Something else I did this weekend was pickup Supreme Commander. For those of you who don’t keep up with computer games, Sup Com is the huge, much anticipated game from the same guys who did Total Annihilation. It got amazing reviews, but it’s a performance hog. Fortunately I’ve got a decent rig to run it. Core2Duo 6400 + 2GB ram + Geforce 9800 + Dell 24″.
Fire the badboy up… Welcome to get owned 101. No tutorial besides, build a power plant. Build a resource gathering thing. Okay.. now I’m going to attack you with a shitton of stuff… Yep… They basically throw you into combat without telling you anything. And those of you who say RTFM, the M has nothing in it. The graphics are beautiful, the interface takes some getting used to, but has a lot of niceities, like smart queuing, but for the most part… very complex.
The game is designed for the guy who knows all the commands. If you don’t… boy, does it suck.
I’ve been playing it between system rebuilds of my linux box (I would be wow’ing, but the (package) downloads suck down a lot of my bandwidth so… yeah. Besides… getting ganked and kernel panicing is too sucky even for me.
The thing you first notice is that you need balanced armies. For example… I had 87 light tanks. I tried to attack a base with 5 tier 1 point defense guns. Me -87 light tanks, them -1 point defense gun. 2 subs vs no sonar detection, – 15 frigates, and 2 shipyards before I could defeat them. When they say rock paper scissor, they aint kidding.
You start to pick up little tricks you can do to manage the crazy things, like queueing up a build order to generate an army. For instance, build 2 tanks, then 2 artillery, then 2 more tanks, then 1 anti aircraft, repeat build. Also, transports were a huge enigma before I finally figured out how to use them. If you try to load them up starcraft style, failure. The carrier and the troops just sit there. If you get a bunch of carriers, and set up a ferry point with just 1 of them, then tell the other 15 carriers to assist the ferry point, then tell your whole army to enter the ferry point, all the carriers work like the US Army with military precision to transport everything. Once you get things going, its awesome. Too bad they don’t mention how to do these things.
I’ll post more stuff later.
