Determinance screenshot

Supreme Commander Demo

Supreme Commander is almost exactly the same as Total Annihilation, with a few minor changes.

On the plus side there’s:

  • The zooming thing, which works very well
  • Loads of cool bigger units – in fact, in general the difference of scale between units is very cool
  • Minimap on the second monitor, very good if you have a second monitor

On the minus side:

  • The new graphics engine is ok if you have a very fast PC, but looks pretty much worse than TA otherwise
  • You HAVE to run it at a very high resolution to get a big enough playfield due to the ridiculously over-sized HUD (modders are reportedly sorting this out)

To be perfectly honest, the zooming feature/scale is responsible for how bad the game looks the majority of the time. They had to come up with a solution which looked acceptable very zoomed-in and was playable zoomed out. The only solution turned out to be a huge compromise, making it almost impossible to be emersed. As my esteemed colleague says, every zoom level is a trade-off between looks and the ability to do anything useful. They needed to have the max zoom level be much further out, abandon their desires for up-close visual carnage, and create a zoom level which was both acceptable-looking and functional.

But having said all that, it’s still TA.  And nothing else has been TA. The importance of territory and the sheer coolness of having battles so incredibly large remains, and that makes SupCom dissapointing, but still important and just about essential.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Supreme Commander Demo”

  1. namaste:

    § February 12th, 2007 at 1:03 am

    I don’t think you gave Supreme Commander a fair shake. While I’ve only been able to play the single-player demo so far, I think it is a fundamental improvement over TA. While new user interface features like ferrying and movable waypoints are great, they don’t fundamentally improve the game. The two features which do are the larger scale and the strategic unit icons. When zoomed far enough out (or all the time with an option), units are replaced with abstract icons indicating what they are effective against. Anti-ground units and turrets have plus symbols, anti-air has an arc symbol, etc. Furthermore, they shape of the icon that has this symbols varys by the type of unit, so ground units might be squares, and air units might be diamonds (I don’t remember all the different shapes and symbols). Anyway, the effect of this is that once I’ve scouted out a base or force I’m about to attack, I can zoom out and very quickly determine it’s composition. If the base is defended only by a few anti-ground turrets and many anti-air, I will send in my tanks backed up by a few mortars, and target the anti-ground turrets, then mop up the base. So the advantage to the strategic icons is that they allow a quick assessment of the strength and weakness of the enemies forces assuming you have scouted them sufficiently.

    The real advantage to the larger scale is that it makes micro managing individual units or small squads of units nearly absurd in big battles. What do five bombers matter in a war involving many hundreds of units? For this reason, trying to win with micro is nearly absurd, because the superior strategist will just bring the correct wave of the counter-unit to bear at the right time and wash over your squad. Supreme Commander, like TA is built for strategic play, but by virtue of the scale, SC actually enforces it.

  2. Ian:

    § February 16th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

    Hi Namaste.

    That all sounds very good – I’ll be picking up SupCom this weekend and I’ll maybe give it a more thorough analysis.

    Ian

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