Supreme Commander
Agent911's comment to my Starcraft 2 post inspired me to research this game as I am getting desperate for some new competitive RTS to be released that is of the same quality as Starcraft. Only so much grinding in the World of Warcraft can be done before you begin to lose hope.
I am really harsh though when it comes to non Blizzard RTS titles because not one has come close to being of the same quality as the Blizzard titles so far. Even the most disappointing one - Warcraft 3 is vastly superior to any non Blizzard RTS. Sad but true.
I found a Gamespy preview from July 2005 that has a lot of really promising information in it and some pretty cool screenshots of Supreme Commander.
Some promising huge unit battles in this screen shot. I just hope the units have some individuality about them like in Blizzard titles. I didn't play Total Annihilation much but one major fault I thought with it was that all the units felt the same and looked similar with small variations. I really HATE that. This is one of the same problems I find with the Age of Empires line of games too. A hundred variations of a unit on a horse. So please don't have 15 variations of a small chunky tank in this game. I'm begging you!
"The modern RTS, Taylor asserts, has been moving inward: in games like Warcraft III you deal up close with individual units or small squads. Taylor wants to move outward." - This was one of the biggest faults with Warcraft 3, I want Starcraft style battles again with a similar economy. Not 5 units on gold and 8 units on wood and you are done =(
The game was at E3 and gamespot put up a small text preview with some new information on it today.
"However, if you, like Taylor, want to keep things big, you'll be able to take advantage of some of Supreme Commander's other unique features--dual monitor support, which lets you keep one eye zoomed in on one of the game's huge battles, and the other on a zoomed-out view of the world to keep track of larger developments in the war." - Very cool feature, perfect for us poker players who already have dual and tri monitor set-ups =)
Another recent E3 review from someone at Shacknews. I just noticed that Supreme Commanders Acronym is SC. That is really unfortunate since everyone uses the exact same shortcut for Starcraft. Silly mistake =)
Agent911 works for Gas Powered Games and I believe is working on the networking for the game. It goes without saying that if you don't have a battle.net style in game ranking system then the game will fail at the first hurdle. No community = no future. Apart from the quality of the Blizzard games, Battle.net has been one of the major reasons their titles have survived with huge communities of players over many years. No gamespy please or just as bad would be a terribly implemented Battle.net clone as we saw in Age of Mythology. Got to do it well or not at all =)
Polish and perfection is the key to huge success, something that only Blizzard has done so far in RTS in my opinion. Supreme Commander is slated for an early 2007 release!
I am really harsh though when it comes to non Blizzard RTS titles because not one has come close to being of the same quality as the Blizzard titles so far. Even the most disappointing one - Warcraft 3 is vastly superior to any non Blizzard RTS. Sad but true.
I found a Gamespy preview from July 2005 that has a lot of really promising information in it and some pretty cool screenshots of Supreme Commander.
Some promising huge unit battles in this screen shot. I just hope the units have some individuality about them like in Blizzard titles. I didn't play Total Annihilation much but one major fault I thought with it was that all the units felt the same and looked similar with small variations. I really HATE that. This is one of the same problems I find with the Age of Empires line of games too. A hundred variations of a unit on a horse. So please don't have 15 variations of a small chunky tank in this game. I'm begging you!
"The modern RTS, Taylor asserts, has been moving inward: in games like Warcraft III you deal up close with individual units or small squads. Taylor wants to move outward." - This was one of the biggest faults with Warcraft 3, I want Starcraft style battles again with a similar economy. Not 5 units on gold and 8 units on wood and you are done =(
The game was at E3 and gamespot put up a small text preview with some new information on it today.
"However, if you, like Taylor, want to keep things big, you'll be able to take advantage of some of Supreme Commander's other unique features--dual monitor support, which lets you keep one eye zoomed in on one of the game's huge battles, and the other on a zoomed-out view of the world to keep track of larger developments in the war." - Very cool feature, perfect for us poker players who already have dual and tri monitor set-ups =)
Another recent E3 review from someone at Shacknews. I just noticed that Supreme Commanders Acronym is SC. That is really unfortunate since everyone uses the exact same shortcut for Starcraft. Silly mistake =)
Agent911 works for Gas Powered Games and I believe is working on the networking for the game. It goes without saying that if you don't have a battle.net style in game ranking system then the game will fail at the first hurdle. No community = no future. Apart from the quality of the Blizzard games, Battle.net has been one of the major reasons their titles have survived with huge communities of players over many years. No gamespy please or just as bad would be a terribly implemented Battle.net clone as we saw in Age of Mythology. Got to do it well or not at all =)
Polish and perfection is the key to huge success, something that only Blizzard has done so far in RTS in my opinion. Supreme Commander is slated for an early 2007 release!
posted by TillerMaN | 5:55 PM
12 Comments:
Is SC2 confirmed?
the job application you showed didnt say anything about SC2...
links plz!
I've got to agree. Nothing has come close to SC (Starcraft) and honestly I doubt anyone will. I'd love a starcraft 2 though.
Rise of Nations destroys any and all RTS. What say you on this matter?
hey i mention the supreme commander game in the sc2 post under anonymous :P I dont know why you say all the units felt the same in the original total annhiliation... maybe because they were all futuristic in design and did not come with 3-4 different races? I think the units were different enough both offensively and defensively to provide excellent gameplay. however I have never been a top 3 RTS player in the world either :) I was a very good TA player even though I was very young when it first came out. I played with the top players at the time but have stopped playing RTS when I started playing quake and got into FPS games. knowing that the same guy that created TA is working on this project and seeing the screenshots it just sent chills along me litterally when i first found out about this new game. I think its deffinitly worth a shot to play but its just unfortunate that we have to wait so long to play it =\
:O this game seems nice . Wich is the release date ?????
Good point Puddle, you and Agent911 inspired me =)
I haven't played Rise of Nations, anyone else care to comment on it =)
A few screenshots can tell you a lot about an RTS's gameplay.
It seems like they've got things right in concept (large armies, big focus on economy), but from looking at it I can't imagine that the game's unit control will be anywhere close to being on par with Starcraft.
I agree that a great deal of Starcraft's appeal lied in the individuality of each unit. Every unit was so different in how it moved and how it dealt damage. One unit's advantage over another wasn't a planned and hardcoded "x beats y, y beats z" dynamic, but merely a consequence of the individuality of those units and how the players came to use them.
So much went so right during the development of Starcraft; it came together so perfectly that I think we have to assume much of it was by chance. I doubt anything will ever come along to rival it as a competitive game, certainly not to old-timers like us.
63 MB E3 presentation torrent:
http://taspring.clan-sy.com:8080/torrents/7b368a8ae740a8ad0eb9206600d0a888a29d7640.torrent
I would assume the unit control would be similiar to the original TA but on a much larger scale. You could control as many units as you want at a time. You could asigned up to 9 groups (ctrl+1-9). there were shortcut keys for everything including your commander, air, ground, and sea units. You could set units to gaurd positions, gaurd other units, follow waypoints, go to one waypoint then attack something then go gaurd something... You could put as many units as you want it a group. it was cool to have 100 or so units in one group distracting a base while your other main group of 400 could flank. being able to easily switch from one group to another just by pressing a key was 'key' in taking out bases. Also, if you wanted to select all of the same kind of unit (not just all air or all land) you could do ctrl+double click on the unit, and it would select all of the unit.
I know a lot of these features are in starcraft. The unit individuality may not have been as great as in sc but I certainly thought the gameplay was worth it. I LOVED playing long 3-4 hour games of TA where the final factor after going back and forth was building nukes and anti nukes. I remember building air forces of 300+ planes (which at the time was unheardof for an RTS) going on suicide runs to take out out their anti nuke... wow just thinking about it makes me want to play the game again. and to think that they are doing a remake of it... im starting to get a hard on i better stop.
- Puddleglum
In Starcraft, massing was essential as it was in TA, but at the same time, one unit could win the entire game for you if your opponent slipped up or misread the timing of your build order.
This is a critical element in RTS games. In order for multiple battles to be taking place at different areas of the map at the same time, small groups of units need to be given the opportunity to do huge amounts of damage. This was seen in Starcraft because the worker units were so crucial, yet they were tightly packed together and very fragile, and there were plenty of area-of-effect damage units to kill them dozens at a time before weaker players could even react.
Most importantly though was the complexity of the micromanagement in Starcraft. It required endless practice and a great deal of finesse, and I think that's really what turned Starcraft into what I would call a sport; the fact that a great player could go into a battle in-game with an army a fraction of what the enemy has, and still come out the victor.
We saw in Starcraft a level of micromanagement that hasn't been seen in any other RTS in the history of gaming, and to this day not a single new release has come close. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that every major developer is going 3D, and this just destroys the responsiveness of the units. If everyone keeps making 3D RTS games, it'll take major technological advances in personal computer systems before anyone will be able to micro with the speed we saw in Starcraft.
Good ideas. You can see the shakeycam E3 footage of gameplay at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8793379454940212827&q=Supreme+Commander
TillerMaN, I know that you posted this blog back in '06, but in case you're still wondering about Supreme Commander, I'm gonna advise you not to get it. The main reasons why I think you wouldn't like this game are as follows:
-The unit control was nothing like I felt it should be. StarCraft is definitely still king in this area.
-The units severely lack anything distinguishing about themselves. They all just look like robots, tanks, etc. StarCraft completely owns this game in this area too
I believe that so far, no RTS has been released that rivals StarCraft. The only other RTS that I'd recommend thus far besides StarCraft is Company of Heroes. Just download the demo from Steam (if you have Steam) and you'll see what I mean.
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