Has anyone tried Supreme Commander?

[Tris]

I DL'ed the demo yesterday and am not sure what to think. Have done a variety of RTS's of Blizzard's and a few from other sources.

Honestly I wish I could say that I was impressed, but not so much. Units take forever to build, as do buildings. I remember SC and WCx when you could actually finish a game in under 30 minutes ... with Sup Com, it seems to take 30 mins just to get your manufacturing set up. And then it's over an hour later to build the higher end units.

Also, unit AI in the demo was sort of bleh.

I have tried the THQ stablemate "Company of Honor" demo, and it really seems to be like WH40K, but with WWII units. However, it also doesn't take you 30 minutes to build a single unit:P

I love the scale of Sup Com, but wish the execution was a bit better.

The game looks interesting, and if somebody has had better experiences with it, please post.

[roguebanshee]

SupCom is much closer to Total Annihilation than it is to any other RTS. Partly because both games were designed by the same guy.

As far as speed goes, builders (including your commander) can assist each other and factories even if they can't build the structure or unit itself. And you don't need the tech level 3 (or 4, aka experimentals) units to fight, tech 2 and 1 are good enough. 15 minute games are very possible in the demo, you just have to move your focus from getting a big economy and lots of big units to getting a decent base economy and pumping out units. Trying to get a large army of the endgame units is going to take a long time, mostly they seem to be stalemate breakers instead of the main focus of the game.

One thing that may help you a bit with your economy is understanding the "Adjency Bonus". Basically if you have either a powerplant or a mass extractor/fabricator placed next to another building then the building will recieve an energy or mass discount on everything it does. If you place an energy storage next to a powerplant then the powerplant produces more energy and the same goes for mass storage and mass extractors/fabricators.

Unit AI isn't the greatest, but it's good enough.

As for Company of Heroes, it was made by Relic (but published by THQ). They also made WH40k: DoW + expansions, so Company of Heroes feels like a quick cash-in to me.

[Bob]

I've played the SupComm demo and I loved it! (well, ok, I liked it - I've been playing TA spring recently and with SupComm it was nice to play something TA-esque, in 3D, that I didn't have to fight with to make work).
Interestingly enough, the thing you single out as your major criticism is what I particularly liked about it. I like my strategy games to last a long time and with a fast-paced game like Starcraft it was a struggle to make the game last a reasonable amount of time without blatantly porcing* in my own base and then breaking out when I felt like finishing the game.
Mind, the demo is a bit limited - there's only one single player map for skirmishes.
That said, I probably won't be buying the full version any time soon - I had to put the quality settings right down on the demo and even then the graphics weren't smooth so I don't think it's worth buying when my computer can't run it properly anyway. I'll probably buy it in a few years when I have a new computer and I can pick the game up for £10 (this from the guy who only bought Homeworld2 a few weeks ago).

For reference, my 'just-good-enough-to-run-it' computer is an Athlon64 3200+, 1GB RAM & ATi X800XL (256MB)

-Bob

*porcing - porcupining; sitting in your own base building lots of defensive structures.

[roguebanshee]

For reference, my 'just-good-enough-to-run-it' computer is an Athlon64 3200+, 1GB RAM & ATi X800XL (256MB)

The processor and memory are the important parts for SupCom, your graphics card should be good enough for (near) max settings.

A dual core processor (2.2 GHz or above) of some type and 2 GB RAM has in general been the recommended (by players) minimum specs.

[Wyrm]

The game came as bundled software with my vid card but won't install for whatever reason. Either I got a bad disc or there's a copy protection thing preventing me from accessing the install files.