Ground textures don't look that well compared to FA and Demigod idd but boy, are you forgetting all the extra details they've added elsewhere. Map shapes are more than anonymous landscapes now and units/weapon effects look way better. I can look at a firing Cybran artillery battery for hours, no joke.

Again, Seton's might be the same map size but it's the feeling I am talking about. Big should be big, I don't feel we should mod the game for that if it was said that maps could potentially become bigger than what there currently is.

I used T3 Armored Assault Bots all the time.

In what type of game? I usually play 1v1 ranked-style games. Even against the AI, I always choose maps which will allow me to use ranked strategies. Thus, I rarely use T3, and I think I've only gotten to T3 twice online, once during a ranked game and the other time in a custom game with 2X res (which became a mostly T3 air war).

But during the campaign, I always build T3. And I love the Armored Assault Bots .

Uhh what. It's pretty much the same in that reguard to SupCom2 as it was in SupCom1. As a matter of fact it was still a very bad idea to just "dispose" your units at the enemy, because it was a big waste of mass and you were giving the enemy free mass (80% of the cost of unit).

In SupCom2 it's only a 20% mass bonus from reclaiming, though you do get RP's now which offsets it slightly.

The economy in how you get it is essentually EXACTLY the same as it was in SupCom1. The only difference is that you pay for everything upfront. This just makes it so you can never mass stall, you can only build what you have resources for (which you should be doing if you are a good player in SupCom1 anyways), and you can't que stuff up as much as you could in SupCom1. Oh, and there's no "draining" of mass going on. That's all it really effects.

Okay it was not changed for the console then... but to "optimize" performance... You know you tell your fans for month how much you optimized the game, and after all what we see is a lot less map features/trees/rocks and less units. There might be some hidden improvements but for me it seems more like removing map features to gain performance.

And with only like 5 rocks and trees what do we get? Did you see the flying trees and stones on setons? Did you see the textures? Did you compare the new setons to the old one?

Well sry, its not your fault... but when I see that I only played supcom2 for 60 hours it makes me sad. I even played c&c3 more... and that game sucked.
I can still recommend this game because 60h is worth the money, but for me it failed my expectations.

Not quite.

In a rate based build econ, you could start building before you had enough, and complete the structure sooner*. In an upfront build econ, you must wait twice for your order, once to accumulate the resources, and once for the build time.

Ironically, the idea for research items to have a "build time" associated with them was rejected specifically to avoid this exact same phenomenon.

SupCom2's economy is a fine, standard way to handle it. It's a step down in flexibility, but it doesn't have a significant negative impact on the meat of the game.

*Assuming you had sufficient net income to avoid a stall before completion; bafflingly simple to estimate.

You sir, just mentioned a tactic thats no more in supcom2. of course having to cover your army on a march is a task on its own which is now completely obsolete due to direct sandbox battles.

The only time I paid attention to the detailed props on Setons was to reclaim them. The forests & stones otherwise were meaningless. Overall, I think the terrain decor and textures in FA were designed to look very good up close, and they were very detailed when zoomed in. SupCom2's terrain is designed to look good at further zoom levels, while sacrificing some fine detail at close zooms.

I'm not sure you have actually played Supcom 2....

Sorry but I think this is nonsense. Micromananging has very little if anything to do with the rate based economy, they could have easily done everything the same with the new economy if you didn't need to pre-pay for buildings and factory queues - other than that the only other thing it effects are shields and things that required power.

Anyhow, don't worry you will get used to it, contrary to what some people thing, the economy was NOT the core element that defined supreme commander, it's the other things like strategic zoom, waypoint systems, large battles, experimentals etc.

It affects tremendously the ability to offload orders that are well over the immediate horizon of events. As Cerus pointed out, you now have to essentially
"wait twice" to build. With the rate/deficit system you had a huge amount of flexibility stringing out construction of units and buildings to be coordinated with infrastructure developments over a long time line, freeing you to deal with more important stuff.

I think it’s a little disingenuous to claim setons is the same size considering that much of supcom2’s setons is unplayable terrain.

I suspect that most of that extra stuff isn't actually counted as map-area though.

As I said, this is not caused by the economy, it's caused by the interface and queuing changes.

The old system:
You have 2 factories each building 1 unit at the same time, but you are at the limit of your resources, it takes 1 minute and you end up with 2 units.

The new system:
You have 2 factories, one building a unit, one with a queued unit because you don't have enough resources left. After 30 seconds one unit is produced, after 1 minute the second unit is produced.


The net result is the same, it's only about how you percieve the economy. The problem with the new system is the pre-pay and manual un-pause. If they worked differently, the ONLY difference you would notice with the economy is the effect on sheilds and other power streaming structures.

If factories auto-unpaused, there would effectively be no difference, because at any fixed point in time your economy is the same in both systems - you can either afford it or you can't.

Its just that the new eco requires more micro, which is what they were trying to get away from...

That is actually also FA's greatest weakness: the learning curve. I go out and queue up 6 land factories. Then I queue up 4 mexes across the map. Then I queue up 12 pgens and an air fac plus 2 more land facs. Then goes a mex upgrade and storage. All this can be done in less than 30 seconds and set up your economy up for the next 5 to 10 minutes. Is it powerful? Yes! Is it difficult to manage? Yes as well. It is so easy to overexpand, so easy for one event to disrupt one's entire queue and bring all of the carefully-laid, map-wide construction efforts to a halt. Or queuing up a lot of stuff, then finding you can't afford it all. People say, "just look at your storage and income before you build something." That works for 1 structure/unit at one point in time. But once it's in a queue, how can you know that you will afford the factory which will be built in 7 minutes' time?

Then there's assisting, a tool of great flexibility and yet so hard to manage for new players because there is no UI indication of the costs of assisting.

I do not fully disagree with you, I think the rate eco is a good idea at its core, but FA's system was not perfect and had almost no explanation or tutorial to go with it, leaving new players to figure out the intricacies of the system on their own. Hopefully they don't quit the game out of frustration before they can. To solve this problem, and I don't necessarily agree with what they did, GPG made it so that anything that is queued will be built at the top speed unless the builder is destroyed. Once you buy and place the building/unit, it will be built. No threat of stalls slowing production to a crawl. This simplifies the eco somewhat, but introduces new problems with not being able to afford things. I believe this has as much to do with our habits as FA/vanilla/TA players as the system itself. We are so used to the rate eco that anything else seems foreign and inferior.

I think GPG should have kept most aspects of the rate eco while cutting out sources of mandatory micro such as adjacency, adding new, better economy tutorials, and improving the UI to let the player know when he/she will be able to build a unit/structure. Perhaps a tool that will calculate if a unit/structure in a queue can be built based on real-time predictions of a player's economic status.

why do you suspect this? That wouldn’t make any sense re sorian’s comment. 1024 v 1024. How else would the map be measured if not the, you know, map?

I wish people would stop sticking up for the new resources model. It sucks, you all know it sucks so just admit that it sucks and move on. Nobody of any consequence thinks that they pay-up-front model is an improvement. Hell, even CT knows it sucks.

the net result isn't what's important. it's the path taken that matters.

i'm some instances a flux economy is better (I think it's better in more situations, but I could be mistaken), in some instances the deposit economy is better.

see, having one tank out early is going to be better no matter what... that tank can blow stuff up for you. but that doesn't mean that deposit economy is actually better. Starfox's example was rather shall, and didn't look at the other two options available.

one of those being build one tank at a time with the rate economy. it would take one minute, but you'd have a tank to show for it 30 seconds into it.

also, with the deposit economy; you could save up until you can afford two tanks (ala. save for 30 seconds) then produce two tanks. this is a less ideal solution as you have nothing to show until 1 minute is up.

[EDIT:] FFFF- double ninja.


because the mapping system is so drastically different, the polygon that makes the prettyshit doesn't have to be the same size (or at all related to) as the height-map that units skate over.

Robotronic did a tear-down on the new map format when the game was released. IIRC, the pictures he made relating to that is what has given me my current beliefs on maps.


hahaha. AMEN.

X-Cubed basically sums up the entire flux economy debate here.

I like it

Not quite sure what you are trying to say in your post, or which way you prefer.

Anyhow, the new economy actually makes it easier to manage your building better. If you have 5 factories and can afford 4 tanks, you start building them and know in 30 seconds you are going to have a tank With a streaming economy you have 5 factories, you build 5 tanks, and will *probably* have 5 tanks that you can use, some time after 30 seconds, although if something goes wrong you might end up with no tanks if your economy ends up being too strained.

This example points out why the old economy had a steeper learning curve for new players, and the fact is some people just never understood it, or never bothered wanting to understand it because it was unnecessarily complex (I have a few friends like that). There are those of us that didn't really have a problem with it, but if you can have an economy that anyone can easily understand, you are better off. The game is better off.

Honestly I think if we didn't have to pre-pay for everything we queued up, it would be a nice middle ground, but even that would actually make things a little more complex, particularly for new players, because it adds ambiguity - which of the queued items will build first etc.

I build a bunch of factories, and put a bunch of units on autobuild. If I run low on resources, the buildings go into pause status and keep my queue in tact. Rather than a economic stall that is hard to come back from, I just simply unpause the building when I have the resources. If the economy is not rolling, you have to play with the pause button. However, it is very straightforward to get the economy going.

I'm not sure how this is any better, in fact the current system auto-pauses if you don't have enough economy, so it's actually easier on the macromanagement.



Not for new players.


Just play the game for a while, and you will realize how little difference it really makes to that part of the game. As I have already mentioned, the only way it significantly effects gameplay is the effect on sheilds, firing artillery, etc. Previously you could cripple somones energy supply and take down their sheilds, you can no longer do this. If you want to complain about the economy, at least complain about the parts that actually effect to the gameplay and strategies.

Personally I would like a half-way system. I would like mass to use the Supcom2 system and energy to use the supcom 1 system. So that everything runs on a powergrid and uses power to run like it did in supcom 1, but actually paying for building/units remains simple.

Sorry, but this is bollocks. There is nothing inherently good (or bad) about an easily understood system. It’s the system that matters. Supcom2’s system sucks, the fact that it (supposedly) makes it easier to understand is irrelevant. They could’ve made everything “easier to understand” by say, limiting each faction to 1 unit. would that make the game better? Of course not.

Supreme commander is a worse game as far as economic changes go (not that FA didn’t need refining). So what if a bunch of retards can now play their watered-down title? Who cares? Who says that a bunch of lazy, dim-witted fools who couldn’t handle the first game are the kind of gamer that developers should be flirting? Especially in hindsight we see supcom 2 didn’t sell close to vanilla.

This idea that games have to be stripped of complexity in order to appeal to the casual observer is why there are so few decent titles released since the advent of the last console generation.

link on sales amounts please.

Vanilla had 40,000 ranked players. Do the math.