Supreme Commander 2 demo (review)

Well the demo’s finally out (I pre-ordered anyway) and I’ve been bashing it around to get an idea about how the full game might ‘feel’. Here is a list of Tops and Flops from my very early and highly presumptuous initial gameplay test drive (bearing in mind how limited the demo actually is):

SupCom 2 Speculation

I have high hopes for Supreme Commander 2, and as entertaining as the original was, it lacked the lasting appeal of its spiritual predecessor, TA. Luke already went over the problems with SupCom thoroughly and I must say he’s absolutely correct on all counts.  Before starting in about what SupCom 2 might be like, I would like to add that possibly the biggest failing of the original was it wanted to be playable by casual strategy gamers. It could be said it failed, but it tried. 

I understand that there are more casual strategy gamers than the “hardcore” RTS nuts, and to some extent it is necessary to cater to them to sell enough games to make it worth making. However TA was not a casual game, and it was the depth of play that turned its players from casual RTS gamers into hardcore players. 

Sure, you lose a lot at first, but consider the extremes. Is a game better where the strong and the weak player have equal opportunity to win, or where the stronger player will win 100% of the time? I am of the opinion that the more skilled player should win to the degree of their skill – with the situation where one player will simply crush the other in every case is possible but rare (i.e. Starcraft pro vs player new to the genre). So as much effort as possible should be spent in making the game fun and interesting to play again and again, even at the expense of complexity and being difficult to learn. For those of you who play Dwarf Fortress, you know what I mean when I say more depth is better, even at the expense of graphics, and even if that depth will make you lose time and again. Indeed, in Dwarf Fortress you eventually lose every single game, but it’s still fun to play.

Top 5 Things GPG Must NOT Screw Up in Supreme Commander 2!

I’m rarely critical of Supcom/FA and Chris Taylor’s work. So I figured it’s time to put my ugly cynical hat on…

Here are the items I believe are essential; seriously I mean absolutely critical, that Gas Powered Games do not screw-up upon release of the highly anticipated Supreme Commander 2, around March 2010…

Units (part II)

Finally I get around to part two! I’ve had a number of thoughts lately, perhaps inspired by the recent announcement about a possible 2010 release of Supreme Commander 2, to do with RTS games – more specifically; units, command management / control, and user interface. I’ll continue my rant about units in this post but try to tie in the other aspects as I go along.

Cybran Rhino. An example of a kick-ass unit.

Upon reflection, what most strikes me and sort of disappoints me about units in Supcom, as opposed to say, TA, is how ‘light’ and unsubstantial they feel. They appear to slide about the terrain as if skating across ice (yes, especially the hover units but not only those) and don’t bump into one another in the manner you’d expect giant metal tanks and robots to do – it’s all soft and bouncy and well… it just doesn’t feel right.

Units (part I)

Traditionally, RTS units are non de-constructible. What I mean is that the actual units themselves, in almost all RTS games I’ve played, live a short ‘0 / 1’ alive/dead existence, with a certain amount of damage points (shown as health-bars) to represent damage in a fairly abstract way. Most RTS games display diminishing health/damage of a given unit with some kind of cute preset animation. For example, in Total Annihilation the units billow an ever greater amount of smoke. Upon actual death they possess a variety of explosion animations to represent their demise, such as breaking apart or full blown explosions with flying debris!

In Supreme Commander we see pretty much the same system but with fancier deaths or damage animations. The experimental units in particular go out with a real bang. I’m going to propose a more modern and importantly, more fun system in terms of actual gameplay mechanics. It is also, I think, a more realistic way of doing things and fits in with my RTS concept.