Or just look at some people here on the Demigod forum for example .

 

HAHA.

How dumb are you?

If FA is standalone AND gives you everything vanilla did why would anyone buy vanilla EVER? Also the people who did kinda feel screwed when the other guy gets everything but cheaper plus extras.

 

You can play FA easily 4vs4, so that untrue too.

 

SUPCOM WAS already made with multicore proccesing in mind. What sort of problems are you experiencing?

FA is a stand alone expansion. You can buy the game for an expansion price, rather than the full price, without having Supreme Commander at all and you can play the Forged Alliance campaign and you can play with all factions in Skirmish and Multiplayer. Except in online multiplayer, where you need to have a SupCom and an FA key registered with your account, in order to play all faction. That's the only drawback you get when paying the lower expansion price.

 

?

"FA is a stand alone expansion"

 

Does it play better than the orginal? Did they optimise the game so that it consumes less system resources?

Yes, some things on the simulation side are indeed more optimized. Also the memory footprint is slightly lower, FA won't hit the 2GB limit as soon as Supreme Commander. FA also has the large address aware flag enabled by default.

All in all they are only slight optimizations though. It won't work wonders for old system. Also FA puts more load on the GPU (different FoW rendering, range rings, better effects).

If they're going to market it as a being Stand alone then everything should actually be stand alone. At the very least the box could actually tell you that you need the original to play all the races in MP. But it doesn't, it just says "Does not require the original Supreme Commander" which implies, guess what?, that you don't need the original SupCom for all the features.

It was marketed as a stand alone expansion for an expansion price, not a stand alone game for the full price.

No, it does not imply that. It implies that you do not need the original Supreme Commander to install and run Forged Alliance. And you do not need the original Supreme Commander to play all factions online either (the physical installation), you only need a Supreme Commander key associated with your GPGnet account. The same technique was used for the Warhammer expansions too.

An expansion does not lock you out of features of the original game. And it was not originally sold at expansion price. When it had just come out, it cost $39.99. That's an expensive expansion.

Well, around here a full game typically costs 50 €. The recommended retail price of Supreme Commander was set at 50 € (I got it for far less at release). And an expansion typically costs 30 €. The recommended retail price of Forged Alliance was set at 30 € (I also got it for less at release). So the pricing was fine here. It was always sold at an expansion price or far less.

Huh, that's wierd. Here full games cost around $40-$60, depending on how "big" the game is, etc. Expansions are around $20-30.

Here a game would cost about 399 NOK which is $68. A good reason for me to bitch about getting games on impulse and gamersgate so that I dont have to pay the extreme Norwegian prices (or just drop buying it really).

The requirements are fitting for the campaign in both cases. What you seem to forget is, that Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander have this massive, technically unlimited scale. Naturally you can't put a system requirement for every situation.

Ran like ass in the campaign too.  And Skirimish is a pretty standard fearture in RTS'.  Being able to play on a 4 player map with bots should be covered under 'recommended settings' IMO.  The game was slowing down long before the '500 units' phase.  ~40 units fighting at once usually did my system in. This wasn't a total POS system either, it was a Pentium D 3.0, 2 GB RAM, and a 8600 GT; at the time more than enough to handle any game out there.  Including vastly nicer looking RTS' like Company of Heroes, and the nearly as large scale Sins.  Except SupCom apparently.  I don't mind if you need a really powerful computer to run it, but at least TELL me so I don't waste $50 on something I can never play.  They ammended the requirements in the expansion, but it was too late for everyone who bought it at launch.

By what are you able to tell that the game has been dumbed down for the multiplatform release? All the important factors are still there. Unlimited resources, massive amounts of units, full simulation, etc. The only thing that has been dumbed down for both platforms are the polygons of the units. But that's because GPG saw that there were simply too much for a game of that scale. This reduction is one of the things that will make Supreme Commander 2 playable on machines with lower performance as well. (As you surely have noticed the maps are completely new and contain a lot more detail and are available as such on both platforms.)
Other things, like multiplayer limited to 4 players, are specific to the 360 version and do not apply to the PC version.

 

The 360 has 512 MB of RAM.  Average gaming PCs have 4 GB+ these days, and more powerful video cards.  You can't tell me they didn't scrap features during development that the 360 couldn't handle.  They also have to come up with a UI and control scheme that works with a 360 controller.  I have nothing against the 360 user base, but saying that multiplatform releases aren't watered down so the consoles can handle them is incredibly naive.

Company of Heroes and Sins of a Solar Empire are completely different games compared to TA/SupCom. They are not large scaled games. They do not have a simulation system and they do not have this basic concept of infinity/limitlessnes.

 

Features like flow based economy got scraped, but that was because of gameplay, not because of the hardware limitation of the XBox 360. Also the 360 version is developed parallel to the PC version. The 360 will simply have some limitations which will not be present on the PC, like only 4 players maximum and of course a lower unit cap. The simulation like in the previous games is still there on both systems and stuff like the flow field system for path finding are benefitial for both systems.

 

Supreme Commander 2 is not a port from the PC to the 360 or vice versa. As already mentioned, the 360 version will simply have some limitations which the PC version will not have, just like in R.U.S.E. (where you also only get to see the game in full glory on the PC). All other improvements or reductions (like the overall polygon count of units) are benefitial for both the PC and the 360. Also while they reduced the polygon count of the units, they increased a lot of other details, like overall shader details and texture details, which will also look nice on the 360 but the full quality is only available on the PC.

What you are talking about are games that are primarily developed for the 360 and then a PC version is sloppily made from that. The "watering down" that happens in Supreme Commander 2 (primarily the changed economy) is not solely because there is a 360 version. The intention is to make the game appealing to a broader audience, regardless of the system.

They removed the flow-based economy where units took mass and energy over time?  What the fuck GPG, that was one of the most unique aspects of Supreme Commander.  You actually had to take care and manage your economy carefully, now it has the same economy system as every other RTS.

Yes, it's now a pay-up-front model. You still have mass and energy and a rate based income, but resources are immediately allocated when you start a project. Also mass and energy storage is gone (infinite now). I am not that dissappointed about this change, I am more worried about some implications that you might deduce from it, but ultimately I'll just have to play it for myself. The economy is not so important for me anyway, I care much more about the simulation, strategic zoom, infiniteness, queuing, waypoints etc.

I find it interesting that we have gone from discussing the 'dumbing down' of games for consoles to meet their apparently less inteligent user base to discussing the 'simplificaiton' of games to meet the supposedly inferior hardware.
You're aware, of course, that each interation of Windows requires greater and greater hardware to run it (excluding Windows 7) and then on top of those requirements you have the requirements for your games? The Xbox 360 simply doesn't run a bloated operating system and with a single hardware configuration the developers can tune and optimise their game on a level that you can't achieve on the PC platform. You can do more with the Xbox 360s hardware than you can with a PCs.
Generalising statements - such as any multiplatform release being stupid, lacking features and basic - only show your personal opinion on the matter, rather than a definitive, all encompassing factual statement.

That, and most PC's have a lot of other stuff running in the background that consoles don't. Just open the task manager and look at the processes tab. Consoles don't have any of that stuff, so they don't need as much RAM.

"dumbing down" doesn't necessarily refer to a game being "dumber" for consoles, its a generic term that refers to games having less options or content. games ARE dumbed down for consoles, because they have sh1tty control options and far less power. any cursory experience with recent games shows this (ie no lean in CoD or operation flashpoint).

that said, i think supcom is getting "dumbed down" because GPG were confused about the primary reasons for the game (FA at least) not selling well, rather than due to it being made for the 360 as well. the system requirements for supcom were too high, though they were improved with the first big patch.

somebody found supcom's eco too complex and now we're all paying the price oh well, it could still be a great game. i have my doubts though.

sorry, but that's complete garbage. there's a reason the indie market exists primarily on PCs. ask any developer- its a (relative) nightmare trying to cram everything you need into the available memory on the 360.

games ARE getting dumbed down during multi-platform development. anyone that disagrees hasn't been playing games for very long.

Take a PC with equal specifications to the Xbox 360. Add Windows. Add the trillion background tasks and applications running in the background. Now, tell me which one is going to perform better when running demanding games? The fact that the Xbox 360 is still home to industry leading graphics and games shows that the available hardware is still quite able.


Considering the best independant titles, sucha s Braid and N+, are available on Xbox Live Arcade due to the ease of programming for the platform, I can only label this statement as incorrect. Would the 360 be more capable with 4gb of RAM? Of course it would, it's simple maths. The point is that when faced with finite and limited Hardware, console developers often create very innovative solutions to programming problems. So many PC Titles are simply unoptimised because they can just bump up the Spec Requirements on the side of the box.


There's a difference between dumbing a game down and deliberatly developing inferior visuals, sound and in-game content to allow the game to perform on inferior hardware, which is what you're insinuating. Considering titles like Gears of War 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2 are grabbing headlines with their visuals, it's safe to assume this practice is not industry standard.

There's a reason, but that's not it. It's a lot cheaper to make games for the PC than any console. On the PC you can just make a Flash game using free software off the internet. On consoles you have to buy software from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo to actually make the game, it has the go through quality control, probably some advertising, etc.

If a PC game doesn't work on half the computers out there, who cares? No one is going to stop you from trying to sell it. If your game doesn't work on the console that it is supposed to work on, you have problems. Memory is secondary to cost.

Back to SupCom, smaller more focused gameplay will be good only if they incrase the actual challanges I have to make choices to overcome. 300 units and only one choice isn't really... fun.

 

In the original and FA I often used lower tech units when I really didn't have to just to add SOME fun (I'm talking single player btw, the vastly more popular part of the game). Staging combined arms ground invasions with those awesome carry units was great fun, I could have just spammed aircraft or nukes or whatever.

What I noticed was you couldn't really play SC/FA in a interesting way other than spam. I tried hard to have balanced groups of units shileds, AA, tanks supported by repair points and artillery batterys etc but the they didn't give you anything useful at the endgame for ground warfare, that was purely for the build up stage. Once you got those experimentals out or nukes it was game over and the fun lef.

Maybe they will fix that, maybe not.

I have exactly the same problem with most stratergy games, once you are over the curve there is nothing stopping you and thus no reason to play other than to see the 'VICTORY!' screen. I often wonder why 2 or 3 province factions in Total War don't band together for mutual defense when your 30+ province empire comes knocking.

They try limiting your resoruces, your time or putting massive combined faction armies DIRECTLY ABOVE YOUR BASE WITH NO WARNNING... That is not good design, thats is compensating and its not good enough!

 

 

Ahhh those times were an AI incursion would actualy break down a shiled and blow up some important defenses so I had to roll in some tech 1/2 units as a stop gap measure. Fun.

yeah sorry, i didnt intend for my second sentence to relate to my first. it was a late night of typing!

lol. i love how you have to create thoroughly ficticious situations in order to make a (bad) point. im sorry, but i have no intention of buying a 1.4 celeron in 2003 in order to test your hypothesis. and consoles have never ever had "industry leading graphics", lol. console textures are the ugliest thing ive ever had the misfortune to see. my 8800 has more power than an entire 360, why you're arguing about graphics is beyond me! hell, current gen consoles are incapable of running higher resolutions than i was playing with 10 YEARS ago.

lol, 2 titles don't refute my statement. the indie market is PC centric. look at the sheer number of (mostly crappy admittedly) titles released every year. far more than your 2 examples i can promise you. i agree, console developers do a pretty wonderful job of fitting everything they need in the limited hardware resources. but that doesn't mean they fit everything needed, which is why multi-platform games too often limit the PC version to what is capable on the consoles.

again, console games look like arse. i don't know why we're even having this argument. yes, such titles might wow those comparing them to other console titles, but they look like shit compared to what is available on PC. its simple mathematics.

"dumbing down" can meet either of your statements. i tend to use it like i mentioned before- less content, less options, less complex gameplay. supcom is getting dumbed down, quite obviously. as i said previously though, im not blaming the 360 for this. i blame chris taylor and his goals of reaching a bigger audience. forged alliance is too awesome a game to be as popular as more accessible titles.