Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

Yup, though it was easy to get the energy needed to be able to spam that over and over.

On another note, it took several nukes hitting a krogoth directly to kill it. 1 d-gun shot was enough to do the trick. Same with the commander blowing up. Instant kill on anything nearby.

Actually the Krogoth required 2 shots, all other units died with 1 shot, including the commander.

Ugh, my bad. And I'd trust your word over my own, seeing as I've still seen you on Warzone recently (or at the very least, your clan). So I'm guessing you play a lot more TA than me at the moment.

One of the things that makes Supcom feel less chunky than TA is the delay between click and response. In Total Annihilation the reaction from a click is instant, but in Supreme Commander it is not.

This delayed-reaction click is presumably intentional but it gives the impresssion that you are somehow less connected to the units. Planetary Annihilation should definitely have the instant click-select of TA.

The delay in SupCom is 500ms in multiplayergames for technical reasons (thanks to the synchronous networking model)
*I think*

Just fired up the original Supcom campaign to check and you may well be right. What I did notice that was that although the units are selected apparently instantly, most of them have a sort of two-tone noise that makes it sound (to me at least) much less instant. In a lot of cases the noises don't seem that appropriate.

The sounds in TA were much better at conveying unit character I think, so hopefully with Planetary Annihilation we will hear small bots making high-pitched zipping noises, medium tanks making precise thudding noises and heavy mechs winding up to unleash a haymaker.

There was quite a bit of latency injected into SupCom to make sure that you had everyone's commands before executing the next tick. TA was async and effectively had no latency moving your own units. With PA we'll end up with some latency because the server actually moves the units.

O_O

Interesting, I always just assumed (from the path_ debug console command names) that was done to grant the pathfinder a background calculation time budget so it wouldn't block the simulation when large numbers of units were given orders at once. In Spring, the host player acts as the clock ticker by injecting a SIM_FRAME message SIM_FRAME_RATE times per second into the command stream broadcast back to clients, so any given client knows everyone's commands pertinent to the simframe it is executing (each player can be at a different simframe, slow guys fall behind the host further rather than reducing game speed for everybody else) and there's no need for artificial delays. Wasn't this approach considered for SupCom or am I missing something?

edit @ the poster below me: I know it did, Spring (which I dev) works the same way. If someone gives orders to units that have already died in a (for that player) future simframe the other clients simply reject them upon reception, since they can check the unit identifiers are no longer valid which preserves sync (up to a point, but players that are way too far in the past get dropped from the game anyway =)).

Supreme commander used a synchronus system where the only thing transfered between players was commands. This essentialy made the game a series of linked skirmishes where other people are telling the AI players what to do.

This meant if one person fell behind they might give orders to dead units and desync.

As others have pointed out Dgun required energy.

Well actually Supreme Commander made commanders/ACUs much more interesting than in TA. TA commander became vulnerable very early on, while in TA you can use it on the frontline for a long time, thanks to good range and powerful upgrades. Also being able to battle the enemy commander without his explosion automatically taking you out makes for epic duels and less stalemates... another genius decision from GPG.

Check out this channel for very good commented SupCom:FA matches between top players, btw (though the commentator lacks a bit of enthusiasm, he knows his stuff): http://www.youtube.com/user/praisegugleourmaster

I'm guessing you meant to say Sup Com, not TA. :lol:

more or less. and the weird added bonus of this was that as long as players had less than 500ms, a world-wide MP match felt the same as a LAN. btw enjoyed your replays back in the day C_C.

there was too much to do in supcom for the "injected latency" to ever bother me. watching units react wasn't as important as getting onto the next task.

sorry champ. what word, other than "idiots" should be used to describe people that couldn't grasp the brilliance of strat zoom to the RTS genre? it was a huge leap in development and UI, and made a very complex game a breeze to play. if you wrote a history of RTS games and the evolution, you would mention zoom. populous for instance, would've been 100x the game with that option. (actually, that's an idea. someone make a new populous with strat zoom.)

your friends are idiots.

this

There's a difference between saying "I think your opinion is stupid" and "you are stupid". The latter is not necessary, as was the final line in your comment.

Can we please stop feeding the troll ><
Either he's trolling or we should feel sorry for his horribly narrow-minded view on strategic zoom, either way, let's just leave the topic now...

pkc was always aggressive like that. There was a time where basically he did nothing else but insult everyone constantly on the GPG forum. May be he had a very disturbed childhood .

This.

You can't win against PKC. But you'll only incur his fury if you actually do/say something incredibly dumb.

Having read a few of the posts earlier, I have to side with PKC. Dinosw opened up by levelling an attack on Strategic Zoom, PKC responded in kind.

Personally, I would have dismissed the silly post against zoom a little more diplomatically.

Most of us are. It's a great feature, and it's becoming commonplace in other programs too. Have you looked been on Google Maps in the past four years (note I only noticed it four years ago, there's every possibility it was used prior)?

I'm incredibly sceptical of your claim. The exceedingly large majority of my friends, and everyone that I have spoken to about SupCom, think the zoom was a brilliant feature. Some of them had problems adjusting to it, but that's nothing more than learning a new feature.

There's no reason to call it sucky. Resorting to insults over an inanimate object is pretty silly, and doesn't help your argument at all.

This is a good idea, and I also wish to see it implemented. If Uber decides to continue with strategic zoom, then I expect it'll be included as a natural size effect.

[PS:] It is also interesting to note that dinosw didn't justify why it was bad: only that he thought it was sucky.

oh come on, i think i've mellowed a bit since then

im sorry if i hurt anyone's tender feelings. but people really are slow if they can't see the relationship between epic scale and strat zoom UI. how much more maneagable/playable are the supcom titles, SoaSE, and Wargame EE because of it?

woah, you have mellowed.