Supreme Commander and FA team games are nearly always won by either an experimental or a “game ender”, such as a nuke or a massive artillery piece. I've never played Total Annihilation online so it never occurred to me how differently it played. Having read lots of first-hand player accounts on here, I'm really starting to think that SupCom might have got it wrong with the focus on uberunits. I get the impression that the developers have come to this conclusion too, what with talk of only two tech levels and no shields (SupCom shields are pretty impenetrable to anything short of massed T3 or experimentals). I'm just looking for reassurance from the devs that in the main, battles will not be won by a single, base-crushing unit. It's going to be a tricky tightrope to make planet-destroying weapons and not have them either obligatory (like the Monkeylord rush was at one point in Forged Alliance) or pointless (you never see the really high-end stuff in Forged Alliance as it's so damned expensive).
Players can also launch more than one asteroid. (If their economy supports it of course) Still, being able to completely wipe out planets can drive a game towards its end really fast. Which in my opinion should qualify as a game ending.
I dispute the fact that games of FA are nearly always won by experimentals or game enders. It's just not true by a long stretch.
I've got to agree. The only time that's even close to true is if you're playing the largest maps (particularly maps with extensive oceans between spawn points), no rush, or seton's clutch. If you want a tight game that'll almost certainly be decided by conventional units all you have to do is play a smaller map, or a larger map with close spawn points, and play aggressively. Hell, even on a big map aggressive play can win it (or leave you so overstretched that you lose if you screw up) before the game enders come out. Which class of unit is most effective varies according to the circumstances of the game and the strategies of the players. This is a good thing!
Sure, but in this scenario it seems that the only way to avoid experimentals is to have mandatory close-quarters combat. You say on a big map aggressive play could win it, but it wasn't very common. Total Annihilation didn't play like this nearly as much of the time. I definitely think Supreme Commander lost its way with experimentals. It doesn't matter how big or small the units in the game are, it matters how powerful they are in relation to each other. Nukes in Total Annihilation weren't as much as game enders as experimentals were in Supreme Commander because a nuke would only blow up a section of your base. An experimental would just walk through and destroy everything. The major issue with putting so much power into one unit is that it can still deal the same amount of damage at 5% health than it could at full health. An army of units scales down more linearly the more of them you kill, and it's easier to do so. I found using experimentals made the outcome of the game much more random because of this, and it was intensely annoying.
So try playing aggressively yourself. Push from the outset, don't let up, raid their base before they realise what's happening, choke off their economy with constant harassment of their mexes. It's all doable and shakes things up very nicely. If you always play the same way you'll always have the same type of game experience. FA is a complex game, look at it differently and all sorts of fun stuff can happen
somewhere is mentioned that there are no shields in PA. If that is true, it will be much easier than in SupCom to end a game^^
Nearly always is perhaps wrong, but a lot of the team games I play end up that way. Could be because I'm too much of a noob to be aggressive enough in team games, but whether that's the case or not, experimentals definitely obsolete everything that's not a heavy T3 unit and I think that PA would be better if that scenario is avoided. As for nukes, they aren't game enders in the same sense as experimentals can be, because 1) anti-nukes, and 2) they can only kill a certain amount of your base.
