The Feel of Total Annihilation

I played a little of Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance, and maybe Im looking through rose tinted glasses and although I didn't play much of it [them], it didn't feel like TA did.

TA had the impression of sending nigh on immortal armies of robots crashing headlong into each other in a massive genocidal war. The explosions and the music all stirred it up.
The mixture of tactics & strategy is also what made it great.

Some may want a sort of balance but sometimes in TA balance didn't matter, sometimes you needed something to tip the scales without being unbeatable. I also play CoH and think that is a great game too. A person can come back from the brink of defeat in CoH.
Im wondering if that would be possible in PA too.

I don't know what CoH is, but I agree that the SupCom series didn't feel like TA. They weren't bad, but they felt like they improved some things, and got rid of some things that were done well in TA.

I think SupCom: Forged Alliance has a much, much more epic feel than Total Annihilation.

It is, by far, the better game, and not alone for its more modern interface and strategic zoom.

The ranking of rts games is as follows:

1. SupCom: Forged Alliance.
-- huge void --
2. SupCom Vanilla
-- giant void --
3. Total Annihilation: Core Contingency
-- large void --
4. Total Annihilation Vanilla
-- sheer endless void --
5. SupCom 2 (with or without DLC)
-- literally endless void
6. Total Annihlation: Kingdoms
7. All Other RTS games on the market.

This is more of a statement about how much the entire genre sucks than how good RTSes could really be. There is always room for improvement, evolution, and innovation.

A huge number of RTS games simply sucks. Some are bland. Some are RTTs and should be considered a different genre (but aren't - by the German press in particular).

As long as they don't make it feel like SupCom 2. I couldn't put my finger on what was missing or changed in SupCom 2, it just felt totally less epic, and nearly everybody agreed on that point. I think it was just the way the unit movements and graphics looked. As long as they make the feel like FA or TA, I'm sure I'll fall in love with it.

Yeh the only thing SupCom2 did better was the pretty awesome flow field pathfinding.

The teching, the experimentals, the economy... it all felt inferior.

Yeah, cause having units slide sideways and clip into each other is great.

Movement might have been 'easier' in SupCom2, but I wouldn't say it was better.

Mike

I believe the flowfield was included in the initial alpha/beta stages of the game.
I think the actual COOL flow mechanic as shown in the demo videos was removed because of performance cost.

is it me or didn't supcom2's unit just push each other away in the end?

Let me tell you: I still play SupCom 2 from time to time, simply to enjoy this easily-trolled game. But are you serious? Better than any other RTS on the market? That is just so incredibly ignorant, I don't even know where to start. This hybris is nothing but sad. Sure, other RTS might not appeal to you that much, but static this as a fact is just plainly arrogant. Seriously, I just finished a 3+hour long match which mostly involved spamming King Kriptors (or what their retarded name was) and Fatboys. And right after so much delicious gameplay, I read your post - it makes me sad, having played Starcraft 2.

I was trolling. It should be obvious to the observer that I'm a blatant fanboy.

While I don't personally care much for StarCraft and StarCraft 2, I respect the franchise as being pretty much top of its class. I just think it's a different genre, not exactly RTT, but still not really RTS, either. A lot of games fall into this category. I think other games, like Warcraft, WC 2, WC III and especially the Dawn of War games, were excellent, I played them quite a bit. Company of Heroes was good, but very tactical.

Warzone was good, as was the Earth series. Dark Reign was okay but imba. But for example, Command & Conquer was abysmal in every installment after the original Red Alert (and even that was broken).

Empire Earth series was decent, but had too little unit variety on each tier, limiting your options.

Total War series was groundbreaking, Rome was my favourite but I even played the first Shogun when it came out.

RUSE was great, and quite strategic; maybe too indirect at times. Sudden Strike series was great, and very demanding.

The Cossacks series, especially American Conquest, were probably one of the best RTS franchises ever to hit the market. Deep, realistic, challenging, fast-paced, both tactically and strategically fascinating.

I could go on. I played dozens of RTS, many of them passionately, some of them on world class competitive level (TA, SupCom and American Conquest).

RTS are my favourite genre, and that's why I'm so picky about them. If someone is a conoisseur of fine wines, they also start to develop a more demanding palate. I play RTS since the genre was basically invented. I played Z. I played Dune II. I played Warcraft: Orks and Humans in LAN multiplayer, and RTS was almost strictly multiplayer for me ever since.

Honestly, I think the TA/SupCom franchises are head and shoulders above its RTS genre competition, the strategic zoom alone leaves pretty much every other game in the dust. And that includes SupCom 2, with all its shortcomings, simply it is, despite all attempts to stomp out the goodness it posessed, a SupCom game, and it shows.

Yes CoH = Company of Heroes.

Best tactical rts of all time imo [especially with blitzkrieg mod], compared to TA/SupCom's strategic rts component.

And for me, not only did TA feel far more epic than SupCom, SupCom didn't feel epic to me at all. You spent much of the game zoomed out, so it felt like you where controlling an army of ants, instead of an army of tanks. I guess this is a matter of opinion, but having more units/bigger maps does not mean more epic feeling. Scale is what matters, and being zoomed out a lot ruined that scale. I just hope the zoom feature in PA doesn't hurt that aspect of the game for me as it did in SupCom (not saying the zoom wasn't awesome and useful).

Also the predilection to use experimentals meant you would generaly assault a base with relitively few units. if there aren't any experimentals (or they aren't really "the standard") players will be using hundreds of ground troops instead of quick jabs (or as well as) while they tech.

This.

I can't believe how uninteresting and slow the game feels while unzoomed, and you don't really want to zoom in and "lose" the big picture. On the other hand, a perfectly sized fixed minimap, fulfills that picture for me.

Even in TA, playing it with current ultra-large resolutions, everything looks tiny, so hard to click. At 800x600 or really pushing it with 1024x768, it was, somehow, perfect.

I believe you could turn them off if you didn't like them, but being able to see anything when unzoomed was kinda important. The icons were great as they gave instant feedback on what was happening everywhere.

Never liked minimaps either, with stratzoom and icons they're not required.

I loved the zoom. There was just not enough incentive to zoom in, other than the graphics.

Retaining full control at any zoom level ist still betterthan big map oerview modes, limited zoom, and whatnot.

TA felt like a clusterfuck after a while, especially in FFAs. SupCom felt like a ballet performance.

I still love TA, but SupCom:FA is the better game.

Dudes, you've all missed the MOST IMPORTANT difference between the feel of TA and the feel of SupCom.

in TA, planes did barrel rolls.

You are absolutely correct.

I'll try to make a movie comparison. Now, everything below is awesome in my books.

TA - Arnold Schwarzenegger films (Cheesy/Actiony)
SupCom - New Batman Trilogy (Serious/Epic)

True. Our arguments are invalid.

I think the sense of epicness (is that even a word?) that was lost in Supcom is due to the scale being off. The units are meant to be stupidly enormous, and travel at ludicrous speeds. The mech marine for instance (if the fluff is to be believed), is 9m tall and runs at 175mph. If you compare it to the size of trees and the size of windows on civilian buildings you can see that's the size it's meant to be, but judging the units against the ground texture detail or any other ingame art makes them look and feel much smaller than their intended size. I'd say the ACU looks about human-sized, which makes everything look a bit too piddly.

The other advantage TA has in this area us the chunkiness of the units, which is enhanced by the different levels of explosion (ordinarily a relatively small boom, but with serious overkill the unit flies apart into little pieces). The visible recoil also contributes strongly towards this feeling.

I think in that in order for something to feel big and "epic" it needs to look like it is heavy and carry alot of momentum.
The mechmarine from SupCom with standard game speed moves more like a rat, turning on a dime instantly as you order it about and as it dies it stays on the spot without moving abit. Imagine a 9 feet tall mech going above 175mph weighing several tonnes. It would have enough momentum to plow through tens if not hundreds of meters of dirt before it comes to a stop.

Bigger units and turrets also suffer from an instant turn rate acceleration. If a battleship is slowly turning to the right but then just suddenly start turning to the left in an instant you lose the feel of a big, slow ship.
I would like to see a big turret accelerating to face the enemy and then decelerate as it aligns its aim against the target. That gives a feel of something heavy.
It could even be away to balance units as turrets with slow acceleration would have trouble changing targets or aim at unit that keep jinxing back and forth.
It would requires much more aiming calculations though.

Although it might be frustrating and not that fun to control slow and heavy units. I haven't really tried it. Fast feedback and quick response time is propably more prevalent in thoose design decisions I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSUL3TjSg84