Making Supreme Commander Play More Realistically

Fri, 09 May 2008 03:14:20 GMT

I thought I'd start playing Supreme Commander again after over a year of ignoring it. And I slowed its game speed down to -7 just to see if the units moved more realistically instead of using the normal speed that allowed units to race across maps everywhere in seconds.

So I played through UEF's mission one last night at speed -7 and it was kind of cool watching the units travel close to scale speed. Tanks were taking around 15 seconds to build instead of 2 or 3 seconds.

At normal speed, I never really cared about each unit. I'd just build and send them off to their destruction. Then repeat. No big deal since it took only a minute to build more and a few seconds for them to get across the map. Battles lasted less than a minute.

At speed -7, the same ground battles went on for over 10 minutes.

And if I needed an engineer far away somewhere, it would have to use an air transport because it would take 20 minutes for the engineer to drive there itself.

Supreme Commander is now less of a video game and much more interesting to play. Maybe I'm a fan of realism in battle games? It seems like a more real war at slower speed. I have way fewer casualties and I don't need to build as many units since I can keep them alive longer.

It may seem boring for some after playing Supreme Commander at only normal speed. Units don't zip across the map like they used to. They don't die before you have a chance to respond to their attacks. You have time to veteranize units and do cool things like flanks and formations before starting your next offensive. You begin to use only scouts for actual scouting because they can get somewhere quick. All units essentially could be used as scouts before because they all could zip around before.

The generals aren't buzzing in every two minutes telling you what your next objective is. It's more like 30 minutes go by before you hear back from them. It's like a more real battle is going on. I'm not into building and bashing in 12 minutes to finish a game. I can stretch it out and get some cool bases built at various locations to make up for unit trip-time across the map. And then there's the battles.

The battles can go on for a good long time when they start. So why rush through all those quick little ones when you can have one long big one? And with better unit management besides?

And I can save a game and come back to it later. Supreme Commander is a much better game for me now. If I had wanted to play the game at normal speed, I would just play Starcraft instead.

FROM SHONNER'S STUDIO: Games

Making Supreme Commander Play More Realistically