Supreme Commander 2 - Hardcore Games and the Downward Spiral of Mass Appeal.

The Supreme Commander 2 demo hit steam a week ahead of the actual game's release, and now people have had time to take a look.

You can go and search "Supreme Commander 2 Reactions" on Google and see the things I have, but I'll defer to my personal experience here:

Supcom 2, taken solely based on the Demo's scenarios, feels very, very wrong. There's a tantalizing edge that hints at a solid, unique gameplay experience, but it just constantly feels wrong, wrong, wrong... And, most of the concessions that I'm alienated by seem to be the sort made for those outside the devoted SupCom 1/Forged Alliances demographic.

This is mostly accomplished by a few things:

1. The Resources.
TA and Supreme Commander both utilized a realtime +/- system for their two resource types, mass and energy. You have a pol that fills up, can be expanded with certain buildings, and the costs of units is centered in a constant drain on those resources, meaning you have to balance the flow of energy and mass into your economy and then into solid units or structures.

SupCom2 has done away with this; Structures that produce resources over time remain, but they simply produce x value per so many seconds, and units have been reduced to a single cost per building order. And, these queued units price is deducted -Immediately- instead of each building project taking a rate from your economy.

To make things worse, you now have to build 'Research Facilities' which produce a third type of resource - Research Points. Which leads to the next problem.

2. The Tech Trees.



Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander both worked on a unit-based tech tree. Each level of builing unit could produce a factory, and that factory produced the next tier of builder unit, which could produce the next factory and so on. No longer is this necessary; A new panel keeps track of your resource points, and splits every tech advancement you might want into five trees (Land, Sea, Air, buildings, and ACU), each tree containing tiered benefits ranging from unlocking new units to faster veterancy gain (IE, units level up faster). So, in other words - You have to manage an abstract 'research' resource, then click through a 'talent tree' for your army, instead of the structures you build determining which forces you can deploy.

Now, speaking of structures...

3. Integrated Upgrades / No More Adjacency bonuses.
Much like the process of tech building has been stuffed into one abstract mechanic, there's no need for the sprawling, well designed spaces of a Supreme Commander base. instead of having to put point defenses in rings outside your base, turrets can be slapped onto your factories. Instead of Shield Generators popping up strategically to cover swaths of your construction, each factory must be upgraded with their own. Oh, these structures exist independently, but the game's tutorial makes it clear that the attached versions are inherently more powerful.

In addition, one of the innovations of SupCom1, Adjacency bonuses, seem to be gone. Adjacency bonuses meant that if you placed factories buttressed up against power plants or metal extractors, those structures used less metal or energy. Shield Generators against power plants, same thing. This lead to a unique sort of 'feng-shui' requirement to make efficient bases by taking advantage of adjacency. Now, the most tactical advice offered in the demo? Space your buildings out so that your units can move around in your base. And while, sure, this makes a mini game out of keeping firing lines open from your turrets to your base in three dimensions, I would rather have capable turrets ringing my perimeter than worrying about such simplicities.

4. Lastly - Experimental Units.
This was the part that made me think, What The Hell. In SupCom, Experimental units are titanic, overwhelmingly powerful military units. Titanic walkers that suck tanks into their crushing claws, or UFO-like flying aircraft carriers with main beam weapons reminiscent of ID4. But now, instead of something on the scale of Wild Wild West's spider walker, only with more Lasers, we have so-called experimentals more in like with Star Wars' AT-ATs - Big, sure, but not exactly the same sort of monolithic, world-wide theater changing units. When three of the Cybran experimentals popped out of a warp gate, and my line of battleships evaporated them in seconds, I was honestly disappointed. A single flight of Tech-1 bombers and a few salvos from basic cruisers bested the Kraken-like submarine before that without much fuss. And indeed, the amazing Tech-2 Destroyers I recall fondly from SupCom 1 who sprouted legs and walked onto the beach, were strangely weak sauce in the sequel.

In general, not to get into the graphical issues or the insanely cheesy storyline (The stockified terran empire, the UEF which was formerly morally conflicted and blinded by poor intel and vision) makes their Face-heel-turn to be bad guys in *Mission 1* for Chrissakes) SupCom2 does not feel like a proper sequel. This is another game, toying with a new sort of strategy element, that's simply looted some of the mechanics that SupCom pioneered, like the lack of a minimap and zooming out to the theatre-wide conflict. (I also found that the tiny warzones in the first few missions had arbitrarily limiting camera angles that felt more frustrating than the simply ever expanding field of battle in the original game.)

I don't see why this game had to be simplified and toned down in so many ways, for the benefit of those not familiar with the nuances of the original heritage. It's a disservice to the returning fans who would like to have more of the deep RTS experience SupCom1 originally offered.

My First Assembly Code.

Woot. Finally done, and all commented up. It's all:

# assembly commentary // Java commentary.

The java isn't quite good enough to work if you pulled it out of the comments, but, C'est la vie.