First impressions of the Supreme Commander demo
The Supreme Commander demo was released yesterday, and after waiting a few agonizing hours for the download, I was finally able to play it. Here are my first impressions.
Some technical difficulties still need to be worked out (since the game has already gone gold, maybe in a release patch?). I wasn’t able to get multi monitor mode working at all — the game was chugging at 0.2FPS just at the title screen when I enabled that option, and it took over two minutes to slowly navigate the menu options to turn it off again. I don’t even want to think how badly it would have performed in game. I really don’t know what went wrong. I have a GeForce 7950GT which I basically bought to play Supreme Commander, and it definitely should be able to handle this. The only possible thing I can think of is that my second monitor is rotated 90 degrees. Later I’ll try rotating it back to normal and see if the gameplay improves (for all I know, rotation is done in software, bleagh). Also, the game runs slowly in large battles, at far-out zooms, and at fast speeds, even on my brand new Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor. This reminds me of when Total Annihilation (TA) came out; the computers at the time simply weren’t good enough to really get the full experience out of it. It was only after a few years, when computers had gotten significantly better, that massive battles with thousands of units could be fought on the largest maps.
Ignoring technical difficulties, the game is great, and a lot of fun. The Metal/Energy resources from Total Annihilation have been replaced by, big stretch here, Mass/Energy, both of which function pretty much exactly the same as their analogues in TA. The tier one units are very wimpy, and need to attack defensive emplacements in large groups to be able to do any damage. The tier two units, however, are significantly better, and one of the tier two cruise missile units (or at least that’s what it feels like) seems overpowered — it will shoot at radar targets far away and destroy them before you ever see them. Incidentally, units automatically shooting at targets on radar is a nice improvement over TA, which didn’t have it originally, and then only added it with the construction of an expensive in-game building, a Targeting Facility, in one of the expansions.
The air units are excellent, especially the bombers, who, although being fragile, are great at taking out enemy units in swarms. The bombs fall inaccurately but cover a wide swath, and it’s very fun to just slow the game down a lot and watch flocks of bombs fall on their unsuspecting victims. The same commands (Move/Attack/Patrol/etc.) have been carried over from TA, which was a bit of a weakness. For instance, tell your units to attack a place and they will literally go attack the ground where you clicked. Not very useful. Tell them to move to a place and they will do so, regardless of enemy units. For ground units with swiveling weapons (which is all of them) this isn’t such a big problem, but for air units, they will literally move to exactly that position, only shooting at enemy air units that are exactly in front of them along the way, leading to massive casualties. Like TA, if you actually want to mount an effective fighter assault (to take out enemy fighters), you basically have to set up a patrol route over the enemy territory. Only then will they break off, follow, and engage enemy units intelligently. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, and some non-TA-veterans are probably having problems with the demo because of it.
The best new feature has to be the removal of the minimap. Rather than having two separate screens, you just have one screen, which transforms from the battle screen to a schematic overview map as you zoom out. It’s quite the amazing effect, and I’m surprised nobody else has used it. Navigating around in a battle is now much more fluid. The controls are all pretty much exactly spot-on, with the sole exception of the Shift key. The Shift key is used to queue up construction as well as to make scrolling around on the battle map go ridiculously fast, so if you’re trying to queue up a building in a place just slightly off-screen, well, you can see the problem. Other than that, everything is very intuitive and you’ll be navigating around the battle like a pro after just a few minutes.
All in all, from what I’ve seen of just a single campaign mission, the positives definitely outweigh the negatives, and I’m looking forward to buying this game when it comes out. I’ll have more impressions as I finish up the demo campaign and start messing around in skirmish mode.
