Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

Some generally good observations, here, especially point 2. I much preferred the slower pacing of SupCom, though. I don't think or act fast enough for Starcraft level rushing and never will, but I still have tons of fun in TA and SupCom with more drawn out game where long term strategies thrive.

Fixed zoom, however, is draconian nowadays. SupCom had a minimap you could turn on and use if that was your preference, so it was really the best of both worlds. I was overjoyed when I first realized that SupCom had pretty much the exact same zoom and navigation controls as AutoCAD, a software drafting tool I use daily. Navigating around the map in SupCom was like second nature to me.

molloy considers it less efficient though.

And you know better. Saying it's a choice just because he thinks it's less efficient is just keeping him ignorant. At the same time, it can confuse people that don't know whether zoom is actually useful or not (which obviously won't be the main RTS fan crowd).

Moving away from the giant argument inducing zoom point, i'd like to say that, at least in forged alliance, the supcom raiding game has definitley improved from when it was released. While raiding mass extractors is pretty much pointless since they have high HP + low build time, raiding power generators can very quickly cripple your opponent, forcing them to reclaim trees if they want to have a chance of getting their economy on track in time to still be in the game.

Also, most raiding in the game currently takes place not on the enemy's home base, but in the outlying mass deposits, where engineers are currently trying to establish factories and mass extractors. If you kill that engineer, the enemy has to send another one all the way from their base, along with some defensive units, so you've made quite an impact on the enemy's attention and map control. This may in part be due to the lack of fast flying engineers (although that's still something i'd love to see come back, they were amazing =3).

But all in all, games seem to be escalating quicker and are more raiding intensive than I remember from the early days of supcom. Although I appreciate that those are probably the days that have been referenced in many of these posts.

This is all in the community-driven lobby Forged Alliance Forever, since GPGnet shut down, for anyone who doesn't know

I found SupCom meh, while SupCom 2 bad. On the otherhand, I heard Forged Alliance was really good, but never got it because of the servers shutting down. So there are community lobbies out there? Might want to give FA a go.

Yeah, i never much cared for competitive play in supcom, until this new community that actually balanced the game, it's here if anyone's interested.

Although be aware that the frontpage is horribly outdated, check the forums if you want to read about patches and such

I'm really not liking the "balance" changes FAF are making (especially since they are forced on you).

Oh yes, you really should. FAF even comes with its own patch mod, that fixes a lot of bugs (but also changes balance severely, especially for air. Since you are new to FA anyway, it shouldn't be a problem for you . Btw. you can try putting your Supreme Commander CD-Key into Steam, you might receive Forged Alliance with it too.

What, free?

Yup, and guess who lost their original supcom CD-key? =|

I generally agree. I think here that PA has the opportunity to make something great:
Player begin on the same planet, so relatively close compared to the play field.
So it can have a good pace from the beginning while still allowing people to go on another planets and transfort the first skirmish into a planetary war!
The best of the two world

For me, the magic of TA was how quickly the units and the building were dying. Raiding was really fun. But's that only a part of the trick. The second part was the wreckage: slowly, as the war progress the wreckage would build a real wall, were 80% of the shots were wasted. Thus, units on the front war becomes 5 times more resistant. It was giving the impression of an endless war. You could even build defences under the ennemy shots!
The fun is that you could always find some backdoor around the front war to make massive damage.

Hot topic here. I can't say I agree, but I do not totally disagree. I think the problem is elsewere: in units scale.
I think units are too small. Take a factory in TA and in Supcom as a reference. Units in supcom are really tiny... where is my ******* huge army ??? Of course you can zoom in but then you've got huge building, a very bland terrain texture and the game is really not fun like that. I think it destroy immersion.
To say short: disabling the strategic zoom is the wrong fix. And I think people feel that. Tinkering with the units scale so everything can look awesome without the need to zoom in or out is the right thing to do.

Did you try out SupCom2? It pretty much did just that and it was terrible.
The Units need to be small like that. You are commanding armies on multiple Planets in PA, so surely a single tank should be like an ant to you.

I already had both anyway, but this happened to me too; when I added the vanilla key to Steam I got FA too.

Yep . Since it was clear, that GPGnet had to be shut down, GPG was able to create another update for Forged Alliance, so that it uses Steam for Multiplayer instead. This patch was integrated into the Steam version of Forged Alliance. However, the same was not done for Vanilla Supreme Commander (wouldn't have been worth the effort anyway). In order for everyone who already bought Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance to be able to continue to play at least Forged Alliance online, everyone was supposed to be able to put in their Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance key and get both games in both cases.

But, it didn't work in all cases. There were a few people on the forum reporting, that their CD-Key didn't work and some reported, they only got Supreme Commander with their Supreme Commander key (though may be they didn't really look ). But there you have it, it worked for raevn as well .

Won't hurt to try it. If it does not work, may be there will be another Steam sale.. there was one one or two weeks ago where they sold FA (and SupCom) for only €2.75 or so.

heu .... no .... not really :lol:

Playing zoomed in in a serious supcom2 game guarantees you'll be dead pretty quickly. No serious player plays in anything but strategic icon view, unless doing intense micro and watching health bars occasionally.

I didn't like the SC2 scale at first, but as I played more and more I understood what they were trying to do and I came to love it.

Sure, it was smaller and faster, but not worse than FA by any means. If anything, the strategic icons when zoomed out were an improvement over FA.

Making units extremely small will promote MASSIVE spam of units, which in turn will make the game very expensive in CPU time when those units start pathfinding and simulating shots, as well as require ridiculous micro to get a competitive advantage in huge blobs.

From that point of view, I would love to see a scale similar to the concept video actually.

Thats not the point I was trying to make. I said that it is a bad idea to make units as big in SupCom2 cause it just ruins the game. Sure you still need to zoom. I should not have quoted that part of the sentence. TA/SupCom/PA are all about commanding huge armies. The Unitssize of SupCom2 just doesnt fit in at all.

I did play it abit, too. Actually even quite competitive at some point, but the whole scale of FA is just better imho and made me go back to it.
I played like like 15times more FA than SupCom2. And I still play FA sometimes. SupCom2 isnt even installed.

Thats subjective, but to me it was far far far worse. Just some other RTS. Nothing special. The only reason I played it cause it was named Supreme Commander, but the name alone was not enough to keep me playing it. If I want a good game of that scale I play Starcraft. The additional strategic icons in SupCom2 were btw annoying to me, I disabled them and went with the classical icons.

Thats the spirit of TA/FA imho. We all love that, dont we?

The combination of efficient programming (and I think the guys at Uber do have enough experience to do it real good) and todays computers make it possible
Just set up a powerful server

You dont micro single units in bigger fights. Apart from your acu, ofc.

As far as I understand PA will support Planets of any size your computer/server can handle. So you will be able to play on Planets as small as in the conceptvideo or on planets ten or even hundred times as big.
So actually PA will pretty much support both: the super small SupCom2-style maps or the huge SupCom-Style maps.

Everyone gets what he wants. Yey for scalability

May be xtf was referring to the amount of memory a 32-bit application can address under a 64-bit OS. The memory allocation limit for a 32-bit application that has its large address aware flag enabled under a 64-bit Windows Operating System is 4GiB.

Doud on the other hand was referring to the amount of physical memory he can access under a 32-bit Windows Operating System. Which is typically anywhere between 3.25GiB and 3.75GiB, depending on the hardware. The physical memory limit on Windows 7 x64 is not 4GiB of course. Depending on the version of the OS it's anywhere between 8GiB and 192GiB. e.g.

• Windows 7 Professional : 192 GiB
• Windows 7 Home Premium: 16 GiB
• Windows 7 Home Basic: 8 GiB

(see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... _windows_7 )

Actually, depending on the OS, it can get up to something like 4 (I think this was the amount) TB of physical ram. It's just windows that's limited to 192GB with 64bit and the higher versions of it. I think linux supports up to 256GB, and there might be others with even higher values.

Also, I think it's GB, not GiB. Those are two different sizes.

Actually I kind of liked that it made the distances feel real having everything so far apart. Maybe if the ferry command was a bit more awesome (easy to use) on flying transports the long marches across the wilderness wouldn't be so bad.

That's a good point, expansion was a bit more of a hassle than it should have been, even with robots protecting your engineers a few bombers could screw up a new base coming up. Especially when people built enough artillery to hose down large chunks of the map

Noooooooooooooooooo! Strategic Zoom was amazing and should be in every RTS ever.