Square Enix Announces Supreme Commander 2 70
arcticstoat writes "Supreme Commander 2 has now been officially announced, but with a surprise publishing partner on board — Square Enix. Gas Powered Games' original RTS game and its expansion pack, Forged Alliance, were published by THQ, who is no stranger to the RTS genre, but Square Enix has previously specialized in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Explaining the move, Square Enix said in a statement that it 'has previously worked exclusively with Japanese development companies, so the decision to form strategic partnerships with developers located outside of Japan serves as a new cornerstone of its strategy to create games targeted primarily at consumers in Europe and North America. Additionally, Square Enix Group's foray into the real-time strategy genre is a significant expansion of its product lineup.'"
Front Mission (Score:4, Insightful)
The Front Mission series is incredible. Not to mention that I'm more interested in the developer than the publisher when it comes to experience and game design.
Let me get it out of the way (Score:1, Interesting)
Let the great grandchild of Total Annihilation [wikipedia.org] be as great as the original!
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I suppose I'd call SupCom2 the grandchild, not the great-grandchild, but yes. please do let it be so. Also, please let it not require hardware in excess of what, say, StarCraft 2 will need (although TA had its taxing moments as well - I remember thinking that the 256MB needed to play the Four Corners map was completely unreasonable). SupCom will only barely run on one of my computers (though it's fine, if not any where near maxed out, on another).
Re:Let me get it out of the way (Score:5, Informative)
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Supreme Commander (Score:5, Interesting)
Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.
It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.
Re:Supreme Commander (Score:5, Insightful)
The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game.
Then your enemy's not playing right. A horde of small/medium units should have been able to wipe out your base while you were building up to your uber units. Unless you were only playing against the AI, in which case you probably shouldn't have been expecting a challenge anyway :)
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But that's how you play it...
You send in a line of continual rocket kbots and small cheapies to harass and destroy mexxes and solars. While you do that, you set up a perimeter, prepare missile defences against aircraft and later on nukes, and tech up fast and build what you need.
By the time you cloak and get good radar coverage up, you should have a bertha or 2 for suppression and "OMG BERTHA".
One of the fun strategies is to play with cloakers and attack from both sides using either MERLs (medium range miss
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"But that's how you play it..."
so boring playing just one game and just one way. i've got about 6500 games on battle.net and i could not have done that with a single strategy for each race. heck i couldn't even remain sane playing that much and there were many people pulling me away from warcraft.
but just imagine how much happier say for instance pigs in some giant factory farm would be if they could play warcraft all day. sure with a short life span they're not going to learn how to play games that well,
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+1: Bat-shit crazy
That's possibly the oddest thing I've read on /. in a while - thanks for brightening up my day!
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lmao that would be awesome.
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Turtling isn't too bad a strategy in vanilla, but will get you stomped good and quick in SC:FA. There is just too much power on each side for even the most over the top defensive lines to be stopped.
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So true. Nukes have a huge advantage compared to the anti nukes so worst case scenario you drag the fight out till they build mass nukes and overwhelm your nuke defense.
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I heard SCFA is what SC should have been with actual fun in the game. I still avoided it since my PC couldn't handle even a moderate number of units in SC and I was annoyed at being expected to buy a second game to get what the first one should have delivered.
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Then your enemy's not playing right. A horde of small/medium units should have been able to wipe out your base while you were building up to your uber units. Unless you were only playing against the AI, in which case you probably shouldn't have been expecting a challenge anyway :)
Exactly. Try playing against humans and see how quickly your strategy will change - if you reached Tech3 in 30 minutes before, expect to be barely hanging on at Tech2 after 1 hour... THIS WILL HELP. [gaspowered.com] [GPG]
Don't be offended by the title - I always played SupCom by slow, quiet research followed by the same old blitzkrieg and got bored pretty quickly. You'll be surprised how intense and stressful a game can be when you play by going for blood rather than immediate research, not to mention how quickly your g
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Aye it did not. Online the game was simple - Who rushed who first.
Against friends, when you could build in some extra "this makes the game fun" type rules it is a great game.
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I'm not sure a "no rush" rule actually makes it more fun. Maybe when people don't know the game well it lets them experiment but when they're more adept it'll either lead to an insane arms race (I know many games where a 20 minute no rush rule would mean at 20:00 the game turns into DefCon) or just boredom.
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Depends on how formal you take "No Rush". We never have the No Rush option ticked, just a gentleman's agreement that none of us would spam units in early game.
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I only remember an RA2 game (FFA so no teams) I was part of, the rule was just "no rush". When I steamrolled the nearest few players with a gigantic army they complained that I was rushing. A rush is when you sacrifice economic development to get a strong force out fast enough that the enemy cannot defend, I just made sure to expand my economy quickly and then ran the factories at full speed all the time. I even waited quite long before making a move with the army. Not my fault that they were playing SimBas
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I'd not take that as a rush. To me rushing is more T1 spam. Which is what most of the online games I've played turned into. IMO T1 spam is just not fun.
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Yes, if your enemy can expand his base to cover large swaths of the the map, then their production will be ridiculous, but no longer are they continuously growing their economy without taking up more space.
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http://code.google.com/p/sorian-ai-mod/ [google.com]
In this case, simply building uber units won't work, as the enemy bases will almost certainly have enough shields and defense to bring them down before they even reach the defenses. While you may be able to hold your own, you ca
Re:Supreme Commander AIs (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I also did a fairly successful AI patch for SC.
Get it here:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929 [gaspowered.com]
The AI script was all in lua so it proved quite easy to mod.
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There were several 3rd party AI patches for TA as well that would improve the AI. Not by much, but it would at least improve the AI.
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With vanilla, the built-in AI was so horrible that Sorian was pretty much required to get any challenge out of skirmishes or comp stomps. And I'm absolutely horrible at RTS games, as much as I love them. However, by the time FA came out, the built-in AI had improved to the extent that it didn't really need help to kick my ass.
Unfortunately, even though the built-in AI was much improved, it was still dumb. One of the advantages of Sorian was that it behaved a lot more like a human, making the game more fun a
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Unfortunatly, the community is basically dead, because they left the game in a fucked up state for too long and a lot of people left. That and having a ranking ladder with extreme smurfing where one person had 10+ top 100 acco
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It was like this for a long time, but they changed it near the end. It's now a very different much much deeper game. There's infinite resources, but a more linear growth curve thanks to capped building speed, in addition to making the economy generating structures much more expensive.
Unfortunatly, the community is basically dead, because they left the game in a fucked up state for too long and a lot of people left.
Hmm, interesting.
Unfortunately, that was why I left. =)
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OTOH, the game is mod-friendly enough that somebody could produce a mod that rolls back the game to any previous version, or makes whatever other balance changes they like. There have always been a ton of balance-related SupCom mods.
oh noes (Score:3, Funny)
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This game has as much RPG element as, well, Warcraft 3. (It is actually marketed as a RTS-RPG).
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Also Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings was an RTS.
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And they were both godawful and slow.
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I hope this means ... (Score:2)
they will finally patch Forged Alliance!
I loved Total Annihilation (and Absolute!) and Supreme Command. Forged Alliance added some direly need rebalancing to Supreme Commander, however the game was never 'finished'. It had some serious unit bugs that were, indeed, possible to live with, but should be patched (and many have been patched by the community). However, FA slows down. And slows down. And slows down.
I have a really fast computer, but still, just launch a game with two LAN players and no AI. Do _not
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Get Spring [clan-sy.com], it has much lower sys reqs than SupCom and both the engine and the games on it are still seeing active development so if an issue arises it can actually get fixed.
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Python is used for the build system (scons), Lua is the scripting language for custom game logic. I have no idea why it uses Java though.
I hope they get better artists and programmers... (Score:2)
Supreme commander 1 was horribly designed, this fact must be faced. It used a tonne of memory and the art direction was barely passable for roughly %50 of units for all races.
They also ruined the story of the game in the expansion by cutting off any interesting threats one could generate off the first game. The seraphim just became another evil-alien faction, when in the beginning they were these enlightened beings. It was really sad that the seraphim were all cookie-cutter. They killed the russian girl
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I agree, supcom had a lot of potential that was blown by bad design decisions. It's too bad they lost any kind of creativity when they mirrored the factions, the xpack was entirely underwhelming, Supcom did not need another race, what it needed was the replacement and/or tweaking and upgrading of the art and units that already existed.
The artist they hired to do supcom were simply all over the map, some of the stuff they produced was great, while the bulk of it was "meh" and uninspired.
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It's reasonably unlikely - moving up to 4GB of RAM on Windows means getting a 64 bit operating system. They are available, but 64 bit installs are very much in the minority.
I still don't trust 64 bit versions of Windows to be compatible with everything, and 64 bit versions of Linux can be a PITA sometimes. I may well be unfairly biased.
The majority of shipped computers with installed operating systems are still using 32 bit versions of Windows, so I think it unlikely that anything outside of rarified market
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I've been using Vista 64 for 18 months or so, both at home and at work and I think you should trust 64 bit Windows. It's very good, and as long as you can get drivers for your hardware (initially a problem, but not so much any more). As far as software compatibility goes, it's pretty good. The only difficulty I've had is with some video codecs and overclocking software which needs to install low level drivers. Graphics drivers were iffy for a while, but they're fine now.
Anecdotally, I've observed that peopl
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The only real 'teething' issue it had was Creative's utter driver incompetence (X-Fi Titanium sound card). They have 64-bit XP drivers...they just don't want you to get them, apparently. And their customer service reps are either deliberately mislead as to what's available on their website or are utterly incompetent.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of games that have 64-bit installs available (Crysis a
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From the experience running Ubuntu's AMD64 version, there isn't really anything to be a PITA; the only thing with any issues whatsoever is that you must use npviewer to get Flash running in a 64-bit browser, and it's very unreliable.
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? Your post makes it look like your replying to something but you're not. I haven't seen any mention of the system requirements anywhere, in fact I don't think they've even confirmed it's coming out on PC. From TFA:
Little has been revealed about the game itself yet, although weâ(TM)re promised more details about the gameplay, features, supported platforms and the release date in due course.
Obviously it'd be mental if it didn't come out on PC, but still. Your post looks like a poor troll.
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I'm not sure where the memory req's were mentioned either, but I am certain SC2 will at least prefer 4GB. SC was one of the first games to hit the 2GB memory limit on 32bit systems. Apparently SC would crash on very large maps when it hit the limit, even on 64 bit systes (bc the game is 32bit and still limited to 2GB mem).
Here is an article citing Chris Taylor that even 4GB is not enough for all the factions they wanted to add to SC2: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=185765 [computeran...ogames.com]
And here is a l
Unit and map tools! (Score:3, Insightful)
I no longer care how good it is. Unless they include decent unit and map making tools as part of the game, I'm not going to buy it. I'm sick of hearing "they'll be released later" and then getting crap or nothing.
You hear me, GPG? Unit and map tools. Good ones. No more excuses.
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You should write them a snail-mail, bro, if you're serious about it.
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It would probably help if you said what you think is wrong with the existing map and unit making tools. Apparently the community thought they were good enough to pump out a ton of awesome custom maps and units.
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The community? You mean the tiny subset of the game's playerbase with the free time and coding skills to devote to hacking the game rather than just playing it?
Total Annihilation: official map editor eventually released, as a beta, and so buggy and unstable that this "community" had to write their own version (which while more stable, had even less features). No official unit editor at all; "community" had to write their own.
Supreme Commander: official map editor (described as pre-alpha!) eventually re
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Did S-E even play Supreme Commander 1?? (Score:1)
It wasn't a bad game overall, but it had bugs, balance issues, and became quite repetitive as compared to other RTS titles. And instead of working to correct the issues fans had with the title, it went ahead and rush an expansion pack out the door (which sold far worse than the original title) and moved on to the equally abysmal "Space Siege."
Oh well, at least it'll have some awesome looking cutscenes!
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OMG Space Siege was horrid, and I was so looking forward to it after the acclaimed Dungeon Siege. As a developer, they really need to take better care of their IP because all of it reflects on them as a brand.
Maybe the choice to move to S-E as a publisher is a reflection on this? S-E seems more likely to give GPG the space and time they need to release a quality product.
I was disappointed (Score:2)
I used to be a huge fan of Total Annihilation and I was really looking forward to Supreme Commander. I was pretty disappointed with it though. Allow me to preface this complaint by admitting outright that I am bad at RTS games. The scope of the missions was, for me, very frustrating. On one mission in particular, I could complete the first theatre pretty easily, the second theatre without too many snags, and then got completely trounced every time I got into the third theatre. Presumably I was doing so
you didin't miss much (Score:2)
I too was disappointed. The missions for all three races took place on the same six maps, which was pretty dull. Also you spent most of your time zoomed out in order to see what was going on, so the game reverted to watching dots move around.
Overall I'd say 'nice idea, terrible execution'. I'd also suspect that the real reason for bringing in this new company is because whether they admit it or not, supcom was an awful game.
I waited eagerly for it, having also been a huge fan of TA back in the long ago, and
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I agree regarding the zoom affecting overall "fun-ness". It's ironic that the most highly touted feature had this impact. In retrospect I would opt for a mini-map that had a more functional level of abstraction. Make it more useful then just unit type and location.
I was also impressed they utilized a second monitot for the mini-map. Great feature. Everygame should utilisze multiple monitors if there is a practicle reason for it.
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It wastes rendering power though. A zoomed out minimap can use just one flat image for the terrain while a screen needs to render the map geometry.
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Alliance forging? (Score:1)
So I'll be watching developments here with interest.