Supreme commander

[Raghar]

I just won a skirmish at Seton clutch against 7 crazy AIs and had a blast.

I seen a Tempest to blow shields of mobile units, and then they ate a whole Torrent salvo, and about 5 siege tanks exploded. These who were saying Tempest can't be used well against mobile units were bit mistaken.

It's also great that T1 units can have its uses even with T2, and possibly T3 units. That combination with a lot of units in naval aspect, air aspect, and normal aspect is also great.

They changed in FA the time of introduction of experimentals. In SC it was a late oh fuck you moment, in FA it moved into a late middle stage.

BTW I captured..., and finished my current game with Yolona Oss.

 

[Kaucukovnik]

We play this thing with friends over LAN, usually 2vs2. It's a blast as long as we keep the game-ender stuff forbidden. So 10 nuclear missiles at once (or the experimental silo), t3+ artillery and the humongous resource generator are banned to keep the game going up to the megalomaniac stage. You know, a nuke here and there, all right. But sending 6 at once and heh! You only had five defense silos? Well, that sucks in MP. Traditional experimentals like mechs, or even the satellite, are manageable and their destructive power is fair. And platoons of huge robots and crawler tanks clashing against each other are the most satisfactory way of battle, of course! :D
Also playing with No Air setting can affect the gameplay greatly, and together with the above restrictions you can run the game in 4 players even on 20x20 maps and have enough space for all the maneuvering you'll ever need. So you don't need a mighty computer to keep it stable.

But I agree that the experimental insane stuff is a lot of fun in a comp-stomp which we also do from time to time.

 

[Raghar]

10 nukes means just two SMD can stop them. It's true that if they had 10 missile launchers, it will not stop the second wave.

I actually don't think experimentals should appear that early, it should be late oh fuck stuff that needs to be protected by rest of the army to be the most efficient.

BTW in current game, opponent used Scatis. And when I located it and destroyed it with a loss of GC, it made another one. When I finally get at him again, I found he started to make another two. If I'd delayed the attack, or was less capable, it would use three Scatises.

 

[Destroid]

10 nukes means just two SMD can stop them. It's true that if they had 10 missile launchers, it will not stop the second wave.

I actually don't think experimentals should appear that early, it should be late oh fuck stuff that needs to be protected by rest of the army to be the most efficient.

BTW in current game, opponent used Scatis. And when I located it and destroyed it with a loss of GC, it made another one. When I finally get at him again, I found he started to make another two. If I'd delayed the attack, or was less capable, it would use three Scatises.

If they come too late you will never see them in any serious game. Even with the reduced cost/build time experimentals we never had one on the field in the dozen or so multilayer games I played with friends, they were all won and lost before that would be practical.

 

[Kaucukovnik]

Yeah, if you play competitively and aggressively right from the start, you will probably never see any experimental unit and lv3 things will be the top tech.
I think they got them balanced right. They aren't all-powerful on their own, and their appearance is a sign of strong economy or a dumb commander.

But we like to amass some armies and do just minor diversions for some time into the game, to get to the point of huge armies.
Same reason for banning the game ender stuff, huge army on a huge map < Scathis or Mavor, since you can easily wipe armies on the move with just a few nukes, sometimes a nuke submarine is all you need to destroy the core of an otherwise killer attack.

I think most of the time you need to apply some house rules to actually have some cool MP battles like in the intro.

Also there are some custom maps (on moddb, I think) that have neutral bases for capture. They sometimes contain heavy artillery installations and experimental bots for anyone to take...that can provide some refreshment, I'd say. I definitely recall two such maps, The Hive and a dark narrow tech-valley map, both are from a single map pack, if I remember correctly.

The custom Sorian AI is also worth mentioning. It has almost all the normal/cheating variants as standard AI.

There are also mods adding, for example, tier 1-2 experimental units or more stealth to Cybrans / more direct firepower to UEF etc. But beware, most tend to have very un-optimized models (duplicate mesh faces, I guess by common flickering up-close) and go overboard, which can choke especially 32bit machines quite fast in large battles.

One mod changes SupCom to spaceship battle game, complete with stars and asteroids. And you can even try to use multiple mods at once, some really don't conflict! There is a lot of this stuff on the official forum, look around there if you haven't.

You know what? I'll make a pack. SupCom with its mod support should be a breeze compared to AoW.

 

[potatojohn]

SC was pretty cool. Nice graphics too.

 

[Raghar]

Well a competent MP can have experimentals as well. And it's not a sign of extremely strong economy.

Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr-vr_vIpfs it's full of late game stuff.

 

[Kaucukovnik]

And here we go...personally tested mods + mostly tested maps, if you want moar tech and landscape and don't want to search for anything.
A documented and polished version of what we copy around to get any reinstalled game up and running.

The balance mods are a fresh acquisition after we got fed up by stupidly effective restorers.

Too big for Mediafire, so I used a free Czech hosting:
http://www.uloz.to/xxwLcVD/supcom-pileomods-exe
http://www.uloz.to/xhafUef/supcom-pileomaps-exe

Unpack in your SupCom\Forged Alliance directory, the game can handle everything natively.
Haven't tested on original game without the expansion, but I suppose it won't work. Well, maybe some maps.
And beware, what comes out of the ~700MB of archives is quite huge, almost 3 GB in total.

All players need to have the included Lobby Enhancement and Sorian AI in order to start a multiplayer game.

The pack can uninstall itself in case you need to.

Keep in mind mods can decrease stability, especially during large wars.
Your mileage may vary, on my XP PC most 40km+ maps crash after about an hour of LAN 4 player game.

 

[Multidirectional]

So, I was starting to get into it but then got massive stutters in second campaign mission already, after map gets expanded. Army close to capped. I'm running on i5 2320 CPU and a gtx 760, 8GB DDR3 RAM, is this still not enough for a 2007 game? Tried to search for something called "core maximizer" but couldn't find any download link. Anyone have any tips for making it run well?

 

[Valky]

Forged Alliance, more like Forged Perfection.

 

[trais]

Tried to search for something called "core maximizer" but couldn't find any download link. Anyone have any tips for making it run well?

http://www.moddb.com/mods/total-mayhem1/downloads/good-ais-and-tools-for-fa

 

[Endemic]

That's weird, I run it on a much worse PC. I only get slowdowns with 6+ players on 20x20 or larger maps.

http://direct.faforever.com has co-op campaigns now as well if you're not interested in traditional MP.

 

[Raghar]

So, I was starting to get into it but then got massive stutters in second campaign mission already, after map gets expanded. Army close to capped. I'm running on i5 2320 CPU and a gtx 760, 8GB DDR3 RAM, is this still not enough for a 2007 game? Tried to search for something called "core maximizer" but couldn't find any download link. Anyone have any tips for making it run well?

3.3 GHz is crazily low. Especially for Setons. You wanna 3.9 GHz, or Haswell, or Skylake.

They modded it so one player can use 4x more units. And they expanded number of max players to 8... So CPU is bit heavy loaded. And because authors used LUA for AI. It's extremely inefficient, and it runs at one core.