Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

If you think not liking one feature of a game means the game is not what you are looking for, then there are very fews games anyone is looking for. Nearly every game I have ever loved has had things I didn't like about it. That doesn't mean it's not the game you are looking for.

This is some terrible joke, right?

#3 obviously you are dead wrong as everyone has pointed out

#1 ARE YOU JOKING? Watch any video replay of the top 100 in Supp Comm and you'll see (myself included) that "harassers" were being sent out nearly instantly... I always had at least one aerial unit or a light scout out to snipe lone engineers...

#2 - you obviously didn't place high in the game.... on small maps i had 2-3 engineers out very early on and on larger had dozens... they were slow, but they got out there....

1. SupCom was fast paced on its own terms, like btustorm said, early scouts were very annoying and could cripple the opponents economy under the 1 min mark.

2. TA didnt have shields and efficient defenses were expensive, thus extracting the metal wasnt. In supcom you could tech up your mexes in less than 10 minutes using the glitch, also building mass converters didnt take up that many resources compared to TA.
The economy was different. nuff said.

3. Absolute bullcrap, Supcom had minimaps and worked exactly like TA's

Um, implementation considerations aside, wouldn't it be perfectly possible to have a 'sticky' zoom level for the camera? Namely, if you zoom in, it zooms to exactly the same height all the time, and in order to get closer you need to hold a hotkey or something. The sticky level could be configured to user preference, and those who like the TA style camera would be happy and those who love the strategic zoom wouldn't be affected either.

Not to mention that this could be the 'standard view' that the unit designers would work towards, so that units are clearly distinguishable at that zoom level.

In this way you could have your cake and eat it too.

This sounds good. As long as it is fully customizeable (turn on and off, etc) that's fine. Infact, players might want to have a sticky for zoom-out too that is adjustable that gets them to a mini map view of the current developments. It helps a lot to be able to switch to a zoomed out view especially if you only have one monitor. If you have two you can easily make one your mini map with strategic zoom.

Really? All I did was move the camera back in exponential increments along a ray from the mouse cursor to the camera and it worked fine- didn't take long at all or impact on the rendering system whatsoever- it was purely a question of translating the camera in the UI.

I mean, I have to admit that strat zoom also changed some of the camera angles, whereas I had top-down only, and also interplanetary strat zoom would probably be a tad more complex. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to cap the zoom properly so that you couldn't zoom out of the map.

Strategic zoom is fine. Efficiency isn't even a sensible argument because the same system exists for everyone. It isn't imbalanced if everyone has strategic zoom. Nobody is gaining a mechanical advantage from it. I agree that minimap clicking is probably marginally more efficient (because the mouse move axis is more precise than mouse wheeling) but it isn't problematic unless one player is doing it and the other can't.

If there is an issue with SupCom (and I don't advocate fixing it) it was that a player with 2 monitors had an outright advantage over a player with 1.

Stuff like this is precisely what will make or break the interface. Screen hot keys, snap to commander, snap to zoom, etc. Those "bugger the strat zoom, get me here now" options are what will really help. Especially when you have a base on a moon.

Snap to strategic zoom/interesting zoom would be very nice, particularly as my mousewheel is broken.

Sorta like the FPS player with the overclocked water cooled Extreme Edition CPU and Quad SLI GPUs.

Face it, better hardware gives (fairly small) advantages. That's impossible to avoid in a game that's intended to scale as hardware improves. The only 'solution' to that is to lock resolution and frame rate at some minimum and reject any system that can't meet that minimum value. I hope I don't need to point out that this would be a terrible idea.

As I said I don't advocate fixing it. Though I think 2 monitors gives a larger advantage than the FPS player example. It is something I'd put down as "too cool to scrap over balance".

You can buy a second monitor. You can't buy free time to beat all the school kids. Should having more free time be considered unfair?

Getting fond flashbacks of the uni days 'studying' Counterstrike and Team Fortress Classic for hours on end...

lol, good god DeadMG, that was a very unqualified question, I expected more from you . Obviously (but evidently not that obvious to you after all...) the actual challenging part of Strategic Zoom is not its interaction or how you calculate a new camera position... from a rendering standpoint at least.

Molloy has a lot of good points and I see where he's coming from about the zoom. Perhaps the option to zoom lock on your current view would be helpful, for players that don't want to accidentally zoom in or out while microing/macroing.

There's no need to get mad or insult him over your opinion. Constructive criticism is always better.

I strongly agree with your point.

There are lot of very good players who actually dont agree with that at all. Some tried 2 screens and went back to 1, because they could not see a real advantage of 2 screens. At best a 2nd screen gives you a very small advantage and thats depending on you being able to actually use it properly.

Obviously (but evidently not that obvious to you after all) is that I wished for Mavor to expand upon those other challenges.

Some of it was talked about during the development of Supreme Commander, but nothing in any significant detail. John Mavor intends to do a blog post about the technical challenges in Supreme Commander's engine, just like he did with Total Annihilation. Only question is when he will get around to it .

Supcom had this, it was called the V-Key. Unfortunately, the default UI didn't allow for customization of how the "good" zoom level looked.

I wrote a small console command batch script that gives me the perfect angle, but then I also zoom around like a madman and pretty much never use the minimap because zooming is so efficient.

I also frequently zoom in to enjoy the epicness of Supreme Commander battles. And I also like that to manage units like navies, you need to zoom out so far that tanks look like ants, and to manage experimentals, you need to zoom out so far that navies look like ants.