Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

Weird. Camera zoom 'detent' was just mentioned in one of the Kings and Castles' video blogs I've been re-watching for no particular reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2KezvQLllw#t=155s

+1 totally agree

Hi All,
I could not read the whole thread, but I would like to add a few point where I think SupCom fell short.

1) Multi-dimensional strategy. TA was an information war game, you had to find out what your enemy was building to be able to defeat him and at the same time hide your game from him. In SupCom, you pretty much had a speed competition to see who could build the super weapons first.

2) Unit Design. In TA most (if not all) units were cool and useful during the whole game. In SupCom the basic units become useless very fast and you can only play with a handful of big units until the end. And to boost the units in TA had more personality.

3) Real physics, in TA any unit would try to hit any enemy unit regard less of the fact if it was possible or not. It was really cool to watch an anti-naval unit occasionally hit an incoming bomber. It drives me crazy when I play games where a unit will just sit idle while it is destroyed by a bomber, because it is not an anti-aircraft unit. Is that what you would do? Wouldn't you at least try?

That is my 2 cents, hope it helps in some way.

Best,
Marcio.

To an extent yes it makes sense, my infantry can try to shoot planes. But trying to torpedo a bomber is just a waste of resources, for both the sub and your computer, it doesn't add anything. I'd be happy to see a lot of gun based units be given very inaccurate AA abilities instead of anything with any weapon type trying to shoot planes down.

Hmm, honestly a notable part of the TA unit set is pretty useless. But the ones that are good at the beginning do stay quite relevant till the end, in one role or another... Super units replacing the common fodder would indeed be shitty and boring. Attacking with 2 huge units is not nearly as fun as 200 smaller ones.

Replacing a unit with a superior version of it is no fun, either. T2 allowed you to get berthas and such, but there was no "super flash" or "super samson" available and that's good.

The above poster has never seen anyone good play Supreme Commander.

Granted. Maybe I never got good enough in SupCom to explore the multiple possible strategies. But that is only because I got bored before I did.

The problem IMHO is that, every game of SupComm was very much the like the others (again, maybe I didn't play it right), while in TA you could win the game using robots, cars, ships, planes. (usually you only had time to evolve one of them to the last tech).

There were a lot of improvements in SupComm engine that I loved. I think the RTS engine itself was great! (zoom, transport shuttles to secret staging areas, etc). And when I finally got to play it, I felt that those cool features were not as big a part of the game as I expected.

Again, this is just my opinion.

Ha, you know what? If you don't have any free time, you probably have more money to buy a faster computer and several monitors. If you're a broke teenager with no money, you probably have gobs of time to get better than all of the adults with more resources.

Now that's balance.

True that many of the TA units were utterly useless in competitive play but I did like that the units you had at the start were often still really useful at the end, albeit in greater numbers.