-=|[/ OFFICIAL \]|=-* Supreme Commander thread

[AsianriceX]

Heads up to anyone that hasn't bought it yet or bought it from a place that does Price Guarantees:
Circuit City has it for $37.99 this week. I plan on picking it up, playing the demo, then deciding whether or not I'd like to keep it.

 

[Maximilian]

Bump for the official SC thread

 

[QuantumPion]

I bought it last week but have only played it a bit. It definitely runs better then the beta however once you have a couple hundred units around, it still slows down a lot. I have to run at the lowest settings to get consistently decent speeds in large games. I think there are a few things that need to be worked out but it looks promising. I have an E6600 and a 8800 GTX, btw.

My beef is that ground units are so slow and take way too long to get into formation. They get destroyed before they can move into position or turn their turrets to return fire. Units in the front become stragglers and are picked off easily, while units in the rear never get in firing range.

Also, a large, diverse army will still be annihilated by a concentration of one unit type, gunships, bombers, artillery, etc. It seems like the only viable strategies are to use a crap ton of gunships, or to sneak in a bunch of tanks behind the enemy base using transports. Defenses and air units seem far too powerful.

Can anyone post a list of special hotkeys and special interface tricks? Like how to attack-move, attack-move in formation, different ways of using transports, air units guarding other air units, stuff like that?

Also, has anyone with surround sound speakers noticed that all sound effects come from the rear speakers, and the music is much too quiet?

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: QuantumPion
Can anyone post a list of special hotkeys and special interface tricks? Like how to attack-move, attack-move in formation, different ways of using transports, air units guarding other air units, stuff like that?

Its called the instruction manual.

Also, by default, a unit will atack enemies along the way of a move order. You need to disable its fire altogether if you just want it to haul ass from point A to point B. If you want an air unit to guard another, just left-click guard on left-click on the second unit. Or right-click on it while the first is selected.
I dont know what you mean by different ways to use transports.

If you are having trouble with units getting wiped out by other groups, remember to mix in artillery and anti-air with your main ground attackers. They have a much greater range and can even shoot outside their site radius. That extra range is what helps protect your main attack force.
Also, sending quick harrasment squads is good for shaving down enemy forces and distrupting their flow. Very important to do this while building up your own massive attack force.

I dont even know if gamefaqs.com or the other strategy sites have any tips up yet, but the tricks used in TA and TA:K would work in Supreme Commander as well.
As a matter of fact, I was reading the Strategy Guide for Kingdoms before I got this game and it has a BUNCH of nice techniques. Maybe when I finally get bored playing I'll post them here.

 

[fyleow]

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[BurnItDwn]

I just picked up a copy of it today at gamestop ... (I know, it's cheaper at Circuit City ... but gamestop I can stop at during my lunch hour at work ....)

I can't wait to try it tonight!

I LOVE Total Annihilation, I Love Core Contingency, I hated TA Kingdoms.
I love TASpring.

I have extremely high expectations for Supreme Commander, probably too high ....
That said .. I know it will kill my hardware ... (overclocked X2 4200+, 2GB ram, 1920x1200 24inch LCD, X1800XT) .... I'm probably gonna need to blow serious money if I want to play at my native resolution

I remember playing Total Annihilation on a AMD K6 233 with a few friends in a lan setting, one guy had a P133, one guy had a P90, and then my second PC at the time was a Cyrix P200+ (my brother would use that PC) ... and once we got anywhere close to the unit limit .... the game ran at like 15% speed and the p90 and cyrix got really really really choppy (as in, we would have hit pause to pause the game so they could select units and/or issue commands .....)

Man that was the game ....


Anyhow .. I can't wait to play Supreme Commander ... my expectations are high, but given the reviews I've read .... I don't think I'll see disappointment.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[shortylickens]

Its even cheaper at Target.

 

[NYHoustonman]

Are there any decent guides out yet? I'm having some issues with strategy - mission 2 was a pain in the ass, until I realized I could just pound the defenses from far (if I was careful to keep my units just out of range), and even then it was tougher than I'm used to. I kind of expected to be able to run over the base, considering I was hitting the unit cap :x.

 

[vhx]

If anyone wants to play, PM me.

This game is awesome tho.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
I just picked up a copy of it today at gamestop ... (I know, it's cheaper at Circuit City ... but gamestop I can stop at during my lunch hour at work ....)

I can't wait to try it tonight!

I LOVE Total Annihilation, I Love Core Contingency, I hated TA Kingdoms.
I love TASpring.

I have extremely high expectations for Supreme Commander, probably too high ....
That said .. I know it will kill my hardware ... (overclocked X2 4200+, 2GB ram, 1920x1200 24inch LCD, X1800XT) .... I'm probably gonna need to blow serious money if I want to play at my native resolution

I remember playing Total Annihilation on a AMD K6 233 with a few friends in a lan setting, one guy had a P133, one guy had a P90, and then my second PC at the time was a Cyrix P200+ (my brother would use that PC) ... and once we got anywhere close to the unit limit .... the game ran at like 15% speed and the p90 and cyrix got really really really choppy (as in, we would have hit pause to pause the game so they could select units and/or issue commands .....)

Man that was the game ....


Anyhow .. I can't wait to play Supreme Commander ... my expectations are high, but given the reviews I've read .... I don't think I'll see disappointment.

I think you'll be happy. My friend and I are TA fanatics and we love SC. Such a great game...

 

[Chaotic42]

My Supreme Commander screenshots

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
My Supreme Commander screenshots

Hmmmmm.......
Looks like someone else has a 1920x1200 display.


For mission 2, you will find it much easier to swamp the lower left and right corners with missile tanks. The southern defenses are a lot easier and eventually the enemy commander will move out. When you kill him/her, they will make a big boom and wipe out most of the base too.
(Again, protect the long-range units with some heavy tanks and anti-air.)

As for guides, go to the same place you get all your other guides: http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/game/928861.html

Only one but he provides a good walkthrough and lots of decent strategy.

 

[BurnItDwn]

I played this from the time I got home from work yesterday until the time I went to sleep ....

Holy crap ..... this game is awesome ....
As a bonus, it actually runs with 1920x1200 on my main monitor, and then 1024x768 on my second monitor ... and that secondary display is VERY nice ... (I did have to set a lot of the settings to low though .... but since I just run an x1800xt ... I'm surprised it works at all at this resolution)

I love having both monitors at different resolutions

The "split screen" functionality is also nice ... I can effectivly fight and monitor a 3 front war, or a 2 front war while also watching the overall map, or my base ...

My initial thought is that this is the most fun playing a RTS that I've had. It parallels TA in it's greatness.
Now I just wonder if this will stand the test of time .... (I had TA installed on my laptop until the hard drive died on it .... at that time ... TA was the only game I had on it, and I'd play it if I was out and about, and also bored .... or every now and again on small lans)

I'm hoping to get 10 good solid years of play from this game

 

[NYHoustonman]

Originally posted by: fyleow

Originally posted by: NYHoustonman
Are there any decent guides out yet? I'm having some issues with strategy - mission 2 was a pain in the ass, until I realized I could just pound the defenses from far (if I was careful to keep my units just out of range), and even then it was tougher than I'm used to. I kind of expected to be able to run over the base, considering I was hitting the unit cap :x.

For the single player campaigns you can usually just keep using that strat. Just make sure your long range units are protected from air and ground attacks and you have a radar set up. Then you can go afk and come back after the base has been leveled

It doesn't matter even if they have shields because the shields lose power when they get hit so if you keep pounding them long enough they will go down.

Either that or nuke the crap out of them.

Yea, mission 3 was actually extremely easy in comparison for some reason, I'm thinking maybe going with more air units could have helped - those long-range stationary land defenses were pretty devastating when I got too close. Oh well, at least I'm past it .

 

[Lockout]

Anyone have any screenshots of this minimal UI the patch added? I don't have the game yet, and I'm curious what it looks like.

 

[vhx]

Originally posted by: Lockout
Anyone have any screenshots of this minimal UI the patch added? I don't have the game yet, and I'm curious what it looks like.

I took this shot. I like it, but the only bad things are you don't get a minimap and an option to expand the build bars would be nice. I suppose this would be pretty awesome with dual display.

Text

 

[Smilin]

I'm running 1600x1200 on monitor 1 and 1440x900 on monitor 2. No idea what my framerate is but I don't notice it so that's good enough (rig in sig).



Question for others running multimon: Have you found a way to completely flip what's on each display? I want my 16x12 screen to have the clean zoom-map and the 14x9 screen to have all my icons and controls.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: vhx

Originally posted by: Lockout
Anyone have any screenshots of this minimal UI the patch added? I don't have the game yet, and I'm curious what it looks like.

I took this shot. I like it, but the only bad things are you don't get a minimap and an option to expand the build bars would be nice. I suppose this would be pretty awesome with dual display.

Text

The minimap is there, it's just switched off by default (you don't really need it anymore the way the zoom works). Look for a button in the lower left that flips it on.

 

[vhx]

Not for the minimalistic UI unfortunately.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: shortylickens

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
My Supreme Commander screenshots

Hmmmmm.......
Looks like someone else has a 1920x1200 display.

Yeah, I'm thinking of adding a second one.

 

[bsobel]

I've been having horrible crashing problems with SC and I stupidely didn't catch why (but another poster on GPGnet did). When hosting games with large maps and a couple computer players, I was running out of memory (well, more correct address space for the SupremeCommander.exe process). It fails to check memory allocations and eventually it would hang/crash in the MSVC runtime.

Well, a kind soul over on GPGnet made a post about tagging the application as large memory aware (which on XP with proper boot.ini switches can give you about 3gig of uiser space vs 2gig and on Vista 64 [my box] gives 4gig of user address space). The crashes went away and we completed our first big fight on a huge map against 3 computers. Fun fun fun

Bill

 

[Nothinman]

When hosting games with large maps and a couple computer players, I was running out of memory (well, more correct address space for the SupremeCommander.exe process). It fails to check memory allocations and eventually it would hang/crash in the MSVC runtime.

You would think that they would have caught something like that since they designed the game to be "big" from the start.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

When hosting games with large maps and a couple computer players, I was running out of memory (well, more correct address space for the SupremeCommander.exe process). It fails to check memory allocations and eventually it would hang/crash in the MSVC runtime.

You would think that they would have caught something like that since they designed the game to be "big" from the start.

Yep, a bit disapointed to find that. Glad for the workaround, and hopefully GPG will tag the binary directly for the future (or better, trim in memory requirements for the games, we we could only get 15 mins into a game with two computer players before crashing)

Bill