Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

I liked a lot of elements of Supreme Commander 1 and 2 more than TA but there were some aspects that rather got on my nerves. I'm going to end up making a few generalisations here because SupCom 1 and 2 were pretty different and it's been a while since I played them.

1. Pacing.

It seemed in TA that the game got going really quickly and escalated in pace. The units just got around the map more quickly, without having crazily sped up animation like SC1 after it was patched a few times. Maybe it was the scale of the maps. Might have been a price and build time of the units. It got better in the sequel but that seemed to be more by making most of the maps small. Large maps didn't seem to play quite right. TA played well on tiny maps, huge maps, water maps, metal maps etc.

2. Expansion
In TA the construction units had a fair bit of armour. The mexes were cheapish and low armoured with short build time. In Sup Com the construction units had paper thin armour and the mass extractors were slow to build and expensive with lots of armour. I preferred the TA approach. It encouraged people to send construction units all over the place and treat the entire map as their base. People 'raided' the enemy bases because low level tanks could take out extractors quickly and keep moving. It kept the game pace up. Good players should be able to rebuild nearly more quickly than you can destroy them. OH YEAH, the metal patches were more plentiful and closer together. In SupCom you lose a few extractors it's a huge deal in TA you've got loads so your whole production doesn't grind to a halt and a bit of reclaiming wrecks will keep you going till you can get the mexes back up. When con units have a 40 second treck between mass points instead of a 20 second one it makes everything so slooooowwwwww.

Notice how in TA multi everybody mostly uses vehicles and kbots hardly get a look in? It's speed. Same reason little of the tech 2 stuff got used. If you want people to tech up the upgrades should just make things faster.

3. Fixed Zoom
Strategic zoom was a brilliant idea but once the novelty wears off it's far less speedy and efficient than a fixed zoom perspective. In TA you can just right click the minimap to jump to an area that needs your attention. One click and you're there. Plus you can see the entire map at all times. In Supreme Commander assuming you don't have two monitors you have to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel to get a full perspective. This is slow. Few games utilise the scroll wheel that much for a reason it's just a bit fudgy. Lots of people zoomed out all the time and ended up looking at icons. When you zoomed in depending at how close you were the units were more or less identifiable. You could manage larger more complex battles in TA better because there wasn't any scroll wheel involved.

So in summary, just make everything a bit nippier. TA was the sort of game where you could get a rush going on Gods of War in a minute and ten seconds. The battle could go on for 2 minutes or 4 hours. But the long matches weren't because of stale mates. The battle wasn't artificially extended because players were being defensive. It was 100% attack all the time and escalating continuously. Rebuilding and expanding should be cheap and speedy. Players should be utilising the whole of the map and it shouldn't be difficult to get your attacking units and construction units into far flung positions quickly.

Let me address this on a point by point basis.

From my admitadly limited experience of online play, and more so with ladder maps which tend not to be particuarly large, but if you aren't building units right after your first one or two engineers you are probably going to lose, because all your outlying mexes will be dead and soon after all your power.

Casual lan games and such were much more relaxed and the game tended to play slower because we could trust the other person not to be super competetive but the game was still plenty action packed.

Addressing the issue of larger maps, unless you move into the truely epic scale maps where it would be unreasonable to expect an attack in the first 5-10 minutes due to just sheer distance, a couple of teir 1 bombers keep them on their toes and force them to build defence or once again lose their mexes. I can almost see a gap in things to do over medium to large maps in the mid game where turtling through shields was very effective but at the end of the day someones base has always cracked. Given there will be no shields turtling will be less effective and the mid game will have more combat.

I'm not saying that for some people the game didn't have pacing problems, however in my experience i haven't found the reasons you raise particularly relevent to pacing.

There was a common theme throughout TA that units tended to be reasonably fragile, less so in supreme commander. Also metal in TA gave you less so you needed more. once again the prevalence of turtling and defending brought about by the increased toughness of most units after the early game made the game play slower and thats a legitimate concern. Similarly as to how i think sup com tended towards larger maps than TA, but someone will need to check that for me.

but in the end the real difference between most of your points thus far has been scale so...

I have never heard of anyone agreeing with you on this point. ever.

Further more the strategic zoom tended to be more accurate than the minimap and give a better view of the battlefield situation as a whole as you could always see the level of detail that was necessary. It is perhaps not quite as fast as a minimap but the difference is minimal (mouse wheel out and in compared to go click on minimap) and i have never been in so much of a rush to move from place to another that it has inconvenienced me in all my years of playing. While you say that it gives you less detail, the icons allowed for easy and simple identification of any unit you had identified at a glance (pointy triangle, dome, three white blips/moving fast = ASF) Given that this is considerably better than TA's thumbnail sized minimap i'm not sure how you get more information from a mass of red blips obscuring half your minimap.

But i think that this accurate depiction of the battlefields scale is also part of where many of your other complaints come from. Because you have no maximum view size you can see just how slow a unit is moving across the entire map granting the impression that the units themselves moved slower when it was more that they were just smaller.

As a side note i'm not sure how you are expecting a minimap to be done in a multi planet theater (or even a spherical theater, although thats far less challenging), where strategic zoom is far more intuetive.

In previous threads i did a little survey and what little data i managed to construe from that is at least half the people dont want to be forced to go all attack all the time. They'd like all attack to be an option but not be forced to playing a rush fest every game.

:shock:

Wash you mouth out with soap!

We will not hear such heresy in these fora.

Nuke from orbit, it's the only way to be sure we've cleansed the bad.

I've been lurking here since the kickstarter went up. There have been a lot of bad ideas posted so far, but no one (not even the tards who want MMO style unlocks) has even come close to the utter idiocy of killing strategic zoom.

In short, I created an account here for the sole purpose of telling you that your idea is bad and you should feel bad.

Please note - I am not in any way concerned that Uber would be stupid enough to pay attention to this unbelievably moronic suggestion, i'm just hoping that if you get enough people telling you how dumb you are you will stop posting.

I hate to pile on, and your first two points actually had some merit, but this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion. I find the strategic zoom to be one of the very best TA to SC changes.

Well the first two points had potential merit.

Have to disagree with you on this point.

A Samson in TA had 650 HP, and did 16 dps (40.6 seconds to kill 1v1)
A Mantis in FA had 270 HP, and did 26.67 dps. (10.1 seconds to kill 1v1)

A Bulldog in TA had 2102 HP, and did 105 dps (20 seconds to kill 1v1)
A Rhino in FA had 775 HP, and did 72 dps (10.8 seconds to kill 1v1)
A Loyalist in FA had 3100 HP, and did 189.09 dps (16.4 seconds to kill 1v1)

While the damage of TA weapons is often higher than that of FA, TA weapons have a typically *much* slower fire rate. I find the quick deaths of units in FA hinders strategy - retreat of your force in a pitched battle is usually useless due to the massive losses you'd take doing so. Also worth noting is that wreckage in TA had a limiting effect on battle damage, further slowing down unit deaths.

What *was* fragile, and worked, was the metal extractors - this made raiding far more fun and useful, without a single raid meaning you lose (decreased risk, but decreased reward). I find too many events in Sup Com happen too quickly compared to their impact on the game.

Totally agree, and just to add one further point, using strategic zoom means you don't need to move your mouse away from the battlefield to change where you are looking (a small but important advantage).

I do think Molloy is right about Strategic zoom being bad in one respect, but certainly not the one he intended to be.

Having a fixed point of view allows you to do crazy optimisations with the engine (back face removal, caching of building images etc), and also allows much more detailed terrain - compare maps in TA with FA.

Not saying I'd prefer a fixed POV (and definitely not in PA), but it has it's advantages.

I have to weigh in to support raevn's point's.

The strategic zoom was brilliant, and has since become practically an industry standard in large scale strategy games - because it works, and fixed-zoom plus tiny minimap really doesn't. I would love to have had fixed zoom in the larger maps in TA. I only personally know one person who doesn't care for it, and that's because he games with a touchpad (yeah, I didn't believe it until I saw it either - and the dude's good), so he has no readily accessible equivalent to the scroll wheel.

As to pacing, I think that's bang-on. Units in TA tended to die slower because they fired slower, were generally less accurate, and got clogged by wreckage. The end result was a slow, hammering battle pace, which kept the action level high even when there wasn't a major attack being pushed. FA units tend to die so quickly that retreat is rarely an option, and battles generally end with one side wiped out in very short order. That said, SupCom was on a large enough scale that even if individual battles didn't last long, there was usually something going on somewhere on the map - I know I'm usually kept extremely busy during FA games after the first five minutes. Now throw in larger and more elaborate maps for PA, and I'm not sure we want the pacing too accelerated, or the biggest complaint will be the overwhelming nature of games, where you don't have time to handle everything you need to.

It wasn't uncommon when versing the AIs for a single battle to last most of the game. As deaths occurred slower, you could re-inforce the battle while it was in progress, leading to an actual, defined "front-line" where the fighting occurred, which changed over time. You could then build defences near the front line to keep it in check (building defences under fire is awesome, and adds a sense of desperation to the conflict). It felt so much more like a war; FA by comparison feels like a series of strikes

Even today I'm impressed by the detail in both the units and the terrain in TA. It definitely had its advantages, especially at a time when computers were just beginning to come of age. Now though, with the ridiculous amount of power available on a desktop, we can do things that we never even dreamed of 15 years ago. We can have amazing looking maps and a full level of zoom. We can have a unit limit in the tens of thousands. Nowadays, there's no reason for a fixed zoom other than to place arbitrary constraints on the gameplay.

I agree with you on all but this, maps in RTS are either large and bland (Sup Com / FA) or details and small (Company of Heroes). The maps might have detailed textures close up, but the terrain detail is lacking, to the point where terrain is only strategic - barriers or rivers etc. TA had tactical terrain, which you could use to your tactical (not just strategic) advantage. Placing a laser tower behind a ridge with a small gap could mean a potent defensive unit that was hard to kill.

PA could have this aswell... If it works well with planets that is. Another great way is that the screen automatically move to the center of a ctrl-group when you doubletap the hotkey.

You could enable minimap at all times in SupCom(I'm sure it was in FA atleast). We don't even know how they are gonna visualise planets in PA. There is a 14 page thread about it http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34863

I bind the camera movement to WASD when I get the chance. Then I don't need to scroll out and in to move the camera while my hand is close to all the hotkeys. Needs some customization but if you are lucky someone has already done it and uploaded it so you can just download it.

Just because we don't have it now doesn't mean it's not possible. The most recent game in the vein of SupCom was, well, FA. It's been five years since then, and with the move from a synchronous model to client-sever model, as well as the simple art style, I believe that it will be possible with current tech. If not possible today, at some point in the near future you'll be able to crank that slider all the way and get full detail at a distant level of zoom. Mavor has really been hammering the point about scalability, and I think it'd make perfect sense in this regard.

possibly the worst post on the internet.

To make a more serious post:

Navigating in any RTS game that is not Supreme Commander, Forged Alliance, Supreme Commander 2 and to some extent Demigod is far, far more inefficient, than it is in those games. The strategic zoom makes everything far more efficient. In all those "classic" RTS games, including Total Annihilation, you have the following options:

• Edge panning
• Maybe (Middle- or Right-)Click & Drag panning (not in TA)
• Clicking and dragging on the Minimap
• Clicking on the Minimap

In 3 of those interaction techniques you must first move your mouse cursor away from the action and aim at a specific interface element. Clicking on the Minimap (and dragging) is also a very imprecise method of going where you want. Additionally, you lose spatial context when you transform the viewport instantly from one place to another via a Minimap. In addition, Edge panning can also be very cumbersome, slow and imprecise.

Strategic zoom on the other hand only has advantages. Going from on end to the map to the other is much faster with strategic zoom, than with the archaic edge panning method. Plus any zooming operation will always provide you with a seamless spatial context and thus your mind will have a much better overview at a glance. Your mind does not need to waste any processing time in quickly figuring out where you are and everything else is, in relation to your current position, when you instantly switch from one spot to another via a Minimap for example.

That is just complete... bullshit, to be frank

Btw. you don't seem to know, that both Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance have an actual, classic Minimap, where you can do the same things as in any other RTS. Have you even played Supreme Commander..?

I really don't get why people are so hostile about the idea of fixed zoom. I'm trying to explain what I mean but people are dismissing it outright. TA had it and everybody loved that game. There are as many if not more people playing it competitively than the SupCom games and it's 10 years older.

My issue is to play SupCom efficiently (i.e. in a competitive environment) you had to be zoomed out to icon view most of the time. It was really ugly and boring to look at things that way. I saw people playing it in the QuadV tournaments and they pretty much stayed zoomed out the entire game except for a few moments when they had to zoom in. It looks rubbish. I much prefer scrolling about right clicking on a minimap than zooming in and out. It's just a preference. All that scroll wheeling just reminds me of Autocad and my day job.

Like if everybody could just calm down and stop calling it the worst post ever and think about it. In TA you could right click your base, you'd be in the right zoom to place the buildings or d-gun some tanks, right click the enemy base you're in the right zoom to move your flash tanks around behind buildings and stopping the enemy commander d-gunning you. You're at detail view to do fiddly precise commands. In SupCom you're encouraged to zoom in and out to do these things but to go from your comm you've to zoom out, then move pointer to where enemy base is, zoom in. It's slower which means people just leave everything zoomed out and don't do much detail stuff. I know we're talking the difference of half a second but when you can do something in less actions more quickly it gives you more opportunity to switch back and forth between the attacking, defending and the economy building in the blink of an eye. You could switch about incredibly rapidly like this.

I don't think that keeping things at a fixed zoom is arbitrary. It looks less dramatic but it's a cleaner UI. Zooming in and out is slow and in RTS that's a really, really bad thing. Efficiency is everything. TA frees you up to do as much micromanagement as you want. It's often not a sound decision to micromanage instead of focus on the big picture but at least the interface didn't get in the way of you doing it. I want to be able to multitask better.

I pretty much agree with all of raevn's points about the combat. TA's battles lasted longer. You could conceivably not pay massive attention to a battle (when you have multiple battles to deal with) and it wouldn't be concluded in 30 seconds. You less had fights with endings than streams of units and a moving front line. Of course this was somewhat facilitated by the pathfinding going to **** in large matches and everybody getting stuck on wrecks but it worked for some reason. In the early game the risk/reward balance between expanding and raiding was much better.

You're clearly forgetting that SupCom also had a minimap which operated in the same way as the TA minimap did. So people CAN play the same way they did in TA, but they choose not to because the zooming system is an easier and more clear way of looking at the situation.