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Supreme Commander


Raziel
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This is the spiritual successor to the RTS Total Annihilation. *cough* though I hope not, TA sucked something awful*cough*

If you have seen the E3 trailers, then you would get a taste of the massively scoped scoped combat. It recently went into the closed beta stage. (note, if you check on Fileplanet tommorow,they will be giving out more beta keys)

So far, I have mixed feelings about SC, I love the since of scale and the myriad units and their interactions(read...Nukes! ), but at this point the game has some rather huge flaws that make it really un-enjoyable.

First and foremost, the game is a resource hog. In this I was not surprised, just like at the trailers you could guess that this was going to be a beast to run, but just not to this degree. Even players with top of the line rigs are saying that the game becomes unplayable after an hour (which is the average half way point) in 1 v 1. And the game barely even runs for 20 minutes with anymore players then that. It even wonks out in 1 player sandbox mode...sigh

I am holding out hope, that there will be a lot of optimization later on.

The biggest and by far the most aggravating flaw in SC (for which, some developers need to smacked for) is that the multi-player matches use an external matchmaker/chat room. ie. GPG's version of Gamespy.

I can hear the screams of bloody horror now.

It wouldn't be so bad, except that as I stated above, the game is a resource hog, and even the pre-match lobby loads slowly and lags (Looking at 1-2 minutes on an 'average' machine). Now, if the all the slots are filled, or if the host decides to cancel the game during this loading sequence, you get kicked out of SC and back to the external lobby to start the whole process over again.

As if that wasn't bad enough, currently there is an aggravating error, that will falsely return "The game has launched." kicking you out. Which makes getting some play time a roll of the dice affair and the dice are loaded.

Amazingly though, despite all of these problems, when it does work, it works really well. Enough to overlook...eh... chant another verse Om Mani padme om. and keep playing. It's just that much fun....when it works.

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Man for a second I thought SimDerek had been released and I would FINALLY be able to have my own forums and rule them with an iron fist!

Oh well.. guess another shooter will do

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It's just another C&C knockoff.

The only difference is it's being used as a Fileplanet subscription tool.

What a bunch of hosers. LOL

I jumped into the beta and as soon as I figured out what it was, I jumped out. Dumped the program into the bit bucket poste haste with great disgust.

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Big patch was released a few days ago. It allievated a lot of the major problems I mentioned in the OP.

The game has had some pretty sizable optimizations and is not as much as a resource hog. (though it still is..just not as bad)

Same thing applies to the connection problems, it's a lot easier to get into a game...but you will still get randomly disconnected or fail to synch.

Which brings me to the external lobby...it's still there unfortunatly and it still takes an absurd amount of time just to get into the pre-match lobby....but not as bad as before.

Still has quite a ways to go, I think but it is a lot of fun when it comes together. I just came off of a five hour 3 vs 3 match that managed to escalate to the Global thermonuclear war stage annillating everyone's infrastructure, forcing us back down to the measly foot soldier level and then back up to GTW ^_^

It was a blast.

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quote:

Originally posted by Raziel:

This is the spiritual successor to the RTS Total Annihilation. *cough* though I hope not, TA sucked something awful*cough*

Huh????

From what i can recall, is TA was the first fully 3D (albeit simple 3D) RTS, with 3D units and Terrain elevation.

TA kicks the crap out of any RTS I've ever played, I still have it and i still play it, and yes its still fun.

And if too many units are the qualm don't download all of the 3rd party units, there are a BILLION of those. If the AI sucks, get a new AI (yes you can do that). If you don't like the maps, get new/more maps. You can change the game to suit your particualar tastes with TA Mods...

The strenth of TA is the variety of units and the varieties of game play strategies that can be employed for any set of terrain features. And how the game itself can be modified.

Besides if TA sucked that bad, why would their STILL be a large fan base after all this time and several large websites dedicated to TA and gaming communities?

-Fox

I'm my opinion Star Craft wasn't all that impressive...

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Dune? Which?

The first dune game wasn't very good and deserved to be a bargin game, but the last dune game to be made was excellent and well made.

However,even so, if you are comparing the latest dune game (I can't remember the name anymore) to TA, you can't. Since both where created several years apart from each other, and both used different technologies.

In reality, TA was a VERY good game and even I still play it.

Hopefully Supreme Commander will live up to the name

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I'm talking about the original Sega Genesis Dune: Battle for Arrakis. It was much better game then TA even though it was far simpler.

I always wondered why Westwood never brought back the DeathHand units though, they always spooked me when the comp used them and the game announced "DeathHand approaching!"

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  • 1 month later...

Personally I think it is far too early for it to be going gold. SC is definatly going to be suffering from release now patch later syndrome.

It is still an obsessive and unessary resource hog, with alot of gameplay bugs still being found in the beta...which apparantly from what I have read on the Beta boards is actually farther along development wise then the release version o.0

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  • 4 weeks later...

I managed to join the beta a while ago and played a couple of games before uni work got in the way.

My experience with poor in-game performance and long lobby loading times was similar to Raziels, although I wasn't too bothered with the lobby having used Valves Steam for a while now. I do admit however that a 'liking' for such a system tends to be more like something that's beaten into you than anything else.

When the game ran ok though, it was extremely fun to play; It bears more than a striking resemblence to TA in everything other than the graphics department, which isn't a bad thing in my opinion especially as far as the resource model is concerned.

This game and STALKER will probably fight for attention with my final uni project... And I just kicked the WoW addiction too

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Well would you believe it... I bought the game, spent an hour moving stuff around on my HDs to make 8gb of space that the thing needed, and then the game actually causes my PC to reboot!

Performance starts off OK, then rapidly drops over the course of about half a minute and then bang! Black screen, reboot. The game can't even grace me with a BSoD. Great.

[Edit]

Seems I'm not alone with the reboot problems, according to this URL:

http://forums.gaspowered.com/index.php

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