Comparaison between TA and Supcom closed view

I'm a big TA fan and I still love how it looks. I did play Supcom too and I really liked it too. But as cool the strategic zoom was, I always found the closed view as a downgrade.

I didn't exactly know why I had this feeling, so I did some screenshots and I found the result quite intressting.

I love tanks and blowing tanks. And mostly, I love to look at them firing and exploding.
So I took them as a size reference and try to get them at the same size.

Here is a TA screenshot ( on a full HD resultion ) :

And here is a supcom one :


So, where is the difference?
*the LOS of the units if bigger in supcom. In that view it's more difficult to play because we have to scroll to see what our units can see.
*The firing range is greater too. I again have to scroll to see where my tank can shoot. ( that's the red circle in the supcom view )
*The terrain is flat in this view compared to TA, it means that it's harder to know where we are when we are not hovering our base. (For exemple, a small attack force between two bases)
Mainly because there is no "landmarks".
*The scale of the building is a bit bigger than in TA, but it's not as significant as the other points ( thanks to Spooky. You were right in that point )

To resume, I think that close view in Supcom is quite harder to play than in TA.
You can't even see the ennemies your tank are shooting at without scrolling.
Which render that zoom level quite annoying to play at.
And I still think that the terrain is better in TA, but that's more a personal view.

Strategic view is really cool, but please, don't forgot the normal closed view.

Preach! You explained that very nicely. I'd like to see units of all types have a more similar Line of Sight like they did in TA. It'd mean you'd have to scale down the big units a lot, and have the planes fly at a lower altitude but it'd mean you could play close up and do some micro without having to adjust your zoom constantly (as I explained in greater detail in the other topic).

isnt the point of having the zoom to nearly obsolete the zoomed in view?
I like it more how supcom did it, the scale of the units is better. You have the feeling to control a ton of small units, that look like ants. I like that feeling.

btw: you just need to zoom out a bit and you can micro just as good as in TA.
Also: there is an option like "always render strategic icons", that is quite helpful to see units at any zoomlevel.

EDIT:
example here

That's the point, I don't want to play with icons. I want to see the tanks fighting.

Problem is, if you make the tanks bigger the scale would kind of turn towards SupCom2. I think most of us agree that SupCom2 was bad because -well it was one of the reasons- the maps were so small in comparison to the units and the ranges of the units were terribly small, too. So making the units bigger and ranges(line of sight) smaller is bad. You end up with a game that gives you the feeling you are playing with playmobile or lego. If you want to see the tanks fight, you need to zoom in to the maximum. Thats a logical consequence from having a more or less realistic zoomable 3D-view. If you look at the battlefield from 50m height you cant expect to see any units as big as it is close up.

So, TA did it right in 1997 but now in 2012 it's not possible anymore just because supcom2 was a failure?

I doesn't need to be realistic and look like real tank, have you seen the trailer?
They will indeed look cartoony.

This is one of the main reasons I didn't like SupCom much. It's also noticeable on that screenshot that the units don't stand out enough from the terrain.

The cartoon art style should help.

Ranges were massive in SupCom. I'd like to see ranges and LOS more like TA than SupCom.

Reduce unit range and you get what you're looking for.

Mind you, not everyone's looking for that.
Maybe make it an inbuilt mod? Reduce all unit ranges by an adjustable X% so closing in on the action won't mean you getting a disadvantage, how's that?

The opposite would also be helpful for play on very large maps, but in both cases some other things (such as speed) would also have to be modified to keep similar balance.

I think you could increase the size of the units a bit without breaking anything + the said that they aim to make the units stand out more.
The important thing is that the ranges don't get reduced. Bigger units with smaller ranges just cant work out. TA only works with those low line of sights because the zoom is missing and the actual fire-range is often bigger than my screen. -Given I only played a bit campaign, dunno about which units were mostly used in ladder games- The ranges in SupCom2 look totally weird and very very unrealistic. The cannons that are used in SupCom/TA/PA are supposed to be hight tech. The ranges of SupCom2 look like they are stone-throwers from the stone age.

So just size up maps and units. So you have bigs units that are visible from rather high, but the maps are so big that it still feels like ants on a planet. Cause thats a very important selling point of the game.
Since the planets gonna be any size we want, this should work out fine.

tldr:
A tank on a planet needs to look like an ant and a tank needs to have a range that is far bigger than its own size. SupCom2 showed us how it doesn't work.

Homeworld 2 does scale the ships to make them look a little bigger when the view is quite zoomed out. It may be a good solution?

zoomed out we have symbols, which is fine with everyone -I hope-
The question is what to do when zoomed in. Does there have to be a point at which you can actually control units without symbols and see everything thats in range? How to scale units and ranges to make this possible without destroying the immersion of a big battlefield with realistically sized units on them?

Interesting question. But I think the immersion of a big battlefield with units that re like ants is more important. Simply for the fact that most people play zoomed out 90% of the time, since it is just more efficient.

The problem with such comparisons is, that the references you are using, in order to be able to actually make any comparison, are completely arbitrary. You say that LOS and firing range of units in Supreme Commander is bigger, but you could also say, that units in Total Annihilation are simply much larger than in Supreme Commander. The same basic problem applies to other cases as well.

Furthermore, Supreme Commander uses four different tiers, each of which are distinctively different in their size. It's deliberate in order to make you feel the shock and awe of the ludicrously big Experimentals. It's supposed to convey their power, their brunt force. This of course can have an impact on the visual identification of the lower tier units in battle.

This was frequently the case in Total Annihilation as well, especially back in the day when not everyone was able to run the game in high resolutions. Even in your screenshot, most of those units can shoot beyond their LoS as far as I remember. In any case, there were many units in Total Annihilation as awell, that can shoot beyond their LoS. Total Annihilation also was "harder" to play, if you weren't able to 'zoom out' (by using a higher resolution).

Terrain in Total Annihilation are pre-rendered tiles, rather than realtime 3D graphics. It did look very good, yes, they did an awesome job there. Also Total Annihilation uses a very limited colour palette, so it is simply bound to have a high contrast.
The visual fidelity of terrain got better in Forged Alliance and in the Supreme Commander 2 DLC as well. Also I think Planetary Annihilation will have a very clear and simple representation of terrain, while still looking very nice.

RUSE uses this as well, but I don't really like it. I am more for strategic symbols.

// oops, double post

I do not want a game where artillery pieces have ranges that medieval longbowmen would scoff at because people want to look at tanks blowing up. Looking at tanks blowing up isn't as cool when those tanks could increase their range by having a guy lean out the window and throw rocks.

Actually, both TA and SupCom explicitly measure their distances in units which can be converted to meters. In general, SupCom units are much bigger than TA ones. A T1 scout in SupCom is about 10 meters long, and is teeny tiny compared to most other units, while a PeeWee is about 8 meters tall.

It seems we will not understand each other

Would you be okay if I resume this by saying that you prefer the Supcom scale and I prefer the TA scale ?

You know that you can delete posts on this forum, right?


Anyway, I agree that units need shorter attacking ranges. It was far too big in SupCom, which actually resulted in more than just a problem with the view, but also cause fights to end too quickly, as the entire armies from both sides could fight at each other at once. It's weird to see tanks in the back rows of an army firing over their own armies to shoot at the enemy anyway. Missiles are one thing, but lasers doing that? No.

Here's a video of SupCom 2 tanks fighting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHsidQdPJw
Does that look right to you? How in the world are the tanks not hitting their own allies in the fight? How is this physics based? Sure it looks cool, but it's also a bit weird looking, and it doesn't last long, as the armies annihilate each other really fast.

Now look at TA tanks fighting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZkQ2xzjZIM
Sure it's not perfect, but the units rarely try to shoot through your own tanks, and when they do, they hit their own tanks instead of going right through them.

This also means fights last longer, as it's not the entire army fighting it out at once, but only the ones on the front lines; which gives you time to send reinforcements, which means fights can go on and on instead of being a bunch of separate skirmishes.

Errrr no? Usually people would move in range with the front row and retreat or -if they wanted to get really serious with aggression- moved in with everything. That resulted in the armies mixing into each other, which ofc leads to units shooting at each other all over the place. Bigger ranges just mean that you dont have to hug the enemy to attack him.

No, I agree this looks terrible SupCom2, as I already said, is just a "bad" game.

Thats nearly identical to normal fights in SupCom:FA, with the only difference being that the tanks in TA really hug each other. In FA you usually stay away a bit, unless you really want to commit hard. TA has the problem that the tanks are rather big and the ranges are rather small, so armies quickly fill out space and tend to block each other extremely. Thats one of the things that TA did not very good. I dont want my tanks to dodge into enemy tanks while they are shooting at each other.

In a good game of SupCom:FA fights go on over time all over the map. Thats what makes the game so beautiful.

This is not supposed to be a melee-stlye RTS, is it?

The range in TA was really good actually. The "hugging" was more due to the ai/pathfinding than the range.

Also, won't deny SupCom 2 was much worse than the first one/FA.

Finally, fights are either melee, or tactic based. Seeing as everyone is saying the game should be more strategy then tactics, I'd say the fights themselves SHOULD be melee styled, but deciding where those melee fights will be held, and with what units should be the focus. Of course, I'm taking more about ordinary tanks, and not something like artillery, which needs to be placed in good positions and work with other units to stay safe. So while not all units should have melee fights, some definitely should.

I don't get this whole ZOOM discussion...

in SupCom2 you only get this weird angle when you completely zoom in, a bit before and you have a very fine and close up high-angle shot.

Most of the time I play zoomed in to micro...there is a mouse-wheel that reacts very sensitive... not having a strategic zoom is not going to happen, so when you don't like it at all, stay zoomed in, use the minimap and never touch the mouse-wheel.