Why all the SupCom 2 Hate?

BURN THE HERETIC!

By the time Steam sales roll around for the summer we should have some playable Planetary Annihilation build around anyways =P

And if you get in some FA practice then you'll have some transferable skills and you won't get roflstomped straight away! Everyone's a winner!

You *will* get roflstomped in your first few games of FA, but I shall choose to ignore that as it doesn't support my argument.

No one will know how to play PA. It'll be fine =P

@Polynomial, find someone with some cd-keys left from oryginal boxes of SupCom or FA, you could transfer those to Steam for Gold Edition, because GPG-net went down. I used all, for me and friend, so I cant help. But maybe someone else can :3

I tried that a while ago, you can't activate Supreme Commander (or at least FA) on Steam with a CD key from an original box.

I did.

You can activate SupCom through Steam, and you get the Gold edition; i.e. FA for free!

That is possibly why the FA keys do not work. At release, if you installed FA without having SupCom1 already installed you would only be able to play the Seraphim faction. It sounds like they just assume a valid SupCom key is for Gold so give you both (although in Steam, they still list as 2 seperate program entries).

Hunt down your SupCom CD key and you should be good to go, my brother recently did this himself so I know it works

I played a lot of SupCom, SupComFA and SupCom2

While supcom2 had some questionable stuff, it was the best RTS ive played because of 2 things

1- strategic zoom (cannot play any rts games without it anymore)
2- SupComFA was really great but at some point where too much stuff was involved the game started to lag badly... and that was not the case with supcom2.

Fluidity with a lot of unit in the world is KEY, hope PA do well with that !

One thing that may have contributed to that lag is that in FA you could have more than just 500 units per player. I think you could set the unit limits to 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000, but don't quote me on that. I only know for sure the first two numbers. That's an INSANE amount of units, which was one thing I was saddened by in SupCom 2 when they locked it at 500.

Still, that's a lot of units, and it lets you do crazy fun things like having a metric butt-ton of units fight a metric butt-ton of OTHER units. You can send zerg rushes against other zerg rushes with a buddy and see what happens. That was probably what turned me off to the Star Craft series, is that you just couldn't do massive swarms of tiny, weak units to just overwhelm people, which is something I love doing, even if it's not a good strategy. XD

Having an experimental war with some buddies of mine was a blast, as I recall. We each picked a different faction and picked different amounts of a certain single experimental to throw at each other, then just mass-produced them. It was also neat to see how many of one experimental were needed to counter one of another type.

One of the Culprits of lategame lag is the AI, using Sorian's AI in combonation with his Cheating Options Mod(for the AI) lets you tailor the AI to your skill level and lets you use fewer AIs but still achieve the same challenge. Map size also has an effect as well.

Playing with other Humans is still the optimal Solution thought.

Mike

The other culprit for lag is people trying to play Seton's Clutch with a Pentium 4.

But the Seton's lot are pretty weird at the best of times so I try not to get involved.

Nothing quite like a game on the 81km map!

Even if torpedoing Cybran bricks and tanks is annoying as hell.

It is important to distinguish the differences between all of the games in this genre. I would argue that there are three camps, or three distinct driving forces affecting the development of this game: Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, and Supreme Commander 2. Each game was developed by three different companies and three different groups of developers with their own vision. These three visions have the same core set of ideas:
- A RTS game depicting intergalactic war waged by robotic armies.
- Player controlled economy, production, and units on a large scale
- A single, easily identifiable “Commander” unit which can build and destroy units

However, each game is fundamentally different in how these core ideas are both implemented and executed. This is where the ‘Hate’ comes from. Some of those folks who enjoyed the economic nuances and challenges of Supreme Commander 1 did not approve of the simplified economy and research of Supreme Commander 2. Others found it to be a liberating and much needed improvement upon Supreme Commander 1. I’m sure people from both camps will be very watchful of how the economy will work in PA.

While we’ve heard a lot on forums about the differences in appeal between SupCom1 and SupCom2, I find it equally important to pay attention to the Total Annihilation camp. Total Annihilation is not only the beginning of the series, but it is the fundamental premise behind developing Planetary Annihilation. This is evident in the content they have released, the vision they have announced so far, and in the commentaries we’ve heard online or elsewhere. The way Tech 2 buildings and units will currently be built is an obvious homage to TA. For the moment, a lack of factions, experimentals, and shields clearly set PA apart from SupCom 1 & 2. Only time will tell if these end up being part of the final product, a later released update, or not at all.

We know that when we buy and get PA that it will be an altogether new vision of the series; the first teaser trailer’s moon mission assured that. So we as a community have the unique opportunity to engage with the developers and help them decide which elements of PA’s predecessors should be implemented in the game. All of this must be done, as mentioned before, with patience, compromise, and understanding. We all want a broad and diverse community because that will increase Uber Game’s sales and make updates, expansions, and PA 2 be that much better and come that much faster. Let’s just hope that the developers use a discerning eye to filter through all of the ideas which would be “nice to have” for ideas which we must have for the game to be more than just financially successful.

Nice analysis. I'm glad people are starting to understand this is a TA inspired game.

The "Annihilation" part of "Planetary Annihilation" wasn't enough?

You, good sir, are as wise as your namesake. That was a great post, and certainly helped me understand a good deal more about the game and its influences.

@atticusfinch: Well said!

I went back and looked it up and you can indeed activate SupCom 1 and 2, but not FA.

I started playing TA around the time that FA came out ("OMFG WUT??"), so I never had the first. I went straight from TA to FA. I run FA through Steam, though. I must also add that I could play any faction from the start, not just the Seraphim. Never ran any updates at the time either, so that is one strange issue you speak of. :/ I didn't get it at launch though, so maybe that's why.

Hmmm... it's possible that I'm confusing the campaign and multiplayer then. I'm sure that there was something in FA that needed SupCom installed to be able to do, but I'm now far less sure what that was. I thought it was multiplayer faction availability, but maybe it was some extra campaign missions? :?

I'm also now going to have to dig TA out from wherever it's hiding and/or grab Spring or Zero-K, because I'm struggling to remember how the original played after this many years