Preview: Supreme Commander
02.12.07 - 09:29pm
Earlier I stated that Supreme Commander would be the end of the rest of my life and that pretty much sums up how addicting I have found this game to be. Between the eery similarities with Total Annihilation and the fantastic gameplay with shocking graphics, Supreme Commander has managed to deliver on all accounts with very few rough spots. Once I receive a copy of the actual public game I’m definitely going to do a more indepth review with more/better images and videos.
Hardware Requirements
I have a good feeling that people using single-core Athlon 64’s and Pentium 4’s are going to have some trouble playing this game to the fullest extent that is possible. I unfortunately haven’t got a way to simulate having a singlecore so I can’t backup this claim but I have heard users complain of terrible frame rates on Pentium 4’s and Athlon 64’s. Supreme Commander was developed to utilize multi-core processors by breaking up the game into multiple threads. Supposedly one thread focuses on rendering the game and keeping the graphics card fed while the other thread performs all the simulation calculations ranging from AI to physics. Besides requiring a fast processor to take care of business a high-end graphics card is another requirement to really enjoy the game. DX10 will be supported after the launch with a patch to enable DX10 renderings but in DX9 the game will kill any onboard video and budget video cards.
I myself was running the game on a 4GHz Core 2 Duo with a 7900GTO(720MHz core, 830MHz memory) at 1650×1080 with all settings on high and anti-aliasing set to 2x and the system was having trouble delivering 30 frames per second. On average the frame rate would hover between 22 and 25 unless I zoomed out to the strategic view where there was considerably less rendering to be done. Memory usage was surprisingly light with only 450 megabytes being used when there were roughly 900 units and buildings on the map at one time. The map I was testing on was one of the smallest maps so memory performance may increase dramatically in 6-8 player games but I wouldn’t expect the game to go over ~1 gigabyte in normal situations.
Interface
I felt like there was a ton of wasted space in the interface with huge chunks of the bottom bar displaying no data and just restricting my view of the actual game. Rumor has it that Gas Powered Games is working on slimming down the interface but there will also be custom interfaces that can be installed over the game to suit your personal taste. Actually using the interface was not a problem at all, once you play one RTS you can normally jump right into another one. The minimap and detail features were great features to implement with various buttons showing your line of sight limitations on units and maximum firing range. The second button can be crucial when you are setting up defensive structures and trying to carefully advance up the field with artillery support.
Units
I was only able to play with the Terran forces due to the limitations of the demo so I can’t comment on the other 2 races units but I found the Terran units to be rather well balanced. Your main construction centers were air, ground, and sea construction bays that can each be upgraded two times to yield stronger units. The starting Tech 1 units are your standard cannon fodder with light mechs, artillery, and air-air and air-ground planes. The Tech 1 ships are the attack submarine and the frigate, both which can be immensely useful at the start. Tech 2 units take considerably longer to create, more resources, and therefore are much larger and stronger. The ground units are all various versions of a tank with your standard ground-air and ground-ground artillery along with a frontline tank. The air units mix it up a bit with a air-ground attack helo, torpedo bomber, and transport craft. The attack helo is the first truly effective air unit, the previous planes are light cannon fodder and easily get eaten up but the attack helo packs quite a bunch and can both dish and take it. The boats consist of a destroyer and cruiser with the destroyer being capable of walking on land, albeit very slowly. These two boats can be very formidable with the destroyer capable of functioning as a powerful mobile artillery platform.
The Tech 3 and Experimental units are where Supreme Commander gets very exciting. The ground-pounding Loyalist mech can literally lay waste to dozens of Tech 1 and Tech 2 units while the ground-based artillery fires a devastating bomb capable of flattening buildings with very few shells. The Tech 3 bomber drops a similar bomb that will easily flatten an enemy base. The Tech 3 air-air fighter fires a barrage of missiles that’ll easily destroy any flying targets. However, the Tech 3 naval units make the land and air-based units look like small fry. The Battleship is equipped with multiple cannons capable of easily shelling the majority of targets while the Carrier can easily stuff a couple dozen planes for transport and create a sudden aerial assault. The ballistic submarine normally fires non-nuclear ballistic missiles that pack a decent punch however the sub becomes very useful when it is armed with the 2 tactical nukes. These nukes aren’t nearly as powerful as their ground-based brethren but they will still easily flatten a decent area or easily dispose of enemy naval facilities and ships. The ballistic submarine is most effective in the fact that it can easily sneak within range of the enemy, quickly launch it’s payload, and then scurry back to safer waters.
Finally the Experimental units are perfect definitions of the word overkill. The Spiderbot is a walking spider-esque robot featuring a decent missile platform and a phenomenal laser beam system that’ll quickly destroy anything within range. The gunship contains a weaker version of the same beam but I found the gunship to be rather in-effective compared to the Spiderbot in terms of expected battlefield effectiveness. The mobile artillery platform is a gargantuan unit that is easily capable of flattening the enemy base within minutes. This beast features a multiple barrel rotating system that’ll pump out a good 30-40 shells a minute with each shell dropping with the force of a small nuke. Once you have this badboy up and running there is no place that the enemy can run from the raining stream of death.
Structures
Just like the various Tech level units, the buildings within Supreme Commander either evolve or are staged in various levels of complexity. Your Tech 1 resource buildings pump out a meager amount of resources but they will quickly scale up to the Tech 3 buildings that produce 10 times the amount of power/mass. The Tech 1 defensive structures consist of low-range laser, flak, and torpedo turrets which do a good job of blocking Tech 1 units but easily get overwhelmed with Tech 2 units. The Tech 2 defensive structures will be your meat and potatoes of the defensive game with an excellent laser turret, a decent anti-air turret, a long-range artillery platform, a force-field generator, a stealth generator, a decent sensor array, and a tactical missile defense system. The Tech 3 defensive structures consist of a strategic missile defense system, long-range missile based anti-air turret and long-range artillery installation. I found that combining the Tech 2 laser turret and artillery platform with the Tech 3 anti-air turret yielded great results in overall protection, the Tech 3 artillery platform was simply too expensive and didn’t have a satisfying rate of fire when compared to the experimental mobile artillery platform.
Nuclear Weapons
Honestly the team with the most nukes is usually going to come out on top. The missile defense systems will do a decent job stopping nukes but they have a limited magazine before they must be replenished. The yield of the nukes ranges from anti-unit missiles up to base-flattening warheads. The tactical nukes make for great anti-Spiderbot platforms but lack the range and punch to end a game but the strategic nukes will singlehandedly end a game if a single one gets through. In the limited time that I played one of the safest and easiest strategies was to simply build 4 to 5 nuke silos, build 5 nukes in each silo, and then launch 5 waves of nukes at the enemy base. After waiting the 20 odd seconds for the warheads to drop you will be entertained with a lightshow and a few mushroom clouds and victory will be yours.
Gameplay Notes
Due to the nature of how the units scale over time there will be primarily be two types of games, those that last 20-30 minutes and those that last 90+ minutes. If you come out swinging early in the game and are relentless than you can easily overwhelm your enemy in a Tech 1-2 rush but if you give them enough time to dig in then you will have to slowly pound them to death. Once 30 minutes have passed you will usually be ramping up production of Tech 3 units and then you just simply have to continue sending waves of 50-60 units until you break through their defenses and start to flatten their base. The AI within the game can act a bit funny at times though with the easy and medium setting computers building Tech 1 unit rushes till the end of the game. The hard AI will do this for the first 20 minutes or so until it starts building Spiderbots, then it will continue to send a Spiderbot every 5-10 minutes until it either breaks through your defenses or you destroy it. I surely hope that the AI is balanced a bit more as the Hard AI currently has defeated me about 2 times as much as I have crushed it. This might also be due to the fact that I play a highly-defensive game and they Spiderbots just tear through them so easily, just another challenge to circumvent.
Conclusion
I eagerly await the full release of the game, the multiplayer capabilities should be amazing. There are just so many different functions and features within the game that I feel like I am cheating Gas Powered Games out by not listing every single detail but I just couldn’t warrant writing a 10+ page article on a demo. The learning curve can be a bit steep but once you get the hang of how the resource management, multi-tasking, and general mayhem evolves you will quickly develop the ability to crush the computer. Supreme Commander has support for multiple-monitor setups which I would like to try out in the future with two 1680×1050 monitors as I always wish I could be looking at everything at one time. Supreme Commander is a time management test and a hardware test but if you have the hardware and the ability to manage multiple threads at one time then you’ll easily enjoy the game. This isn’t a game where you can micro-manage every unit, you need to play the game slightly removed and take a commander’s view of everything, not the view of a little footsoldier. Great job Gas Powered Games, can’t wait for the release on February 20th.
Videos
I recorded a few short videos using ZD Soft Game Recorder and they are of decent quality but I cannot seem to get the standard embed tags to work along with encoding them with the proper codec. They run on my Mac but I have a ton of codecs installed so rather than risk crashing your Firefox I will give you two options: two YouTube videos or risk viewing the source and/or encoded files. The YouTube videos were the direct feeds from ZD Soft and then castrated down to YouTube resolutions so I apoligize for the terrible quality, it was being reduced from 1680×1050.
Hey,
I’m getting a new PC and was wondering what CPU and video card you would recomend if I want to play this game.
I am looking at vidoe cards between 200-300 dollars.
The bad ones are the Single core processors. Dont get them at all. Look for the dual core processors. Even the 64bit singles arent really good to play this game with. Friend of mine is having trouble with the 64bit he is only getting 10fps with everything on low once it really starts putting units on the map.
As for the graph card get a 256mb or higher if possible. Not a el cheapo either. Something that with pixel shading etc.
And at least a gb of ram, i am thinking about getting another 1gb for mine.
Dual Core +5200 (2600Ghz each)
1Gb ram
256Mb ATI Radeon card
Mine works fine with that. 50fps. No problems everything on medium Fiedality.
Yup single-core just won’t cut it unless you are pushing a 5GHz Pentium 4 or a 3GHz A64. The funny thing with Supreme Commander is that memory consumption really isn’t that bad. I think I saw it peak at ~650 megabytes once but I don’t ever recall it being above that. That being said, 2 gigabytes is almost required now to do anything, I personally am testing 4 gigabytes in my system and loving it, it’s nice having tons of stuff open and still having 2 gigs of ram sitting idle. SupCom will utterly destroy low and medium quality graphics cards, I’d safely say that a 7900 or X1800 or higher graphics card would be required to enjoy the game at any decent resolution but then again my standards are different than others.
Ive found supreme commander is perfectly playable on my system which is about two years old now -
3.6 ghs p4, 1 GB ram and an ATI Radeon X 800XT (one of the first cards to use pci express)
I dont have it at super high res but it looks fine and runs quite well, the framerate does drop a little in big battles but not enough to spoil my enjoyment or make the game difficult to play.
Awesome game but my one big gripe is that the battles are so epic that you spend alot of your time zoomed out looking at little blips on a map, this has the effect of making you feel detached from whats going on so you dont really care that much about what happens to your units.
I do agree about the epic battles, I’ve seen battles where there are 400+ units involved all converging on a little space and to manage your troops you do have to be zoomed out. However one of the best things is to tell them what to do and then just zoom in and watch the fireworks. Siegebot charges are the best, watching two groups crash into each other and then tear each other into shreds. Great game especially if you can handle the online 4vs4 games, some intense stuff.
I am almost certain that a lot of people will not like what I am about to say.
But to be brutally honest there is no such thing as a “perfect” and “flawless”
game. And for every review that praises a game there should always be one
review that breaks the illusion of perfection and allows for a different
perspective.
I admit that the ideas, concepts, and goals of Supreme Commander are exectly
what the RTS genre needs. A much needed move from “twitcher” RTS’ that only a
person with no social life (computer excluded) and the thinking rate equal to
the excessive amounts of caffine found in the energy drinks that they soak up.
From what I have observed Supreme Commander pulls it off well. Even with the
chunky command bar and AI pathfinding issues, (yes issues do exist, more so
with the sea based units) Supreme Commader has managed to become the single
becon that will lead the way for many more RTS titles in the comming years.
Now that the praise is over let me bring up the issue that has irritated me
for ages now. And from all my reading and research not one single person has
brought up this problem that would have been pounced upon had the game not
been created by the godlike “Chris Taylor”, a.k.a master of RTS and all
following genre. Design and Style. Now cue millions of gamers throwing energy
drinks at computer screen.
How can the simple factor like Design and Style effect a game that solves so
many RTS problems? Especially a game that introduces so many brilliant and new
concepts? Easy. Just as easy as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 being at the core
unrealistic and generic shooters, but being unmatched in the game industry
and extremely popular too just because the story, design and style was almost
perfect. Other games that had supposedly better and more realistic gaming
elements have gone under the radar just because the story was as weak as a
Hallmark Channel midday movie (*cough* Far Cry *cough*).
The first issue I am bringing up is the story. The “Infinite War” is not a
good title. Simply because it lacks to hook anyone who would just pick up the
box and read. War is not a 97% fat-free candy bar, it is a fat choked
chocalate dipped in butter. Something better like the ‘Thousand Year War’
(a title based on the real ‘Hundred Year War’ between England and France), would
have a better effect in translating the violence and graphic impact of a
galatic war. The “Infinite War” does not at all convey the horrors that a war
like that would generate. It is a subtle difference but it can have an amazing
impact on the general feel of the game.
Other than a limp title that simply fails to excite is the three factions
that are all surprisingly dull. The designers had an entire fictional universe
to create an array of races, cults and political influences but instead went
with the most generic forces. But even with unorigional ideas being the
foundation of each army the designers made no effort at all to at least add a
perspective and realism, maybe also a longer history database (like Homeworld)
that achieves more than just explaining the faction’s drive but captures the
passion of the player. Supreme Commander needed to get players to ally
themselves with an army not just because of the units or abilities but because
the player wanted to see the future of universe painted in the image that they
deemed right. Again another small task that would have broken the souless war
and would assist in helping the player develop an emotional connection for the
faction that they fight and kill for.
By now I am expecting a lot of people are wanting to find me and to politly
tell me that I am sorely misinformed (O.K maybe not politly, maybe quite
violently beating me into the ground). People will argue with me that my
standards are way to high and that design is not as important as gameplay. But
I stand by my opinion and what I say. Design and Style is 50% of a game,
just as a stylish game with no gameplay value will easily crash and burn. My
only question is how often have you checked out a game because the box design
was better than other boxes?
The story of Supreme Commander is a small design failiure compared to the game
itself. For a galaxy that has been at war for just over one thousand years it
is odd that the enviroments appear to be very clean and untouched. I would
usually expect war ravaged battlefields littered with torched cities, scorched
forests and rocky wastes, but for some reason there is none to be found. The
battlegrounds are perfect (like something from a Greenpeace fantasy), with
water as clear as glass, and lush green valleys with thick forests. Not the
place you would associate with an an “Infinite War”. Even the other planet
battle zones (please insert here generic desert planet A and generic snow
planet B) still have an air of being unscathed by any form of the great
galactic war. This is quite a big failiure considering that the enviroments
are one of the games biggest features. How could the team at Gas Powered Games
be satisfied with enviroments that do not at all reflect the story? Is it
that they ran out of time or that they just got lazy?
The biggest problem of Supreme Commander however is in the unit and army design.
All the other problems could be barely overlooked if this hurdle was jumped, but
for reasons unknown the armies in Supreme Commander represent a lack of effort
altogether. I believe that games like Company of Heroes, Command and Conquer,
and Dawn of War 40,000K do so well is more than just the gameplay. It is more
than the story, more than the graphics, more than the history of the game
itself, it is the gamers ability to relate to the characters. The ability to
relate is a designer’s greatest tool. If a designer can get the target user to
in any way connect to the product the user will accept the rest of the game
without much effort. Thinking about Supreme Commander I wonder, how emotionally
connected can a person be with a robot? If that has not yet convinced any reader
let me bring up this commparison, Star Wars and Saving Private Ryan.
In Star Wars the battle sequences are filled with thousands of droids and clones.
Huge battle enviroments filled with dead clones and cold steel, explosions and
gunfire everywhere. Partly due to the directors fault, but at no point
in the battles do you feel any sympathy towards any of the dead, period.
Now I bring up Saving Private Ryan. Anyone who has seen the movie will remember
the infamous Omaha Beach scene. How much more effective is the battle sequence
because it contains human beings. Even though the director is partially
responsible for the scenes effectivness, if the sequence was with robots I
seriously doubt that it would be as easily emotional.
Could anyone really say that Supreme Commander can get an emotional response (no
matter how faint) with just robots?
The problems with the unit design span over more than just the fact that the
armies consist of only robots. The creative effort put into creating individual
units is at best minimal. No doubt that the detail put into each unit is good,
each unit has moveing parts and features, but the designs are weak. Units have
no real individual features (all look like mechanical boxes) and telling them
apart in the heat of combat can be a pain. I am also perplexed about the core
design of each army. What I mean is that the different armies in Supreme
Commander have wildly different histories that vary greatly, but unusual thing
is how they all appear to be practically identical. Even in the most week RTS
games the designers at least had a go at seperating the designs of each army
so that each one looked and played slightly different. This effort is not evident
at all in this game.
This is my final point. Supreme Commander is a good game with a good engine and
some good gameplay elements that are currently unmatched in the RTS genre. This
does not make up for the fact that the Style and Design of the game is sub-par.
The units look like they belong in a different era altogether. And simply being
the “spiritual” sequel to Total Annilation does not give the designers the
excuse to simply slack off in creating an interesting and compelling galaxy
that had so much potential. I think that the gameplay of Supreme Commander would
better suit a world like Dawn of War 40,000K. Before anyone cries out heresay
me explain. The world of Warhammer is all about massive armies (like Supreme
Commander) fighting for countless mellenium (kind of like Supreme Commander).
Dawn of War has many individual and unique armies, all with different styles of
war and idealologys that appeal and draw in players, hardcore and noobs alike
(not like Supreme commander). A studio like Relic Entertainment for example
could perfect what Gas Powered Games started and create some of the best RTS
games. Overall Supreme Commander is great but not perfect. And Chris Taylor is
talented at creating great games, but he is not good at the design and style of
said games. To the Church of Chris Taylor this may seem like the biggest insult
but it is true reguardless of what you think.
I like the game a lot but it far from a perfect game.
Whew quite the interesting read there. I suppose an individual who played the singleplayer campaigns extensively would have noticed these issues, I played 3 missions within the campaign and realized that the AI was simply too easy, even on the hardest settings. Within a campaign mode it would be understandable to develop a connection between your specified race and yourself. Within the multiplayer, the race you choose is simply the race that you believe is best equipped to handle the scenario at hand. Let me give a few examples to clear this up.
4 vs 4 Seton’s Clutch, assassination, 500 unit cap. This is a great map as there are land, sea, and air elements to winning consistently. If you are on the land bridge then you’ll want to be either UEF or Cybran due to their superior point defense and damage absorbing abilities to hold the choke point. The back supporting players will want to be Aeon or UEF for different reasons. The UEF can build T3 Gunships, best assassination tool in the game. Aeon can build a flood of T3 Siege bots that can repair and reclaim on the battlefield which can be crucial to fuel your economy. Cybran T4 players will also do well as Spiderbot’s prove to be very effective in holding the center.
x vs x, FFA sea-based maps, supremacy, 500 unit cap. With no direct land connections between enemies, your main offensive will consist of artillery, ships, aircraft, and troop drops. Aeon with their hovercraft T1 units can be very effective in the early game by swamping a fledgling base in units and destroying them, hence why Aeon is a popular choice. Aeon also has superior T1 ships with their attack boat providing superior ground-air cover. Cybran Spiderbots are also great on these levels as you can usually sneak one within a hundred meters before the enemy realizes it’s there and once the Spiderbot hits the surface the enemy base is toast. UEF once again can rely on air superiority and their Mavor which in itself is a game ender.
These two scenarios show the diversity within the races, each one has a few situations where it excels, but these differences aren’t large enough so that each race is susceptible to another. These strategic differences are what make it very hard for multiplayer players to side with a single race, every match I pick the best race for the settings, not from personal preference. You provide a most interesting read that points out a huge flaw within SupCom single-player matchups, but the multiplayer version is a whole new beast. I do wish though that the races were more different, even though it is 3 human groups fighting each other, I would have preferred something like StarCraft. It was so much more entertaining watching marines and firebats toast zerglings than watch 300 siegebots duke it out on a field.