I wasn't going to respond at all in this thread, because it was just to mock Zataku's one. But since you've put your clumsy foot in the proverbial dog ****, I shall point out that TA didn't have any tech tree.

What it did have was tiers like in Sup1/FA, that could be cool/strategic.

I guess we don't all get our rage quota from LoL so we have to rage on forums instead .

Should have "so cash"-d it.

SupCom 3? You think GPG will still be around by that point? We don't need SupCom 3. What we need is a proper engine for FA (and I don't mean just use the engine from SupCom 2, which performance-wise is not that much more of an improvement compared to FA. Recreate an authentic FA experience in SupCom 2 and you will still have a system killer).

As for SupCom 2 DLC, has no one noticed that the DLC is contrary to how the game was originally marketed? SupCom 2 PURPOSEFULLY reduced the number of units as a marketing strategy, only to add units down the road at an additional cost? Ahh, just throw them in the tech tree somewhere, it doesn't really matter where.

TA: Kingdoms vs K&C?

Just FU. If you dont like the game, thats fine with me. But dotn spread your garbage here. Supcom2 is good. FA was good in an entirely different way, and most people here want supcom3 and KnC.

Well, it's hard to imagine how you can possibly simplify SupCom 2 in order to make SupCom 3.

Simplify in what way? You play a few competitive games, and youll find out theres more than meets the eye. The tech tree makes for enormous amounts of possible strategies. Of course you wouldnt know, because you dont give it a chance. FA was just SPAM TANKS FTW and try to get some T3 air...

Mod FA to play the way you want to play it. Spam, sure, if you're playing vanilla.

The SupCom 2 tech tree is so arbitrary it's not even funny. Using research as a resource is also flawed. You eventually get to the point that research becomes abundant and you don't even have to know what you are upgrading on the tech tree. Just click on all the icons that haven't yet been upgraded. Unlike mass and energy which are always required resources throughout the course of the game, once you max out the tech tree and you have 99 research points, what's the point of having research as a RESOURCE? That is a fundamental design flaw and makes no sense.

I'm not against research-based tech trees as other games have implemented the concept far far far better than SupCom 2 (even having multiple parallel tech trees in the same game). The concept has been arbitrarily implemented in SupCom 2. Most of the upgrade paths make no sense.

STOP
PLAYING
20
MINUTES
NO
RUSH

seriously.

Ahahaha neph, you're really funny. The amount of "strategies" amounted to maximum 3 (with slight variations of them) per race, depending on map size and if there's water or not.

Of course on the other hand the tech tree does indeed offer a whole lot of strategies....in team games or FFA's.

Ok, well, balance might be a bit bad, but in team games / FFAs, I have used about every possible strategy you can think of. The most fun probably being Pulinsmash + teleporting gunships....

Too bad eventually the most viable route to go in team games was to wank (get massconvo).

What youre talking about is not a problem in game mechanics, but balance.

I'm just showing you that the tech tree itself never offered the unlimited strategies that you suggest. Unfortunately, I have to say that the pure tech tree system didn't work and tiers are probably better.

"An enormous amount of possibilities" was also possible in large team games in FA as well. The main difference between Research Points and Tiers is that instead of waiting for your Factory to finish upgrading to T2 to build that better tank, you have to wait to accumulate the RP to upgrade your tank. In both cases, you need to wait.

Of course each approach has different consequences.

The Tier system means that there is something "physically" there that is giving you access to T2 (The factory). The reason that is good is because it becomes a strategic target, which promotes combat.

The Research system forces combat, it doesn't say "Here is a strategic target that you should try to take out", it just says "Kill **** to get more RP".

That, in my opinion, breaks immersion. Other things about it that break immersion is that you are collecting "Research Points" which is just... weird, and also that all your units upgrade instantly on the field, again, kind of strange.

Instead of abandoning Tiers altogether, they should have just balanced the numbers out (reduced the exponential costs and stripped away some of the redundant units) and with a bit of fine tuning it would have been perfect.

/rant

I prefer a restructuring of the tier system to be a bit more similar to TA so that higher-tiered units do different things and not just be the same lower-tiered units but with tweaked stats. TA did have a bit of redundancy, but the construction system was pretty good.

Yeah, I mentioned that somewhere in there

Anyways, I think for example the Naval tiers were pretty well structured. You had Anti-naval and light anti-air at T1. Anti-naval, anti-sub, monster anti-air at T2. Anti-naval, base bombardment, support (aircraft carriers) at T3. Throw in some specialized units here and there and it seemed to work pretty well.

Except for the whole 'there is no counter to submarines at T1 but more subs' thing.. lol.

Anyways, it wasn't perfect but it was decent I think.

Subs should only be available at the same tier that torp bombers and destroyers are. Problem solved.

Just introducing that change by itself would introduce another problem: You would only have frigates at T1. That seems a little stale..

Better stale than 'oh whoops you didn't get enough subs you're out of the water for the rest of the game'.

Hah yeah I guess, although they could just add a third unit and complete the triangle.

I just got the Earth 2150 trilogy from Impulse. Never played it before. But apparently you can piece together your own units in-game. I wonder how that would play out in SupCom...

Tedious and unnecessary?

This is the problem with the whole Supcom series that few if any other RTSes have: it attracts two opposite types of players. You have the people who play competitively, who play a comparatively simple, focused game, and everyone else who thinks it's Sim City 40k.

And if it isn't obvious, the former category have a much better handle on core mechanics of the game, and generally better ideas for improving gameplay.

This.

There are 2 branches of SupCom: the competitive level, and the builder level. And I've noticed that everyone who makes a big deal about scale and "epicness" belong to the latter group while everyone who cares about balance belongs to the former group (not literally everyone, these are generalizations). The vast majority of SupCom2-haters also hail from the builder group as well.

[Tangential]
And just a tidbit on my view of mods: gameplay-changing mods in my view are not legitimate improvements on a game. I think the only real, legitimate way to play a game is to play the game in its vanilla state without any mods, only developer-made content. Mods, by nature unofficial, are not acceptable ways of changing the game. You cannot make a bad game with good mod support and say, "You can mod the game to make it good." Now if a mod is taken in by the developer and its content included in an official update or expansion, then the mod's content becomes legitimate in my eyes. UI mods are different because they don't change the gameplay, they change the way the user interacts with the game to execute the same gameplay. That's why I miss UI mods in SupCom2, because they were the only mods in FA that I ever used on a regular basis.

In other words, sim mods aren't legit in my opinion.

In that most people will never use one, let alone one of those intended to improve competitive gameplay or balance, yes.

While I appreciate the ability to do whatever I feel like with the game, it's completely unrealistic to think that modding is ever the reason for a game's success or failure, or that a balance mod adopted by a tiny minority is somehow a replacement for patched-in changes.