Supreme Commander Comments by Alec Meer

This is a great game - and a very fair rating.

Who didn't see a review coming at this time O_O
Sounds a bit good regardless.

Strange time for a review
;)

Hoping this comes to the 360.

If only my PC could handle this. It just can't :( Sniff.

A lot of people seemed to love Total Annihilation. For me, it was the game which finally turned me off RTS altogether.

I'm loving this rts revival and this one is the cherry on top.

"a timeless classic should have more universal appeal."
Of course it should.

you know, i don't think i could be happier, first ever dual monitor game?

/after 9 pints

Awesome!

No mention of the insane system requirements?

Going by both the Beta and the demo the games just not well optimised at all, PCZone seem to back me up of this aswell, seeing as their insane power house rig had trouble running it at full.

Whats the point in creating a game where no one can play it and have it look like it should. So people can finally enjoy it in a few years time? When theres a bunch of new games to play?

Eh, I think ill give this a miss, it just seems to want the player to do far too many things at once. I can handle multi-tasking but on this scale its just not fun anymore, its like a chore.

@absolutezero : Ah, see i once fell into the same trap as it seems the developers of this have.

Years ago, i used to make pc games for a living. As a method of "future proofing" our game, we put in a "super high" graphical setting. The idea was, that no CURRENT pc was capable of coping with this setting, but by time the game came out on budget, pc's would more than be able to cope, and then as a budget game, it'd stand arm in arm alongside the "full priced" games at that date. We even put warning messages to that extent in the manual.

Then the game was released, and every pc gaming mag moaned about the game being unoptimal, and that with everything turned on, it ran too slowly... People on message boards moaned about the frame rates, etc etc.

It seems that gamers are stupid and will turn everything on (even if you tell them not to), and then moan about framerates.

In the end, we just released a patch which fixed the problem. Everyone was happy, all gamers in forums said how great the patch was, etc etc. All we'd done was disabled the highest level option.

To this day i still believe that gamers who post on forums are monkeys who just like to moan! :-)

I got out of industry not long after shaking my head at how stupid some gamers are :-)

id be very interested to know what that game was called smelly? :)

i seem to remember though that TA was the same - when it first came out you needed 64mb of ram to play on the really big maps and very few people had that much ram at that time. Its the same thing now with this game and everyone remembers TA as a classic.

I am so looking forward to this game - i think its going to be awesome.

"In striving to be the ultimate RTS, it accentuates everything that those don't get on with strategy games despise the most."

Yeah. I'm one of those people. I'm sure it's a lovely RTS, but I despise RTS games. The things that I don't like about them seem to be ingrained within the genre now, so I don't see myself liking an RTS game in the foreseeable future, either.

Oh well.

/goes back to playing Civ

Review embargo expired today? :)

smelly: Bad user interface design is the cause of your problem.

Do not allow the user to select the highest possible setting if it will be unplayable. Warn the player if his cheap ass Geforce won't be able to handle 16xFSAA at that certain resolution he decided to choose.

PC game interfaces are shit.

Thing is I never said I had everything turned up to high. In fact I set it to the same level as I have Company of Heroes. Coh runs perfectly with minimal hits to how it looks, even with SC looking like complete shit it still as awful frame rate problems.

Future-proofing is pointless, a classic game is going to be well recieved when it his budget, even if it does'nt look as nice as anything else at the moment. Look at the reception that The Longest Journey got when it was recently released. More people play CS than CS:S and the Thief games are still very playable.

Theres a difference between future-proofing a game and releasing a game that no current PC can play in any form.

This little discussion is moot though because you already admitted that internet forum users just whine about anything, much like yourself about my first comment. Good job.

@Smelly: By any chance, are you really Scott Adams of Dilbert fame? Man, what you described is SO like him!

I couldn't get into it (based on the demo). Seemed bland. Might have to give it another go.

Scott Adams doesn't like kiddy Nintendo games, so no, I don't think so.

;)

Anyone tried running this on a Macbook?

"Which is also its greatest flaw. In striving to be the ultimate RTS, it accentuates everything that those don't get on with strategy games despise the most. It's a game of constant management on multiple fronts"

Eeeeeek!

/runs in terror

absolutezero, think of a difference between SC and CoH. Like, the scale. In CoH you occasionally have 20+ units on the screen and couple of buildings.
I've made assaults with 100+ of my land units ramming into well-populated and well-defended enemy base, backed up by 50+ gunships, some 20-odd fighters and 10 bombers, plus naval support. Guns blasing, shields taking hits, shields going down, turrents opening frantic fire, units maneuvering etc etc. That alone could make game into crawl. And my poor comp has tu calculate something for all these units, render them to my monitor etc etc.
So same settings don't work. Though yes, it is more bland then CoH. Specially the landscapes.

I'll be rather sticking to CoH and WH 40k: Dark Crusade. Sounds very good, though.

a bit like gran turismo, eh

Do not allow the user to select the highest possible setting if it will be unplayable.

Dear God, no. A warning, yes - many games do that these days, but I don't want a game to patronise me. And nearly all game come with a "recommended" button which usually works pretty well. I actually agree with smelly - people complain the game doesn't run well at the highest setting, then happily play the console version that looks like the PC version on "medium" anyhow.

That said, SC is an evil system hog - best way to improve the perfromance is to turn off the minimap, which is a bit suicidal though.

I was going to give my second monitor to a friend. Might have to reconsider now...

I haven't played it, but I have a feeling I will still appreciate CoH more

Smelly - isn't it a bit like driving - you're safer off assuming everyone around you can potentially be idiotic ;) We've had people ring up and complain because they can't turn their computer or monitor on ;)

I'm intrigued! It'll be like advance wars DS - I'll pick it up, play it, fail miserably after the first few scenarios, get angry, leave it on a shelf for 9 months and finally sell it on ebay.

Nice review though, makes me wish I had 2 monitors.

Played TA last night again with a couple of mates and it was still as brilliant as ever.

TA & E2150 are the best RTS games ever made imo. Really looking out for this.

To this day i still believe that gamers who post on forums are monkeys who just like to moan! :-)

A bit of a selfowning there? ;)

"@absolutezero : Ah, see i once fell into the same trap as it seems the developers of this have."

That'll be the trap of programming it really badly then ? You can turn everything off in SC, run at 800*600 and play in map mode only and it'll still run at 1 FPS when you've got a large number of enemies. It's the AI that appears to use all the system resources, not some scaleable graphics engine.

Not sure this is a great review tbh, it's great that the reviewer has played it on dual monitors. What about those ( and I'm guessing we'll be in the majority ) that don't have 2 monitors ? When I played the demo I was amazed at the utter awfulness of the UI, it took up over 50% of the screen so that, on a 17inch TFT, I seemed to be playing on a tiny strip at the top of the screen. I'm sure the game has great graphics, but in order to actually do anything I was zoomed so far out it was more Dune 2 than CoH for me.

I'm sure I'll pick this up at some point, and I'm sure it'll be a great. But I'll need to upgrade my PC, wait for the inevitable patch optimising the AI, and buy a second monitor before it's worth it. That's a pretty big spend.

TA & E2150 are the best RTS games ever made imo. Really looking out for this.


E2150 was indeed fantastic - and it had terraforming, all those years ago. Building big trenches around the base rocked. :)

Aaah.. dual-monitor gaming == ubergoodness. It's not quite the first game to make use of two monitors - X2 and X3 could do so as well, providing additional views on the second monitor.

I also remember how I tricked Homeworld 2 into running on two monitors. (For many games, this is surprisingly easy when you use the "horizontal span" mode. I think it's nVidia only, though, and the monitors should have the same size and resolution.) It was truly a sight to behold - the level of immersion is so much higher, it's kinda crazy.

IMHO this is one area where PC gaming can truly distinguish itself from the console crowd. I wish more games would make use of it - nowadays, all graphics cards have two adapters anyway.

I picked it up a few days ago (found a store who forgot it isn't out until tomorrow here in Sweden). Played 1 1/2 mission yesterday on my Dell 9400 laptop and so far it has worked great.

The laptop has a 7900GS videocard (and I haven't unlocked it yet so it runs faster), has Vista Ultimate installed and has 2 GB of ram. I had no problems setting the game to run at 1440x900 with everything set to high and 2xAA. And tht even with a ton of units on the screen. So I don't think it's that bad really.

So far liking the game a lot. I always loved TA so I've been looking forward to it. Man are the missions long though. I like it how the mapo gets bigger and bigger and bigger as the mission progresses.

/B

I'm pleased to see it getting a good score, but having been playing the retail version for well over a week - I can't help but wonder how on earth this review misses the biggest negatives.

production values for a start, the design is fantastic but the final product looks and feels like an alpha test, the 'battlemap background' is a single jpg which gets stretched to whatever resolution the user picks (and poorly stretched at that), the loading screen was blatantly supposed to have been animated but instead they kept a static picture and some unaliased white text in the direct-x default font, then the huge list of bugs and memory leaks, the AI which jumps between genius and moron at random, the dodgy path finding and AI aiming where two units will happily sit opposite each other shooting rockets into the tree inbetween them until user intervention.

and most of all, how on earth could the review not make any comment about the performance? Even on a top end alienware rig people are finding the single player mode almost impossible to play due to the CPU usage, it's not multi-threaded very well and so even with 4 cores you find the first core max's out and slows the whole game down, while the other 3 sit around 30% with nothing left to do but AI routines (I assume).

I'd probably have given it an 8, its certainly a top class game but needs a good patching before it can reach the lofty 9.

To: All

It's not CoH & it's not Dawn of War - it's a completely different game from a completely different developer. Deal with it!

and as for the guy who banged on about Supreme Commander being everything that he has always hated about a genre of games that he has never played and has no interest in or intention of playing - why are you even posting on this review?

Re: the high system spec for this game - Didn't a lot of people have to upgrade to play Half Life 2? I wasn't a regular reader of EG back then but did you all get up in arms about that too? seems wierd that on the one hand we all rave about how the PC is the ultimate gaming platform cos of it's adaptability and ease of upgrade but as soon as a game comes along that might just push our systems people get all upset. Maybe we should all petition Chris Taylour to make it run at the same spec as TA then even my grand parents will be able to play!

Rant over. ;)

Hoping this comes to the 360.

If only MS would let you plug any mouse into those USB ports...

the loading screen was blatantly supposed to have been animated but instead they kept a static picture and some unaliased white text in the direct-x default font

My loading screen is animated, are you sure they sent you the final version? There's some kind of spinning logo in the middle.

In terms of running this game on a widescreen monitor (there seem to be very few widescreen benchmarks generally) - if I need to run it at 1680x1050 then what sort of PC will I need for it to look decent?

E.g. atm I have a E6300, with a Sapphire X1950 Pro Ultimate and 2GB RAM, would that do it? Or should I hold off buying a widescreen until more cards support the wacky resolutions?

P.S. good review, although possibly a little bit harsh. It's only a first release; when C&C Generals came out there was a bug where when the expensive supersonic Aurora bombers dropped their big bomb, the game crashed. So if it's better than that then it's a good start :)

Been playing the demo at lunch every day, and my only dislike (as with TA) is that if you have a full mass/energy bar, then you are losing...

I have always hated queuing up tons of units and watching my resources fall, but with this and TA, you have to do it. Once you get your head around 'BUILD MORE!!!!!!' it become awesome.

I think i'll play it much more co-op vs AI than vs humans, as i just don't have the click mentality of some gamers.

I'm more of a Total War, Company of Heroes 'tactics over strategy' guy.

Performance issues are almost completely related to processor speed rather than your graphics card. It seems a dual core processor is almost mandatory for this game.

That's the reason it doesn't scale in performance that well - it's easy to turn down the effects and textures to help your graphics card, but not so easy to tone down the AI to give your CPU room to breathe.

@ FluffyTucker

"thinking this could run on a 360"

You know, it amazes me how some people can be so ignorant in this day and age.

The benefit of consoles is that they do not have a constantly changing, wildly different setup; even with the core and premium 360s, the baseline hardware is still exactly the same.

Therefore, developers can optimise their code to a far, far greater degree as they don't need to take into account the 100 or so graphics cards little Johnny could have, or what processor he has, or how much RAM he has.

Yes, maybe in two years Supreme Commander would look even better on the latest PC out at that time compared to the 360, but for the majority of people, for the lifetime of the 360 the 360 version would probably look and play smoother and better.

Remember, after all - Halo on the Xbox. Played on an Intel Pentium III 733 Mhz, with 64 mb RAM and the equivalent of a GeForce 3 (which, incidentally, SHARED that RAM). Now tell me that Halo could have run as well on a PC with that specification?

EDIT: Forgot to add the clock speed of the CPU. Doh!

Ohh yeah.. the things he doesn´t like make this a 11/10 in my book.. weaklings!

i wish my puter could handle it, i'd love to run the war on the 40" and all my base building and stuff on the 20" but my gfx card and cpu would melt

"Remember, after all - Halo on the Xbox. Played on an Intel Pentium III 733 Mhz, with 64 mb RAM and the equivalent of a GeForce 3 (which, incidentally, SHARED that RAM). Now tell me that Halo could have run as well on a PC with that specification?"

Yeah but Halo was shit, in terms of gameplay AND graphics.

This is Supreme Commander talk, take the unneeded Halo bashing elsewhere. It's completely irrelevant.

The thing that slows this game down on most PCs is the lack of dual core. An Xbox 360 has 3 cores, albeit each is "weaker", so in that respect it might actually be more suited to the game than most PCs.

*edit* the reason for this is the calculation of all the physics and AI that is going on, much of which is perfectly suited to multithreading (the paths of all those artillery shells for example are all independent of one another)

Unfortunately anything outside the top end of TV sets would be pretty useless as you need as much resolution as you can get on a single display.

@ FluffyTucker

"Considering it seems to be the AI that's slowing this game down, I fail to see how they could "optimize" the code to run better on a vastly inferior 360 CPU than it does on a Core2Duo type chip. Aint going to happen."

But the graphics and the physics and the shiny-explodey-things-what-go-boom will have some kind of resource drain, yesno?

So if they can optimise that code, then the supposed (seeing as the only 'proof' that this is what causes the problems are opinions on here, not actual benchmarking) AI problem would to a certain extent become mitigated.

Oh and care to provide benchmarking at all to support the statement of "vastly inferior"?

Because as a triple-core 3.2ghz system, the 360 isn't exactly a slouch. Willing to accept that a newer processor will be more speedy, but I hesitate to believe in "vastly".

Any news on what I asked? :) Whether or not this comes on the 360 is up to people who think a gamepad in *any* way is as good as a mouse for RTSes.

My copy arrives Fri XD