It’s been almost 2 years since supcom2 was released and I have been thinking about what it succeeded at improving for RTS, but also why it didn’t gain wide scale success and acceptance. As much as I enjoyed playing supcom2, it surely hasn’t been anywhere near as long lasting as supcom1/FA was and I wanted to provide some of my thoughts on why. Supcom2 tried some interesting changes over Supcom1/FA in a bid to try and fix the perceived issues with the earlier game. I have been a long time defender of many of those changes, however in hindsight I can see that ultimately they caused supcom2 to not be as deep or provide as much long term fun as supcom1.

Let’s consider some of the main areas for change and the issues that they caused. The list moves from minor changes through to the major gameplay changes.

Transports – For some reason GPG decided to remove the elegant pickup/drop off animations of the supcom1 transports and replace them with a short range teleportation option. I assume this was done either because of time constraints or for improved game performance. However this changed caused a significant balance problem for transports and this meant they were given a higher cost than previous games. This meant that early game transport tactics were not really feasible accept for a highly skilled player and even then it was a risk to try. A minor issue to be sure, but it removed some fun tactics from the game.

Engineer assist – One of the micro evils of supcom1 was having an army of engineers move around the map to rapidly build structures to counter enemy tactics. For this reason, and also because of the overall economy changes, engineer assisting was severely nerfed in supcom2. I now think they want too far. I can see how having 50 engineers rapidly build an experimental was insane, but in supcom2 anything more than 2 engineers at once is pointless. Perhaps 4 would have been more sensible. This limit means some of my favourite tactics such as surprise bases or hidden artillery are no longer nearly as viable.

Unit diversity – Many would say that FA lacked this as well - early game units were of no use late game. Supcom2 streamlined the unit count and each feels like it has a specific purpose. Units were given long game usage with research upgrades to their health and damage. So what’s my beef? Well clicking and upgrade button to get a tougher bot is not the same (or as fun?) as having a new bot type to build. Leaving aside the balance issues of instant battlefield upgrades, it just didn’t feel like there were enough robot types in supcom2. Plus I had a soft spot for the mini LAB bots in supcom1.

Maps – The maps in supcom2 look great and have much more variety than supcom1. Unfortunately this came at a cost. The scale was shrunk, possibly for performance and there was no map editor. I didn’t faze me too much, but some would surely consider this one of the major killers of replayability of supcom2. (The Mod manager was also removed which really annoyed many, but in the end we worked around this and there are mods out there).

Research – Supcom2 introduced a fantastic interface/system of upgrades. Rather than have to locate and click on specific buildings like in certain other RTS games, the upgrades are all managed from one interface with a nice tree view of how the upgrades connect. GPG decided that these upgrades wouldn’t be brought with mass/energy and a wait time. They introduced a new resource called research points that are essentially just time based. I think the goal here was to further simplify the economy (more on that below). However they also added research stations as a proxy to turn mass into research and allowed research to be gained from destroyed units. In practice I think this caused the game to be harder to get into than a 2 resource economy and the combat RP contributed (but didn’t cause) the blob based battles that we see from high level players.

Mass extractors – It’s my belief that the number one reason people got stuck in supcom1 was not upgrading mass extractors. It was a micro task across the whole map that new players forgot in the heat of battle. I think the core economy and hence research changes in supcom2 were a bid to stop inexperienced players stalling their economy. Mass extractor upgrades had to go. As a consequence mass extractors had their cost and hardiness increased. After playing and watching many games of supcom2 I think it’s this that led to the blob style 1 army vs. 1 army combat that we see. Map control, raiding and patrolling tactics became far this effective and hence less important. My opinion is this dramatically reduced the gameplay variety and caused top players to not stay long with the game.

Economy – As I have mentioned above and as Chris Taylor made clear in previews for supcom2, the economy in supcom1 was hard for players to get into at first and often hard to manage during each game. Many of the other changes above are related to trying to address this, but the core change was to switch from a flow based economy to pay upfront economy similar to other RTS games. This had the side effect of removing the ability to queue building to be built. GPG fixed it in a patch, but the damage had been done. I think it’s this change that killed supcom2 early on for existing supcom fans and the player base never really recovered from it.

Some of these things were identified before the games release, and many within days of release.

How has it taken you 2 years to come to the same conclusions people had 2 years ago?

And do you remember being critical of these people at the time? Because I do.

I was excited about the announcement of SC2 but it didn't take much playing of the demo to realize that it wasn't going for the same audience.

The success of Total Annihilation, and to a lesser degree, SC and FA, was a clear indication to me that there was, and still is, a market for a 'serious' RTS. In fact, I feel that the current state of FA - and the developments made by it's community - have kept it at the top of that particular genre. I anxiously await whomever will attempt to top it's level of sophistication.

I was excited about the announcement too. However, the more I learned about the game the less I liked the look of it.

I too anxiously await whomever will attempt to top it's level of sophistication.
I think SC:FA aimed high and fell a little short. Supcom2 aimed low and still missed.

You missed the biggest point: Supcom 2 has NO COMMUNITY CONTENT because it doesn't allow modding, mapping or anything that adds new content and longevity to the game. Also, the game is really imbalanced.

I still think after 2 years (not quite March yet, though I know some players here may have had early access) it seems to me many aspects of this game were developed heavily with the XBoX360 in mind, or at very least the PC version did not see it's full potential because the XBox version held it back.

Units had to be big enough to register on a 480i screen, and therefore could only shoot projectiles 5-10x their length (thats like a real life tank only being able to fire ~100 yards). The projectiles also move very slowly, in scale to the units only like maybe ~150 miles per hour, whether or not it is related to the same topic could be a possibility. Unit's also turn on a dime like they have no weight to them. Whatever the reasons these things really breaks the scale and, more importantly, the immersion of the game that was a dissapointment to those of us looking for true sequel to Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance.

Perhaps that was the key to it disappointing many people; that it was supposed to be a sequel to our favourite RTS, but instead we got a spin-off. The game might not have caught as much flak as it did if it had been marketed as a stand-alone spin-off instead of a sequel...imagine the March 2010 release of 'Supreme Commander: Annihilation', accompanied by a statement from Chris Taylor that said Supreme Commander 2 is starting development and looking for publishers (only to disappoint fans by putting it on hold to work on AOE:Online).

Overall, though pure opinion, Supreme Commander 2 was a step forward in almost every direction, except the only (and most important to many) thing that set the original apart from most RTS: scale. Which brings my argument full circle back to the XBox.

Here's hoping Supreme Commander 3 gets developed by GPG, primarily for PC but spec'ed to run on the nextgen consoles, and can combine the best of both games: SC/FA's great scale in the size of maps/units/projectiles/speeds/flow economy, and SC2's great pathing, research UI, upgrade system, fast pacing, production values. Throw in a 'galactic war' or a 'darian crusades' type deal and you have got yourself a winner.

I did make that clear under the maps heading. There are mods, Eternal Conflict being a good current example, but I agree the lack of a map editor had a big impact on long term replayability (again I did say this).

At the time of release the economy was heavily criticised, but the other point did not reach general discussion until months after release.

I did defend the econ system at the time and in many ways I think GPG did fix the issues in a later patch when they allowed for buildings to be queue. But as I said above the damage was already done at that point.

The other point of my post, which you seem to have missed, is that these changes were ment to fix the issues people had in FA. Some would say that GPG had some success here. I'm implying that the improvements over FA actually reduced the enjoyment for top players and its that reason (along with no map editor) that few still play supcom2 today.

That might have been the plan, but the execution was way over exaggerated. Such drastic, sweeping changes were not required to solve issues people had, but that's just GPG's style, remember the Mercy?

Mike

Can you be more specific?

Thats the other thing I have been thinking about - how would I have fixed it. Would I take FA and try to add the best bits from supcom2 without the crappy changes or take supcom2 and try to make it more like FA, i.e. remove the crappy changes.

WEll the answer to that will depend on what you were expect really, a lot fo us hear were really hoping for just a better FA I think.

For me, I would start with FA, identify the issues and try to fix them by doing as little as possible.

Eco too Exponential? I'd look at changing the stats first, because That's EASY, well, relatively, once you change the eco to be more linear you have to adjust costs right across the board, but you get the idea, you could even do just 1 race to test the numbers.

Ect Ect, I won't go into details, we all know that dance by this point xD

Mike

I think the big issue in FA was the economy required too much attention. The way I would fix FA econ issue is to make it so that mass extractors would auto upgrade after you had held that point for a period of time. While upgrading it would produce mass, but it would use any either. For the units I would increase the health of the T1 units by quite a bit and possible the cost a small bit. Plus maybe some of the changes from FunkOff faction diversity mod would probably be nice.

The issue is this doesn’t give you the nice bits of supcom2 namely the maps, performance, upgrade system and the good upgrades (jump packs on ACU’s yay!). It may be easier just to “fix” supcom2.

For supcom2:
- Half the cost and health of mass extractors.
- Make it so that when one of your units is killed you get half or a quarter of its RP (I really like to rip out the RP system, but that’s a lot of work and RP isn’t a big issue).
- Increase the engineer assist so it’s more worthwhile.
- Change the transports to be the FA style ones with the same models and animations. Reduce the cost a bit.
- Add LABs and scouts back in, possible as an upgrade and they would be FAST.
- Add back in a T3 style power gen. Reduce the output on basic power gens.
- Make mass convertors auto like in FA and make them an add-on to the T3 powerplant (they would reduce its power output).

There are more changes to supcom2, but they are all minor and easier to implement and you get all the cool features of supcom2.

I understand what hotho11owpoint says about scale, but I don’t think it’s a major issue; we just need more large maps to play on. Which leads to the last fix that supcom2 needs – Tells us the map format and what tools are used to make them.

Of course this wouldnt bring back any players as supcom2 has missed its chance ;-(

The size of the maps doesn't really change the scale in existing maps, or the battles you see on the field as far as immersion goes because the units still behave the same. You could make an earth sized map, but if my Experimenal Megabot only shoots 320 meters, being attacked by tanks that max their range at 170 meters, is it going to feel any more epic or play better than it does now? In my opinion it would not (and probably does not, ever tried to 1v1 on the 4v4 Etched Desert? I have not but I do not think it would solve any of the games many percieved shortcomings).

Speaking of shortcomings, again I will mention lack of map editor.

I completely disagree.
That adds more strategic depth to the game.
At what point do you upgrade your mex? Do you spend time on macroing your resources or your army? Do you do spend some time on your economy early for a tech advantage? But risk losing against someone who is spamming T1? Do you take advantage of some or all adjacency bonuses you can? What impact does losing a T2 mex early, have on your game? What can you do to come back from that?
Do you commit resources to protect your T2 Mex and risk losing more T1 mexes?
At what point do you move to T3?

Simplifying the economy is removing a giant chunk of the strategic game, which is what makes FA great.
And as proven by Supcom2 people might complain about it, but they miss it when its not there.

I didnt say the FA econ didnt give many strategic options. I said it required TOO MUCH ATTENTION.



The mass upgrade decision was the key one. If you miss timed it, even for just one of your 4 core mexes, you were toast at high level and almost certainly lost at mid levels. And for new players - they just couldnt see what they had missed.

Chris Taylor clearly said fixing the econ micro and learning curve was a goal for supcom2.

My views on the matter are that FA's exponential nature (tank health, damage, range, etc) meant that you needed to grow your economy exponentially to either;

1) exponentially spam more tanks, or
2) get a tech. advantage and build exponentially fancier tanks.

Unless you were doing something hilariously cheesy or strategically genius, all strategies can more or less fit into one of those two boxes.

That's why the economy needed so much attention. It was a symptom of an underlying problem (as opposed to being the problem itself).

[EDIT:] Tweaked something to be clearer.

I don't see many regulars here saying they miss SC/FA's upgrade aspects to the economy. We miss the flow/rate based economy, but I don't see too many people saying "I wish I had to each upgrade my mexes individually in order to be able to stay competitive in a multiplayer match".

Some might see 'added strategy' to how you had to upgrade in SC/FA, but more than likely most people just see 'added annoyance'. Personally this is a 'feature' I am thankful got removed because it makes the game alot more accessable, and if you lose to a superior economy, it is because you did not get enough mass spots, not because the other guy upgraded one of his mexes while you may not have (which is harder to percieve then just saying 'oh he had two more mexes than I did, whats why he could outbuild me').

I could write another huge wall of text about SC2 game design... But I guess thats been done enough in this thread.. Except I usually try to draw comparisons with SC2 / CnC instead of FA.. Would anyone care enough about my opinion to read my wall of text? Because otherwise it wouldnt be worth the effort.

I would like to read it.

I know what you said. I was highlighting the fact that alternatives to the FA economy offer less strategic options.

And if you want to talk about too much attention, how about having to build each individual anti nuke missile? In each and every silo that you have?
And each and every nuke missile? In every silo?

Or what about having to upgrade each factory with shields, radar, missiles? Any better than upgrading to T2/T3?

What about energy/mass conversion? Is that not requiring too much attention?

How about having to manually trigger a units special ability?

What about the research tree? That temporarily blocks your entire screen and requires your attention.

I honestly dont see how Supcom2's gameplay requires any less attention. Its moved it around and IMO the total sum of these changes makes for a way worse game.

BTW, If there was no SC:FA, I'd probably think supcom2 was the best RTS game out there. Way better that SC2 or C&C.
Though having been spoiled by FA, my standards are now very high.

Cheese is far too strong, cybran are underpowered in 1v1 and overpowered in 4v4. UEF vs aeon 1v1 is map dependent, but usually will favour one side or the other.


I've had this as my opinion for a while though - I prefer almost everything about FA, except the pathfinding. But, I hate the FA pathfinding to such an extent that it now kills the game for me. Yes, units turning on a dime looks a bit stupid, but I'd say it improves the game rather than having you play bumpercars.

When I say 'turn on a dime' as a criticism I don't really mean the fact that they can turn in place, as a real tank can do that. What I mean, for example, is my tanks are going north, but I click to the south and instantly the tanks swing around 180 degrees without losing speed, and appear to have no inertia.

I made a personal mod for myself a while back and one of the things I changed was unit acceleration and turning properties. Watching the units move in my mod felt much more natural in the way they reacted to having to turn while on the move, while at the same time because of FlowField the units did not get all jammed up. My point? It is possible to have the best of both worlds .

Hi guys! Here is my wall of text! Beware, this monster isnt even done yet, so I will update it, but I cant be arsed to write more ATM. I dont have a conclusion/actual comparison yet, so that will be there at some point. I was also going to write some more stuff about a business point of view, because some of my ideas are very idealistic. Ill also fill in stuff I forgot (im sure there is plenty), and add some reactions to your standpoints. I feel balance has been done to death, but if someone would like to hear more of balance (not individual units, but the metagame design), I'll address that too.

Enjoy.

Introduction

My point of view:
A good game has features that draws interest from many different kinds of players, which I usually divide in 3 groups:

* Casuals (play single player mostly)
* Social players (Play mostly team games and maybe a few solo games)
* Competitive players (Play 1v1 ladder regularly, and actively try to get better at it)

But with the rise of E-sports, in our gaming genry mostly depicted by Starcraft 2, there is another also another potential market: Broadcasted games. This is both an excellent way to get new players interested into your game, and to keep people interestedso you can sell more expansion packs / DLC. For this to work, you will need a solid, balanced, competitive multiplayer game to start with though. Also, to keep competitive players interested, tournaments are more and more a most.

What I like in a game is ofcourse the competitive 1v1 part. For SupCom2, it is the realm that could-have-been.

Things that are important for competitive success:
- Solid design that leads to players being able to use a variety of strategies, which includes both rushing and macro-games (variety)
- Being able to react to the opponent (no rock-paper scissors build order wins)
- Different strategies for different factions and maps (variety)
- The ability to become better than others by mastering the mechanics
- Balancing.

And, to a lesser extent:
- Mapmaking (to make sure the game stays varied after a while, and to make subtle changes to the metagame)
- Viewability (To make sure people who do not play competitively can see at a glance what is going on, and who is winning)

Things in the game's design that are not at all important for being a competitive success:
- Campaign
- AI
- Exclusions (are actually HARMFUL)
- Mods

Mechanics

Skill vs convenience:
Skill works in two ways: You have to know what to do at all times (Experience / Creativity) , and you have to be able to turn your plans into actions at all times (Mechanics / APM).

One of the things that annoys me most about Starcraft is how a lot of the mechanics are INTENDED to make the game harder to control, to "increase the skillcap". Think things like..
- No zooming out
- Limited build queue
- No ordering units before the resources are collected
- No premade formations or formation move
... Other UI limitations

I think mechanics should be designed to be convenient to the player. The game can still be complex by making players make more decisions, and high APM can still be used by encouraging activity all over the map, and by allowing you to make units more effective by microing. Added bonus is, IMO, that a user friendly UI is more appealing to non-competitive players as well. GPG did most of this well - The economic system, the map zooming... But, IMO it is a bit too focused on the casual players, because the hotkey layout is simply shitty. It should at LEAST be customizable. I want easy hotkeys for all my structures and abilities. I want to be able to say: A = build mex, S = build Pgen, D = build Factory, C = Build PD... You catch my drift. There are many, many ways to make this doable that are way better than the system GPG has. It would also encourage me to use control groups once in a while, but thats another story entirely.

Micro
In vanilla supcom2, the biggest group of tanks / fighterbombers usually wins. Being able to win a battle against equal or superior numbers by microing better in my opinion makes or breaks a game. It allows better players to simply crush n00bs who try to rush them for a quick win.

Supcom2 unit design
Battles are fun if there is depth in them, not just a-move-and-the-biggest-ball-wins.
In supcom2 vanilla, the only thing that adds micro to land battles is a potential bumbing run, or mobile artillery, while in Starcraft, something interesting can be done with almost every unit. This isnt nescessarily a huge problem - If you encourage the use of multiple unit types in a unit mix, things easily become more complex, because if in supcom2, you have, say, Loyalists, Brackmans, Adaptors and Gemini against Rockheads, Pshields, Archanists and Eagle Eyes,
the ability to micro quickly ramps up. This fact is the core reason why my CBP mod is more fun to play than standard supcom2 1v1 (From the perspective of everyone I played it with, not just mine). But, consider this: In Starcraft 2, I have to make use of 150 APM to play at master league level. If I play SupCom2, I need to use around 20 APM to play top level in vanilla. Thats huge. Its mostly because macroing is incredibly easy, while there isnt much micro to do either. You just need to time your clicks right. In CBP Supcom2, I need to use around 70 APM - Simply because I have to keep building structures all the frikkin time, and usually have at least 3 different groups of units running around (a blob of air units, 1 or 2 squads of assault bots, and a main battle group which usually consists of a mix of units).

Factions have diverse enough units and tech to keep them interesting. It wouldve been more interesting if every unit had at least one ability that has some impact on combat. I find teleport a horrible ability, and jumpjets / afterburners on every unit doesnt quite fill my expectations. But we can make do with what we have, if balanced correctly.

So, Better unit balancing wouldve gona a LONG way to improve the playability of SupCom2. One MAJOR flaw is still the ability to exploit kiting to a rediculous extent. Experimentals shouldnt be able to fire backwards, ever, and shouldve been rebalanced to that end.

Economy
As I stated before, I like the economy of SupCom2. It removes the FA flaw of being able to crash it, so its more noob-friendly, and it allows you to order units ahead of time, in whatever numbers you like, even repeatable, so it is about as convenient as it can get. Maybe the repeat ability makes macroing TOO easy, but that is a discussion for another time. Lets split economy into 4 sections:

Resources
As resources, we have mass, energy and tech (RP).
Mass is the most important resources, needed for building stuff, and requires control over areas of the map to gather. Fair enough.
Energy is infinitely producable, and the only reason to make extra power generators (above the normal 2:1 mex/Pgen ratio) is to use unit abilities or make experimentals. I think there shouldve been more difference between energy cost for different things, so the amount of power generators your opponent has would be a tell for scouting. Pgens should also be more expensive, so you cant overspam them to confuse the enemy. But again, fair enough.
Tech is where my real problem lies. It is almost always better to just pick 1 path and stick to it, because stacking tech is just so favorable. I think this is a horrible system. Unit variety should always be encouraged (again, for variety of strategies). Also, I think the concept that you get tech from killing stuff is ABSOLUTELY GAME BREAKING. More on that later. I think techs should ONLY be used for unit and ability unlocks, NOT for buffing a whole theatre of units as a whole, becauyse that only encourages specialization and spamming.

Inflation
This, is in my opinion, THE MOST GAMEBREAKING DESIGN FLAW IN SUPCOM HISTORY, so read and consider this, GPG!

I named this part of the economy after factory veterancy, or the inflation of unit build cost. But this paragraph will mostly be about its result - the impossibility to come back into a game after losing a battle. Damage dealt to you always stacks. Lose more units in a battle? Your opponent doesnt just kill your stuff, they also get more RP from it than you, and their remaining units have veterancy so they will be stronger the next battle. They might even suck up your dead units, for a 20% refund THEY get for killing YOUR stuff. Even worse: Losing a factory. That means that is a x0% unit build cost decrease on your land/air units that HE has and YOU can IMPOSSIBLY get back until you kill an equal amount of HIS factories. The advantage your opponent gets is always at least double what it seems. Also, the fact that if you open with land, your land units get cheaper, means that you cannot switch to an air strategy, because your air units are not only relatively weaker due to tech, they are also relatively more expensive due to veterancy. Removal of fac vet and nerfing of tech stacking has made strategies way more varied, comebacks actually possible and macro games longer in CBP. For great justice!

Expansion
Most maps have just about 9 mass extractors for every player. That means, after like 5 minutes, you can no longer expand. At all. Just spam units until you roll over your enemy, or kill his economy. You should ALWAYS be able to keep expanding, until like 20 minutes into the game. No, mass conversion obviously does not count. I do NOT believe upgrading mexes fills this hole at all, because that leads to just making the same location more valuable, instead of spreading out over the map. Spreading out over the map encourages more action going on all over the map, which leades to more excitement. More on this in the map section.

Structure upgrades
I actually think this was a great addition. It gives some meaning to structure placement, because you could use these factories to both defend (shield) and attack (TML), and their placement could make or break a strategy due to this. "Having to add pgrades to every factory", as stated in this topic somewhere, is a terrible argument, because that would be a huge waste of money. You have to use them intelligently because theyre EXPENSIVE.

Intel

The intel system in SupCom2, is (as with other features), built for convenience. A radar can see almost the entire map, to the point where you do not need scouting units. Even worse, it is DESIGNED so you do not need scouting units. Radars are even practically FREE!! (If they werent, spuddy wouldve lost all his games har har) Ill start by saying that this has very different effect on games depending on the map size - on most 1v1 maps, you can see the enemy's base if you build a radar in the middle of the map, or closer to your own base when you use a radar upgrade. On bigger (team) maps, this is not possible. This in itself makes balancing for both solo and team games at the same time impossible. Scouting should require a bit of skill to pull off, and there should no doubt be scouting units. Right now, all you can do is suiciding an air unit into your opponent's base. This is fair enough, but there should be a land alternative, a light assault bot or something. And then, counter-scouting can be used to mask your strategies.

This is just a fundamental standpoint. Combined with other elements in supcom2, the intel system leads to more fundamental flaws in the game:

- Raiding is almost worthless. Your opponent can always see where you are going , and you can see where he is going, allowing both to react in time, coutnering each other's moves. Even worse, if you send enough units out to raid, your opponent can just shove his army up your throat and kill your base. Have fun with that mex kill. CBP fixes this a bit by improving assault bot speed and making defense stronger. The assault bot speed forces your opponent to react faster and allows you to retreat more easily, and the stronger defense makes blob attacks weaker, allowing players to build up a presence in more areas of the map, which means you need to defend more ground. Still, radar range was not adressed, by lack of a scout unit. If radar range would be shorter, there would always be uncertainty about the enemy's troop movement, and clever scouting could discover holes in the opponent's defences and exploit them.

- Air is overpowered. You can always know where the enemy AA is, and bomb everything that isnt covered. This would force a player who didnt spam air to make AA all over the place before being able to expand, which allowed an air player to take the map and transition into whatever the F he wanted unless the land player all-inned in hopes of killing the air player before getting far behind. As flying into an AA ball could be very costly, air players would have to be mroe careful.

- Missed opportunities in stealth. As radar gives people comfort, knowing the other players' army position, cloacked units could be able to stir some action, and keeping players on their toes, by attacking a seemingly safe position.

- Sonar. Besides the fact that naval was completely imbalanced, mostly due to the lack of unit variety, Sonar was kindof all over the place. The cybran radar has a seemingly random HUGE range, and so does the cruiser, while Aeon can barely get sonar at all. Meh, everything about naval in supcom2 is FUBAR so I wont elaborate..

Maps
Maps. Hmm. Well, this is one of the points I do NOT like about this game. In this topic, someone stated that the maps are too small. I say that most of the 2v2 maps are about the perfect size for 1v1, but the team game maps should not get much bigger, and Etched Desert is CLEARLY oversized. Ofcourse, that is considering we do not completely overhaul all the unit stats.
Then why do I not like them? Well, I like maps where there are multiple ways to attack the enemy, with chokepoints and areas to flank, as well as open ground for bigger fights and enough room to build a base. There should be rifts and mountains ofcourse, and overall interesting map features. The map I like the most is Way Station Zeta: It has rifts, it has walls that impact some units, it has multiple paths to all expansions, it is great. But then look at the other maps: Arctic refuge - Big bunch of empty. Markon Bridge - One chokepoint and rediculously biased for Aeon. Coalition Shipyard - Interesting base design with the cliffs and piers. It was ALMOST THERE, but most of the action would take place in the middle, which is just open plains. Pity. Mirror Island? Ugh. Treallach Island? The 4 cliffs dont serve any purpose, so while you can ofcourse flank your enemy's base, nobody will ever expand outside of their base without full map control, so it ends up being very 1-dimensional. And then Open Palms, which ends up with people fighting for the hill in the center, and then just marching right into the opponents base with land units only.

Point to all this? Well, Almost every map has one obvious path to attack your opponent, and with little options for expanding, it will just be base vs base, armies meet in the middle, winner takes all. I want more features to take advantage of, placing units intelligently, locking off zones of the map, and not just having the main base as only target to attack.

Mapmaking wouldve helped for that, but the way SupCom2 map models worked, this was impossible. I wouldve liked extra maps made by GPG though. I wouldve paid for a map pack.

edit: Intel

Lots of interesting points there.

In regards to the expansion section - do you think the issue is extractors are too expensive or that there's not enough mass points on the maps or a combination of both?

In regards to the inflation section - do you think if the expansion issue was solved, as per one of the changes above, would this issue be less important. I.e. if players had to concentrate more on expansion then "blobbing" on units wouldn't be an option or a problem.

Also what do you think of the suggestion that RP should also be gained when you lose units, not just when you kill units?