Supreme Commander and CPUs

[xsamitt]

I haven't played SC yet.You can get it free with the purchase of a E6600 and E6700 on Newegg.

 

[jay2tall]

I think its a good game. I used to love Total Anihhlation (spell check) back in the day. It plays VERY similar if not exactly. Same energy and mass needed sorta the same units exept I can't download new ones from their website like TA, which would be cool. haha. But there ARE flaws.

It eats up a $hit load of memory. It uses 1.4 GB on my system and probably swaps the rest. My buddy hosts a lan party and has an overclocked dual 185 Opteron with 8GB of mem on an XP 64bit OS. He hosts the 8-10 player games we have and it eats 4+ GB of memory. THAT IS INSANE. The lag is horrible once you have about a billion units and you have one bad/slow machine in the bunch. I hosted the game once and it ran better on mine than his server.. I wonder why that is? I dont think its opimized for multiple cores or something because my cores run faster than the server's. How knows. BUt the gameplay if fun. He thought the network was to slow so he got a full gigabit switch.. what a weiner. haha. it still lags.

 

[3Ball]

meh, I wasnt impressed with supreme commander. Or atleast the demo. It doesnt seem as fast paced as C&C3 or wc3. It also gets a bit to complex for my tastes in an RTS. I dont play RTS enough to learn the ins and outs of a game such as supreme commander the easy to pick up feel of C&C3 suits me best. But to each its own I suppose.

Best,

3Ball

 

[djgandy]

but it lacks of the cool zoomin and out of supremecommander ;_;

I agree. C&C3 is poor because of this.

😀 I also liked the zooming in and out feature a lot in Supreme Commander, it made the huge maps much easier to manage. Don't get me wrong, C&C3 is a very fun game. However, that RTS feels watered down compared to Supreme Commander.

My views too. I was dissapointed with C&C3. If you've never played C&C before you might like it, for me it got boring. Same as the old ones, can't super build silos and stuff. Like drag a 8x8square of them. That would be nice. Wish you could do that in RTS.

Boring game with a design flaw that makes it have very frequent "do nothing and just wait" gameplay.

If you are doing nothing all the time then you aren't going to last long in multiplayer against 6 top skilled ai! I've left the game for a few minutes before and come back to find nothing left!

 

[mpasternak]

want to know where the game really starts using resources.

2 screens. play the game with 2 monitors, with 100 units in play.

this really puts a load on your system.

 

[3Ball]

I have played and owned every command and conquer, every blizzard rts, every age of empires rts, company of heroes, stronghold 1 & 2, and a few of the total war games. Im sure I have left a few out, but the only RTS games I didnt like out of the ones ive played are stronghold 2 and supreme commander. I must be either missing something or am possibly just playing for the name. I dont know...I must just like one of the differences between the two games that i cant see, but regardless of all of that. I love C&C3 better than all of the others I have played except possibly red alert 2. WC3 is probably my fave of all time to date and I am eagerly waiting Starcraft 2 (if it ever sees the light of day)!

Best,

3Ball

 

[djgandy]

Well each to their own

I haven't played C&C3 mp yet since my mates pc is broke (GG Asus Deluxe super expensive pos. Asrock > Asus 😉) so I will hold my overall judgement on it till I do. I did play skirmish though and found it really boring 🙁
I started a campaign too and got bored, would rather dig out the original C&C 😉

Supcom on the otherhand was totally new to me so...I guess that sways in its favour. I have a feeling I played TA but was probably a demo and I didn't like it.

 

[corvetteguy]

want to know where the game really starts using resources.

2 screens. play the game with 2 monitors, with 100 units in play.

this really puts a load on your system.

Ya i noticed you can spilt the screen in two and have the view area and the other half a giant map. Can you put each half on two monitors?

 

[3Ball]

Indeed, I may still pick up supreme commander when it drops to like 30 - 40 bucks so i can just play with my friends, who knows it may grow on me!

Best,

3Ball

 

[djgandy]

want to know where the game really starts using resources.

2 screens. play the game with 2 monitors, with 100 units in play.

this really puts a load on your system.

Ya i noticed you can spilt the screen in two and have the view area and the other half a giant map. Can you put each half on two monitors?

Yes, I ran in dual monitor mode for a while. Both maps are identical (i.e one isn't a low res radar mockup) so you can zoom to any level on each

 

[jaffa]

The game runs great on a Turion 2.4Ghz at 1680x1050. Haven't any real lag issues just the occasional stutter. Also depending on the number of players it can eat anywhere from 400mb - 1.4gb of RAM on my computer.

As for game play, my most recent game saw me up against 80 Cybran Soul Rippers... No lag there, it was a deliberate long game to test my RAM as it was causing probs previously. In fairness, i sent 70 Aeon Colossus at his base! Many pretty flashing lights i can tell ya! Well if you have a few hours, you're not just gonna sit and build tech2/3 are ya!! 😀

Depending on the players it can be a slow paced game to begin with, but in my experience the initial stages of the game are crucial while you build a solid economy. I spent a lot of time showing my friends techniques to speed up building a strong economy as they wondered why i would always be far in the lead, both in terms of points and units. So to a certain extent the beginning of the game isn't that slow paced, it's a frantic build-everything-in-the-right-order...

I prefer to play Aeon, though recently i have been figuring out weaknesses in the other teams so playing a lot more Cybran and UEF. All in all though, a very good and challenging game!

 

[jaffa]

Supreme Commander is awesome, but it's kind of slow & boring & it takes more than 2 Hours to have some T4 units.

I would have to disagree, T4 in under 45mins is easily possible... BUT no good if you don't build your economy enough and spend all your resources on that rather than a mix including T3/T2...

 

[Gustafarian]

I love SupCom and play it when ever I am not on CS:S. I think that SupCom is the only RTStrategy.

C&C3 like all it's predecessors is all about short term tactics, you build as much as you can as fast as you can and then tell them exactly what to do. It is like an arcade/console game. In SupCom, you have plently of time to think and optimise build paths. You have to balance the need for protection with the desire for T4 units. You can set factories to build massive armies which automatically patrol and engage.

With regards to slow down, I only experience lag when playing multiplayer with people with bad connections or when a Commander goes pop!

I have seen some people on this forum refer to the 'server'. In the multiplayer, there is no server. What your units do is decided your PC and this is relayed to everyone else in the game. This works very well for smaller games because it shares the work between the PCs. But it is the reason the 8 player games rarely work. Your PC is trying to send information to 7 PCs so your upload speed causes a problem. I think this is correct but I can't supply links because I am at work.

 

[djgandy]

Supreme Commander is awesome, but it's kind of slow & boring & it takes more than 2 Hours to have some T4 units.

I would have to disagree, T4 in under 45mins is easily possible... BUT no good if you don't build your economy enough and spend all your resources on that rather than a mix including T3/T2...


We always have T4 in under 45 mins. If we don't were dead!
I've won a 6 player multi in under 50 mins before, nearly got destroyed but a spiderbot build in time and wiped out attack then walked to base and wiped that out 😉
Wish my mate would sort his pc out, miss playing it a bit actually!

 

[djgandy]

I love SupCom and play it when ever I am not on CS:S. I think that SupCom is the only RTStrategy.

C&C3 like all it's predecessors is all about short term tactics, you build as much as you can as fast as you can and then tell them exactly what to do. It is like an arcade/console game. In SupCom, you have plently of time to think and optimise build paths. You have to balance the need for protection with the desire for T4 units. You can set factories to build massive armies which automatically patrol and engage.

With regards to slow down, I only experience lag when playing multiplayer with people with bad connections or when a Commander goes pop!

I have seen some people on this forum refer to the 'server'. In the multiplayer, there is no server. What your units do is decided your PC and this is relayed to everyone else in the game. This works very well for smaller games because it shares the work between the PCs. But it is the reason the 8 player games rarely work. Your PC is trying to send information to 7 PCs so your upload speed causes a problem. I think this is correct but I can't supply links because I am at work.

I have no idea but just thinking...
A torrent style network system....Would that work here? It's an idea, especially if you could setup upload speeds so you'd have certain players act as "server nodes"

 

[Gustafarian]

I have no idea but just thinking...
A torrent style network system....Would that work here? It's an idea, especially if you could setup upload speeds so you'd have certain players act as "server nodes"

Yeah, that does sound like a good idea. It would definitely reduce the total traffic flowing but I think the increase in latencies would negate any benefit. I think the publishers should shell out for some beastly servers and let us use them for free

 

[kaoru780]

I really2 enjoy Supreme Commander. For those who didnt like it, it was possibly because they havent played Total Annihilation back in the days. And does anyone knows if SupCom has an expansion in the works?

Owh and to the guy that created the compilation units for TA , U ROCK, create some for Supreme Commander as well.

 

[will14]

sup com is fun and since your rendering a huge area and the code is tight I guess your fps stays relatively constant. I'm always at my max of 60 reardless of what game I play because it's my monitors refresh rate I think. I don't know the minimums of what's needed but I play on max settings. The campaigns are freaking annoying though fyi. Hey great job at defeating part 3 of 100+xxx now defeat the large force at your undefended flank. BTW they're attacking you now. what? anyway, fun game.

 

[Gryphyn]

If you hold the spacebar, it allows you to zoom around and view the action from any angle you wish. You can't lock it in this position though, as soon as you release the spacebar it sweeps back to the overhead position.

This is a great way to check out the terrain in full 3d...sometimes it isn't as easy to see when you're in the overhead view.

To the other poster, if you hit the numbpad + and - keys, that changes the game speed.

 

[will14]

nice, I'll have to try playing with spacebar zoom.

 

[Gustafarian]

nice, I'll have to try playing with spacebar zoom.

Yeah, I didn't know that either. Don't you hate when you are Cybran and your tanks' lasers hit the ground while you are being shelled into submission. :x

 

[corvetteguy]

nice, I'll have to try playing with spacebar zoom.

Yeah, I didn't know that either. Don't you hate when you are Cybran and your tanks' lasers hit the ground while you are being shelled into submission. :x

I don't like cybran. My main problem, is with their sheilds. I'm big on creatin a bubble around everything i own, and its annoying when i have to upgrade the sheilds 4 times when all the other races you just build it and leave.

 

[Gustafarian]

[quote="corvetteguy]I don't like cybran. My main problem, is with their sheilds. I'm big on creatin a bubble around everything i own, and its annoying when i have to upgrade the sheilds 4 times when all the other races you just build it and leave.[/quote]

I think the whole 'upgrade' process is flawed. As far as I can see, you can't cancel it and you can't make multiple sub commanders upgrade without clicking on them one by one!

 

[Vash-HT]

I have two copies of SC now because I just bought a E6600. I love SC for LAN or mp with my friends, and I could care less about the campaign of it. C&C3 was fun for about 2 days, and then it turned into the same thing every game so it got very boring. The bad thing about C&C3 is that you get so much money that you don't really have to manage your money, which should be part of a RTS like that. Anyway I like SC because you can build up a great defense and build up crazy armies. Against humans it probably wouldn't work, but smashing computers with your friends is pretty fun. C&C3 was very fun at first and got boring really fast, but SC has more staying power for me at least. It's very hard to go back to resource collecting like that after DC and CoH have come out though. I prefer that style of RTS way more than either SC or C&C3.

 

[corvetteguy]

[quote="corvetteguy]I don't like cybran. My main problem, is with their sheilds. I'm big on creatin a bubble around everything i own, and its annoying when i have to upgrade the sheilds 4 times when all the other races you just build it and leave.

I think the whole 'upgrade' process is flawed. As far as I can see, you can't cancel it and you can't make multiple sub commanders upgrade without clicking on them one by one![/quote]

Ya, upgrading is annoying in this game. I usually forget till i am actually looking for something to do.