

I was very thrilled to learn that Stronghold 3 was in development.It, for those who don't know, was a complete disaster of a game. It was so dumbed down and the game mechanic,witch most of them where gimmick, where so badly implanted, i stopped playing after a few days and uninstalled the game for hdd space.

Now i feel the very same thrill whit planetary annihilation, don't get me wrong, i love these dev and i truly think they have the technical experience to make this a reality. On the other hand, they said there would be only 2 tech level and no unit veterancy. Don't get me wrong, i love space, orbital stuff (I am a very big KSP player), and huge battle, but smashing planets together while being cool, seems like something that will get hold quick. It is not what will keep this game alive, what will keep this game alive is the awesome unit diversity, the unique and complex economic, the supreme commander building/engi system and the awesome late night game you get whit random people.

Now i have the feeling that all these thing are getting overshadowed by the whole planet/space mechanic, that the core gameplay is getting dumbed down in favour of the planet, "gimmick" stuff.

I hope I'm wrong, sorry if my tone is rude or something, had a tough day at work.

You know.. Same thing happened to games like Supreme Commander 2 and Civ 5... Thats why they couldnt attract many fans. If the devs take notes from the mistakes that those games made, i am pretty sure they will not over-simplify the game.

I will confess that this is a concern I have, myself.

Planetary Annihilation and Supreme Commander both had an extremely distinct feeling of rapid advancement. Every battle started out as a minor skirmish between forces that would not seem overly out of place on any battlefield of the modern world. But it grows and swells, rapidly, to become a massive battle between two violent wars.

Tech levels allow for something really important in gameplay, especially for those of us who aren't really big tournament grind-the-game-out-asap types. Being able to build a krogoth or a mothership or an atlantis or even just a plain old vanilla Can is something special. Having good reason to build these things is fun.

I understand the simplicity offered by a single unit level, of being able to balance all things against themselves, but I fear that this will take away from some of the glorious spectacle of the game, and have an unpleasant effect.

Take a look at Starcraft 2. All units are meant to be balanced against eachother, but this means that your glorious battleships or Collossi are still meant to be balanced with the lowly Marine. That's fine, that makes it easier to balance, but it makes it a fundamentally different game from Total Annihilation.

At the very least, Experimental level units are important, psychologically if nothing else.

There will be 2 tech levels. Anything above that I suppose you could call experimental and there will be some of these types of units. It's just not a huge emphasis of the game.

Keep in mind that "release" is just the beginning for the game as well in terms of unit content.

PAY 2 WIN CONFIRMED.

This is a bad dream...

It is worth noting that the very method of modding would make implementation of traditional 'tier 2' and 'tier 3' units fairly simple- Just create a second tier factory of the appropriate kind, assign appropriately upgraded units to it, and so forth.

The differences are more in quantity of stats than in quality of stats.

Probably the intended meaning~

Where are the modders at anyway? I'd like to contribute.

Here I am!

There's a pile of us on here, we're waiting to get our grubby coding fingers on the alpha and beta.

Yup. I'm even getting ahead of the curve a little bit.....

Mike

Wow, sup com fans moved here fast. They'll need to make a modding section soon, even before mods are made!

A little off topic but it still gauls me how Chris and team just sort of abandoned FA and never even fixed the 8 player crashes on huge maps. And don't get me started on SC3 ><

But back on topic I think PA is going to be a little more like TA in some ways. It's hard for me to even quantify what that means into words though.

No it isent.

What he have said could mean free unit patches. Or it could mean expansions. Neither are "pay 2 win" unless the expansions can use their units against people without the expansion.

Offcourse it could mean dlc and "pay too get a advantage" too but i doubt it.

Son, you've been trolled.

There was no way to salvage the Supcom game engine. It doesn't take a deep understanding of computers to start up a game, get -8 max speed 20 minutes in, and know that something was really screwed up.

I had poked around the lua a while back to make a few simple balance mods. Even with my limited coding experience, I saw things that blew my mind. An entire base building AI, built right into every single engineer (ever wonder why they lag?). Targeting priorities that were worthless because they were in the wrong order(assuming order mattered at all). And adjacency. Dear god adjacency. *sob* They were using some kind of FLAG to represent a NUMBER, and it ran through over 30KB of conditional statements to turn the flags back into numbers just to run one damn formula! It was horrible. I can't go back. ...I won't go back. Don't get me wrong, I loved Supcom everything it stood for. But the execution was just terrible.

I'm very pleased that PA gets to learn from the mistakes of its ancestors, and that the devs are tackling hard issues early on. Hopefully it'll pay off.

I thought the main cause of the issue was that AI was still processed for dead units, or something like that. And the reason GPG didn't patch the major issues for Supcom was that THQ wouldn't provide the funding for it. Even the devs weren't too happy about that.

In any case, I wonder if what you were looking at wasn't some sort of lookup table, or abstraction. The Supcom devs definitely knew their stuff, so I'd be surprised if it were actual bad code . . .

"Bad code" isn't really the case. I see it as more of a "forced to launch game before finishing optimisation."