*Hey guys, I just wrote this cuz I played Supreme Commander for the first time today and had some time to kill so instead of playing more, I decided to just write out my thoughts - if anybody wants to give me a job as a game reviewer or anything, I'd be more than happy to say "yes and thank you", but if not, all I hope is that it's not too bad..
SUPREME COMMANDER
..is a sweet game. It looks great when you run it on a high-end system, has complex gameplay mechanics, extensive micro and macro-management opportunities, incredible depth, lots of action and explosions, and an unrivalled map system that lets you control EVERYTHING.
..the catch is, assuming you can run the game smoothly, that it's a lot more complicated to play than some recent rts games. There's so much you have to do in the game that it requires what seems like micro management just to get your base up. I have to admit that I've been playing a lot of fps's and console games like gears of war, and that I've succumbed to the lure of fast-paced action gaming. That doesen't mean I can't appreciate the sophisticated RTS once in a while.. but then again, maybe it does. I've also playeda lot of DoW and CoH - games that have all but eliminated their resource systems in loo of more action-focused games.. so at least recently, I can't call myself a true strategy guy.
I play for the action, the explosions, the satisfaction of completely destroying whoever it is I'm playing against. But what's the shame in that?
The thing is, when it comes to Supreme Commander, there's plenty of action and mayhem to be had, but it comes at a slow trickle for most of the game. You have to build and build and build for what seems like hours in order to have a decent battle.. don't expect that little squad of tanks you can build early on to be able to last longer than fifteen seconds later on in your game.
But anyways, what I should start by saying is that I haven't played a game in a long time where I actually had to mine for resources.. even though that sounds ridiculously easy (which it should be), it requires more effort than would be expected of the player than in say, Starcraft. In Starcraft, you selected your builder unit and right-clicked on the minerals or gas factory and it would collect the resource, return it to base, and repeat. In SupCom, you have to make sure that your engineers tread along a path that you have manually assigned it to follow and automatically collect the resources along that said path - sounds easy? well, your engineer will eventually collect all the resouces in the path and just follow the path around over and over, in spite of all the resouces to be had everywhere around it. You will then have to reassign another path, which occasionally the engineers will decide not to follow and just stop because they're tired. This shouldn't be a big problem though, especially for the rts gamer - who only needs to do this once every several minutes (a dozen clicks or so out of the hundreds of clicks a skilled player makes every single minute).
This is just to get started building your base though, which at this point, does not exist.
You have to gather your resouces, build multiple buildings and fend off attacks all while trying to amass a large enough army to destroy the other. This is very typical of rts games, but in this game, an army large enough to destroy the enemy can be the size of a real army - hundreds upon hundreds of units, each of which seems to take minutes (longer than you think) to build. When you finally amass those upgraded, tier-2 gunships that you think pwn everything in the face, you realize the enemy has shields over his entire base of anti-aircraft turrets, and by then your prized fleet is a smoldering piece of shiet (fleet and shiet rhyme.. sorta).. by then you have to counter with ground units which take a long time in their own right to build up a sufficient force, and even longer to get across the map.. at this point, you learn that you can transport your units across the map to fight on the front lines in pairs, sets of eight, or some other small number - it's all very epic, but it is, needless to say, quite frustrating and tedious to micro-manage your hundreds of units onto 80 or so transports. This is where you suddenly feel like you're trying to organize an entire war by yourself (in effect you are, but it is very, very hard). It's not until you realize that your transports' pilots are capable of shuttling back and forth between landing and pickup zones and doing all the afforementioned micro on their own, that you realize how silly you were doing that. You just learned something new, and it's so very very cool! Nowhere in the manual or in the tutorials does the game tell you how to do this - you figure it out on your own (or with the help of others) and it makes you realize that this game doesn't suck after all!
In my four hours of playing this game, I only learned how to do this one thing - how to transport my units effectively, yet it has been the most satisfying gaming moment I have had in a very long while. No longer was I forced to wait for units to trudge across the battlefield and stage for half an hour; I staged my units within minutes, and coordinated them for a successful three-pronged attack that saved my units and obliterated the computer's. It was amazing.
This leads us back to the beginning - this game is really complicated - it has so much to it that you must learn from trial and error, and will probably cause more than a few frustration-induced headaches and cursings, but if you really put yourself into this game, it'll reward you many fold. When you first play this game, you'll probably fail repeatedly, and you'll try to develop new strategies - kind of like what commanders have to do in real life. But when you finally figure out what you've got to do and the effort and thought you have to put into coordinating a massive army and a successful attack, you really feel like you've accomplished something. This is a game that really makes you the Supreme Commander.
SUPREME COMMANDER
..is a sweet game. It looks great when you run it on a high-end system, has complex gameplay mechanics, extensive micro and macro-management opportunities, incredible depth, lots of action and explosions, and an unrivalled map system that lets you control EVERYTHING.
..the catch is, assuming you can run the game smoothly, that it's a lot more complicated to play than some recent rts games. There's so much you have to do in the game that it requires what seems like micro management just to get your base up. I have to admit that I've been playing a lot of fps's and console games like gears of war, and that I've succumbed to the lure of fast-paced action gaming. That doesen't mean I can't appreciate the sophisticated RTS once in a while.. but then again, maybe it does. I've also playeda lot of DoW and CoH - games that have all but eliminated their resource systems in loo of more action-focused games.. so at least recently, I can't call myself a true strategy guy.
I play for the action, the explosions, the satisfaction of completely destroying whoever it is I'm playing against. But what's the shame in that?
The thing is, when it comes to Supreme Commander, there's plenty of action and mayhem to be had, but it comes at a slow trickle for most of the game. You have to build and build and build for what seems like hours in order to have a decent battle.. don't expect that little squad of tanks you can build early on to be able to last longer than fifteen seconds later on in your game.
But anyways, what I should start by saying is that I haven't played a game in a long time where I actually had to mine for resources.. even though that sounds ridiculously easy (which it should be), it requires more effort than would be expected of the player than in say, Starcraft. In Starcraft, you selected your builder unit and right-clicked on the minerals or gas factory and it would collect the resource, return it to base, and repeat. In SupCom, you have to make sure that your engineers tread along a path that you have manually assigned it to follow and automatically collect the resources along that said path - sounds easy? well, your engineer will eventually collect all the resouces in the path and just follow the path around over and over, in spite of all the resouces to be had everywhere around it. You will then have to reassign another path, which occasionally the engineers will decide not to follow and just stop because they're tired. This shouldn't be a big problem though, especially for the rts gamer - who only needs to do this once every several minutes (a dozen clicks or so out of the hundreds of clicks a skilled player makes every single minute).
This is just to get started building your base though, which at this point, does not exist.
You have to gather your resouces, build multiple buildings and fend off attacks all while trying to amass a large enough army to destroy the other. This is very typical of rts games, but in this game, an army large enough to destroy the enemy can be the size of a real army - hundreds upon hundreds of units, each of which seems to take minutes (longer than you think) to build. When you finally amass those upgraded, tier-2 gunships that you think pwn everything in the face, you realize the enemy has shields over his entire base of anti-aircraft turrets, and by then your prized fleet is a smoldering piece of shiet (fleet and shiet rhyme.. sorta).. by then you have to counter with ground units which take a long time in their own right to build up a sufficient force, and even longer to get across the map.. at this point, you learn that you can transport your units across the map to fight on the front lines in pairs, sets of eight, or some other small number - it's all very epic, but it is, needless to say, quite frustrating and tedious to micro-manage your hundreds of units onto 80 or so transports. This is where you suddenly feel like you're trying to organize an entire war by yourself (in effect you are, but it is very, very hard). It's not until you realize that your transports' pilots are capable of shuttling back and forth between landing and pickup zones and doing all the afforementioned micro on their own, that you realize how silly you were doing that. You just learned something new, and it's so very very cool! Nowhere in the manual or in the tutorials does the game tell you how to do this - you figure it out on your own (or with the help of others) and it makes you realize that this game doesn't suck after all!
In my four hours of playing this game, I only learned how to do this one thing - how to transport my units effectively, yet it has been the most satisfying gaming moment I have had in a very long while. No longer was I forced to wait for units to trudge across the battlefield and stage for half an hour; I staged my units within minutes, and coordinated them for a successful three-pronged attack that saved my units and obliterated the computer's. It was amazing.
This leads us back to the beginning - this game is really complicated - it has so much to it that you must learn from trial and error, and will probably cause more than a few frustration-induced headaches and cursings, but if you really put yourself into this game, it'll reward you many fold. When you first play this game, you'll probably fail repeatedly, and you'll try to develop new strategies - kind of like what commanders have to do in real life. But when you finally figure out what you've got to do and the effort and thought you have to put into coordinating a massive army and a successful attack, you really feel like you've accomplished something. This is a game that really makes you the Supreme Commander.
Comment