What Would Matt Do

Wow… Back when I first covered 4.0, I asked that Hasbro/Wizards not screw it up. I realize that was asking for a lot. After playing Star Wars Saga (Talent trees stolen from WoW, no more rolling for saves, dumbed down lots of things) and seeing what they are saying about 4.0, I haven’t been that enthused…

Then a buddy tells me you can find out exactly what they are doing with 4.0, before it’s even released. I thought that was pretty sweet…then he tells me they are selling two separate books each at $20 a bucks a pop. Not with actual rules or anything. Nothing you’ll be able to use in the game when it finally releases in June. Just preview information. That’s it.

Just so we’re clear here, Hasbro is selling previews of their next system. SELLING IT. WTF?!?! I knew, I fucking knew it. I knew Hasbro was going to screw it up. I knew they were going to nickel and dime us. I knew they were going to milk every penny out of this shit. And even I didn’t foresee them selling got damn preview books. I can’t wait to see what else they charge us for. Maybe they’ll release new rules that requires everyone that wants to play owns all three of the core books, or that to run a game, you have to pay them a fee (like another company tried to do) or maybe sign away your first born. Or maybe even worse, they’ll want you to sign up to a monthly fee to access errata (i.e. - bug fixes), new adventures, character sheets, etc.

Thanks for ruining D&D Hasbro, thanks a fucking lot.

-

What Would Matt Do: I guess I’m going to have to stick with 3.5 and White Wolf for now. Oh, and give a hearty fuck you to Wizards of Draining their Customer Base of Every Last Nickel and Dime, er, of the Coast. Sometimes I really hate being right.

(this is all based off the demo and logical assumptions. All of which are subject to change in the actual game)

I can’t say I’m horribly disappointed. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from the latest C&C, especially after Generals was just mediocre and C&C2 was such a joke. But damn me if I wasn’t hoping for more.

As my good friend Squeaky describes it, “the game is more about action and blowing shit up than ’strategy’”. Now, for him, that’s not a bad thing. For me, that’s a horrible thing. It’s a got damn Real Time Strategy game, not a FPS or some other thing where blowing up stuff is the point of the damn game. There is supposed to be strategy involved, not just building tanks as fast as possible and rushing them. As I was playing the demo and built up some medium tanks and they got pwned by some infantry, I was pretty impressed. I thought, “Wow, they actually added in some rock paper scissors action.” then I upgraded my tanks to have rail guns…nevermind. It completely removes the need to have any infantry, except maybe a few here and there at your base. And yet, there are about 6 or 7 different kinds of infantry you can build…Thanks for all the useless units guys!

And just coming from SupCom where defenses matter a lot, the sillyness of these defenses is horrible. They are worse than useless. And buildings…dear god man. They die in about three seconds to two or three tanks. Which means serious base rapeage. Sweet! Oh wait.

And a now special comment about the level of zoom being locked to the height a three year old can jump…wtf? Sure, your game must slow way down on zooming out what with all of the special effects, but man, they aren’t that great so as to limit me to seeing so little at once. I’m going to let the size of the maps go at this point, assuming they are just a demo thing (if not, you’ll find me gunning for you, because they are damn small).

Overall I’m anything but impressed. Yeah, some of the grahpical effects are cool and the explosions are somewhat fun, but for my money, RTSes aren’t about supar special effects, but about actual gameplay. And there? C&C3 fell down hard.

What Would Matt Do: Try to educate EA about what Strategy means. Or maybe just call C&C3 an RT, skip the S all together.

Dazam!

While I’m still in the New Game Glo™, I’ll go ahead and declare Supreme Commander the best multiplayer RTS I’ve played in five years, maybe the best RTS I’ve played ever. I’m that impressed.

Pros:

• Amazing game play.
• Great graphics
• Actual strategic RTS
• Easy interface for joining multiplayer games.

Cons:

• If you’re computer isn’t top of the line, you’ll probably see some slow downs when not on the lowest settings.
• Single player is boring…at least, the hour I played of it. Very much on a rail and very much you only have this much tech, make it work. Bluh.
• Interface for joining multiplayer games isn’t in-game.

Let me talk about the multiplayer because I’m not really playing anything else so far.

Supreme Commander is amazing. Each game can be very different from the last depending upon the map (does it have water, what are the natural flow points, where are the mass extractors) and, of course, the person you’re playing. This being the beginning of the game, no style is THE style to win with and given the flexibility of the game, I’m imagining/hoping there won’t be a single win strategy like you find in so many other RTS game.

You start by either going into the game and selecting Multiplayer and then GPGNet or by directly loading up the external GPGNet application (my preferred way). From there, like most other RTS games, you can join an auto ranked game, join a custom game, host a custom game, see friends and clan mates online, etc. One cool thing about the GPGNet interface is that when a friend in the same chat channel creates a game, you see a message with a html like link you can click to autojoin the game. That’s pretty nice.

Once you’ve joined a game and it’s started up, you are presented with a sparse looking map, a Commander who just appeared in huge burst of energy (literally clearing nearby debris, sometimes starting forest fires and so on) . Your two pronged goal? Destroy the other player’s Commander (or their base completely). Why do I say two pronged? Because the economy is what enables the huge strategic game that Supreme Commander is. If you don’t keep pushing your Mass gain and your Energy output, you’ll lose. If you don’t manage them both so you don’t end up in a major deficit, you’ll lose. If you don’t guard your base well, you can easily be taken out by having your resources network hurt badly enough so you can’t recover in time to defend yourself.

Thankfully enough, SupCom is all about defense, more so than any recent RTS. You’ve got ground guns at every tech level (the three tech levels in the game reached by upgrading factories so you can build engineers of that tech level, along with other fightin’ units), AA guns at most levels and more than a few options for shielding your installations and troops (and your troops can shoot out of the shields. Very cool). So as you’re upgrading your economy, building your fighting forces, you also build defense around your base, extractors, choke points, etc.

And with all of that, you’ve also got to manage three different factories (Land, Air, Naval) worth of units, all with three tech levels, all with lots of rock paper scissors units. How do you manage it all?

Patrols and queues.

You can put units on huge Queues to build anything. First thing I do when starting a game, for instance, is to start my Commander building three extractors (just by holding down shift as I place them), add four power plants, and a Land factory connected to the power plants for an Adjacency bonus (more later). Then when you’ve got your Land factory started, you can have it queue units it will be building when it’s finally done (once any Factory is started, you can queue up what it will build. So NICE). Then when your first engineers get built, you queue them building more extractors, ground and air defenses and let them go on their marry way (you have to tell them where and what, of course, but they will just keep at until it’s all done…be it 2 or 100 components).

Then with Patrols, you can have your more warlike units ready to attack a moments notice and always be scouting. Want to know when your opponent starts building on a part of the map, just have a scout or an interceptor built from your Air factory patrol that side of the map. Want to have your tanks attack anything that comes along on this entire choke point? Just have them patrol it. They will stop, attack, then go back to what they were doing, assuming they aren’t now dead :).

Another nifty feature is the Adjacency bonus lots of buildings get. Want to make your factories build faster? Build some power plants next to them, so you’ll both get power and the factories will get a bonus to their building speed. Want more mass from your extractors? Build mass storage sites next to them and they will mine faster. Everything just fits together.

That really describes what I’ve seen of SupCom so far, everything fits together. A whole host of features you’ve wished for in other games are in SupCom. “Man, I wish I could build a shield over that supergun so it was twice as hard to kill, but it didn’t stop it from shooting anyone else” Done. “Man, I wish I could have my planes patrol this area and destroy anything that flies nearby.” Done. And so on.

The game is a masterpiece. And I barely even mentioned the combat. So many different ways to attack. From the early rush (which must be well planned and executed since the Commander is a formidable unit on it’s own and handle most early tech level 1 rushes), to the experimental units that only tech level 3 engineers can build, the game is full of possibilities.

Oh, I’d be missing amiss on a really good part of the game if I didn’t mention how the player rating works. Ever been a ranked Chess player? (I have! Because I’m cool! My score? well, don’t ask) If you have, you know exactly how the rankings in SupCom work. If you beat players at your level, you gain a set amount of points. If you beat players higher ranked than you, you gain more points. If you beat players lower than you gain very little points. And the automatching system takes it all into account when doing ranked 1v1 games. Very nice, very simple and very friendly to all skill levels. Play a few games and you’ll start playing players your level everytime you play. And that’s what multiplayer is all about, a challenging game.

Matt’s First Look Rating: Direct Hit (proudly stolen from Daily Radar)

The recent release of the SupCom single player demo really brought a few things to mind as I played through a bit of it.

One, I’m really tired of the tried and true RTS mechanic of doling out unit types. You either need to have me find and expand my tech in some believable in-game manner or give me all of my abilities up front. The entire single player game doesn’t need to be a tutorial on how to use the system and if your campaign is depending on the next unit type as a driving force to get the player to continue, you’re already losing. That being said, this isn’t the end of the world, just annoying. Maybe I should I tell those kids to get off my lawn too…

Two, this game has really good graphics…when you see them. I mean it. I was zoomed for some reason or another looking at my material extractor and was amazed at the level of detail it had. Same goes for a lot of the units, the explosions, the forests catching fire, the guns/unit missing with their shots and so on. The problem? You don’t see that very much. Due to the very nature of the game, you’re often zoomed out to such a level that you either can’t distinguish units from each other or you’re just seeing icons. And the one thing that is always present, the map, is VERY sparse. Those factors together give the impression that SupCom doesn’t have great graphics. You’ll hear this complaint a lot. It’s not true really, but at the level you’re playing, it often will feel like that. And if it feels that way…

Three, I was impressed with the level of story and the voices for the single player game. I thought for sure it would just be a tacked on thing to help you get used to playing for multiplayer. That is not the case. I was pleasantly surprised.

Four, and perhaps the most important, I really like the multiplayer of SupCom a lot more. Yeah, the voices and story are interesting and the objectives are plainly spelled out, etc. But it’s pretty straight forward.The AI is going to do this and this and that’s about it. Playing the multiplayer beta is overly interesting because there are so many viable tactics. It’s truly war on a massive scale. Work a land invasion, attack via the water, dominate in the air, turtle up a bit and sneak attack, build on their continent when they aren’t looking (taking out that radar isn’t very hard), etc. The unpredictability of the human player makes the battles better. Though, much like Risk or Axis & Allies, the moves the beginning often decide the late game. Which is a good thing.

My only complaint with multiplayer? Yeah, there is no unit micromanagement, but you had better rush the resources. If not, you’ll get destroyed in the later game. You need all of the material sites near you and as many of the other guys as you can get and you need power stations like a mad man. Get it done! So yeah, it’s not WC3 (dear god that was annoying), but resource management is still as or more important than good battle management. Which is an RTS staple for sure, but I think I was looking/hoping for a bit less fo that.

So, icon war game comments aside, I’m definitely going to give this one a go. The multiplayer alone has sold me on it. The single player is just and added bonus.

What Would Matt Do: I’ll buy it as soon as I can. It’s a good to great game. And I love everything GPG has put out so far, minus that last expansion for DS2. Ugh.