Supreme Commander 2 - Demo... sucks?

[AlanShore]

Exactly my point. The guys there should have realized that they can't cater to the crowd they're not as good with, and kept it a professional game.

Sorry, I misunderstood, I thought you were saying it should be dumbed down.

But yeah I agree with you. It's such a risky move to make it simpler; not only do you annoy the fans of the series but you simultaneously risk new players not being interested.

 

[BigHandInSky]

Ok, so theres a lot of hate in this game, and heres my opinion:

I've played through the demo[Tutorials and a bit of the first mission] and liked it when compared to the first two (which i own and have gotten quite far in both sets of campaigns)

And tbh, im liking this new system, because:

1ue to the tech tree, basic tier 1 units now have a chance at becoming useful again through upgrades other than being used as cannon fodder and distractions
EG:The Rockhead[Basic Tank]
Upgrades: More Barrels[DPS], AA gun[Becomes Jack Of all trades], Shield[More Survivability](just a few of them available)

2:The tech system now means you have a chance at getting the Experimentals you want to build without wasting time looking at the other Exp.'s stats;as well as the upgrades for your other units along the route

3:The ACU may be weak, but it has a WHOLE tree dedicated to it becoming more powerful as well as being the fastest builder so it can be a power to be reckoned with, IF the player chooses to go through that tree.

4:The bright colours help to distinguish units and the new art style shows that in terms of the war, the factions are looking for more armoured and distinguishable outlines in a battle.

5:There is still micromanagement, its that now because things have been simplified down, it makes focusing on the battles themselves and making units to reinforce more easy to keep an eye on.

6:This demo only showcases two campaign missions and the tutorial,so the constraints in the missions for a buildup in technology are there.As well as no skirmish/Multiplayer so how can you guys create a definate opinion from what is around 1-2hrs max and what might be changed within the firest few months/weeks of the game coming out?

7:There is going to be a mod made for this game changing everything to the way it was in SupCom 1, i know there will be from all this hate just in this thread.

8:Yes its being 'dumbed/simplified/etc.' down, but in this world things need to change at some point, and I think that GPG are making this game simplified to appeal to people who couldn't get into the first one.

9:The experimentals may be weaker than in the first one, but they are what seems to be far easier to get to now through this tech system.Because its around 10-18/20 tech points in the naval tree before you get a battleship, so making them weaker may be a good call. And again, theres gonna be a mod to make them stronger.

 

[Amnestic]

Played the demo, seemed solid. Haven't played SupCom1 so that might be a reason why I'm more open to it than other people in this thread.

I will say that they fucked up with the tutorial though: If you're going to subtitle instructions, there needs to be a way to skip them otherwise I'm just going to be when it takes 30 seconds to tell me how to move when I read it in five.

 

[Robyrt]

This game will be awesome, as soon as the Retro Economy Mod comes out. (If nobody else makes it, I will!)

Everything else about the game is better than the previous one. It's more intuitive, less micromanagement, easier to see what's going on, strategic zoom works better, the story is better although still mediocre, and the system requirements are LOWER than the previous game. What's not to like? Except for the one-engineer-only, pay-up-front economic system, of course.

And YES there is a mass fabricator in-game. It's not in the demo's tech tree, but it appears in a tooltip.

 

[NeoDMC]

Is it just me or are the graphics worse than the first one? I'm not saying Commander 1's graphics were bad, but I had this baby on high settings and everything still looked liked polygons.

Is it just the demo?

 

[AlanShore]

What's not to like? Except for the one-engineer-only, pay-up-front economic system, of course.

You've kinda answered your own question there. That was one of the best features about the original. If I want to queue up a load of units I'll have to keep switching back and forward between the action and the factory everytime I have enough resources for another unit. That's exactly the kind of micro this game doesn't need.

 

[Sebenko]

Ok, so theres a lot of hate in this game, and heres my opinion:

I've played through the demo[Tutorials and a bit of the first mission] and liked it when compared to the first two (which i own and have gotten quite far in both sets of campaigns)

And tbh, im liking this new system, because:

1ue to the tech tree, basic tier 1 units now have a chance at becoming useful again through upgrades other than being used as cannon fodder and distractions
EG:The Rockhead[Basic Tank]
Upgrades: More Barrels[DPS], AA gun[Becomes Jack Of all trades], Shield[More Survivability](just a few of them available)

9:The experimentals may be weaker than in the first one, but they are what seems to be far easier to get to now through this tech system.Because its around 10-18/20 tech points in the naval tree before you get a battleship, so making them weaker may be a good call. And again, theres gonna be a mod to make them stronger.

Yeah, but the joy of the first one was watching the slow progression from tiny insect-like irritations, to massive tanks that would make C&C's mammoth cry, to mechs that can challenge an ACU eve in a small group, to the ludicrous experimentals.

And escalation was a reasonable tactic- enemy at the gates? tech up and build something better, unlike this one which seems to have the most generic RTS research system ever.

 

[Yokai]

Well, I didn't enjoy the SupCom 1 demo, so I can't say I'm surprised. It's weird, Supreme Commander is the only RTS series that has held zero appeal for me. I don't know why, I just can't enjoy it. Although, due to my obsessive demo-playing, I'll probably try the SupCom 2 demo anyhow. Thanks for the heads up that it sucks, although I probably won't be able to tell the difference...

 

[kingmob]

I was absolutely appalled by the demo tbh. I just couldn't believe what I was playing. In stead of rehashing all the arguments here, I want to mention my feeling when the battle started to get some scale. A constant state of "err... wtf". I hate micromanaging, so I hardly did in SupCom1. That is why I like that game and dislike almost all other RTS games. When multiple things are going on, micromanagement makes macro-scale tactics go right out of the window. Now I constantly have to recheck my engineers and factories, I have to check the battles because I couldn't find a way to make any meaningful formations and all my build orders were constantly paused or cancelled because of a lack of initial resource.
All these things (and many more small things) make the game into nothing more than spamming as many units as possible. And of course making a huge research farm...

I'm left with a big "why" expression on my face and a feeling of utter disappointment.

 

[kingmob]

Sounds like an extraordinarily complex RTS being somewhat streamlined for less hardcore audiences. Key word being "extraordinarily complex". My bet, they're going to dumb it down either too much, or not nearly enough.

Calling SupCom extraordinarily complex is overstating things quite a bit. It is not as simple as most RTS, true. And it probably needs some practice to get good, but it is quite easy to understand the basics.
Whichever manager concluded the game needed dumbing down to be "more like the rest" is a moron. Bad business as usual in the game world, where people with no clue control the market.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

In a cruel irony, my graphics card spazzed out just before I started downloading the SupCom 2 demo, causing it to crash fatally only a minute or 2 into the tutorial. So I don't really have any personal experience of it to comment. But from what I've heard, this is not going to be good. When a game falls just short of perfection in its genre/subgenre (as Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance did in the massive-macro-scale RTS) then if you MUST release a sequel, the best idea is NOT to drastically remove it from its predecessor.

The same thing happened with Dawn of War 2. Dawn of War was my OTHER favourite RTS, but I didn't even try DoW2 because I looked at the changes they made to it (i.e EVERYTHING) and said "this isn't the game I loved." I don't know if the game is actually enjoyable or not, but I wanted to play the SEQUEL to Dawn of War, not a completely different style of RTS with the Dawn of War name slapped on it. SupCom2 doesn't look to be QUITE as bad, but it looks to be that most unforgivable of failures- a sequel that fails to be, plain and simple, a better game than its predecessor. Rather than perfecting the formula that Forged Alliance had ALMOST perfect, they decided to retool everything, including removing many of the features that made SupCom great in the first place!

I'll reserve final judgement until I actually get to PLAY the demo properly (damn graphics card) but at the moment it's looking like I'll be sticking to Forged Alliance.

 

[kingcom]

This game will be awesome, as soon as the Retro Economy Mod comes out. (If nobody else makes it, I will!)

Everything else about the game is better than the previous one. It's more intuitive, less micromanagement, easier to see what's going on, strategic zoom works better, the story is better although still mediocre, and the system requirements are LOWER than the previous game. What's not to like? Except for the one-engineer-only, pay-up-front economic system, of course.

And YES there is a mass fabricator in-game. It's not in the demo's tech tree, but it appears in a tooltip.

My only solid complain about this game is the economic system (max engineer doesnt seem to bad since everything builds faster i feel? and would take away the whole "commander builds faster" idea).

 

[BigHandInSky]

Ok, so theres a lot of hate in this game, and heres my opinion:

I've played through the demo[Tutorials and a bit of the first mission] and liked it when compared to the first two (which i own and have gotten quite far in both sets of campaigns)

And tbh, im liking this new system, because:

1ue to the tech tree, basic tier 1 units now have a chance at becoming useful again through upgrades other than being used as cannon fodder and distractions
EG:The Rockhead[Basic Tank]
Upgrades: More Barrels[DPS], AA gun[Becomes Jack Of all trades], Shield[More Survivability](just a few of them available)

9:The experimentals may be weaker than in the first one, but they are what seems to be far easier to get to now through this tech system.Because its around 10-18/20 tech points in the naval tree before you get a battleship, so making them weaker may be a good call. And again, theres gonna be a mod to make them stronger.

Yeah, but the joy of the first one was watching the slow progression from tiny insect-like irritations, to massive tanks that would make C&C's mammoth cry, to mechs that can challenge an ACU eve in a small group, to the ludicrous experimentals.

And escalation was a reasonable tactic- enemy at the gates? tech up and build something better, unlike this one which seems to have the most generic RTS research system ever.

Fair enough, but one thing i ask is:

If everone is absoloutely hating the change in this one to appeal to a more varied market, then why not just stick with the first one and ignore this?

 

[Christemo]

ugh damn, guess Ill have to try the demo, oh well at least dow2 is getting its expansion soon

oh jesus, now a friend of mine will start about my Fanboy hating of the game again. last time he meant i couldnt judge the game after playing it for 8 painfully miserable hours. ugh, i miss Dark Crusade.

 

[Mr. Drood]

Was SupCom 1 even that hard? I mean the most unusual/hard thing about it was the resource system, and was that really so difficult to understand? You get a certain amount of resources per second, and building stuff costs a certain amount of resources per second. If you gain more resources per second than you spend, you can continously build units, if you lose more per second, you run out pretty quickly. Was that really SO hard?

 

[Wicky_42]

Guys, it's not all that bad! People need to chill out a bit. The only real drag is the 'can't queue build orders beyond the cash you have' thing - it's really annoying and pointless, considering the manner or resource harvesting, and how if you have factories on loop production they all pause when you run out of cash and have to be restarted manually one at a time. That is both boring and painstaking, if you've got several such factories spread out across the map.

The tech tree works, but I would have liked to have seen a greater cosmetic change to the units as they are researched - getting physically larger with armour upgrades, for example. Spamming barrels and guns onto Rock Heads' small chassis just looks kinda silly, tbh.

I wish the demo let us play with an experimental or two - that would have been fun, especially as you can research about 5 of them :/

 

[SaunaKalja]

I tried the demo and overall the gameplay seemed nicer than SupCom 1. But there are a lot of horrible things I hate (which I'll be listing soon). I'm most definitely NOT going to pay 45 - 50 ? for this game. I'll buy it if there's ever a mega-sale so I can get it for like 5 - 10 ?, though that's not going to happen any time soon, if ever.

So, things I like or dislike compared to SupCom 1.
+ Unit group movement is better. No more traffic jams from one tank bumping into another causing the pathfinding to go bananas and the unit starting to spin around making a 10 cm adjustment to the route.
+ Other unit behaviour seems better. Engineers actually repair stuff if ordered to 'assist' in an area. Air units attack stuff instead of just making 10 fly-bys before doing anything useful.
+ The action and explosions looks pretty nice (although the units look like shit).
+ Other engine/gameplay fixes.

(Things I'm undecided on
* Seems the game is faster paced. Less basebuilding micro and tweaking.
* Tech-tree. Units don't seem to become obsolete after teching up, instead you unlock units of different roles and improve ones you have.

Bad stuff:
- The resource system, holy hell! I can't queue units if I don't have the resources to build them NOW? You got to be kidding me. Also if you're going to pause my production, at least fucking resume it when there's enough resources!
- Research "points". What a stupid way to do this. Why not assign your research facilities to unlock techs over time instead of them producing a "resource" you can use to go from 'shitbots' to 'ultramega planeteating megarobot lazermonster' in 0.9 seconds.
- Units and buildings look like plastic toys.
- I hate the Maddox asshole already. The story and characters seem pretty ridiculous.

All in all, the game is very different from SupCom 1. As a different game it seems okayish if some of the horrid bad things are fixed. I'm surely going to play the demo again, it was that entertaining.

 

[Acidwell]

It is pretty simplified compared to the original but it isn't a bad game, if this was a new rts it would be excellent.
Also you CAN have multiple engineers at one building you just tell the extras to assist the first one and they build or do what ever the first does. Don't forget that this is just the demo and a lot of the land units are blocked from it so the area anit air could be in that section

 

[Amnestic]

I wish the demo let us play with an experimental or two - that would have been fun, especially as you can research about 5 of them :/

You did get to play with an experimental or two.

You got the Aircraft Carrier and the super duper air gantry thing which made the flying aircraft carrier, the mega gunship and the mega transport thing.

 

[Wicky_42]

I wish the demo let us play with an experimental or two - that would have been fun, especially as you can research about 5 of them :/

You did get to play with an experimental or two.

You got the Aircraft Carrier and the super duper air gantry thing which made the flying aircraft carrier, the mega gunship and the mega transport thing.

Wait - you CAN build those? Where?! I though you needed an experimental factory or some such for those? :O

Then again, I never even began to need one, so one might wonder what the point is...