Supreme Commander Quick Take
There's a long list of upcoming and recently-released games that are on my list to pick up when I can afford 'em (and afford the time). I'm afraid I'm going to have to put a moratorium on purchasing some of them until after Apocalypse Cow is done. (And dang it, I have been waiting for Dark Avatar to pick up Gal Civ II, also. And now it's out and apparently rocks. Too many games, too little time!)

But Supreme Commander is one I have been anxiously awaiting for a long time. In fact, one might say I've been waiting for it since 1998 or so. So I picked it up and have been trying it out for too many hours.

In a nutshell --- Supreme Commander is Total Annihilation 2. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. In fact, as I'm playing, I keep hearing the soundtrack to Total Annihilation playing in my head. Chris Taylor has pretty much borrowed good from his previous game, made it even cooler, and given it a new name. If and when the "official" TA2 ever arrives, it's probably going to discover that a new king has taken over it's long-abandoned kingdom.

For those who never played Total Annihilation, it was a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game that came out around the same time as StarCraft. It never gained quite the notoriety as StarCraft (I mean, sheesh, they made an OPERA about the latter game in Korea and made it practically a national pastime!), but it developed a rabid following. It was too big and popular to be called a "cult classic," but it's considered by most to be one of the best RTS games of all time.

However, it was also very different from most other RTS games in many ways. For one thing, the most important factor wasn't how many resources you currently possessed, but rather your rate-of-change - your production rate versus your expenditure rate. You were constantly producing tons of weaponry in that game, and all that production cost a ton of energy and minerals. In addition, your buildings cost energy to operate (though you could temporarily shut them down to save costs), and some of the gigantic static siege weapons required enormous amounts of energy to fire.

Another difference was that there was an avatar that essentially represented "you" on the battlefield, the Commander. In the default gameplay mode, destroying the commander eliminated that player. Even with that option turned off, destroying the commander resulted in an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb going off, wiping out everything within a wide radius. And as he was one of the most potent combat and production units on the battlefield, and irreplaceable, defeating the enemy Commander really hurt the other player.

Consequently, most winning strategies were focused on an early defeat of the enemy commander, or crippling his production.

Radar and stealth also played a pivotal role in the game. So a lot of sub-strategies involved blinding your opponent prior to an attack.

Two other noteworthy elements came into play. The game had 3D units (which was a new idea back in 1997), which allowed for some really believable motion and animation that was too cost prohibitive with 2D graphics. The aircraft banked as they darted and turned on their attack runs, and spun into the ground as they were destroyed. The artillery units rocked believably as they fired, and the tank turrets recoiled. As objects were destroyed, they flung pieces of themselves all over the map. And the production queues kept churning out more and more air, land, and sea units to make the conflicts huge and epic. When you were watching the battles in Total Annihilation play out, the chaos of the modern battlefield was visceral and believable. It was an incredible thing to see.

The other thing that 3D units brought to the table was that they were able to create a staggering number of units - they were cheaper to build and less memory-intensive than 2D units which had to have every frame of animation from every angle and action built and stored in memory. Now, purist veterans of other games didn't like this feature so much - it made battles confusing with so many different ways you could attack or react to an attack. The simple rock-scissors-paper equation of most RTS games was exponentially increased as you could combine land, sea, and air forces into really creative strategies. This led to battlefield tactics feeling very... organic. And creative.

And it had to be. Because resources were unlimited, a game could into a stalemate condition that could last indefinitely. Players could hole up in almost unassailable positions, with such strong defenses that brute force attacks would fail miserably. This could lead to very long games.

Now, it's too early for me to give a definitive answer. But as far as I can tell, everything I've just said about Total Annihilation applies equally to Supreme Commander.

Now, the specifics of some of the sneaky tactics that worked in TA have changed. There were a number of dirty tricks that were popular in TA that I don't know about in Supreme Commander, but I am already able to envision how some of the "organic" tactics will start to pan out with the game (and with whatever expansions come down the pipe).

A couple of examples of what I'm talking about in Total Annihilation: Your air transports were capable of picking up an enemy unit. I haven't tried this in Supreme Commander. It was hard to pull off, as the transports would usually be destroyed if they tried. But if you pulled it off, you could kidnap an enemy unit. They would be helpless as long as they were being held by the transport. If the transport was destroyed, they would be, too.

Remember what I said about what happens to the commander was destroyed?

One "cheap" way to victory (almost impossible to pull off unless your opponent was half-asleep) was to create an early fleet of air transports and scouts, and send them off to kidnap the enemy commander. You'd lose most of them in the attempt, but if you could kidnap him, you could fly him over a high-priority target (the center of his base), and either let enemy defenses destroy you or self-destruct your plane. The resulting explosion would cripple your opponent in the early game, even if the destruction of the commander wasn't set to an instant-win scenario.

Another, less cheap trick was to use crawling mines combined with air transports. Crawling mines were extremely slow vehicles that exploded with about half the force of a nuke. One mid-game strategy was to combine these with fast-moving air transports to create poor-man's nukes (or nukes not vulnerable to missile shields in the late game). You'd send a bunch of these through enemy defenses, either to self-destruct over the defenses, or to be destroyed by the defenses when they were close. The resulting explosions from the crawling mines would take the defenses out with them, which - if done right - could leave a gaping hole in their perimeter for you to rush in with your air units, followed up by ground support.

Now, most RTS games have little tricks like this you can pull. Experienced players have a whole bunch of them up their sleeves, backed up with very sound traditional strategies and very solid production priorities and unit control. But Total Annihilation seemed to have far more than its share, with new ones opening up that the designers had never intended with every new unit released online (one other innovation of the game) and with the expansions. And after some early game-balance problems were addressed, players found an effective defense against every tactic - conventional or unconventional.

So far, it seems like Supreme Commander may the heir to the legacy.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:24 AM (Permalink)