
The making of Supreme Commander - camtarn
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-01-07-the-making-of-supreme-commander
======
tynpeddler
I really enjoyed Supreme Commander. There are a number of features (scale,
strategic zoom, automation controls) that I wish were more popular in RTS's.
Planetary annihilation tried to extend the concept in a novel way, but the
execution stumbled a little bit and the micro transactions were aggravating.

That being said, I think SupCom had a critical error that really hampered the
longevity of the gameplay. SupCom (and Total Annihilation) follows the
"Upgrade is Upgrade" model of game progression. This is a really common model
in a lot of mediocre RTS's. Basically it means that in the early part of the
game, you build a selection of robots, tanks, artillery, and planes. At some
point you "upgrade" your economy and build a new selection robots, tanks,
artillery and planes that are almost identical to the first batch but are
bigger and better. And then this happens again and you build a 3rd set of
units that are almost identical to the first and second sets of units, except
they're even bigger and better. If that sounds repetitious and tedious, that's
because it is. Basically you repeat the same game 3 times before you start
getting to end game units that start offering you new and different strategic
options.

This is contrasted by Warcraft and Starcraft's "Upgrade is Sidegrade" model.
In these games, every unit represents a new and unique set of options. You
upgrade your economy in order to create an army that moves faster, or in the
air, or has better artillery option. Economic progression is used to drive new
tactics and strategy, or is used to counter your opponent's new units. In this
model, the play changes as you move through the different stages of the game.
This is much more interesting to play and watch as the game is constantly
evolving as players produce new types of units.

If someone could combine Planetary Annihilation's concept, with SupCom's
execution of scale, and Starcraft's polish and upgrade model, I think we'd
have an RTS for the ages.

~~~
jbattle
You are on to something, but as a counterpoint:

The T2 navy gives a lot of options not present in T1 - largely due to longer
ranges. T1 subs and frigates mostly only interact with other naval units. But
T2 get cruisers and destroyers anywhere near a coastline and they put large
areas under thread

A lot of T2 & T3 units have weird special powers (e.g. the destroyer that can
sprout legs and walk on land, the T3 Loyalist has built-in TMD). These are
somewhat sparsely distributed though

The experimental units obviously have a lot of character

Depending on circumstances, T1 units remain viable throughout the game. I've
seen tons of matches where a T3-heavy naval invasion is pushed back by
overwhelming numbers of amphibious T1 units (Zthuees)

Making the switch from T1 to T2 and then to T3 is a huge part of the strategy
of the game. It is true that the higher tier units are more efficient per unit
of resource, but there are real costs (both in resources and in time) to
upgrading your force and the decision of when to upgrade is never easy

~~~
alyandon
I also found it very effective even in late game to mix in t1 artillery units
with mostly t2/t3 unit armies because they tend to spread their damage around
so effectively.

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klibertp
My one and only problem with SupCom is that it slows down to a crawl when you
have many AI-controlled players on a large map. This is still true today - I
tried playing SupCom on a high-end laptop from 2017, and maps larger than
10x10 with multiple AI opponents are still unplayable. There are AI mods which
supposedly improve this, but in my testing, the difference was minor to non-
existent. Which is a damn shame, because even the hardest, cheating AI is very
easy to defeat if you're somewhat experienced, so I mostly resorted to playing
against 3+ allied AIs, which is simply impossible on larger maps.

That being said, SupCom is easily the best RTS I ever played - it was
basically Total Annihilation, only bigger, better and prettier. And TA was
already an exceptional RTS, one that people still played and enjoyed as long
as a decade after release.

I think TA and SupCom ruined the whole RTS genre for me. I was trying to play
some newer RTSes, but they are all lacking in features which the two taught me
to rely on and enjoy. Strategic zoom, queues of commands in factories and
building units, waypoints, unit formations, ferry routes, terrain obstructing
visibility, radars, and getting in the way of bullets/missiles, an economy
where you have to balance income and spending, gradual construction of
structures and units, massive amounts of units on the map and massive units
themselves (experimentals), very well-balanced factions with each still being
quite distinct and so on - there are games with some of these features, but I
couldn't find a game which would have all or even most of them. SupCom2 was a
disaster and I refuse to consider it SupCom at all, so I'm basically still
waiting for the sequel.

Or maybe I just missed a game like that - suggestions on the titles to try
would be very welcome!

~~~
jbattle
You might like Sins of a Solar Empire. The scale is even larger than SupCom,
so a full game can run several hours to complete. You can play on smaller maps
as well, but the game shines best with several different solar systems.

It's got large fleets, a decent amount of automation (very little micro needed
as I recall), a huge range of scale in terms of the units themselves,
strategic zoom every bit as good as SC.

Layer on top of that a research tree, neutral factions (pirates) you can
influence, 'hero' units in the form of capital ships that you can level up and
customize.

I haven't played since the very first release, so maybe it's gotten
overcomplicated since then - but I think it's worth a look

~~~
eximius
It's still pretty good. :)

I sometimes wish there were more micro, but I'm really not that good at micro
so it's probably for the best. Haha I always feel like I have things to do,
macro-wise.

Haven't played much recently due to the game lengths, but it's always fun.

(Go Vasari!)

------
mrguyorama
SupCom still survives today with Forged Alliance Forever[0], a fan made
client, server, and community chock full of features, bug fixes, mods, and
rebalances that make the game very polished.

If you want a taste of Supreme Commander to truly understand the beauty of the
game, check out Gyle[1] who is a truly underrated caster of the game on
youtube.

[0]:[https://github.com/FAForever](https://github.com/FAForever)
[1]:[https://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta/videos)

~~~
Nelgraf
Gyle! Agreed - a roommate and I slowly made our way through the backlog. You
really grow to love Gyle - he's so enthusiastic and a fantastic commentator,
if a bit obsessed with zooming in on reclaim while a battle is happening.

------
bmc7505
I still think Total Annhilation had one of the best soundtracks of any video
game ever recorded, including The Elder Scrolls. It was Jeremy Soule’s magnum
opus. [https://youtu.be/o2jS4ZaVOWA](https://youtu.be/o2jS4ZaVOWA)
[https://youtu.be/lA-iag83kQc](https://youtu.be/lA-iag83kQc)
[https://youtu.be/r_9QO_76l_I](https://youtu.be/r_9QO_76l_I)
[https://youtu.be/1mOG3Q8CSoY](https://youtu.be/1mOG3Q8CSoY)

~~~
im3w1l
It's quite cool that you could insert the game cd into an ordinary music
player and have the background music play. Shows how proud they must have been
of it.

~~~
qu4z-2
That was a moderately common thing in those days. In particular, iirc, there
used to be a cable between the CD-ROM and the sound card that let you play
audio off the CD without having the (limited) CPU needing to get involved,
deal with audio encodings, etc. The CD would have a data track followed by a
bunch of audio tracks, then the game can just say "Play track 5" and carry on
with its business.

At least, that's my understanding. I was pretty young in those days and some
of this is reconstructed "Oh, right, that would make sense".

The downside is that if you find a dump of only the data track/files it's hard
to reconstruct the full experience of abandonware games. FireFight just isn't
the same without the background music.

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russnewcomer
I'm a big fan of Chris Taylor and his games, the modding community around TA
led 14-15 year old me to learn how to program so I could make my own mods. I
think one of the most underrated things about the best of Chris' games is the
interface. The TA, Dungeon Seige, and SupCom interfaces never get in the way
of play, and are very, very fluid. GPG's two games that were less successful,
DemiGod and Space Seige, added layers of complexity onto interfaces that made
the games feel more technical, managerial, and less fun than needed to be.

As I developer, I really strive to think about how the interfaces I design and
implement are used by my users to quickly do repetitive or important tasks,
traits I associate to Ctrl-grouping, shift clicking to build 5 units at a time
in TA, and of course, strategic zoom.

By the way, Camtarn, still like Guanine? :) I lurked the Cavedog WSB in the
early years.

~~~
camtarn
Holy crap! Yes, that's me :D What a blast from the past.

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docker_up
Total Annihilation was one of the best examples of rock solid software that I
had seen up to that point. My friend and I played it across the country on
dialup modems, with 500 units each. It would slow down to a crawl, but it
never crashed. We would optimize by giving each other 30 mins to build a fort
and then we could attack at will. It was truly a thing of beauty.

~~~
danso
I never really played online, but as a kid I was fascinated by the near-
automation that TA allowed for with its unit queuing options. I'd happily pay
full price for a game that had TA-era graphics, but the AI improvements of
today. Though it seems improvements in single-player AI has stagnated with the
growing ubiquity of multiplayer [0].

[0] [https://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-
alife/](https://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-alife/)

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xenihn
Slightly offtopic but I'm now reminded of it -- I was a huge fan of TA as a
kid, skipped Supreme Commander, and supported the Kickstarter for Planetary
Annihilation based on the awesome pre-rendered gameplay trailer (as I'm sure
many others did).

I was really disappointed with the final game and put maybe 2 hours tops into
it before never playing it again. It just wasn't fun to play.

Despite that, I still felt satisfied that the game was finished and came out
at all. The engine is really impressive IMO, and I enjoyed their engineering
updates and videos.

This is probably the only time I ever supported a project and didn't care at
all for the final product, but still didn't feel burned because I could
appreciate the enormous undertaking that it was, from engineering and
development standpoints.

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drtse4
Imho, this is probably the best RTS ever created. Huge maps, huge number of
units easy to control with a great UI, amazing music (the first game that had
a background music that was aligned to what you were doing in the game? i.e. a
mass attack triggered the appropriate bgm).

~~~
theandrewbailey
I'm sure that the Elder Scrolls 3 had situational music, and that was a few
years prior. TES 4 did for sure, and that was a year before. I'm a big fan of
Jeremy Soule (composer of SupCom, Elder Scrolls 3,4,5).

~~~
jamesrcole
I don't know if it was the first but there was iMUSE at Lucasfilm Games
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE)

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danso
Great to hear that Chris Taylor is working on a new RTS, but I wonder how
it'll be received given that the RTS genre has seemingly been eviscerated,
particularly by MOBAs. Even Starcraft 2 seems to be a niche title, even
overshadowed by its predecessor -- which Blizzard opted to remaster. The only
other RTS I've recently paid attention to is also a remaster: AOE2 HD.

From my narrow personal perspective, it's easy for me to understand why RTSes
aren't popular -- I'm too old to have the time to master them. But I wonder
why the genre has stagnated for the rest of the world -- is it because it's
too complex? Or because the mechanics of other similar genres, like MOBAs, are
inherently superior? With instant-gratification being the default mindset
nowadays, the thought of spending 30 minutes building out a base only for it
to be wiped out in 2 minutes of action does seem antiquated.

~~~
pmalynin
I wouldn’t say the RTS genre has been destroyed per se. We have Stelaris for
example and Hearts of Iron 4 some time ago. There is also RimWorld and
Wargame. Banished, comes to mind. Oh and of course They Are Billions, great
game combining Starcraft and age of empires.

Anyway, I think the genre is alive and kicking — mainly driven by smaller
developers. It’s a shame that EA killed off C&C but they only have themselves
to blame.

~~~
thrower123
Paradox grand strategy games are real-time, but it's bending the definitions
of the genre to a ridiculous, meaningless level to consider them RTS games.

~~~
pmalynin
My point more generally was that hard core strategy games are still coming out
and are beloved

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AceJohnny2
For fans looking for a fix:

Spring [1] is an RTS framework that started off rebuilding TA's engine. It has
since branched off with mods creating new RTS's entirely... but still with
that TA/SupCom feel.

FA Forever [2] is a mod for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (the
expansion), that gives access to community servers to download maps, mods, and
find matches. It replaces Gas Powered Games' own shutdown servers.

[1] [https://springrts.com/](https://springrts.com/)

[2] [https://www.faforever.com/](https://www.faforever.com/)

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baud147258
As a RTS Sup Com was pretty cool, even if the scale of the maps was a little
daunting. On the other hand, during the campaign missions, the maps extended
as objectives were reached, which was a good way to avoid being overwhelmed
right at the start.

A few other cool features: chaining move or build orders, having worker
helping factories, flying unit doing crash damage on death and being able to
set repeating build tasks in factories.

~~~
Karunamon
Believe it or not, Supreme Commander is a spiritual successor to Total
Annihilation - a game which actually had all of these mechanics back in 1997!

TA can be had on Good Old Games for $6 and works perfectly on modern Windows
or Wine.

~~~
majormajor
TA used to crash at launch on GOG for Win 10 for me, but I rechecked after
this and between updates to the GOG setup and/or Windows, it works now.
Thanks!

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alyandon
For anyone wanting to pick up a copy on the cheap, Supreme Commander bundles
are currently on sale for 80% off on Steam.

~~~
kwoff
I think it's not a coincidence...

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mariuz
Previous related discussion Supreme Commander – Graphics Study
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770020)

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corysama
If you like this, you’d probably appreciate
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/)

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pivotalcmdr
I want my dual panes back, isn't this a file commander? Who cares about games

