This released yesterday. Any feedback yet? It looks like a long WW2 RTS. Peaks my interest!
So far our Steam User reviews have been positive. We expect press reviews to start appearing early next week.
However I think you were asking the forum more than asking me. I am also curious to year forum feedback :)
If you have any specific questions, will continue monitoring this thread.
I’m a big fan of grand strategy games and the Hearts of Iron series in particular. I don’t have much experience with your games, so for someone like me, what would you say sets the Supreme Ruler games apart from HOI? I guess what I’m saying is, as a Hearts of Iron fan, sell me the game (if you so desire). :)
EDIT: I saw this on one of the FAQs that I thought was pretty cool.
Q: When date does the game end? How does the game simulate the Post-War World ?
A: When played in Sandbox mode, the gameplay in Supreme Ruler 1936 is entirely open-ended. Players can set their own victory conditions, or play with no pre-set ending date. The Tech Tree and Equipment list in the game span past the end of WWII and well into the 21st century, including ICBMs, stealth bombers, UAVs, and even future technologies.
There’s been some games of HOI3 that I’ve really enjoyed and just wished I could keep going so that’s kinda cool, even though they do say the economic model of the game is tuned for the war setting so may not accurate in the post-war era.
That is certainly one of differences I’m quick to point out. Another is their use of provinces while we actually use hex tiles to create our map making for dynamically changing borders. We also use exact unit types that are individually researched as opposed to their somewhat generic connection from techs to generational unit types. Development of the map is done right on the map, not province wide upgrades making individual hexes important. My impression is also that they try harder to make the gameplay pass through specific points in history while we allow the story to create it’s own flow a little more while still making historical events possible. I have to admit I have a hard time comparing the two games, I’ve not played much HoI, I could never get into the game. I played more Vic2 but that was a few years back.
As for selling you on the game, I really feel we’ve created something that catches that “just 5 more minutes” feel of HoI, Civ or Superpowers. You can always see where your country is headed and have options for where you want to go. And with events that go far past the war, you can watch a region in sandbox that grows over decades.
If I type anymore I’ll be down to just please, please, please, please…
Support indie developers! ;)
Haha, no need, I already purchased the game. I’m a sucker for nerdy strategy games.
I’m going through the tutorial now, we’ll see how it goes. If I can get into it I can probably convince my strategy gaming cadre to pick it up for some multiplayer (thanks for including that feature, by the way! It’s very important to me, although I do realize I’m in a small minority).
One piece of small/minor feedback on the tutorial: I might suggest either discussing map scrolling options as one of the first items or make keyboard and edge scrolling smoother, if possible. The jitter of keyboard or edge scroll was giving me some eye strain but when I realized I could scroll via the middle mouse button I found that it was very smooth. Later on in the tutorial it mentioned that you can scroll by holding down RMB and dragging but I have one control issue with that. Say I zoom in and select a unit and now I need to scroll so I can see where I want them to move to. If I try scrolling as the tutorial tells me to (RMB+drag), it issues a move order as soon as I have to release the button. It would be nice if it detects a RMB+drag it won’t issue the move. I do realize I can zoom out and zoom back in to issue the move, but it would be a little more intuitive for me personally the other way.
Thanks for the feedback, I’ll pass it along!
Also, we will be getting GameRanger support soon (I haven’t checked their site today, might already be there) and I periodically play there, so I might find you and your group sometime :)
Had a few hours to play this today. One thing that struck me is the game is much more of a strategy game as opposed to a war game than I was expecting. I don’t know why I was expecting that, other than maybe the WW2 setting. That’s a good thing for me, though, I’m more of a strategy gamer than I am a wargamer.
After playing the tutorial I decided to start in out-of-the-way Brazil just to push and prod the game and learn the ropes. So far I’ve been spending my time trying to build up my economy and I quickly learned not to overdo simultaneous construction. It reminded me a little bit of Supreme Commander in that sense, I outstripped my ability to produce and use resources so everything was taking forever to build. I went back and kept a much closer eye on my economy and noted a few major deficiencies. It mostly boiled down to not being able to produce nearly enough Industrial Goods and the cost of those on the world market was skyrocketing as time went buy. I also had a deficit in power generation and a complete lack of coal mines. Given the enormous cost (in terms of Industrial Goods required) for hydro plants, I’ve instead opted to start a coal industry and see if I can get some coal power plants up and running. From there I want to increase my capacity to produce industrial goods myself so that I don’t bankrupt myself importing everything I need.
Once I get my economy in order I’m going to see what happens when I try to bring South America under the yoke of fascist Brazilian hegemony or something like that. :P
Hmmmmm, I think this is the setting these games were ment to be in, so I’ll bite.
One area where the game falls short is in the documentation department. The manual is very sparse and I find the tooltips to be lacking. For example, I have social spending sliders for education, law enforcement, unemployment insurance, family subsidies, etc. What do any those sliders do? I couldn’t find that information anywhere on the documentation or the game. I see my population is going down but I’m not provided any feedback on what the inputs to that are. I’ll also get periodic notifications of things like being short on workers (my unemployment is very low) our the domestic cost of petroleum is too high but no further info on what impact that has.
Now I should mention that some googling had answered a lot of these questions for me and others some broad common sense can be applied to. For instance, when I saw my population was going down I increased spending on social programs like health-care, family subsidies, law enforcement, etc. This caused my birth to death ratio to improve and made my country a lot more attractive to immigrants.
So if you enjoy tinkering and figuring mechanics out, it seems like a game with a lot of depth and I’m having fun with it. If that sort of thing frustrates you and you want to have all the info at your fingertips (Paradox gas gotten extremely good at this via their tooltips) then I would warn you away.
Here is Out of Eight’s Youtube. I’ll probably watch this, but I’m not patient enough to watch this now.
So I’m finally getting a handle on this game and I’m liking it quite a bit, just not in the ways I thought I would. I have a really fun time playing around in the Sandbox mode and trying to improve my nation. I find I’m almost playing this more as an economic game or builder and the game seems to work quite well for those purposes. Trying to balance an economy can be quite tricky, as it’s not a matter of spamming out factories. Build up too much production too quickly and your unemployment rate plummets which creates labor shortages which cause worker wages to skyrocket which spurs on inflation which causes your industry to become less and less efficient. Trying to balance out your economic growth with social and military needs can be a tricky act.
I’ve mentioned the lack of documentation before and it’s a real issue. Thankfully, the developers have been extremely active and responsive on the Steam forums. I’ve asked a question and had a developer response within 15 minutes before. I just can’t help but think if they would spend some time including informative tooltips in the game, a lot of these questions wouldn’t be necessary.
Is anyone else here playing this?
I’ve been turned off to this series of games. My experience with prior ones is that they were very buggy and like you mention, the lack of documentation makes it so I have no desire to make the effort to try and learn the game. Even if they answer questions within 10 minutes, I rather have adequate documentation and tooltips within the game.
Well, they seem to be working on alleviating my complaint about the game. They released a v1.1 of the manual which includes substantially more information. Hopefully they continue this trend and, honestly, as helpful as the manual update is (and it is), the thing they can do most to help a newcomer like me would be tooltips, tooltips, and more tooltips. I’m realizing how spoiled I am by the latest games from Paradox, where whenever I want to know what something means or how it’s calculated I can just hover my mouse over it.