Will we get intense frontline battles?

exactly. the OP has NFI about how FA was played.

To be fair, plenty of people on this forum make the same judgements about Zero K, having played it for an even briefer period than those who only briefly played FA. This is most notable with those who assume that units that have micro AI "play the game for you."

I've played both enough to be familiar with both styles of play, and though I still haven't played extensive ZK multiplayer, I have a general idea of how things work. I do prefer the smoothness and gameplay style of FA, but I do see a lot of nice ideas in ZK that would be a boon for PA.

Also, jurgenvonjurgensen, I'm not sure why you'd use "Free Software" as a negative point in your argument. It's a very important philosophy, and there are many free software projects that are as good, if not superior to their non-free counterparts.

O hai, PKC! I see you haven't changed a bit in the last couple of years...
Please try to keep the insults to a minimum, thx.

As for FA and intense frontline battles: I believe that depends on the map size and the people you play with. Play Finn's, Theta, Canis or Blasted... against a good, competitive player and then tell me that it has no intense frontline battles!

Finn's can get ridiculously intense. That's one of the few maps in FA where I regularly see actual base trades.

My house's media computer uses Ubuntu. My work machines use OpenSUSE and Red Hat. Free software is practically synonymous with "terrible user interface". Spring has no design language, no polish, no style, it feels like it could just as easily be a text editor or a network status monitor as a game about mass robot battles.

I feel like SupCom1 had a lot more focus on a players base and economy then SupCom 2, while I have no MP experience with SupCom1 (So I may be wrong) MP in SupCom2 frequently lead into total melee battle with tanks and bots fighting, but as I feel in SupCom1+2's flaw static artillery is far to important and planes are far too durable.

But again, I may be wrong.

Let me put it mildly: No other game has better front line battles.
Here is evidence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BA2y39IM5s

Then I retract the part of my statement that SupCom1 has little to no front line battles (Although your evidence is kinda in a forced situation) But I still feel like the combat overall in TA and other RTS games portrays the 'intense frontline battle' better then SupCom1.

Spring is an RTS engine not a game. Saying a game engine doesn't have have a pretty design is pretty irrelevant when you might be thinking a of specific game.

So then we have frontline battles in FA IF you get the right map and top tier players while in Balanced Annihilation everyone can experience it skill-independent right of the start. You're not limited in your map choice and you don't have to be Uber-leet to play it that way. It just happens that way because that's how the game is made.

Erm... what?

How you seen a truly low skill game in BA? It's just porc and MM spam. Then someone buys a nuke and wins coz everyone forgets to build anti.

Well if you had a newbie teching in the base who doesn't know anything about nukes then yes. But something that worked most of the time was simply asking for anti-nukes.
Same at the front, tell the newcomers nicely what they should do and how to engage the enemy. This works most of the time.

Of course if you just go full-aggro like "Stupid noob, uninstall! You got no idea!1+111!" you'll probably lose to some nukes since those newbies won't care anymore.

I disagree with your assessment that you only get front line battles with top tier players on Supcom FA.
Here is the biggest noob map in supcom FA. Thermo is the place were noobs come to learn the game then battle it out on the front line. Here is an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQI3Lxqb6LU

Problem was that a large part of the players DID NOT want T1 and T2 battles at all in SupCom/FA. And if you consider that Thermo was one of the really popular maps - they didn't like scouting, harassing, airdrops or any interesting tactic really. They just wanted to spam T3 and T4 in the general direction of the enemy until somebody's defense crumbled.

Don't blame the game for what players decided to make out of it. You can turn every RTS into a parody if you just try hard enough... :S

That's because most of the time, average players tend to strive for the "endgame"-content. It's the simplest thought: Get T4 first, win game.
They think that because there is so much power in those units and the only real counter is either to build own T4-units or producing large T3 armies.
The "Oh Look! RTS with gigantic units!"-hype didn't help either.

That won't work in Spring. You can't just ignore your enemy and go for a Krogoth. What happens if somebody sends a Krogoth is a D-Gun right in his face killing it before it could even shoot once. Building said Krogoth also takes way more time then the usual T4 in FA. Have fun defending your base.

That Thermo-replay was actually kinda boring. Especially the "Throw T4 against each other till somebody dies"-part.
Those 2 high level player FA-matches posted above are interesting to watch to be honest. It just looks like you really only get the good stuff in tournaments and top-skill duels.

Also: The Thermo replay features one point of action, the middle.
Take almost every average match in Spring on Nuclear Winter or Small Divide and you see several spots of action with different tactics and stages. Those are open maps without a bottleneck.
If you get boring of two guys porcing each other in and doing nothing; wayne, jump a few screens further and look what they do. And those games can consist of newbies as well.

Apart from balance and playerbase there are a few things I would love to see in PA too such as the ability to draw a string for unit-formations and the of course the good old Total Annihilation D-Gun.

All the equivalent of the terrible Thermo players on Spring will play with some awful unit pack on a metal map with a single chokepoint. Do the words "Orcone" and "Karganeth" ring a bell? Probably with a bunch of Alien Fusion Reactors and Core Pumps just to make the resources curve retarded as well, and a bunch of OP defensive towers that chew up any mobile units that get sent your way before they can fire.

Lol, superspeedmetal. Those guys don't do well there either. When you spam out ten planes per second, you can literally use bombers to screen for other bombers so you can get something to drop a bomb. And it's going to be atomic bombers.

Did you know nanoturrets chain explode and the usual kind of player who would play sueprspeedmetal doesn't use the autospacing?
You see travesties like a solid line of fusion reactors. T_T And stupidly low amounts of BP for the map (when you are resource unlimited, you are BP limited)

exactly. average players. who don't know how to play (or play stupid rulesets). i think supcom deserves more than to be judged by what shitty players did.

Do most players of a RTS do that?

Perhaps even a not-pro-but-treats-game-seriously player like me is already in a minority?


We could be making the game for the wrong sort of people.

The key is an easy to learn game, that is hard to master.

Personally? SC/FA and even TA to an extent were not easy to learn, let alone in MP.

Its far to easy to totally destroy your economy.