Supreme Commander...NOW!

Games
1

I was just thinking today how much I miss playing Total Annihilation on-line. In the glory days, when there were thousands of people playing online, those were good times.

I really really hope that Chris Taylor is able to recreate the magic with Supreme Commander. I’m not really looking for any major changes in the TA universe. Just a real 3D engine and better built in match making.

What are people’s thoughts on Supreme Commander so far? I read about the commander unit being able to launch fighters and such, I’m not sure what to make of that kind of thing.

The game mechanics I’m interested in are:

  1. Two types of resources – one which you build yourself without limit and the other that is spread all around the map that simply needs a thing to be built on it.

  2. Being able to give build orders iwthout worrying about how many resources you have – everything is about your spend rate, not your treasury.

  3. Being able to queue up things way in advance. In TA, I could queue up a constructor to build things for the entire game seamlessly.

  4. Wide variety of defense and offensive type weapons (the heavy beam weapons which are powerful but rarely shoot to rapid fire weapons that do little damage but can take out masses of weak units)

  5. The commander concept – kill anything short range with one shot – go ahead, rush me.

  6. Radar. Why don’t all games have this? The ability to build installations that show bad guys on the mini map as dots.

2

I don’t understand what this has to do with Derek Smart.

3

Nothing.

4

There’s an interview with Chris Taylor in this month’s CGM and my reaction after reading it is: a) the game is obviously a long way off – which it is, since the release date is a year away – and, b) Taylor doesn’t seem to be very in touch with RTSs these days. I maintain that Total Annihilation was so long ago that you can’t bank on Chris Taylor’s reputation as an RTS developer any more than you could count on George Lucas’ reputation as a director.

Anyway, most (all?) of the things you mention, Brad, are already in RTSs. None of them are particularly innovative anymore, so you don’t have to wait for Supreme Commander to be excited. :)

-Tom

5

That’s why we keep playing it.

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I’d disagree with that. What game allows your peons to patrol, harvest and repair things automatically? Has radar/anti-radar/stealth options? Gives you the ability create your own infinite resources? Let you have a long and intricate build cue rather than a loop? Has a wide variety of defensive structures rather thab just one anit-infantry and one anti-vehicle? And this was just from Brad’s list. There’s a huge list of things that TA did right that no other game has picked up and ran with.
I don’t see how you can be be so dismissive of Total Annihilation, Tom. There have been very few games which are heirs to its paradigm of huge battles, no research and no key mashing for tactical fighting.
You might cream yourself over games like Dragonshard which involve using your attention as a resource by making you babysit a handful or two of units. I prefer RTSes that let me give the big orders without trying to choreograph individual unit attacks. Most RTSes follow the scissors-paper-rock plan which means there is a continual dance as one core type attacks/avoids another. In TA, it didn’t happen. You hoped that the force you planned could do its job against the defence as it ran into it. The tactics were more in the creation of your army rather than any rapid fire use of individual abilites.
It has always dismayed me that out of the original big three RTS franchises- C&C, Warcraft and TA, the two that were the most limited became the preferred model. Gah.

7

And salvageable wreckage! Has any other game ever done that? Or even had wreckage from destroyed units stay on the field longterm?

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Well, Peter, just off the top of my head, here’s one game for each of the things you mentioned:

What game allows your peons to patrol, harvest and repair things automatically?

Rise of Nations

Has radar/anti-radar/stealth options?

The C&C series

Gives you the ability create your own infinite resources?

Act of War

Let you have a long and intricate build cue rather than a loop?

Earth 2160

Has a wide variety of defensive structures rather thab just one anit-infantry and one anti-vehicle?

Battle for Middle Earth 2

I’m sure I could provide a few more example for each of the above if you want. Hopefully those will disabuse you of notions that Total Annihiliation is unique. :)

And this was just from Brad’s list. There’s a huge list of things that TA did right that no other game has picked up and ran with.

Look, I’m not being dismissive of Total Annihilation. It was a great game for its time that actually holds up better than many of those other great games for their times. Starcraft, as I’ve said before, is a huge pain in the ass because of its interface. I think TA’s best and probably most enduring innovation is its interface, which the Battelcry guys and then Brian Reynolds really improved upon.

But this idea that Total Annihilation introduced ideas that no one else has followed up on is absolute malarky. Another of the game’s enduring contributions is this fanatical fan-base that continues to proclaim it’s greatness. Hey, cool, good. But don’t pretend RTS developers are blithely unaware of what made TA great.

You might cream yourself over games like Dragonshard which involve using your attention as a resource by making you babysit a handful or two of units. I prefer RTSes that let me give the big orders without trying to choreograph individual unit attacks.

Quick pet peeve here, Peter, since I know you’re being sincere:

The genre of RTSs has come a long way since TA, and part of its evolution is splitting into sub-categories, like nearly every other genre, from shooters to RPGs to driving games.

So it’s really silly to ding other RTSs because you don’t like their sub-categories. I get it. You’re a TA kind of guy and more action-oriented RTSs like Dragonshard, Warcraft III, and C&C are “babysitting”, “key mashing”, “rapid fire” and “limited”. But that’s like Quake players calling Rainbow Six “boring”. Apples and oranges, Peter.

-Tom

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The salvageable wreckage is a good one, forge. BTW, I think this concept of “spoils of war” found an expression in ideas like the souls in Sacrifice or the ring power in BFME. These play on the idea of a resource you can only get in a head-to-head encounter with the other player.

However, salvage is a concept in several RTSs (get resources for killing the other dude’s units), but I can’t think of any that use it like TA did. Maybe ghouls cannibalizing in Warcraft III or the GLA getting money for scrapping enemy units?

-Tom

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What game has all of them?

Total Annihilation.

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Well, I for one would like to see some more about the various new sub-genre’s of RTS. What differentiates a “babysitting” rts from a “key mashing” one? Lots of hotkeys? And how to differentiate “rapid fire” from “key mashing”? Is it the mouse clicks?

In all seriousness, as Malderi points out, TA had all of these qualities at once, which made it something special. One thing I particularly miss was the ability to do meaningful construction - you could build defensive perimeters, advance a position, fortify it, and continue to move up. Lots of interesting choices to be made, and the counters were reasonably effective. I think one reason this has been phased out is that in multiplayer, you could have people turtling, and I guess this was bad.

Since one the things I like to do in RTS games is build stuff, the elimination of significant construction is a loss. Getting that fusion generator up and running, finishing a big bertha and watching it start to pick away at the enemy base, or even realizing that your construction plans are too ambitious and scaling back to prevent “vapor lock” - these were pretty great moments that I don’t think more recent RTS games have been able to create.

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Malderi, here’s what I was responding to:

Other games have indeed “picked up and run with” things from Total Annihilation. That’s my point and that’s where Peter is wrong.

The fact that no other game has copied TA, bullet point for bullet point, doesn’t really mean anything. Because, actually, that’s pretty much true of any game.

-Tom

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Salavageable wreckage is in the indie RTS Trash. And Rise of Nations has it in theory, since you can get resources from units and buildings that are destroyed.

Troy

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See, now Kevin’s point I understand. He’s describing very specific situations that he misses, that only Total Annihilation can capture, that have nothing to do with this idea I hear from so many TA fans that the game did these wonderful unique things that “no one else has done…waaah!”

I can even sort of understand the thing about “meaningful construction”, although I disagree. A recent trend in RTSs is to de-emphasize construction in favor of tactical combat, and to minimize the sprawl of base-building (I love how BFME2 brings this back in a very streamlined way). But there are still plenty of games that create this sense of building a grand city/base/war engine. I’m constantly amazed at how crowded a Rise of Nations map can get. And if you look up “meaningful construction” in the dictionary, there’s a picture of the forts in Age of Empires III. :)

BTW, how does TA hold up in multiplayer? I imagine it can get to be quite a slog with the infinite resources on some maps. And I know it’s not very friendly to casual players with all those indistinct robots.

-Tom

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I think what TA fans are trying to say is that no other RTS has given them so many new features. Every RTS developer is afraid of making too big a leap from the Starcraft/C&C/ and now AoE model. Most of the time in an RTS game you are fighting the interface, or doing speed management skill drills, and no one has really made an attempt to move beyond that quickly. It’s always tiny little steps towards what TA was years ago. While RoN is an excellent game and full of features, it’s still just an evolution of the genre, while it can be said that TA was more of a revolution.

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TA is awesome multiplayer. You can turtle like crazy, but there’s lots of ways to break a turtle… nukes… berthas… krogoths… massive air strikes…

All of those at once.

Games last a long time between two skilled players though.

And yes, I agree - I haven’t liked any RTS as much as TA. TA>All.

17

I swear, you TA fanatics are going to make me frickin’ reinstall that thing one day…

-Tom

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Everything I’ve heard Taylor say about Supreme Commander pretty clearly shows that he knows exactly what made TA special, and he’s taking it all to the next level.

The whole coordinated-assault-force concept is an innovation (in my very limited RTS experience – correct the hell out of me, please, Tom, I need correction!). The entire “get information BEFORE you commit” paradigm sounds super cool. And the “zoom out to the strategic level” idea sounds also very neat indeed.

I played a lot of TA – not as much as the crazy fans, but enough to get really into the way that automated rally points, patrols, air/land combat interactions, Big Berthas, etc. all made for a feeling like your whole army was doing its thing and you were coordinating it. It was less micro than any RTS I’ve played (including Kohan). I’m psyched that Supreme Commander looks like it’s going way beyond that.

And yeah, it’s all robots, but they look cool and blow up good, and it’s fine with me :-D

Cheers!
Rob

19

A better example would be Terrorist Army side of C&C Generals, who would not only get money for the salvage but also had units that would instantly add more gun barrels and armor to themselves from the wreckages.

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Ah yes, the Gla, that was my favorite side to play as, especially with the battle buses that I got fully upgraded. They could destroy just about anything .