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Supreme Commander Review (continued)
More User Submitted Supreme Commander Reviews
Date: 2007-08-15
Supremely Flawed
I was a great fan of Total Annihilation. I'm a fan of the RTS genre in general. I played SupCom online for a couple months but ultimately I have to confront the fact:
This game stinks. I desperately tried to enjoy it but I can't honestly suggest it to other people. I played for as long as I did hoping it would improve with patches, and while they fixed a lot of technical problems, the gameplay problems still persist.
The game *engine* is fantastic. It looks awesome. The battles are great. The units look fabulous and there are some fun and unique takes on some of the high tech units (the ones always featured in screenshots).
The problem is the gameplay is just horrid, both for online and offline play.
First of all, you should have dual core to play this game. They have done a lot of performance improvements since the game's release, but if you want big games on the big maps, you need dual core. Consequently, trying to do 3v3 games online is a nightmare as no manner how much you stress that everyone in the room needs dual core and they all say they do, invariably one player will not have it and the gameplay will bog down to intolerable levels. Online multiplayer gaming can frequently become unplayable unless you just stick to 1v1 on smallish maps.
The game has Vista problems (or Vista has problems with this game). It tends to crash on Vista during big games. So don't use Vista if you can avoid it. This is just another way big 3v3 matches end up failing -- if someone doesn't bog the game down with their slow computer, someone will crash out because they're using Vista.
The economy is unique and horrible. The economic model in the game is similar to Total Annihilation but with a couple of differences: map control quickly becomes almost completely meaningless and base defenses are vastly improved over what they were in TA. TA was largely a war of attrition against your enemy -- he builds 2 fusion plants, you kill 1. He builds 3 more, you kill 2 more. Due to the improved defenses of SupCom, that doesn't happen. By the time you can break through your opponent's defenses to destroy his fusion plant, you might as well skip the fusion plant and blow up his Commander instead, ending the battle.
So typical long games degenerate into both sides hunkering behind their defenses until one side can launch a single, fast, devastating attack that breaches the defenses and immediately ends the game. The long, continuous back and forth battles of TA are gone, I am sad to say.
On smaller maps, you won't get to that point, and you can have some good gameplay, but then you're not playing the game that was sold to you on the box and in the screenshots. You're doing low tech rushes on small maps and you're not going to reach the cool units proudly displayed to you in the magazine reviews.
All of this leads to a shrinking community, too. I made it as high as top 50 for my 1v1 ranking and it got to the point where I just couldn't find a ranked game to join. I sit there for literally 10 minutes "searching for game" and there's no match, because nobody near my rating is playing ranked games anymore. They all quit or they're all playing non-ranked games because ranked games on small maps honestly aren't that fun and don't represent the gameplay sold on the box. There are top players who have posted screenshots of themselves with 1 hour timers or more, waiting for a match.
This review makes me sad, because I loved TA and I wanted to love SupCom, but it's just not happening, and I don't think you're going to see any further sweeping changes to this game that will ever bring Ranked gameplay back into popularity. You can find people playing custom player-made modifications and maybe you can get some enjoyment out of that, but regular ranked gameplay is DOA and that's too bad.
Maybe the next game, Forged Alliance, will fix some of the problems, but I probably won't bother at this point. Between the way this game released and the company's reaction to gameplay suggestions on their official forums (bans), I don't see myself trying another GPG product until they can prove they've really turned things around.
Date: 2007-08-13
Dual Core Sysems Only
If you don't have dual core don't buy this game. You can play the game on single core but you won't be able to complete the campaign due to the last few levels being massive with several thousand units attacking at once. You also won't be able to play the large maps or play more then one AI at a time. Don't try playing against more then one person online as well or play online with large maps.
If you have a ATI x1900 or Nvidia 7900 or better and have dual core then this game will be the best game RTS you can play on the computer, especially online. Two gigs of ram will be needed for playing large maps against multiple opponents as well.
When I say large I mean these maps are the biggest maps you will see in an RTS for some time to come. That means thousands of units and scouting through the fog of war to find forward bases.
Date: 2007-08-01
I ordered this?
The previous reviews sum this up fairly well. I had a much better time playing the Rise of Nations series, including the quite enjoyable Rise of Legends. This isn't even the same ballpark as the greatest RTS of all time- Total Annihilation, so I was extremely disappointed AND out $40.
Date: 2007-07-23
Supremely Commandeered by Hype
The game IS over-hyped. I've been playing RTS games and turn-based strategy games since the days of Harpoon, Starfleet II, all the Blizzard games, and all those great Microprose titles (Master of Magic and Master of Orion I and II) as well as Total Annihilation, Alpha Centauri, and Age of Empires. And I'm an avid chess player, meaning I go to tournaments, study chess books (I own about 150 such), and, in short, am not one to turn down a good STRATEGIC, thoughtful challenge just because of a bit of a learning curve.
I realize some ADHD players, or younger guys perhaps loaded up with two liter bottles of some pepped up pop, will be disappointed with Supcom because its focus is strategic (rather than on tactical melees filled with eye-candy). Okay, fine. Supcom aims to be a different sort of RTS.
But besides being a "new step in strategy gaming" (emphasis on the "strategy"), a chief reason I bought the game was that there were all these rave reviews and awards. Two days later, after six to eight hours of frustrating play and four or five hours online trying to figure out why I wasn't having any fun with "Supcom," I took the game back to the store. Thank goodness the store in question was willing to take the game back for store credit!
I realize this early surrender might signal that I'm not a very hardcore strategy gamer (the game's true intended niche audience I guess). My counter would be that in this day and age, if you are going to rewrite RTS gaming (good on you!), then you need to 1) create a game that keeps people wanting to play for ten to twelve hours straight, at least during that all important courtship phase of initial exhilaration and learning; 2) be sure your program will work with what you state as the recommended system requirements. I don't see how the game would be playable if someone buys it based on the minimum requirements. That's just treating paying, well-intended customers shabbily and inviting a lot of angry user posts. And 3), the tutorials and campaigns need to be fun and well designed, stepping the user confidently and enthusiastically into the further complexities of the gaming system. Don't just toss new users into the campaigns of an admittedly "drier" version of RTS gaming, with minimal tutorials and manual, and expect them to spend the time required to learn the nuances of the game's controls. They need proper support, especially if you are only being half-hearted about storyline, character, music, and other "atmospheric" qualities of game play.
In the end, I felt ripped off because of what seemed to be the misleading claims (for me anyway) of the recommended and minimum system requirements stated on the game box. I've had to walk away from cool looking games before because they were, at the time, out of my then current computer's league. No big deal. I'd check for the game after my next system upgrade.
Anyway, my system (3.2ghz dual core, 1 gig RAM, Radeon X600 256MB HyperMemory vidram) meets or exceeds the "recommended requirements" of the game, and while I didn't have to shut the music off (which on one board was seen as a plausible fix (!) for the game program's slow operation on some systems), I did have to minimize graphic functions. Even then the game at times got choppy on screen--jumpy screens and over-shooting or under-shooting with the mouse when sliding up or down screen or zooming.
The lack of fine mouse control drove me bonkers (I use a laser mouse with wheel and have no trouble on other games I play) and this frustration was reiterated with the much celebrated zoom feature, which sounds great, but in practice I was over-zooming or under-zooming so much that I was losing time just modulating control of the darned zoom. I thought, why couldn't they have just created a few discrete zoom "steps"? I don't need so much scalability in the zoom. I'd zoom up for a close-up of a patch of grass, over-shooting the level of zoom I wanted, and if I zoomed out too much all the forces were jammed together as little over-lapping triangles. What's the point of the mini-map anyway?
As far as the tech trees of the three "races" go (they are all human), I didn't see that much difference. I played the UEF and the Aeon Illuminate in single player mode and found their stories uninvolving and their units not all that distinguishable. The land, sea, and air combinations were cool enough, but so what? TA did that. AC did that. Lots of games have done that. Using the shift-key to issue orders to groups of units is a step in the right direction, and I liked the idea of coordinating attacks with different units. But the game is so slow to develop, so abstract (triangles with line and dot combinations to distinguish them?!), the battle units so small, and the mouse and command issues so problematic, that I was left underwhelmed by the game and could not see what all the fuss was about. Who cares if you can direct 200 triangles toward your opponent's 100 triangles?
I really don't dig the idea of the robot army. You are the only human transported to the planet and you "spray on" different buildings from downloaded design templates. So then you have this rather heartless class of machines directed by you and the opponent. Sure, in the end, "it's all just electrons on a screen," but imagination and setting do count for something. For example, why couldn't the Aeon Illuminate BE the aliens and why couldn't they have designs that really reflected a different technology, different unit designs, and a radically different philosophy of war? Why couldn't the game have been more and better?
Date: 2007-07-22
SUPCOM is amazing, if you can run it
Supreme Commander is one of the best RTSs on the market and is incredibly sophisticated. The game itself, with the exception of the weak storyline, is absolutely amazing. The problem I faced is that I have a brand new laptop with a dual core processor that is 1.8 ghz and 2 gb of ram and a very nice video and sound card, but I still had to drop the settings in order to reduce the lag. The game didn't look nearly as nice, but I wanted to be able to play the game. If you've got the system for it, there's no better RTS, otherwise, play an old C & C.
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