Things TA did well that SupCom didn't

He must be high again. Only plausible reason why he's so chill. ;P

I always figured the laggy movement in SupCom was because you were trying to discourage unit micro. That's interesting.

The reason I tend to say it should be fixed zoom instead of saying let's have both is if it was fixed zoom it'd have to be scaled around that perspective to be really tight and playable. You could try to play Supreme Commander on a fixed zoom and it wouldn't work as well as it did in TA because it wasn't designed to be played that way. Planes didn't move about in a fashion you could control zoomed in. Nothing controlled well zoomed in really.

Yes you could play SupCom any way you liked but ultimately I'm only interested in what's the most effective way for competition, and in that game it was zoomed the whole way out looking at icons all the time. As Gnug315 said that was really, really boring. I'd rather the most efficient way to play was in the action like it was in TA, which had a spectacularly effective interface AND let you watch the action. You could micromanage too! Something you didn't really have to bother with in SupCom because of the lag but that's going to be important in PA.

With regards anybody preferring fixed zoom being stupid please remember 315 is one of the finest RTS players of all time and could kick your *** in any game. http://www.gamereplays.org/community/in ... opic=65726

Why would you want to force competitive players to watch the action?

Just give them the options, and let them play competitively - that's what they like doing best.

• "You! Over there. Play this game the way I want you to."

I have no idea who Gnug is. And that link doesn't talk about SupCom very much. In fact, it looks as if it was written before SupCom came out. So, why is the link relevant again?

Dude was top notch at a massive range of RTS games, professional poker and backgammon player as well. He was one of the best at SupCom when he still played it. http://www.gamereplays.org/supremecomma ... ils&id=776

The Krogoth dies to a single D-Gun shot.

The Krogoth has 32k health, the D-gun does 30k damage, but that damage isn't done once per shot. It's dealt several times as the shot passes through the Krogoth. So it was possible to deal a glancing blow to a Krog with your d-gun but that'd be an almost-miss. If you hit the Krogoth with your D-Gun, you don't need to hit it again. Of course the trick is also that you need to be walking away from the Krog after you dgunned it or the Krog's death explosion would kill your Commander...

Now that's a bizarre way to think about it. The way molloy put it is: the most competitive way to play the game should ALSO be cool to look at.

If SupCom when played by competitive players looks really boring, then it's a boring game then isn't it?

That's a complete fallacy. The looks of a game are not the only deciding factor for whether a game feels boring to you or not. There are a ton of games out there that may look boring to many people, but are still extremely thrilling games. The graphics are often only a means to an end.

And even if a game looks awesome, but feels boring when you watch someone play, the one who plays it can still have a thrilling experience. You can't decide that for him. Watching someone play Hearts of Iron for instance surely looks extremely boring for many people, but for the fan of the game who actually plays it, it's an awesome experience.

I believe the most competitive way to play the game should be however the competitor so feels.

Back in my days of semi-competitive CoD4 (so promod and pam4), the mod literally stripped all the fancy effects, sounds, and shadows. It was done to make the game more competitive; cool to look at was a distant second.

And don't forget about Lego-Quake

That's a bit of a spurious argument. Call of Duty pro mod takes away from the quality of the textures a bit but you're still in the action viewing it from the same perspective. In Supreme Commander you're watching 2d symbols moving around a 2D playfield. Playing the game well shouldn't mean you have to be bored to death.

The most competitive way to play the game is the most competitive way to play the game. How the player feels doesn't come into it much, unless they want to handycap themselves on purpose, which competitive players aren't going to do.

So, all board games bore their players to death? A lot of Chess, Go, et cetera players want to hurt you a lot right now.

There's no need to resort to hyperbole :roll:

We're not just talking about quality of graphics here. It's the difference between seeing the battle actually happen as it happens, and seeing bunches of tiny icons inch their way around the screen.

Which sounds more attractive?

Some obviously LIKE looking at just little ant-like icons 90% of the time, as a number of posts here attest to. Others do not.

This is supposed to be a game. A game doesn't have to be hyper-realistic with super-duper HD effects, not at all. But IMO, a game has to be FUN. With SupCom my feeling is that the fun aspect got lost somewhere along the line.

If you don't like it, don't zoom out then!

Damn you're arguing the most stupid ****. Isn't there a better way to spend your time?

You assume that not having pretty stuff to look at is automatically boring. That is a horrible assumption to make.

Exactly. Don't force things into one way or the other, just let the players naturally come to their own personal preference.

It is boring to you. Don't project your feeling of the game in this state to others.

Also, to expand on your and gammatau's point further: Lego-Quake is is how "professionals" played it, if they wanted to be the most effective. They played the game so that its graphics were stripped down as far as possible to the most basic things. It looked of course, awful to any observer. But that didn't matter at all. All those players chose to play it this way, in order to be most effective. They didn't care about the graphics and the stripped down graphics also didn't hamper their enjoyment of the game.

Same thing in Counter-Strike, the "professionals" always tried to find ways to play the game more effectively which always meant a reduction in graphics quality, in order to make enemies more visible for instance.

Whether or not the graphics make a game boring to anyone is just in the eye of the individual. That the Strategic View of Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance makes it boring for you does not mean that it makes it boring for everyone else as well.

Also, if symbolism is what makes a game boring to you in general, how many other games do you find boring as well, that mainly use symbolic depictions for most things that are going on in the game? Or, as jurgenvonjurgensen points out, are all board games boring for you as well?

Exactly. Then why do you impose your view on what is "boring" on others?

Whichever is more fun to you, obviously. I care more about the latter and in Supreme Commander I have both.

Exactly. Your post sounded like you assessed that looking at the icons 90% of the time makes it automatically boring. It may be boring to you or molloy, but it's not boring to me and I reckon it's not boring to many other Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance players as well. We don't associate the Strategic View with something boring, we associate it with total control, total overview, easier management of huge armies and resources, etc. A lot of things that makes the game more fun for us. And, as we said, if looking at abstract things is supposed to be automatically boring, then what about all those other games where this happens? Are they all boring by default as well? Is Lego-Quake III boring to a competitive player, just because he stripped it down like that? Is Hearts Of Iron or similar "true" strategy games boring, just because everything is depicted in a more abstract way, due to the scope of the game? Is the board game risk boring, because these very same reasons? (Not all this is directed to you in particular.)

Just to say, people playing SC at pro level don't always play 100% zoomed out, it's impossible to micro that way =S

However, even if they DID, they still get their enjoyment out of it, and anyone watching the replay can either watch it for themselves and zoom as far as they like, or watch someone casting it, who zooms in on the action anyway for us fun-loving types, so this argument rings hollow in my ears at least?

I wouldn't like to play zoomed out, and I certainly wouldn't like to watch it like that. Fortunately SC lets us do both.

...weren't we meant to be coming up with cool ideas for some game? One that spans multiple planets? And therefore wouldn't work without the option to zoom out? Or something?
...Please?

wrong (again).

there is no handicap playing zoomed in if that's how you like to play. im sorry all the crap players in here didn't realise this.

actually i think you'll find those posts actually say there's no f'n need to play zoomed out for 90% of the time. i think most people would agree that playing that way all the time isn't as much fun. so why f'n do it? lol.

Look, obviously there's excitement to be had in playing at zoomed out icons mode, but that excitement comes from the flow of action, not the more visceral thrill of watching robots explode. I want both.

Which you have, in Supreme Commander. And which you will have in Planetary Annihilation as well, obviously.

Yeap.