Supreme Commander Comments by Alec Meer
Appropriate.
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@ FluffyTucker (again)
"It's a triple 3.2Ghz system, but each core is shit." Once more - any evidence for this beyond just rampantly woeful opinion? And you reckon that a single-core Athlon 64 is better than the 360 and PS3 processors? Damn! Those developers REALLY know how to squeeze power out of those 'shit' CPUs then. I mean, who knew that a single core Athlon 64 could give me Rainbow Six: Vegas and Gears of War? Unless, of course, your vocal chords and colon have been swapped over? |
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@ FluffyTucker
"Just compare Oblivion on the 360 and the PC. " Ok, lemme comapre it to a PC with a single-core Athlon 64, seeing as that is what YOU have actually said that is better than a 360 CPU. Wait, no I can't, because it's actually crapping out on me. Yes, on an expensive PC Oblivion is probably better than on 360, but on a £280 one? And a £280 when it came out, not now. Not even on a £400 or £500 PC does it look and perform better. |
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The more you play this game, the better it gets...
As for slowdowns, here's an example of why it slows down: http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/3436/... |
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Computer architecture basics:
The XBOX 360 has a three _cut down_ Power4 processor cores. It has no out of order execution and bad resource sharing, it also has way smaller caches to slow memory accesses with random data. Xenon has 1FPU, 1ALU and 2 vector units. In total 3/3/6. Core 2 has 3 processing units able to do fpu/alu/vector. Having 6 total. And because it has sophisticated out of order and decoding it can keep these well used. So it actually has more execution cores with floating point and integer operations. It also has very good out of order execution and branch prediction. The bottom line is Xenon cpu (in xbox) performs very well in streaming type applications and vector calculations. However this game has fairly little use of such processing and the true general purpose core2 (or X2) should easily wipe the floor with Xenon. Anyway the memory system of XBOX can't handle the required amount of data anyway... Yes, and the game is awesome ;) Edit: Little tweak to core microarchitecture, should have checked it in the first place...
Edited 2 times,
most recently on 15/02/07 @ 13:15
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"@Gurgeh - what sort of setup you running, resolutions, rough detail level, rough framerates? (if it's not too much trouble :) "
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB memory, 7600GS. Framerate isn't a problem until the unit count gets really high. In multiplayer synchronising all those units between players can slow things down (the blue player had over 800 units at the end) so framerate in multiplayer isn't just down to your hardware setup but also everyone else's setup and net connection. |
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"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"
It ain't static at all, the text glows and the circles "move" around a lot. What you're pointing at are prolly the animated globes in the early beta which were awesomely animated yes, but they also had the very noteworthy glitch of a non-fluent repeating point. The loading screen in place now has that a lot less. Anyway, you normally won't be looking at that loading screen for more than 10 seconds (since that's the usual loading time) so what's the big deal about it? :) |
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Well, at first I was open-minded - I love RTS games, and have done for a long time. In fairness, Total Annihilation was not my cup of tea, being more partial to Dark Reign, but nonetheless, revisiting the good old days of RTS cant be bad, eh?
Actually, it sort of can. It's not that the game is bad - graphically, very impressive etc, etc, and on a gameplay level it surely measures right up there with the old favourites. However, the measuring stick has changed. It seems that the old style of RTS is no longer enough for me; I enjoy the advances that have been made in the genre too much. Total War has revolutionised it beyond recognition, and Company of Heroes has advanced the classic style significantly. Micro-management is being toned down, and in my opinion rightly so, placing the focus on strategy and tactics. In this respect, Supreme Commander has not made progress. This is a game very firmly in the territory of the 'hardcore' RTS fan, where 'hardcore' simply means someone who only enjoys games of 5 year vintage or more. It is made for people who only want a graphical update to Total Annihilation rather than a whole new game. And, if that's what youre looking for, then they've done a good job of it. Me? I loved Pong when I was a kid, but now I would play Virtua Tennis for preference. Meanwhile, these guys are making Pong 2k7. |
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Me? I loved Pong when I was a kid, but now I would play Virtua Tennis for preference. Meanwhile, these guys are making Pong 2k7.
Not a fair comparison at all, it's not like the old style of RTS games is outdated, it's just that recent games have moved in different directions. That doesn't necessarily make them better in a way that Virtua Tennis is better than Pong. Personally, while I loved Company of Heroes dearly, way too many RTS games recently had reduced base building and resource collecting too much in favour of systems that force you to play aggressively and capture points on the map, all to make for fast, aggressive multiplayer games. Personally, I like it that SC seems to recuce that a bit. Not to mention that the scale, TA notwithstanding, is pretty unique. Comparing it to Company of Heroes doesn't make that much sense. |
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Ummm, so where's the all encompassing game play and strategy? Why would I want hundreds and hundreds of units rather than have fewer, key units that really make a difference, ones I really care about losing and ones I can really focus on my strategy with?
People wonder why RTGs are viewed as the staple of the PC hardcore - hardly a wonder is it? I've played quite a few RTSs in my time, and along with many others who've commented so far, they lost their shine for me long ago, probably after Z and C&C to be fair but Starcraft was a welcome distraction. I keep coming back to try again though, hence I'll continue to try and find merit with SC until C&C3 comes out and doesn't live up to expectations either. SC is nothing more than TA2, but without the advances I would have hoped for. Didn't this game cost millions of dollars to make? So where's the production quality? It looks awful, yes you can zoom all the way in and out, but that's not new, Frontline Command from the Bitmaps did that a few years ago before they dissapeared. Yes you can have hundreds of units - why? So that they can act as fodder for your big units, glossing over the fact it would be better with just the big units in the first place. Before someone jumps on that and points out that all of the units still have a place as you progress up the tech tree - are you really, really sure? And i'm not talking about spy units here... I was a slow convert to TA, and still think it was way over hyped, but it certainly had something, I don't feel that's transcribed to SC, although SC certtainly does have something - 7 out of 10 maybe, but I expect a LOT more for my money than this offers. 10 minutes of skirmish and 10 minutes of campaign had me in tears of boredom, not joy. The interface is dire, the sound is dire, inovation? Reeks of unnovation to me. A demo is supposed to showcase a game - the SC demo is like waking up bleary eyed next to Jade Goody after a well needed night out with old friends... It will also be very interesting to see if the game raises any legal suites from the Atari camp, owners of the TA IP. I expect there would be a huge case for GPG and THQ to answer, although I would say that this would be unfair. Apart from the almost verbatim gameplay, don't those sound effects, unit animations, and menu appearence all appear incredibly familiar? On another note, I regularily read Eurogamer, but I don't want to read another review that is almost half taken up by blathering about dual monitor support, that's just bad.
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most recently on 15/02/07 @ 15:25
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@ Stim
for someone who seems to think they are something of an authority on, well, EVERYTHING to do with this game it's surprising that you didn't know that Atari only own the TA name - Chris Taylor owns the engine and everything to do with the actual mechanic of the game. and BOY do you love the sound of your own voice! Sure the EG team are going to lose seconds of sleep over you not reading another review that "that is almost half taken up by blathering about dual monitor support" - question on that actually, How you going to know what a review is about unless you read it? |
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Well I posted my dissapointed opinion to muster some conjecture, so you go for it.
Ok, here's one for you, if Atari did TA 2, and did a spiritual successor to SC, how would that stand? I posed the point as I find it interesting, of course Chris Taylor and GPG should be able to, regardless of who actuall OWNS TA, be able to do the sequal that many people (me included) would have liked to have seen Cavedog do back in the day. I also think that for the actual size of the SC review - that my comment about a great proportion of it being taken up by the fact that it supports dual monitor support takes away from the fact that the review is about a real time strategy game - so tell me more about that please, how do the campaigns, races and features really compare and hold up? How far did you progress in how long? The things I want to really know? |
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So you got bored after 20 minutes and still give the game 7/10 :O
The reason you have hundreds of units is that it's a Strategy game, not a tactical one, and the end-game experimental units are not all-powerful. Send one in without an escort and it will get whittled down in short order by all that "fodder". I wouldn't class SC as revolutionary, although the sheer scale of what's going on hasn't been done before AFAIK. What is does is put the Strategy into RTS and that's going to give some people a headache. |
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@Gurgeh
"The reason you have hundreds of units is that it's a Strategy game, not a tactical one" Not to sure about the validity of this statement, strategy & tactical – two words that mean the same as far as skills required. @Stim ‘Yes you can have hundreds of units - why? So that they can act as fodder for your big units, glossing over the fact it would be better with just the big units in the first place.’ I think you have a very good point here… Squid
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most recently on 15/02/07 @ 17:33
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Absolutely not true. History's full of commanders who were brilliant tacticians but pants at strategy, and vice versa. The line between them is as fuzzy as those between night and day or light and death, but as in those examples they're fundamentally different domains. The perception of a near absence of strategy from the RT"S" genre is the fundamental reason Taylor made this game.
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Yes you can have hundreds of units - why? So that they can act as fodder for your big units, glossing over the fact it would be better with just the big units in the first place.’
I think you have a very good point here… Why is one thing automatically better than the other? You could just as well ask why you have to restrict yourself to 40 units in other games when you could have 300. Why not go all the way and put the unit limit to 5? Could be an interesting game, too. Does the Total War series need hundreds of units? No, you could make each unit represent 50 units, with a bigger health bar, so you have 20 units on each side representing 1000 units. Would hardly make it a better game. |
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Stim: "Didn't this game cost millions of dollars to make? So where's the production quality?"
Pretty much every full price game these days costs millions of dollars. Paying the staff alone over 18-24 months runs into millions - do the maths. If the game cost TENS of millions to make you'd have a fair point here. Stim: "Yes you can have hundreds of units - why? So that they can act as fodder for your big units, glossing over the fact it would be better with just the big units in the first place." Isn't this a staple of RTS games? At the end game you get your hands on uber base destroying units that can easily destroy lots of outdated units? In SC smaller units still have a use as the game goes on; the big units can take forever to traverse across the larger maps so smaller units are still very much worthwhile as cheap means to harass isolated enemy mass extractors and small bases. Additionally since the type of enemy unit isn't known until it's visibly seen, it's possibly to build large armies of cheap units as diversion attacks; on the radar, a group of light tanks approaching looks exactly the same as a group of heavy tanks. And as another example, some base defences are heavy hitters but slow to reload; they'll more easily repel an attack consisting of a few bigger units than lots of smaller ones. The smaller units are by no means pointless, but then I wouldn't expect someone who's only played for 20 minutes to have a clue, really. :P |
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"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."
Holey hell! Some of you guys talk nonsense! Tell me how the 360 with 3 dual core processors each with 2 cores running at 3ghz is slower than a core2duo? |
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Well, its here and its great. I spent 5 years of my life playing TA and that was the greatest game of all times for me. This is just a dream come true :)
To the people that say that the score is too high. Well, I think that the score is too high in games like Okami, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus but I do not complain, why? Because people have different tastes and play different games. To me Okami is dry, flat and uninspired apart from the fantastic art design component of the game. |
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Garibaldi said... "No mention of the insane system requirements?"
What??? You mean apart from the very lengthy 8th paragraph??? You blind??? I'm not sure why people are knocking this game, I played the demo and loved it, should be getting my copy tomorrow... Is it that all the console kiddies are jealous? ;-) |
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"Out-of-order execution" and "floating point registers" are the magic phrases in his explanation. The 360's processors lack the (expensive, difficult) hardware instructions for handling large amounts of floating-point math and logical branching. This is the kind of processing required for AI and to a lesser extent physics. They're great for the kind of predictable, brute-force processing required to, for example, twist a texture onto ten million polygons and apply five bump maps and shaders. Relative to the full instruction set of a general-purpose processor, when it comes to "thinking" they're heavily disadvantaged on a MHz-for-MHz basis. Who knows if the clocks/cores advantage is enough to offset that.
The old Ars Technica piece on the seventh-gen consoles turned out to be pretty darned wrong about the Wii, but it explains the difference between the maths at some length: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/h...
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most recently on 15/02/07 @ 19:43
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"Micro-management is being toned down, and in my opinion rightly so, placing the focus on strategy and tactics. "
You're talking about CoH? If anything then CoH put more emphasis on micro than any game before it. SupCom puts more emphasis on macro through its zoom and more convenient non-babysit commands. Tactics and strategy are still present. It's not about one unit that can make the difference, not even an experimental will stand a chance on its own in a game between two equally skilled players. It's all about the big picture, creating diversions (now there's still a goal for your Tier 1 units endgame) so you can execute a painful blow with a mixed attack from all fronts, noticing that gap in a defence and heading straight for it, it's an all-out war. There is nothing wrong with that, it's not even that oldschool imo. More abilities for a single unit and the "what the fuck is happening, it's going too fast here, I can't scroll that fast"-feeling is what most RTS's keep doing, and that wasn't different in CoH at all (the physics, the cover=cool, nice graphics but a lot more micro). Pls, let people have the other breed of RTS-preference too, it's been a long time since TA. |
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@Gurgeh - I feel I need to ratify the point - the demo is a poor showing, hopefully due to THQ rushing it out of the door, the commaner can get caught in the landscape (Skirmish) and thus incapable of continuing orders - there's not audio or visual feedback (till you go back and see it) that this has occured.
I have played it for substantially more than 20 minutes - I was comenting on the fact that the demo does not show case the title. @guvner - (with respect) how much money could have been poored back into development rather than the average FMV at the start? Do you know how much publishers make vs devs at all? Gamesutra or the latest develop mag have rough industry salaries in them, don't believe the hype, most devs do it for the love - there's fa money in it. I'm not going to quote you point for point, I agree with most of what you say in regard to unit quantities and balance, diversions are well needed in play and the ability to create a convincing feint is important - I will quote you here though "Isn't this a staple of RTS games? At the end game you get your hands on uber base destroying units that can easily destroy lots of outdated units?" doe that make it right? I'd much rather debate the mechanics of the games than get into a flame war (especially with fan boys) but will make one comment further comment on the review (no offence to Alec Meer whatsoever) but - i'd like to have seen a lot more detail for a 9/10 review. |
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This game is not the anti CIV, its just what CIV will be if CIV was in real time and set in the future.
In CoH you can finish missions using a couple of units, its all about small quantities and tactical decissions. In SC you can have those too (although not as well as in CoH) but you can also have the grand strategy that not any other RTS can offer. About the stor of SC is poor (not as bad as TA but still nowhere as good as Starcraft) but the game is superb. |
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Who the hell talks like this... "Well I posted my dissapointed opinion to muster some conjecture", "I feel I need to ratify the point" ... and still can't spell correctly? And Stim my friend i think you have tactics and strategy confused - they ARENT the same thing. And judging by the comments on this game there are a load of ignorant and/or spoilt gamers out there. If you don't like grand strategy go play CoH and stop wasting everyone's time with your invalid points and opinions. everyone has a right to their own opinion yeah yeah .. but they also have a time and a place. This review of SC was spot on, you can't fault the game for having too high system requirements, because it does wat is supposed to do so well - not tactics, but strategy. Micromanagement is a pain in the ass yes, but a good player with the right mix of units from all tech levels will always defeat a lesser player with only super units. But anyway for those that are reading, people who get CoH (which i don't like personally, it but i know its a great game) probably won't like SC.
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Criticism is valid. I do not like the interface that much, the story is not very good (although they have set it up in a better way than they did with TA). It is ok but was expecting something better like in Total Annihilation.
The music is fantastic though and the nuclear, chill feeling of the game is fantastic though. |
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SeesThroughAll
16/02/07 @ 11:40
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The review failed to give the impression whether it is a "Rush" RTS or not.
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I'm basing this on TA cos I think it still applies :)
The commander (which you start with) is extremely powerful, the only way an early rush works is if you rush the enemy base (and commander) with your commander. This is extremely risky, and no fun at all to me. It's frowned on by a lot of people in multiplayer. Also while your commander is travelling he can't be building things, while your enemy can. This means you'll almost always lose your commander if you commander rush, as he has a huge radius of damage when he explodes this death blow is your only real hope of doing anything. Skilled players will retreat their commander to the edge so they survive your commander dying. During the main game rushing plain doesn't work, your rush will grind itself out on defences unless you have a proper plan and mixed attack force. |
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Yeah, according to beta reports rushing has been shut down *hard* on all but the smallest maps, at least so far. Two reasons: First, the T1 defensive units, including the Commander, are stronger than offensive. This balance shifts as you tech up. Second, raw map size means that without an air transport infrastructure, early units take forever just to get there. This goes away as players invest in forward bases and transportation. I really respect Gas Powered for finding a way to reduce the rush while still rewarding fast expansion and initiative; if RTSes were cars, it's like previous ones didn't have a clutch.
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