The making of Supreme Commander | Hacker News Reader

The making of Supreme Commander

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85 pointscamtarn58 comments

I really enjoyed Supreme Commander. There are a number of features (scale, strategic zoom, automation controls) that I wish were more popular in RTS's. Planetary annihilation tried to extend the concept in a novel way, but the execution stumbled a little bit and the micro transactions were aggravating.

That being said, I think SupCom had a critical error that really hampered the longevity of the gameplay. SupCom (and Total Annihilation) follows the "Upgrade is Upgrade" model of game progression. This is a really common model in a lot of mediocre RTS's. Basically it means that in the early part of the game, you build a selection of robots, tanks, artillery, and planes. At some point you "upgrade" your economy and build a new selection robots, tanks, artillery and planes that are almost identical to the first batch but are bigger and better. And then this happens again and you build a 3rd set of units that are almost identical to the first and second sets of units, except they're even bigger and better. If that sounds repetitious and tedious, that's because it is. Basically you repeat the same game 3 times before you start getting to end game units that start offering you new and different strategic options.

This is contrasted by Warcraft and Starcraft's "Upgrade is Sidegrade" model. In these games, every unit represents a new and unique set of options. You upgrade your economy in order to create an army that moves faster, or in the air, or has better artillery option. Economic progression is used to drive new tactics and strategy, or is used to counter your opponent's new units. In this model, the play changes as you move through the different stages of the game. This is much more interesting to play and watch as the game is constantly evolving as players produce new types of units.

If someone could combine Planetary Annihilation's concept, with SupCom's execution of scale, and Starcraft's polish and upgrade model, I think we'd have an RTS for the ages.

Ever tried something from the spring-engine game family? http://springrts.com/

Like Zero-k? https://store.steampowered.com/app/334920/ZeroK/

You are on to something, but as a counterpoint:

The T2 navy gives a lot of options not present in T1 - largely due to longer ranges. T1 subs and frigates mostly only interact with other naval units. But T2 get cruisers and destroyers anywhere near a coastline and they put large areas under thread

A lot of T2 & T3 units have weird special powers (e.g. the destroyer that can sprout legs and walk on land, the T3 Loyalist has built-in TMD). These are somewhat sparsely distributed though

The experimental units obviously have a lot of character

Depending on circumstances, T1 units remain viable throughout the game. I've seen tons of matches where a T3-heavy naval invasion is pushed back by overwhelming numbers of amphibious T1 units (Zthuees)

Making the switch from T1 to T2 and then to T3 is a huge part of the strategy of the game. It is true that the higher tier units are more efficient per unit of resource, but there are real costs (both in resources and in time) to upgrading your force and the decision of when to upgrade is never easy

I also found it very effective even in late game to mix in t1 artillery units with mostly t2/t3 unit armies because they tend to spread their damage around so effectively.

I remember reading some SC strategy thing that showed that the tech upgrades aren't true upgrades in terms of mass to DPS; the textbook example being the mass equivalent of T1 uef mechs putting out a notably higher DPS than a aeon colossus. While that stark of a discrepancy isn't useful in practice, the continual pumping out of a lower tier to support a spear of your current tech level to beat out a mass equivalence of just the higher tech level is a viable strategy in the mp

Starcraft, like SupCom, has both upgrades and sidegrades. The attack and defense +1/+2/+3 upgrades are a huge part of the strategy. They're similarly expensive and slow and flatly better.

There are a lot of aspects of Starcraft which make it superior, not only the fact that there is no redundancy, every unit is unique, and they all have special abilities, which are unique. Each race is also different. The gameplay is much smoother and responsive for micro. Basically you can tell they’ve really thought about the game design and continued to polish it, even today.

That said I would love to have zooming in SC2, no idea why it’s not available, it’s already in the engine for replays.

I mean, Starcraft and Warcraft both have tech trees with new units you unlock throughout each game. That’s not much different.

> At some point you "upgrade" your economy and build a new selection robots, tanks, artillery and planes that are almost identical to the first batch but are bigger and better.

While this is somewhat true, there are definitely T1 units that trump T2 and T2 that trump T3, due to specializations and cost. For instance, massed T2 UEF AA units are great for taking out T3 air on the cheap; especially if you're focused on land combat.

My one and only problem with SupCom is that it slows down to a crawl when you have many AI-controlled players on a large map. This is still true today - I tried playing SupCom on a high-end laptop from 2017, and maps larger than 10x10 with multiple AI opponents are still unplayable. There are AI mods which supposedly improve this, but in my testing, the difference was minor to non-existent. Which is a damn shame, because even the hardest, cheating AI is very easy to defeat if you're somewhat experienced, so I mostly resorted to playing against 3+ allied AIs, which is simply impossible on larger maps.

That being said, SupCom is easily the best RTS I ever played - it was basically Total Annihilation, only bigger, better and prettier. And TA was already an exceptional RTS, one that people still played and enjoyed as long as a decade after release.

I think TA and SupCom ruined the whole RTS genre for me. I was trying to play some newer RTSes, but they are all lacking in features which the two taught me to rely on and enjoy. Strategic zoom, queues of commands in factories and building units, waypoints, unit formations, ferry routes, terrain obstructing visibility, radars, and getting in the way of bullets/missiles, an economy where you have to balance income and spending, gradual construction of structures and units, massive amounts of units on the map and massive units themselves (experimentals), very well-balanced factions with each still being quite distinct and so on - there are games with some of these features, but I couldn't find a game which would have all or even most of them. SupCom2 was a disaster and I refuse to consider it SupCom at all, so I'm basically still waiting for the sequel.

Or maybe I just missed a game like that - suggestions on the titles to try would be very welcome!

Have you tried FAF?

I assume you're referring to https://www.faforever.com/ because just googling for FAF doesn't give you anything useful.

To add to this... it appears that FAF is referenced elsewhere in this thread by mrguyorama and AceJohnny2 while providing more details on it.

You might like Sins of a Solar Empire. The scale is even larger than SupCom, so a full game can run several hours to complete. You can play on smaller maps as well, but the game shines best with several different solar systems.

It's got large fleets, a decent amount of automation (very little micro needed as I recall), a huge range of scale in terms of the units themselves, strategic zoom every bit as good as SC.

Layer on top of that a research tree, neutral factions (pirates) you can influence, 'hero' units in the form of capital ships that you can level up and customize.

I haven't played since the very first release, so maybe it's gotten overcomplicated since then - but I think it's worth a look

It's still pretty good. :)

I sometimes wish there were more micro, but I'm really not that good at micro so it's probably for the best. Haha I always feel like I have things to do, macro-wise.

Haven't played much recently due to the game lengths, but it's always fun.

(Go Vasari!)

There's Planetary Annihilation. Many of the same people who worked on TA and SupCom worked on it. It seems to channel many of the same points.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...

I've wanted to dig into this game for years, but haven't had the time. What little I have spent was a few campaign missions fighting on planets the size of tennis balls.

We’re basically limited by CPU performance which is necessarily single threaded since it’s synced to all players, plus it will run at the speed of the slowest player in the network.

Even with modern CPU’s you see slowdowns in SC2, especially with 4 or more players.

SupCom still survives today with Forged Alliance Forever[0], a fan made client, server, and community chock full of features, bug fixes, mods, and rebalances that make the game very polished.

If you want a taste of Supreme Commander to truly understand the beauty of the game, check out Gyle[1] who is a truly underrated caster of the game on youtube.

[0]:https://github.com/FAForever [1]:https://www.youtube.com/user/felixlighta/videos

Gyle! Agreed - a roommate and I slowly made our way through the backlog. You really grow to love Gyle - he's so enthusiastic and a fantastic commentator, if a bit obsessed with zooming in on reclaim while a battle is happening.

I still think Total Annhilation had one of the best soundtracks of any video game ever recorded, including The Elder Scrolls. It was Jeremy Soule’s magnum opus. https://youtu.be/o2jS4ZaVOWA https://youtu.be/lA-iag83kQc https://youtu.be/r_9QO_76l_I https://youtu.be/1mOG3Q8CSoY

That first one reminds me of a theme from Shadow of the Colossus! https://youtu.be/57jIlw6HmCE from 15:10 onwards

It's quite cool that you could insert the game cd into an ordinary music player and have the background music play. Shows how proud they must have been of it.

That was a moderately common thing in those days. In particular, iirc, there used to be a cable between the CD-ROM and the sound card that let you play audio off the CD without having the (limited) CPU needing to get involved, deal with audio encodings, etc. The CD would have a data track followed by a bunch of audio tracks, then the game can just say "Play track 5" and carry on with its business.

At least, that's my understanding. I was pretty young in those days and some of this is reconstructed "Oh, right, that would make sense".

The downside is that if you find a dump of only the data track/files it's hard to reconstruct the full experience of abandonware games. FireFight just isn't the same without the background music.

Quake soundtrack. Reznor perfectly matched the soundtrack to the mood of the game.

I still listen to track 5 as a standalone piece of dark moody brilliance. 22 years later.

Couldn't agree more. I still listen to this soundtrack while working. :)

I'm a big fan of Chris Taylor and his games, the modding community around TA led 14-15 year old me to learn how to program so I could make my own mods. I think one of the most underrated things about the best of Chris' games is the interface. The TA, Dungeon Seige, and SupCom interfaces never get in the way of play, and are very, very fluid. GPG's two games that were less successful, DemiGod and Space Seige, added layers of complexity onto interfaces that made the games feel more technical, managerial, and less fun than needed to be.

As I developer, I really strive to think about how the interfaces I design and implement are used by my users to quickly do repetitive or important tasks, traits I associate to Ctrl-grouping, shift clicking to build 5 units at a time in TA, and of course, strategic zoom.

By the way, Camtarn, still like Guanine? :) I lurked the Cavedog WSB in the early years.

Holy crap! Yes, that's me :D What a blast from the past.

Total Annihilation was one of the best examples of rock solid software that I had seen up to that point. My friend and I played it across the country on dialup modems, with 500 units each. It would slow down to a crawl, but it never crashed. We would optimize by giving each other 30 mins to build a fort and then we could attack at will. It was truly a thing of beauty.

> nr 30mins NO NOOBS

I never really played online, but as a kid I was fascinated by the near-automation that TA allowed for with its unit queuing options. I'd happily pay full price for a game that had TA-era graphics, but the AI improvements of today. Though it seems improvements in single-player AI has stagnated with the growing ubiquity of multiplayer [0].

[0] https://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/stalker-alife/

Slightly offtopic but I'm now reminded of it -- I was a huge fan of TA as a kid, skipped Supreme Commander, and supported the Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation based on the awesome pre-rendered gameplay trailer (as I'm sure many others did).

I was really disappointed with the final game and put maybe 2 hours tops into it before never playing it again. It just wasn't fun to play.

Despite that, I still felt satisfied that the game was finished and came out at all. The engine is really impressive IMO, and I enjoyed their engineering updates and videos.

This is probably the only time I ever supported a project and didn't care at all for the final product, but still didn't feel burned because I could appreciate the enormous undertaking that it was, from engineering and development standpoints.

Imho, this is probably the best RTS ever created. Huge maps, huge number of units easy to control with a great UI, amazing music (the first game that had a background music that was aligned to what you were doing in the game? i.e. a mass attack triggered the appropriate bgm).

I'm sure that the Elder Scrolls 3 had situational music, and that was a few years prior. TES 4 did for sure, and that was a year before. I'm a big fan of Jeremy Soule (composer of SupCom, Elder Scrolls 3,4,5).

I don't know if it was the first but there was iMUSE at Lucasfilm Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE

Total Annihilation had background music respond to the in-game situation.

I tried it out once. I recall being so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I didn't go back.

It's also the only RTS I'm aware of that is dual monitor aware. If you have two screens, the second screen can show a persistent (controllable!) map of the battlefield.

SC is an absolutely amazing title!

All the DLC mechs they released periodically, wrecked the balance. A few were neat, but if you had all of them took away the fun for me. But, it was definitely a neat concept back then.

Great to hear that Chris Taylor is working on a new RTS, but I wonder how it'll be received given that the RTS genre has seemingly been eviscerated, particularly by MOBAs. Even Starcraft 2 seems to be a niche title, even overshadowed by its predecessor -- which Blizzard opted to remaster. The only other RTS I've recently paid attention to is also a remaster: AOE2 HD.

From my narrow personal perspective, it's easy for me to understand why RTSes aren't popular -- I'm too old to have the time to master them. But I wonder why the genre has stagnated for the rest of the world -- is it because it's too complex? Or because the mechanics of other similar genres, like MOBAs, are inherently superior? With instant-gratification being the default mindset nowadays, the thought of spending 30 minutes building out a base only for it to be wiped out in 2 minutes of action does seem antiquated.

I wouldn’t say the RTS genre has been destroyed per se. We have Stelaris for example and Hearts of Iron 4 some time ago. There is also RimWorld and Wargame. Banished, comes to mind. Oh and of course They Are Billions, great game combining Starcraft and age of empires.

Anyway, I think the genre is alive and kicking — mainly driven by smaller developers. It’s a shame that EA killed off C&C but they only have themselves to blame.

Well, most of those fall more under the more general umbrella of "strategy". Stellaris is 4x, Rimworld is a management sim, Banished is a city builder.

RTS is stuff like Starcraft/Warcraft, Age of Empires, C&C, Company of Heroes, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander. I haven't played They Are Billions yet, but yeah, that looks like an RTS or really close to it. So maybe it's not quite dead, but hanging on by a thread! There's also Offworld Trading Company from a couple years ago which is RTS minus combat.

Paradox grand strategy games are real-time, but it's bending the definitions of the genre to a ridiculous, meaningless level to consider them RTS games.

My point more generally was that hard core strategy games are still coming out and are beloved

Rimworld isn't an RTS so much as a sandbox game in the same vein as Dwarf fortress.

Wargame has a ridiculously niche player base. Like, 3k players on most days.

Starcraft is no fun between even somewhat unequal opponents. At least MOBAs give you a little bit of fun first before getting decimated, and proceed at a somewhat relaxed pace compared to the manically frenzied rush-fests that RTSs seem to be.

In the last big DOTA tournament, the top prize was over $11MM. The last StarCraft world tournament's entire prize pool was $700k.

I don't know why there's such a disparity in the payouts. Maybe games like DOTA are more spectator friendly and thus can raise more money for ads? Or maybe it's because the top DOTA players are streamers are more diverse, mostly coming from different countries in Europe, but also NA and Asia, while the top StarCraft players tend to be almost exclusively Korean.

MOBAs are a bit more dynamic I find that most RTSs, and simple for audiences to understand - starcraft in particular ended up playing much more like chess, with a fairly established early/midgame going towards an endgame, assuming no major mistakes were made. MOBAs just have a lot more variables not only in the team composition but also communication and teamplay - combined they make for a lot more dynamic strategies (closer to basketball than chess).

I think it’s more about being player-friendly than being spectator-friendly. Starcraft is just a far more difficult game to play at even a modest level of competence than a MOBA or even an FPS, and it seems to be very difficult to establish a big esports following without a big player community.

For fans looking for a fix:

Spring [1] is an RTS framework that started off rebuilding TA's engine. It has since branched off with mods creating new RTS's entirely... but still with that TA/SupCom feel.

FA Forever [2] is a mod for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (the expansion), that gives access to community servers to download maps, mods, and find matches. It replaces Gas Powered Games' own shutdown servers.

[1] https://springrts.com/

[2] https://www.faforever.com/

As a RTS Sup Com was pretty cool, even if the scale of the maps was a little daunting. On the other hand, during the campaign missions, the maps extended as objectives were reached, which was a good way to avoid being overwhelmed right at the start.

A few other cool features: chaining move or build orders, having worker helping factories, flying unit doing crash damage on death and being able to set repeating build tasks in factories.

Believe it or not, Supreme Commander is a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation - a game which actually had all of these mechanics back in 1997!

TA can be had on Good Old Games for $6 and works perfectly on modern Windows or Wine.

I believe you ;). Chris Taylor evokes TA a few times in the interview. Still I did not called these features innovative or new, just that they are very useful to in order to deal with all the complexities of the game.

Still I'm not really interested in TA, I've been plenty happy with SC and I don't really want to climb another steep difficulty curve. (also lack of time too)

TA used to crash at launch on GOG for Win 10 for me, but I rechecked after this and between updates to the GOG setup and/or Windows, it works now. Thanks!

For anyone wanting to pick up a copy on the cheap, Supreme Commander bundles are currently on sale for 80% off on Steam.

I think it's not a coincidence...

Previous related discussion Supreme Commander – Graphics Study https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770020

If you like this, you’d probably appreciate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

I want my dual panes back, isn't this a file commander? Who cares about games

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