Instant Death

Light Laser Towers were only a minor contributor to what reduced the power of D-gun rushing. In the time it took to lug your Commander over to the opponent's side he could produce ample scouting or radar and spot your incoming Commander soon enough to prepare against you, then several units was enough to either send or kite against your Commander; you would only be able to let off a couple or more D-gun shots before being completely energy drained. Also do not try to lay down an effective energy base before marching out either, because the time that takes means you would have lost your window of opportunity to rush. And this is just on the small maps. I honestly do not know why the patch maintainers felt that damage modifier was needed.

Your fanon always fascinates me.

I am not familiar with Supreme Commander 2's balance history to comment on it, I never played that game. Care to elaborate?

Commander rushing in SC2 is a cheesy tactic beyond no amount of doubt.

It may have been due to the size of the maps, but usually starting next to a player who is going to rush usually gives you no time whatsoever to prepare, either to pre-emtivly defend yourself against it or you more or less lose the game then and there when that enemy commander arrives.

If you try to fight him off you risk taking enough damage to get your commander killed and lose the entire base, and thats in supremacy, let alone assassination where all you need to do is build turrets in an enemy's base to win the game.

I have done it many time, and had it happen many time to know that if you are not preparing for it, you will lose, maybe not right then and there, but the games favor will be shifted enough that you start from a position where you cannot expand and grow your economy like the rusher now can.

The loss of map control, a smaller economy and the time you now have to recover means that rushing in SC2 was less of a risk reward but more of a general strategy on the smaller maps.

It is not something I want replicated, no matter how much I like SupCom2 it was awful.

Not quite the elaboration I hoped for...

What were the factors that made Commanders so powerful?(How much health did they have? How much damage and range did their weapons have? etc.) Did Commanders rush completely on their own or with assistance? What attributes did the patches adjust to alleviate Commander rushing?

How do I know its overpowered state is not just attributed to general imbalance issues, rather than it being the existence of the tactic ruining the entire game?

(UEF ACU)
HP: 20000 (+24/sec)
Weapon: Zephyr Anti Matter Cannon
Direct Fire - Projectile
DPS 200
Projectile Damage 400
Reload time 2 seconds
Range (min - max) 3 - 20

(Before upgrades)

Usually without assistance, leaving the starting engineers to build the mass extractors and power plants to support the commander, using the starting research to also buff the commander.

alleviate?
you can still do it.
But the major patch that allowed you to plan out buildings even without the resources to actually build them did allow people to plan their construction in the few starting mins of the game, giving them more room to micromanage their own commander and forces.

I do not understand.

The problem is the general imbalance, because that leads to the tactic people use not how people are playing the game in some kind of wrong way that allows them to do this because that would indicate that the game is imbalanced.

As what was the problem in SupCom 2 most of the time, imbalance in the maps further promoted this because it gave you no time to react.

Dude, you just gave me a bunch of statistics. Without context how am I supposed to understand that?

I mean: Did the Commander have too much health? Did it do too much damage? Compared to which units? What did patches do to bring the Commander back into balance? etc.

The context is how do I know whether the tactic is really overpowered, or that players are just complaining about a tactic because they have a hunch that that is not how the game should be played?

If it's viable, but makes the game play out in a way it isn't meant to be played, doesn't that make it overpowered by default?

How do you determine it can not be an intended way to play the game? That is why I prefixed "have a hunch that-". And it is entirely possible for a tactic to be intended for play yet accidentally be made too powerful as to be the only viable way to play--this is called imbalance. But the purpose of this thread does not seem to be about that.

Well, I don't remember seeing any ads for "spectacular 5 minute commander rushes". I mostly see ads focussing on large scale armies, major RTS, epic games, etc.

It'd be interesting to find people who look at a game like Supreme Commander, or Total Annihilation, or anything in those series, and conclude that "quick 5 minute rushfest" should be one of the ways the games is to be played.

I'd certainly feel cheated knowing that it's a viable option in a game like that.

It's all about marketed expectations versus what actually happens. Nowhere are these games marketed as "short".

You might want to check that post again. I added a bit more to it.

Well, as I said: if I get the final version of a game like that, and I find that there's a way to win a game in under 10 minutes, I would feel cheated. That's not what the ads were selling me, and it's not what I was looking for.

So how do you achieve the large scale armies, major epic RTS battles?- no rush 30 minutes Setons?- but that is just the obnoxious version of the 5 minute rush game; all filler and zero substance. As far as game advertisement goes, you were not told games would last up to an hour either. Truth be told, 5 minute games only happen when there is a lack of skill parity. Skilled games expand into a large scale when both players are in complete stalemate; they have exhausted all strategic options and the only way to break the enemy is to escalate the conflict.

This is all a lot of bluster though when you realise this sort of Commander rushing is only possible on the smallest of maps. If you do not wish for it to happen you can pick bigger maps. It is a further bluster when you also realise this only happens in multiplayer against other humans. Play single player skirmishes and you will never have to worry about the A.I. pulling a fast move against you.

You start by removing the option to all-or-nothing the game in the first 2 minutes. The problem with a commander rush is that it pretty much never turns into a full blown game (unlike an early unit rush) because the other player is risking everything in a single trick. He either loses the commander (game over) or kills the enemy commander (game over)

You don't need 30 minute no rush settings, but you do need a way to make complete all-ins from the word 'go' impossible to work.

Even with total skill parity, a commander rush game will still be over in minutes. That's the problem with it, and other all-or-nothing strategies. Being facerolled due to skill parity isn't so bad. But finally finding a worthy opponent and realising the game can't last more than 10 minutes because your opponent decided to pull a strategy like that, is a waste of a game.

This sounds as a very valid and smart team tactic. Why not?

The game is to kill the enemy Commander. Everything else just serves this purpose.

If you are facing opponents who keep blindly running against you regardless of assessment of their situation, you are playing with the wrong people, and frankly they are not very good opponents either. If they felt it was not an effective strategy they would eventually stop.

And good lord, play larger maps like I stated and you will do away with the Commander rush for good.

It's boring as hell to the experienced guy who now can't play the game he joined because someone decided to remove him at the onset.
(Hopefully uber will at least allow defeated coms to rejoin as allies or something, but still. It's a "valid and smart tactic" until it happens to you, then it just gets really annoying, boring, and stupid. Games are supposed to be fun for both sides)

You are one of those "the only goal is to win" players?

In Supcom2? Oh. It was a whole lot of things.

The biggest one was the change in economy. Commanders started with a huge chunk of metal and energy. You could build quite a substantial base with no infrastructure. This means you have a lot of money to spend on anything.

The economy after that was very slow. You were pretty much locked into the build order, with little ability to respond after the fact.

Radar towers were expensive, maps were smaller, and detecting an incoming rush was simply more difficult.

Defense turrets did not consume energy. They built quickly. They did a lot of damage. Defenders typically blew all their money on infrastructure, leaving little reserve for their own response. And Commanders did not have any form of super weapon. Overcharge was a late game research topic, and it cost a huge amount of energy to use (400 seconds of generator time).

Guns were insanely quick to build. So basically, if he got in your base and you weren't there, bam. A gun. Then another one. And another one. The Aeon variant was particularly dangerous because it had extra range, letting it turret creep on the others.

I'm sure with proper play you could hold off a turret rush, but it certainly wasn't easy.

That's incredibly flawed game design. I'm sure a valiant "must win"ner like yourself can recognize the overwhelming urge to min/max one's personal skill against victories. Allowing cheesy strats is okay. It's when cheese dominates the game that it becomes an obvious issue. It's something that needs to be addressed directly in the game, not by a castrating community.

Personally, I'd like to see Commanders be as strong as possible without breaking the game. It's fair to say we want a powerful unit with a big gun. The problem with the D-gun is that the stronger it gets, the stronger the Comm rush gets(and Supcom2 showed that no gun at all can cause the same problem). This is probably the only case in the game where the ability to negate a weapon against other Commanders is needed, because it works fine everywhere else.

In other words: Everything in the game was wrong.

If 'the most experienced player' died to a newbie commander, maybe he was not so experienced after all. If I died like that I would think it was my fault. It would feel the need to rage, maybe, but it would still be my fault.

The goal of a race is to be the first to reach the checkered flag.
The goal of Soccer is to kick the ball into the opponent's net.
The goal of Chess is to checkmate the opponent's king.

Likewise, the goal of the Total Annihilation heritage of games is to eliminate the enemy commander...UNLESS you turn off assassination gamemode. Nowhere do the goals state "mow down all the enemy bases and units".

There is nothing flawed about these arguments. These games are fun because they have clearly outlined goals which everyone can follow. The fact that my commander could be vulnerable at any moment, even from my own moronic stupors, keeps the game dynamic and fresh. I find it funny that I am accused of hating fun, when I am not the one in this thread requesting to neuter the amount of ways to play for everyone. Believing five minute commander deaths should be impossible is like saying first corner mishaps, first round goals and early checkmates should be impossible.

If it happened to me once, I would shake my head. If it happened to me twice, I'd look for a different game, because this one isn't offering the experience I'm looking for. If I wanted to play a 5 minute no brain rush, I'd go back to Starcraft. I stopped playing that one because I got tired of short games with people who just wanted to win, and as quickly as possible.

I never said that either. My goal from any game, is to enjoy playing. If the game ads tell me I will get experience A, which I enjoy, and then when I purchase it, it gives me experience B, which I do not enjoy, I would consider that a problem.

If the reason that I'm not getting what I enjoy but something else instead, because someone figured out a way to win that circumvents the "fun" part of the game, that would sound like a problem to me.

How overly simplistic. Those games have a LOT of other rules as well.

A race has rules on engine design and speed limits. It also doesn't allow instakill weapons like caltrops or oil slicks, which would absolutely win races. Plus, EVERYONE has to slow down during a hazard.

Soccer limits the body parts available to the players. No hands.

Chess doesn't allow you any redoes, or the ability to act out of turn.

No steroids, no injuries, fair and balanced teams... need I go on? The simple fact is that games incorporate a large amount of exceptions and "gentleman's rules" to their simple win conditions. Because achieving victory isn't as important as going about it in a fair, sporting way.

In the real world, unorthodox actions can be met with penalties, time outs, or simple disqualification. Typically, a referee oversees the game and enforces the rules. In electronic games, the referee is the game itself. There are no observers to tell you what is fair and what isn't. When a suicide Commander drops from the sky and D-guns the enemy team's best player in the first minute, that's the fault of the game, not the players. It's an optimized course of action, where the team scrub is utilized to maximum efficiency, and is absolutely the wrong way to play.


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Fine tuning a game's axioms is one of the hardest things to do. Saying "I'll let X win if the player is good, but not if his opponent is also good" sounds great on paper. But how do you make that real? How do you make a strategy strong, and how do you determine if it's weak? How do you let the defender win the same situation if he's also good? If you figure it out, go collect your GotY prize.

Keep in mind that the number of options at the beginning of the game are extremely slim. Answers are going to come from the map, economic limits, be produced by the commander, or are going to be part of the commander himself. There are no other solutions.

The answer I went with, was to make D-gun defense part of the Commander. It's part of another defense system used in the mid-late game. The theory is thus- he pays energy to fire the D-gun, and you pay upkeep to protect against the D-gun. Local defenses, rather than getting obscene range or bonus Comm protection/damage, are instead protected by you directly standing in front of them with the shield. The defender has a natural energy bonus to help out, but whoever dances the better dance typically wins. Maybe.

Unfortunately, too much lag would really kill this idea pretty dead. The timings can get pretty precise.

I'm kinda hoping the commander's drop-ship egg would protect players from commander rushing. But we don't really have any idea what it's for, so we'll have to see.