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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely disagree. Supreme Commander is a perfect example of awesome ideas and terrible marketing. The tutorials and intuitiveness of everything is just a joke, but if you make the effort, that game is crazy. It innovated on:

1). Strategic zoom, something which so far I've only seen recreated in 4x space games 2). Advanced economy that allowed for incremental spending, i.e. build yourself a monkeylord, and that thing will cause your mass to go down by 4 for 2 minutes, not an instant 400 mass 3). Intuitive queueing. It's super easy to setup crazy tactics with shift-clicking, and when you are zoomed out and hit shift you see all queues you have setup 4). You can fucking schedule your shit! Have your bombers fly in a delayed manner to attack the base at the same time as your ground units.

That game was epic and awesome, and if you disagree with me I can say with certainty that you never spent the time to learn it.

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Supreme Commander is a perfect example of awesome ideas and terrible marketing.

Both true. It was also buggy as hell, and it had system requirements in its day that would make all the modern Crysis jokes look like they're serious. That didn't stop it being very enjoyable, and Forged Alliance was a decent expansion too, but the endless crashes just as large-scale games were moving into full swing got old.

Also, the strategic zoom was a mixed blessing. It was a great idea, but what's the point of having fine unit control and gorgeous graphics in the game if you have to spend 95% of your time playing general rather than sergeant, zoomed out to global icon view? At higher tech levels and on larger maps, that was almost essential, so you could see a wave of tech 3 attack units or an experimental coming in time to do something about it because the defensive units at higher tech levels didn't keep up with the offensive ones.

IMHO Supreme Commander was a game that genuinely deserved descriptions like "epic", but it was far from perfect and there would be plenty of scope for a modern game to learn from what it did well but perhaps take a fresh look at things like strategic vs. tactical control and providing a flexible economy that created options but without requiring micromanagement of resource generation and unit building.

That's why the game had dual monitor support. I had strategic view on one monitor and the gameplay on the other. Problem solved :)

And if you didn't have two monitors? Little icons zooming around.

IMO, the best thing about TA and TA:Spring is the explosions - when you're under attack, you really know it. Supreme Commander lost all of that feel once you got more than a handful of units.

2 and 3 were actually innovations of Total Annihilation, I believe. (They weren't widely adopted, clearly!) Just /s/monkeylord/Krogoth on #2.

The zoom was great. Shift-queuing was good as well. The mechanics and UI of the game is probably still one of the best of any RTS.

I just didn't like the actual gameplay that much. It didn't feel like TA at all. The factions, the units, the maps, etc. It wasn't as fun to play. To me the whole feel was much too serious and a lot of the units I really liked weren't in SC.

That combined with the performance issues early resulted in me not playing it as much. I just continued to play TA: Spring. And if I remember correctly they dumbed down the resource model in the sequel.

And god, I have horrible memories of GPGNet. There were so many technical issues with the game when it came out.

My favorite feature was a combination of dynamic way points that you could adjust on the fly, and the automatic nature of transport units. Combining the two allowed me to build complex deployment strategies, and then with a few clicks launch a complex invasion. It really did a lot for advancing RTS gaming.

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