Comparaison between TA and Supcom closed view

Having my army and the enemies perform weird dances while never fully commiting for quite a while is an essential part of the game. Reducing the range to near melee destroys this, taking away much tactical depth of encounters. Strategy is nice and all, but in the end when 2 armies collied tactics will and have always to be important. Otherwise you just have a robots-meat-grinder.

I cant see how melee fights improve anything. Also I cant see how melee fight fit into the sci-fi concept of PA. Your statements make no sense to me. At all.

:S

You are assuming that melee like fights = full commitment.

TA has fairly short range on its non-missile units, which often leads them to having melee like fights. However, you see people disengage fights and never fully commit all the time in it. The only time it doesn't happen is if you have a couple players doing nothing but spamming units at each other, ignoring any actual control over the armies (which is obviously something anybody with any skill can beat).

If TA did it, why can't PA?

One thing to be noted is, with the curvature of the small planet and the cartoonish style, short ranges will look less silly. As long as it's enough to not have melee-ing tanks charging each-other like Celt warriors.

TA was 2D zoomed in, PA will be 3D with dynamic zoom levels.

I never played TA on a level beyond toying around, so I cant judge it clearly.
I did however play alot of SupCom:FA, and I just cant see what is wrong with it.
Having a tank thats like --- on the screen only shoot a distance of ---------------------- is a big ... weird. I guess we will just have to wait for alpha and see how Uber decides to do it, and maybe give feedback based on that. Tweaking ranges is simple to do, so lets just discuss this further after we have a game we can actually test it out with.


@thorneel:
it is confirmed that planets will be much bigger, if you chose so. The only limitation will be your computer

Agreed, it will definitely be hard to determine how well the different ranges will work on PA maps before we see them, as they will probably be very different from what we are used to.

I see you can't remember what TA played like at 640x480.

This, right here. Thank you, zordon.
When TA was released, it felt a LOT like Supcom, scalewise, and if you go and play it at that level, you'll find the scales are a lot more similar than you thought. The ability to play at such huge resolutions wasn't even possible until recently, and that does change the feel of the game. (Some purists would argue that it ruins the scale for the exact same reasons you put forth in your comparison.)

So in the end, the argument just becomes whether to scale unit ranges up or down with relation to unit size, and as someone said, we're going to have to wait until the alpha before we can judge on that. Still, it wouldn't feel right to reduce weapon ranges down so small just because of the zoomed in "feel" when it can drastically affect the strategic level of gameplay. Remember, this game is on a much grander scale than TA or even Supcom, and you will NOT be microing your units as much. Reducing weapon range would just cut the amount of response time you have as to how much you can commit to a battle.

Yes, Supcom and TA had a different "feel" to each game, but each game was done on a completely different scale, and in the end, they played as appropriately to their scales as they could. You can't just translate the games as directly like that, otherwise you risk messing up the gameplay balance.

TA style ranges please. I agree with the original poster. FA feels very disembodied from fun. I don't want to fight a fire fight against radar blips. I want to watch the fight progress and see my units smack into the enemies.

What people need to understand is that the units shown in the TA demonstration was the base Tier 1 fast attack tank. It is heavier than a peewee. That's about it. It had a range of 200 if I recall. Stumpe was a medium tank and had a range of 350. This is already exceeding Supreme Commander 2 range with the exception of experimentals and the wierd little mortar style artillery.

Goliath (ultra heavy tank) range was 500 I believe, atleast in Uber Hack. Also, Goliath fires in a visible arc over friendly units. There's no shooting through your units.

I would recommend being prepared for what you saw in the promo video. It is very much what I want to see with base early game units. TA was fun as heck.

Artillery in TA fired all the way across most maps. Honestly, I don't know why the Long Range Artillery wasn't firing in the promo. The player making the rocket might not have had enough surplus energy to fire the big guns, but if you watch the video again they are there.

Medium artillery was a great way to leverage contested ground especially if you could leverage your enemies base. Range was over 1000 I think.

With that said, the Can and the Zues were super heavy brutal close up tech 2 melee fighters that could tear your average unit apart if they could get within range to fire on them. If used correctly, they were heavy enough to wade into the enemy fire and still eat some of your enemy's lunch.

I am really looking forward to this.

The supcom maps in general I didn't like. So flat and uninteresting, and barely any asymmetric maps. Just mirrors.

Can I also point out that the supcom image posted here is rather heavily compressed? It makes it a bit of an unfair comparison.

All this being said, why is it not possible to designate a 'battle group' of units that would automatically pop up a resizeable window when they enter combat? Double tap the window to immediately zoom to the conflict (even if it's on another planet), or watch your battle through the window at a TA-style zoom level.

Supcom just made it hard to do that kind of thing - it was either your entire screen zoomed in, or your entire screen zoomed out. Meant that a large part of the time you watched dots fight.

I dunno about you guys but I spend a lot of time in FA at lots of different levels of zoom. I don't need to see the whole map if i'm currently fighting in one part of the map. Being able to, is brilliant though.

This whole argument seems like you're telling kids to get off your lawn. Back in my day we had to walk 50miles through the snow to get to school, up hill, both ways.

What he said.

Strategic zoom is pretty much a given. If you don't like it don't use it.
If you can't countenance other people being able to use it then I think you're outta luck.

You might as well be arguing against the rate-based economy or asteroid impacts.
Perhaps this isn't the game you've been looking for.

This comes down to the whole idea of solving a problem: Make the battles have that visceral, powerful feel, like in TA, while also maintaining the powerful UI and concept of ranged combat in Supcom.

The solution is not to throw out the improvements of Supcom and revert to TA's style, but to find a new solution that works better. It seems that one of the solutions the PA team has come up with is the art style. Other tweaks, such as bringing back the bolder sounds of TA, will also contribute. I can guarantee that with the proper adjustments, PA can keep what made both games good, and surpass the issues of the legacy games.

You don't need to pick and choose what worked in each game and put them in the new game. You figure out why something worked and how to incorporate that into new elements in the new game. This is a fundamental game design concept.

I feel there are some serious rose tinted glasses when it comes to remembering stuff about TA.

To some extent, yes, but in my case, no.

I still have a 98 computer that I get my little brother to play TA on (I made him start with retro games, before playing modern ones to see how different he would see things from me. He is happy I did that by the way.). I've played it a couple times on there myself to remind myself of how it used to be.

Of course, I usually play TA on my Win 7 laptop now.

Jesus Christ. This forum is full of bads.

if you wanted to play FA zoomed in to see the firefights you could- especially if you play at an angle that isn’t the default. 30 degrees or so gives you a MUCH better view of the battlefield. If YOU played zoomed out all the time that was YOUR fault.

Just because YOU sucked hard at supcom and couldn’t work the zoom out wasn’t the fault of the game. take a long, hard look in the mirror and you'll see who is to blame.

Some people don't remember that we had 1280*1024 screen back in 1997.
Those were not wide screen, but they had nearly the same height than FullHD monitor.
( 56 pixel less ).
I don't remember anyone playing at 640*480, except people which were bad enough to not know how to change it.

I still have 1280*1024, just 2 of them.

Reading this thread surprises me, though.
If you want to see tanks fight, just zoom in and press space. Sure you will lose the game if you do that all the time. But thats just normal. You are not supposed to watch battles while you are playing anyway. ...

I like to see how the battle is going. Perhaps order some troop to retreat or some other to focus on the artillery that just appear.
While I agree on the macro things, I still want to have controle over the battle. I don't want to play PA like Defcon ...

You I like to do these things, too.
Thats called micro, but it is not that important in SupCom mostly. And I hear that people want to get rid of it even more in PA. Also it is quite possible to micro the symbols.
There really is not much to add to this topic until we can playtest PA. Cant wait^^

Anyway it is funny to see how TA and SupCom:FA players seem to have different ideas of some things. Seems you really adapt to whatever you played most.