/v/ - Video Games

Sins of a solar empire (especially with the sins of the prophets or star trek armada 3 mods) could be said to handle the scale better. Supcom has better artillery, though.

>>15349608

SOSE isn't really playable as an RTS as games take far too long (8-10 hours). It's more of an RTS/4X hybrid. I wouldn't say the two are really comparable.

>>15349578

Add an orbital layer like the one the UEF satellite used.

The one man band approach doesn't scale. SupCom approaches the limits of human attention and reaction time.

Make it even bigger, but distribute responsibilities among more players. Have teams with a rough military hierarchy composed of a strategic general, economy/production minister(s) building a Factorio-style production line, and squad commanders responsible for 100-200 units each, and possibly allow random players to drop into the game to command a solo unit. Field engineering teams could answer to both commanders and the economy department.

>>15350007

That sounds pretty cool. A wargame-style RTS with a "general" post and a real hierarchy. To really let the strategy be what it needs to be, it would have to be really slow-paced and games would have to last a long time. Almost like a grand RTS.

I don't know if it would make sense on a single map, though. It would have to be too massive to make the delegation of responsibility make sense. It would have to almost be a fusion of Grand strategy and RTS to make sense like that, and I'm struggling to come up with a good way to make that flow well. Perhaps the "general" is essentially playing a grand strategy while each of the others (as some lower position, "colonel" or something) plays individual RTS battles. The individual battles would be weighted by incoming resources which would have to be allocated by the general, and the battles would be decided by the strategic skill of the player as well as available resources. Colonels can abandon a battle when at a strategic disadvantage to avoid taking too-heavy casualties.

Having a heavier hierarchy than that would probably lead to games that take a very long time, though. Anything above a 3-tiered hierarchy with lots of specialized jobs would lead to "games" that are more of whole campaigns, taking many days, perhaps even weeks.

>>15349578

Spring Engine based games feature a lot of fairly good TA clones but again TA is much smaller in scale than Supcom. As far as large scale RTS goes Supcom is still the pinnacle of gameplay.

Also the game still has a large and active playerbase.

>>15350073

Large is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's impressive how easy it is to get a game going with 600~ players on FAF

>>15350096

600 aint large for a shootan, but its pretty large if youre talking about an RTS.

>>15349578

>Is there any way to improve upon SupCom or has it perfected large scale arcade RTS?

Proper modern hardware support, maybe some GPGPU support for physics/pathfinding.

>>15350027

Pretty much this. Modded TA is as good as RTS gets.

>>15349608

if you are interested in space battles i would highly recommend SoaSE

pretty much every scifi franchise has mod to this game and unmoded its great

the scale is huge but game usually takes at least 4 hours

>>15350007

It'd take somebody actually competent to make both engaging game and provide proper tools for players to communicate efficiently, especially the latter. It's also quite a bit demanding from players, since they have to learn to communicate and coordinate their actions. I imagine the best way to divide a few players per side would be something like economy/base player (though I question necessity for such a player, if nobody else uses economic buildings…), the general and various compositions of field commanders. The most difficult part probably would be communications.

>>15350027

>>15350241

I never followed TA that much. Why did it fail to be a good successor to SupCom?

>>15350430

I assume you mean PA. TA came before SupCom, and was fantastic.

PA failed for a lot of reasons. The main ones are that it was buggy as fuck, difficult to control (like really, really fucking bad; when I played it, there were transports to move individual units from one planet to another, but each transport only carried one unit at a time, and you had to control each one individually. So you want to move 20 units to another planet? Grab 20 transports, and one at a time select each of the individual units to pick up. Fucking disgraceful), and essentially unpolished and unfinished. It had a lot of glaring technical flaws, like horribly bad pop-in (when model and texture quality change depending on your distance, which can be done well, but "pop-in" is when it's visible), which is really bad when the entire game is zooming in and out very frequently to move from planet to planet. The different layers of the planet (surface and orbit) are essentially completely separated and only sort of interact, and moving between them feels really clunky. Controlling almost everything in the game is just clunky.

I haven't played it in about 5 years, but I was really not impressed at the time, and I was really looking forward to it as an old TA fan from when it was new. Maybe it's better now, but I don't think that's likely

In the end, it felt like a stripped-down TA on round maps that were sort of connected in a hacky way rather than real interplanetary combat. Interesting concept but with shitty controls, no good tutorials, tons of bugs, graphical issues, and nothing to really make it worth having interplanetary combat (not even space combat between the planets). Playing it is just disappointing, and makes you want to just go back to TA or SupCom, both of which are simply funner.

I wish that SupCom was more popular here. I'd love an excuse to play more. /v/ tournaments would be fun.

I never played SupCom the only RTS I ever got into was WC3. What makes it so good?

>>15352090

You know how in WC3 and all blizzard RTS you can only see a tiny portion of the map for no reason?

In SupCom you can zoom out to see the entire map. Units, at a certain zoom level, become easily identifiable icons that convey a lot of information quickly. This is a microcosm of the entire game which is focused on making doing large things simple. For example, if you want to task 5 factories to produce 3 tanks, one artillery, and one AA (that ratio) indefinately you do the following:Select all of the factories. Right click on the factory you want to give the orders to. Queue up the 5 units. Click the "produce indefinately" button. Now you can set a rally location for the master factory and everything coming out of the 5 factories will go there. You can also take transports, tell them to assist the master factory, and they will transport the units to the rally point.

Everything is like this.

Combine this with pretty good balance, varied factions, some interesting units (admittedly a lot are boring), and a very good multiplayer client that can be used with a pirated copy and I can't think of many ways to improve it.

>>15350481

its already been 5 years?

>>15352169

Is it tryhard gookclick shit? I prefer games like Dawn of War Ultimate Apocalypse that let me just build massive armies and fight the AI on varied maps.

>>15352280

APM doesn't really matter since you can queue dozens of actions and most things take a significant amount of time, so as long as most of your shit has a to do list you're operating optimally. Understanding and mastering the economy is the most important thing though, and that requires practice.

>>15352280

its actually anti apm for casuals since every unit takes 6 seconds to respond to commands

>>15352448

What? No it doesn't. You can micro certain units to kill entire armies if their composition is shit.

>>15352473

hover tanks are nasty

AI War improved upon it a fair bit with significantly more control over automation and unit commands, as well as larger overall war scale. TA is still the absolute best though, solely because you can transport enemy units.

>>15352674

The enemy ships are released from tractors and proceed to do retarded AI shit. The various tractor weapons are loads of fun though, especially tractor drone launchers.

In those other games you can't disable cute little engineers, throw em into your van, speed back into your base, and spray your green stuff all over them until their mind breaks.

>>15350481

Not to mention it was utterly devoid of content. It had no campaign and a single faction. I've heard the expansion improved it to "decent", but I haven't tried it all that much, and it should have been part of the base game, anyway. There's also a mod that adds another full-fledged faction, but, again, I haven't tried it.

>>15349578

Ashes of the singularity sounds like a bad indie adventure game.