Chris Taylor's opinions on PA

This was made in general to increase visibility of units (Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance was not very conscious about this). If you think that this was made only for "consoles", then you must also think that Planetary Annihilation is choosing their current colour palette because of consoles...

From an engine point of view, the maps were not smaller. Supreme Commander 2 is based on a particular branch of the Supreme Commander engine. In regards to the distance measurement within the engine, the maps were as big as in Supreme Commander. The DLC even added a 4096x4096 map. Even some of the weapon ranges and movement speeds of units that are similar in SupCom and SupCom2 are eqal.

However, the unit sizes and footprints relative to that are bigger in Supreme Commander 2 (which in relation makes the maps smaller ).

No, this has nothing to do with consoles alone. Supreme Commander is a niche game, due to various complexities. The flow economy is one of the most important things of TA/SupCom style games and also one of the most complex ones. It's what makes it great, but it's also one reason why such games are not mainstream.

The goal of Supreme Commander 2 was to make it more accessible for the general public, so that everyone can enjoy other important aspects of TA/SupCom style RTS games. Changing the economy (on the front end) was one of the attempts to achieve that.

Yea he has doubts about the game and people ignore that he said some positive things too, he wished good luck and said he was anxious to play it when it releases. He's a good-hearted man.

No, he's the very devil incarnate and his one mission is to destroy the entire gaming industry.

Seriously though, what are you replying to from my post? :/

Agreeing with you mostly about people seeing what he says as negative.

He's terrible at keeping a secret, or his opinions to himself, but in a world full of half-truths and back-covering I find that really refreshing. I was a bit surprised that he said that about PA but I don't see any malice intended in it, or in anything I've ever seen him say. Lack of tact maybe but better that than being fake.

To be fair, I still hugely admire Chris Taylor for what he did (or helped to do) with the original Supreme Commander, without doubt an incredible game. But to go from there to to its sequel, and now to Wildman... well.
Perhaps he is a great man, a genius... he just thinks a little sideways. I do hope PA proves him wrong.

Don't forget the disaster between supcom 2 and wildman, AOEO. Realistically the last game he made that was good was supcom 1. Supcom 2, Demigod, AOEO, kings and castles vapor, and now wildman I consider four failures in a row with the fifth soon to follow.

The uber guys left during demigod or before supcom 2, someone can clarify that for me. But if I'm not mistaken, the genius behind supcom 1 _was_ the uber team. As soon as they left, Chris made four disasters in a row.

Demigod was conceived and designed by Bob and John who are both at Uber.

I liked the basic demigod design and direction it took away from the traditional dota/AoS gametype.

But for me Demigod was a big failure, not because it was bad but because it didnt succeed as much as it should have even tho it was the first dota like game.

With demigod GPG had the chance to make basically infinite money but due to the sim/network problems of the supcom engine and missing business plan it failed.

Now Leage of Legends and Dota2 are the cashmakers demigod could have been.

Meaning, effectively the maps were indeed smaller!
Not without reason.

How on earth are you going to upgrade all your mass points with an controller.
You cannot micro that, the game has to be dumbed down, there is no mouse.

And consoles at the time were not going to be able to run the unit amount, neither the graphics a pretty decent gaming pc could have.

Read the IAMA CT had on reddit, he tells you literally:
"and we were trying to solve for console and PC at the same time, and that was tough."

I assume MNC and SMNC were sort of an offshoot of Demigod? Perhaps an attempt to improve on the design? Either way, considering how much time I've spent on SMNC the past 2 weeks, I'd say it was a rousing success.

Yeah, I was surprised at his SC2 comments. Sounds like he doesn't have a very high opinion of the game himself:

Q: Was Supreme Commander 2 the game you wanted it to be?

CT: I wished we had pushed harder to optimize memory on the PC so we could have bigger maps... and we made the units bigger, and between the two, we basically f'd up the game.

Q: How did GPG take the criticism of SC2?

CT: Ya, it was tough because we also thought we did a miracle job to get it out on time, but like you can probably imagine, people didn't give us much credit for that... but still, we f'd up some stuff that had nothing to do with time or money.

Q: I'd really like to know what went on with SupCom 2. It just doesn't feel like a Chris Taylor game. Has someone else had a big influence on that game's design?

CT: ...in short... we made some big high level errors, like maps that were too small, and units that were too big. I'm pretty confident that if we did SC3 we'd get it right... but alas, hindsight is always 20/20.

I think the problem wasn't the engine, it was the NAT routing of the online system (Impulse). Because players where not able to play online it prett much killed the community before it could evolve.

Some GPG dev explained that in the comment section of the Rock Papaer Shotgun article about the layoffs, battling there with Stardock's Brad Wardell about the truth behind the Demigod desaster (see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01 ... ckstarter/)

That is quite the Eye opening read(starts on Page 3 of the comments BTW), and while it confirmed many theories I have(or had rather) about Demigod and it's effects on GPG.

Mike

Demigod was killed by its netcode. It was a very good game though, even when it was hard to be next to dota. I loved the techtrees (this is missing in dota 2 for example, in my opininon)

and I was perma-banned from official stardocks forum by their boss, for saying out loud that even GPGNet worked better than impulse netcode... It was mainly stardocks fault imo^^

I read that, it was a good read, but I was a HUGE FAN along with a few friends of Demi-God when it first came out. What killed that game WAS the net code. I don't care what these two shovel out , the fact is, in the community that's all we talked about. That game was based on MP and that part never worked right. We went so far to figure out our older cable modems and routers wouldn't release or re-rout the correct NAT to connect.

In the end, to get it to work, we went as far as using NAT emulators and lan emulators too connect for private games off their network. Still to this day people play this way, (sadly most do to play the hacked version of ) but point being, the networking killed the game period.

Anyone and everyone that tries the game later off of steam or the like love the game, the only negative I hear is " dam no community".

Demi-God would and should have been huge, the net code killed it, to say other wise is just plain denial.

I used to blame Demigod's failure on stardock too. Until I heard the same arguments from GPG thrown at GFWL during AOEO.

I absolutely hated using GFWL, but fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me...

They walked face first into a disaster twice, they get no pitty from me. AOEO's single reason for lackluster profits was GFWL, but they signed themselves up for it.



In this day and age where Steam is king, why on earth would you set yourself up for failure. I'll tell you why, it's because microsoft bailed them out by giving them the opportunity to work on AOEO or else they would have gone bankrupt two years ago. The same way stardock saved their asses by coming in for 50% cost on demigod after their first 3 million failed to produce a title. You reap what you sow. You can't complain after the fact. Chris chose the route to take, ultimately he paid the price.

Well, of course, this is obvious... and it's also obvious that it's tough to make a game with consoles in mind, and all that within the limited time and money they had been given by Square Enix. May be not that obvious to the general public though.

lol, Micro Management in Supreme Commander 2 is even worse, due to the manual Mass Fabricators . The map and unit sizes isn't even the main problem of the game and I find it kind of odd that Chris focuses on that so much.

Demigod's netcode is the same as Supreme Commander's. And GPGNet didn't provide any fancy connection facilitation at all.

yet demigod had much more problem with that netcode. maybe because 10 players were involved at all times, or some other reasons. still it was harder to play than supcom in gpgnet

SupCom's and Demigod's netcode were the same. With the same issues. Also Demigod's troubles didn't come from its netcode, at least not more than with SupCom. Except, as you say, in games with 10 players. The amount of people you can play with is limited by your upload bandwidth in SupCom and Demigod.

GPGnet required you to forward the port you configured. Stardock tried to circumvent this by creating a NAT facilitator that allowed to build up the connection via their server and then hand the connection sockets over to the players involved. However, this did not always work, it was new territory for Stardock. Steam for instance also has such a connection facilitator and it works a lot better.

On top of that, there were some more obscure problems with the way the NAT facilitator was implemented. For instance there was a specific problem with how the client and the server communicated. It created a UDP message flood that some routers, modems or firewalls either couldn't handle or identified as an open tear attack.

All this has nothing to do with Demigod's netcode.