Supreme Commander Impressions

By Cyrris

Like many strategy freaks, I was awe-inspired when I saw the first motion video of Supreme Commander in action all those months ago. Seeing the massive battles, the zoom, the nukes… I was sold almost instantly. Since then, I signed up for the Supreme Commander beta and played around with it. It definitely wasn’t how I envisioned it, but being a beta I decided not to write a review here until I had some more experience with something closer to the official release. Now I’ve played the demo, and so has Holliday. Today we’re both going to share our impressions of the demo in what is Aelon’s first real joint-authored piece. It’s not quite an interview, it’s not quite an article, and it’s not quite a review. Instead, it’s all three, so you can think of it being three times better than any other material on the web. It’s also our biggest single piece of content to date, so we’ve sectioned it up.

Performance

Cyrris: I should start out by saying that, although it ran better than the beta, the demo still performed pretty poorly on what I feel is a decent machine. I have an Athlon64 3000+, 1 gig of RAM, and a 256mb GeForce 6800 GS. I knew from the outset that I would likely need an upgrade to run SupCom well, but I’m still a bit miffed. The main reason I guess is that I’m out of upgrade options, so I’ll be needing a whole new box. I am thinking that the CPU is the main culprit. Reading last months issue of Atomic magazine, they showed that SupCom had some very tangible performance benefits from using quad core over dual core, so I guess that leaves my single core chip out in the cold.

Graphically I find the game pretty good - though not if you plan to run on low detail. The difference between Medium and High fidelity in the game settings are much less obvious - the water will look substantially better than the explosions are slightly more colourful. Textures are also sharper but you’re hardly zoomed in enough to notice. The following screenshot is a meld - Low detail on the left, Medium on the right, with a more definitive screenshot after the click. When there is no water, you really can’t see a difference between Medium and High. Low on the other hand just looks atrocious.

Holliday: I can attest to SupCom’s performance situation. In however many years I’ve been building my computer in a piece-wise manner I never unload copious amounts of cash for a processor. Each time I upgrade the processor solely I don’t notice much more than 1-2 frames per second increase. I usually save the extra money and slap in a best-of-the-best video card. SupCom is extremely CPU hungry though. I first tried it on my desktop PC: Athlon64 3700+, 2 gigs of RAM, GeForce 7800 GTX. I started at high settings 1280×1024. The game was playable but sluggish (especially annoying when you are in a game that has map scrolling). After the first quick play test I went to in reconfigure and get the best settings. To my surprise, the only success in switching to all the settings to low was making the game look absolutely hideous; the frame rate stayed the same. Then, for kicks, I tried out dual monitor support.

On high settings with dual monitors and all, the frame rate wasn’t much lower than low settings and a single monitor. My GPU was definitely not what was holding me back. So I tried it on my MacBook Pro which has a Intel Core Duo 2.16ghz but only a gig of ram and a Radeon X1600 Mobility. The difference had to be 20-30 fps if not more, and a notable smoothness during intense (100s and 100s of units) battles. I even tried out the MacBook on 2 monitors but I think its Mobility video card caught up to it because it couldn’t sustain the smoothness I was getting previously. SupCom wants all of your gigahertz; single core need not apply.

Campaign and Storyline

Cyrris: Given that the performance for me was consistently bad, I can’t help but feel that I’m going to have a more negative response to the game than you. I played the two included campaign missions and a few skirmishes. Before I get in to the gameplay though, I should probably note some of the other facets of the game which I don’t think were influenced by my slow computer. Firstly, the characters are pretty terrible. As usual for Gas Powered Games productions, the voice acting is bad enough to warrant muting them and just reading the subtitles. The actual quality of the characters faces, lip syncing and such, was also bothersome. For a game released in 2007, you’d expect they would have come further, but the choppy video and complete lack of lip sync were even worse than StarCraft. How old is StarCraft again? Now, I understand that Supreme Commander is meant to be for multiplayer, really. But I do recall Chris Taylor saying that unlike Total Annihilation, SupCom would have a quality singleplayer component with a storyline to match. While it was evident from the demo’s 100 MB intro video that there is indeed an overarching story, the quality of how it is presented in game through characters and the like is simply dismal.

Holliday: I didn’t find the characters so terrible. Sure the girl on the “red team” has a Russian accent, but what were you expecting? The briefing and in-campaign chatter seems very much like StarCraft to me. At least it isn’t one mouth animation repeated over and over. Although… StarCraft’s storytelling doesn’t really fly in a post-WarCraft 3/Company of Heroes genre. With the graphical fidelity on RTS engines we should be able to just act out the plot on the battlefield. Company of Heroes, while not perfect in plot execution, is still engaging. SupCom really can’t do much since your entire army is made of robots.

My issue came with the annoyance of the characters during your campaign mission. The constant badgering to make sure I understood my mission was irritating. I know what the hell I am doing; I just want to make a ridiculous amount of chicken-robots to do it with OK? By the way, 200 Hunters sent to their death by base guns is amusing. They should have spent their time telling me the complexities of the game rather than “hurry up!”.

In the end Supreme Commander is not about the charm of its campaign characters (this is Jimmy); it is about the coolness of the conflict and units. Just the way an ACU explodes on the battlefield has all the character I need in this game.

Tutorials

Cyrris: Rather than adding a 100MB intro video, I also think it would have been nice if they had instead used the space to include a playable tutorial of sorts. Luckily for me I had already played around in sandbox mode in the beta, so I knew what was what and I could complete the campaigns (although rather slowly). However, advanced controls are still not something I am too familiar with, and having the “Tutorial” button in SupCom’s menu simply opening a browser and pointing you to a tutorial site just doesn’t cut it. This is a complex game with 250 units - or so the many in-menu interstitial ads say. Don’t you think that justifies some proper playable tutorials?

Holliday: The “tutorial” button is insulting. The first time I clicked it I thought the game had crashed (the extent of my experience with the game in beta). Popping up a website full of videos on how to play is just ridiculous. Why not just have the videos included in a tutorial area if you are going to be so ridiculous as to have video-only tutorials. Furthermore, the tutorials are generally worthless. There is one devoted to “Right and Left clicking”. All they cover is the basic things we’ve learned in strategy games for the last 15 years. The only one worth watching is the one on economy and even then they just gloss over the actual depth and differences SupCom has in that regard.

To be fair, the demo seems to throw you into the second campaign rather than the first. In the first campaign mission the units are slowly dealt out to you and you even get a “build x mass extractors” mission. So the campaign itself is a bit of a tutorial, but not full. I’ve heard on a podcast an editor talking about playing through a tutorial so I am assuming there is one in the retail game. However, wouldn’t you want to give your players the best impression with the demo by actually cluing them in on what makes Supreme Commander stand out? If you don’t know the depth underneath the game it doesn’t seem too different from an RTS with a huge zoom function. I actually didn’t really get into the game until I went on the beta forums and learned a whole lot about what you can do in SupCom that you cannot in other games. After that knowledge the game became something else entirely.

Dual Screen Gaming

Cyrris: When I first started to play the demo, I decided to give dual screen a go, seeing as I do have two LCDs. It is a pretty cool feature, but as expected my video card wasn’t coping too well, so it was the first thing I turned off in the quest for more frames. Oddly enough, after turning it off, I discovered that SupCom doesn’t seem to support dual monitors correctly at all - if you do have two screens but choose not to use the second one, your mouse will still fly over to the other screen whenever you try and scroll right when you’re in game. This is generally something I consider a mark of poor quality developers, and unfortunately it’s something I come across often enough to have downloaded a program to lock the mouse to the primary screen so it can’t happen. It’s a shame I ever needed it at all. How did dual screen work out for you?

Holliday: The dual screen functioned differently than I expected/hoped for. I thought I was going to be able to drag all of my interface elements over to the secondary monitor to have the largest battlefield view possible. So far I haven’t figured out a way to do this. The secondary monitor is just another display of the game which seems to best serve as being fully zoomed out all the time. Basically a glorified mini-map. I would prefer having it than not as it really helps picking up some radar blips while zoomed in on a battle or construction. Other than that I didn’t use it much.

To your point though I don’t really see how they could have done it any better. The game supports dual screen; it doesn’t support desktop and gameplay. If I am going to play the game on just one monitor I would disable my secondary display (and with how easy that is to do with the latest video card drivers I don’t see much complaint). I think the game really exceeds in how flexible the dual monitor set-up is. I’ve tried a ton of different resolution and display combos with it and none caused crashes or incompatibility. If one wants to see and use their desktop on one display and game on the other just use a borderless windowed mode (which works for any game by the way, I do it with EVE all the time). The one irritant in dual mode is you loose one screen edge for scrolling so you have to use the number keys to get around in that direction. Generally your movement is zooming in and out though (which is well done with the zoom focused to your mouse icon).

On thinking this I have just devised a way to play in dual monitor mode how I want, just switch the displays and do all my “playing” on the secondary monitor since that is free of UI bars. I’ll try that out soon.

Gameplay

Cyrris: With all of the less important stuff out of the way, I guess that brings us to the core of Supreme Commander: the gameplay, factions, buildings, and units. Given the fact that you had a smoother experience then I did, you’d best be going first.

Holliday: As I mentioned I didn’t really “get” the game until reading up on the beta forums. The sheer amount of control you have over your units in the game is really pulling me back in for more and more skirmishes. It is sad that the game seems completely oblivious to this at first. However, once you find out how to do it the game is entirely built around it. Almost like it couldn’t be played without it. To clarify I will highlight a couple examples of the means of control you have.

You can “ferry” units with dropships. Most games have transport airships but coordinating a whole army move with them requires a lot of resources and time spent loading and unloading at each waypoint. With SupCom the airships have a “ferry” function. Essentially, you can easily (once you know how) designate a route (that is a pick up and drop off point). At the pick up point a little 3d shape will appear, as the following screenshot shows. If you click any number of units and right click on that shape they’ll line up to be ferried off. The dropships work perfectly. They constantly traverse the route picking up as much as they can hold and dropping them off. You can add other dropships to the route just by selecting them and right clicking that shape. You can even set the rally points of factories and buildings to the ferry pick-up point so everything they produce gets hauled off to the front lines or whenever. With shift commands you can even customize the route to fly around enemy airspace.

On that note the shift key in general is wonderfully designed. Holding down shift you can view all the information about automated commands you’ve given for everything, you don’t have to select individual units. You’ll see patrol paths, ferry routes, build orders, assist orders, attack plans and (my favorite) coordinated attack routes. And if you keep holding down shift you can alter already given commands instead of having to re-do the whole chain. You can drag around waypoints, zoned future-buildings, ferry drop-off spots, and most anything. You can also add units into the automation. Whether it is dropships added to a ferry route or a new group of tanks to follow some that are already patrolling, the shift-interface is far more flexible and less abstract than any RTS I’ve played.

The best use of this (and something I’ve always struggled with in RTS games) is coordinating attacks. In most games getting your whole army to attack at once is an exercise in futility. The varied speeds make timing nearly impossible, large groups get stuck on themselves, or the range of your guns and their guns often seems to ‘bend’ a bit and start a conflict off too early. In SupCom if you have a group of units attack a target, then take another group and attack that same target but double right click it instead of single they’ll coordinate their attack. You can add any number of groups and units to the coordinated attack with the double click. This means the units will vary their speed or just plain wait until the other units are going to get in range. So if you have tanks and bombers attack a base the bombers won’t even take off until the tanks are nearly at their doorstep so everyone will bring the destruction on-time.

You can start to couple these things up to create really intricate attack plans. For example, take a group of tanks and order a series of attacks by holding shift. Attack anti-air first, then ground turrets then structures. Hold shift and you’ll see the red strokes painting the route of your tanks. Then select your bombers and have them coordinate an attack with the tanks on the ground turrets and structures. Now, since the tanks first have to destroy the AA guns to move onto the turrets the bombers will lay in wait, not exposing themselves to the dreaded AA. Now assign a group of fighters to protect the bombers against airborne AA. It goes on and on. You can actually arrange a large scale strategical approach to a specific battle then fill in some other groups of units to handle things that come up. On the above strategy I’d probably have a mix of tanks, walkers, smaller bots and mobile AA guns to go with the ground units and focus on other units or whatever comes at me, directions on the fly but stay the course with my main strategy (probably arty on buildings and turrets anyway).

Cyrris: See now, this is why I wanted you in here. You’ve definitely put more effort in to discovering the intricacies of controlling your army. For me, the sub-10 FPS performance and lack of proper in-game tutorials has meant that I really haven’t bothered to look in to it that much. I’ve pretty much been trying to play as if it was any other RTS with way too many buildings and a massive zoom function. Granted, I knew that many of those things existed, but aside from waypoint manipulation I just never got around to finding out exactly how to run them.

The only thing I did find particularly irritating were my interceptors. Given a line of patrol, they would happily fly back and forth - but their incompetence seemed unreal when just 3 Aeon interceptors arrived. My 10 interceptors won the battle - but only 1 survived. I watched in absolute frustration as my own interceptors blundered around in circles while the Aeon fighters picked them off one by one, my 9 losses to their 3. Now as far as I know they are both Tech 1 aircraft and are meant to be about the same in performance, so I think something is up here. A 3:1 kill ratio definitely seems like an issue.

All that said, I still had a decent time. Given smoother performance, I probably would have had a good time, and if I had smooth performance and I had a better grasp of the controls, I’d say I’d be having a very good time. Despite the low frames I still find the massive scale to be fun. I was really quite pissed when Blizzard revealed that they were taking the scale down a notch with WarCraft 3. I’ve always wanted to go in the opposite direction and SupCom does that to the extreme. I have a friend with a brand new Core 2 Duo/8800GTX desktop. I plan on going over there and playing as much of it as I can on his PC.

Conclusions

Cyrris: So, despite my rather average experience with the demo, I can’t rate it poorly - once players know what they are doing, and if they have a computer to run it well, I think they’re going to enjoy it. Or at least, I think I’m going to enjoy it. I think that Chris Taylor is a technical genius. In Dungeon Siege he pretty much added everything I could have wanted to an action RPG after my years of playing Diablo 2 - auto attacks, no potion wastage, and many other things that were just exactly what the player needed. However, unlike Diablo, Dungeon Siege lacked a soul and a depth to its game world. I can’t help but feel that SupCom suffers in much the same way, but because it’s an RTS game it’s not going to be such a big issue. Clearly it’s focus is not to portray an immersive game world - it just miffs me a bit that despite Taylor saying that it was going to be a big thing, they’ve stumbled the ball with quite a lack of creativity. The 3 sides, in terms of units and buildings, really aren’t very different.

So I guess the final question is, will you be buying the game? I’m not really sure on this one for myself - at the very least, I will be re-trying the demo once I get a faster computer. Only if I am satisfied with it on the new PC will I dive in. But then, as far as me buying a new computer goes, I am pretty much hanging out for StarCraft 2 before dedicating the money.

Holliday: I haven’t much doubt the game will end up in my hands eventually. Probably within the first month of release. That pace might quicken as I play the demo more. Each time I figure more out, and my desire to play increases. I actually spent a good 3-4 hours with it today. The coordinated attacks and ferry functions are just everything Ive wanted in an RTS and really reduce the frustration. Watching a large scale attack come together is something that has the staying power of a chainsaw bayonet.