Comments on: Custom Incredulity: Starcraft II’s Map Cleverness

By: JohnC

JohnC — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:25:01 +0000

Might be off-topic, but I beg to differ. Watching top SupCom players play on QuadV its just T1 spam and T3 air to end it. I follow the pro scenes for both games so…

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:38:30 +0000

“Whereas I can play SupCom at the top level just by spamming T1 tanks and artillery, SupCom is a great game but competitively? Its degenerate.”

Dunno which top level you’re talking about but spamming alone hasn’t saved anyone in SupCom’s top ranked matches (nor FA’s, where all the action is now). Its main focus on macro is its biggest strength, focusing on both micro and macro, mostly through UI loopholes and deficiencies as a sign of ‘skill’, would be a fine example of ‘degenerate’.

So no, you won’t beat anyone of equal skill by spamming T1 tanks and/or artillery in SupCom/FA.

By: Heliocentric

Heliocentric — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:01:39 +0000

I judge starcraft 2 based on the masters they serve. The koreans will not accept massive change, if they did they would have other more progressive games as smaller e-sports. Thus they are actually serving the need to stagnate, nothing to do with its visual style.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:39:11 +0000

It’s fair that people are judging SC2 on the basis that it looks like an old-school RTS. However, I think when it’s played we will realise the difference between Blizzard’s massive over-investment, and their rivals. It’s going to be beyond-slick.

By: JohnC

JohnC — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:15:47 +0000

“I’m just at a loss as to what makes SC so worth being enamored with. It’s ridiculous how little the RTS has evolved since Warcraft 1.”

People are enamored with SC because of how deep the game is competitively. Its been evolving for 10 years, has an enormous global competitive scene and it takes literally years to learn all the strategies and creative tricks. You won’t beat anyone by spamming zerglings, try it if you don’t believe me.

Whereas I can play SupCom at the top level just by spamming T1 tanks and artillery, SupCom is a great game but competitively? Its degenerate.

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:35:38 +0000

Looks cool, if it’s really that easy as Blizzard says it is then we might see some beautiful things although it probably won’t come close to the detail and underlying systems of making such a mod with a shooter engine.

I’ll probably prefer SupCom 2 gameplay wise over the standard SCII game though. Or I’ll play Forged Alliance v3603 (yes, beta has just launched peeps!). Don’t make any misunderstandings about it: SupCom did much more for the genre control and scale-wise than StarCraft ever did and StarCraft II will ever do. I think that’s the tragedy surrounding Chris Taylor’s RTSs (and the likes of Dark Reign/Homeworld): they do everything to improve one of the most key parts of a strategy game (controls) to make room for more complicated stuff which doesn’t rely on who is having the fastest click but in the end people stick with a big name which just swaps some units for new ones and barely brings the UI to a standard level. It’s literally as if people would want a remake of Quake 1 with no mouse-look.

Praise to the polish, the new campaign mechanics, mod tools, art, and Battle.net features but SCII itself can’t excite my RTS heart as other, less polished titles do.

By: Caiman

Caiman — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:04:02 +0000

I must admit, this news item has finally convinced me to get SC2. I’m sure the game itself will be fun for a while, but the mod potential here is much more exciting. Just imagine the epic RTS / FPS / RPG / 2D hybrids…!

By: army of none

army of none — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:22:03 +0000

Very cool. The customs on Wc3 (And no, not DoTA! All the other RPG’s and zombie maps!) consumed roughly 500 hours of playtime, so I’ll be buying SC2 solely for the customs. Awesome.

By: LionsPhil

LionsPhil — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:19:03 +0000

@Railick: Yeah, they did a real hack-job on the supposed multithreaded engine; they distribute across threads by task, rather than by batch of units, AFAICT. This can lead to the hilarious incident where the UI is silky-smooth, but the units are all crawling about at half-speed, because the simulation thread is totally overloaded, and the other processor cores are twiddling their thumbs waiting for it. Yaaay.

Thing is, though, if you don’t have at least a proper Computer Science degree, you’re not going to be able to write nontrivial multithreaded code that works without either intermittently locking itself solid, or just silently trashing your game state all the time (read: hilarious bugs, nigh-impossible to track down and fix, and lots of them).

By: JKjoker

JKjoker — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:10:04 +0000

@Big J: yeah, the map fee is “optional”, but then, who is going to post anything they spent more than 5 minutes on without asking for a fee ? plus its pretty likely any “free” maps worth a damn will be buried under a pile of dung and if, by any chance in hell, any of the free maps becomes popular it will turn into nonfree, anyway i doubt the system will be in place as they described it for long as it would clog with the amount of crap that will be uploaded by idiots, so expect changes

and i doubt Blizzard went out of their way to put this system into place while forcing bnet down our orifices so that they could release “free” maps, so you can expect anything from them for a fee except maybe a few promotions or demos

and after reading that press release about the maps im starting to worry about the ability to transfer or download maps, they might make that bnet only as well

By: Railick

Railick — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:58:19 +0000

Something else I’ve noticed recently about Supreme Commander and it’s expand-alone that was lacking is that sometimes you have so many units moving at once your computer can’t relay the new commands to your units (i had this happen last night when I was trying to command 5 or 10 units to attack , they just stood there and did nothing until they were all destroyed O.o In my mind it was because I had 240 other units moving around at the same time and it couldn’t command them all or something O.o )

I like a lot of complaints about Supreme Commander can be fixed if you just play Supreme Commander :Forged Alliances. The build times for some of the giant units is MUCh shorter (and they are weaker I believe) and everything is much faster paced than the origonal game. The 4 sides are very diffrent in their strengths and weakness but you’d have to actually PLAY the game to see the difference since most of the units themselves are almost the same across the diffrent races. (The differeces are more on a grand level than on an individual unit level. For example Cybran players do well to use their stealth technology to their advantage and strike at enemies and also have fantastic tactical missles compared to the other races. Their tactical missles fire faster and when they are destroyed they split into several smaller missles instead of just disappearing ;P)

I like it is like other people said above, this games fill a niche and players want sequals to the games they like. That is why we’re seeing a Supreme Commander 2 and Starcraft 2 along with the newer RTS games like Dawn of War 2 and so on.

By: Jahkaivah

Jahkaivah — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:41:10 +0000

@ourdreamsoffreedom

It’s nice to stick to roots sometimes, Half Life 1 was more impressive than Doom, but that doesn’t mean we want to forget the “just shoot them” style games otherwise we wouldn’t have Serious Sam or Left 4 Dead.

There are alot of sub-genres that have formed, such as seen in Defense of the Ancients, Dawn of War 2, or the Total Wars games.

But like those and SupCom I can see some perfectly good reasons to prefer the staple resource-fighting micro-managing sub-genre Starcraft was a part of, and Blizzard are devlopers who can provide the quality-assurance fans of that sub-genre want.