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Get FAF, use it to play the SupCom campaign, then try FA. FA just throws everything at you because it assumes you've already played through the SupCom campaign, have seen it all and know it all.
AI:
There are improved 2 AIs for this game:
1) https://steamcommunity.com/app/9420/discussions/0/4515505458300068378/
2) LOUD mod, found on moddb (also changes a lot about the game)
The default AI maphacks, so it knows where your everything is all the time. The improved AIs don't anymore.
The campaign AI is dumb and will remain that way though. There has only been one attempt to improve this game's campaign and that was only in the units placement and objective scripting way, not by improving the AI or maps themselves.
That you have to babysit everything a lot is due to 2 flaws in the game:
1) engineers being catastrophic to handle, both because they don't update their orders properly and because the UI actually lacks proper control options to assign them only to intended tasks while unsupervised and ordered to attend a general area
2) pathfinding being a big issue for the game in general, causing units to get bumped into impassable area, inside structures, out of protective shield bubbles by chance or stuck where there's nothing to get stuck on
Formations are another issue. There are only 2 and not set up right. You'll notice if you're trying to mix a large army of shield bubble providing units and combat units: The shield bubble providing units aren't mixed into the regular units with every other formation position but pushed further and further behind the larger the army gets until they eventually expose multiple front rows of combat units completely.
For naval units and experimentals the distances are too far.
Economy: Early on energy production is nearly non-existent while late game mass is needed. The only 2 ways around this are either spamming economy (by creating the structures that provide the necessary resource or Sub-ACUs that can be equipped with an upgrade to produce both) or making use of adjacency to get a cost reduction by building energy- or mass providing structures so that they connect to structures draining one or both of these resources. This actually helps a lot, as you can produce pretty cheap once that's set up. Examples:
1) land units: shield center, 4x T3 mass fabricator on all sides, 4x T3 land unit factory at the corner
2) aircraft: 2x T3 power generator diagonally + 2x aircraft factory so that each benefits from 2 T3 power generators
Only the construction of structures and experimentals can't be made any cheaper. Also any unit assisting a factory that benefits from adjacency completely ignores and bypasses the adjacency bonus but instead drains resources by assisting at the full price instead of the unlocked discount. So you can always produce fast, if you need to, but at the full price only.
For getting mass it's extremely important to build 4x mass storage units around every mass extractor (starting with T2, once no more new ones can be claimed or you're making a plus), as that increases their output and very relevant for T3, as it reduces their upgrade cost to T3 and increases their output significantly once at T3.
It's also super relevant to gather the resources left behind by destroyed units and found on the map, as that saves you seconds to minutes of resource production and really helps to get ahead.
The most energy draining structures are nukes, T3 mass fabricators and T3 artillery structures (or their experimental version). Otherwise energy shouldn't be a problem at all, except for expensive ACU upgrades, as a single T3 power generator can support multiple shields and T2 artillery structures (they drain energy for a short amount after firing, not mentioned in the tooltip).
Defenses: T1 is trash, especially AA. T2 is when it becomes good, especially AA. T3 land defense structures are only available to UEF. Every other faction is stuck with T2 turrets against T3 land units, meaning that you need either T3 artillery (or sniper units for factions having them) units + some protecting units or experimentals to defend (+shields). To save some repair micro repair stations have been introduced. Alternatively you can assign an engineering unit to patrol the area or specifically to a structure (beware of area damage though, which is when shields should be placed).
The game doesn't have a rock paper scissor concept, as armor classes aren't really used by the game, thus most units just deal the same generic damage against anything and everything. It's a flaw, making air units to easy and rewarding to use, as due to that they aren't fragile enough against AA, with even a AA fighter taking minutes of chasing a a T3 bomber, or T3 gunships being able to raid T3 AA defended area if they're just in large numbers. This also due to aircraft being able to ignore any blocking another, as it affects land units.
That the tooltips don't inform about possible adjacency and the values you can get with it is a flaw that no one has addressed so far and since adjacency is tightly built into the game it's strange that this is the case, still.
If you're having trouble dealing with artillery then just spam a bunch of low tech units against them. Those can be produced fast and they can't defend themselves against the influx, just so long as they're out in the open alone. Other than that you can attack back with the exact same unit type, but the benefit of them being protected by your base defenses and shields, so that should be easy.
I'm not a big fan of bubble shields being the only means of base protection in the game. I'd like it more if structures could be upgraded with custom armor choices against either siege damage, reducing the damage received from burning, bombs, missiles, artillery and battleships, or plating to reduce direct fire damage coming from land units, gunships and destroyers by some percentage, with each choice adding some additional health and some minor health regeneration and also enabling a 2nd upgrade once done, which is a body shield that can be toggled on / off.
All factories should be able to get a bubble shield upgrade for themselves to at least cover their production area, and ideally also 2 production speed upgrades so that adjacency-benefitting structures can also be made to produce fast.
Bubble shields that cover a large area should get more adjacency options, like energy storage units increasing the total shield health while power generators enable and increase the in-combat and out of combat shield recharge rate.
Walls should be one of the first available structure upgrade choices as well, but not act like manually built walls, but instead provide good bonus health and some moderate passive selfheal, maybe as 1st defensive structure upgrade before any of the others.
Bubble shields that cover large areas should be an expensive luxury for base protection, meant only for key spots, and not be able to receive a power drain reduction by adjacency.
The whole point of this would be that it'd be possible to get a base that doesn't instantly get blown to bits once an enemy makes contact or that a single explosive structure taken out no longer can cause a chain reaction. With that design concept bases would be more open to be attacked, allowing for more interesting gameplay than in the current game, with completely bubbled up bases. It'd also be interesting to play due to the necessary choices which structures should remain vulnerable by not receiving defensive upgrades and which upgrades to use or even research (@ACU).
In my opinion the game could also have been better if the ACU itself was the main upgrade center to unlock new techs for structures and units to outfit them with, but the game would need to keep full unit control enabled while upgrading instead of putting a unit into hold position mode when upgrading and still allow actual ACU upgrades to take place. The UI isn't made for viewing a big upgrade tree with dependencies and bad in general, though.
I actually didnt know that engineers use full unit cost when assisting. I usually always send two to assist a factory early but if thats true then I might have handicapped myself the entire time.
Ironically enough the things you wish for are basically just supcom2 (in a lot of areas) but glad to know im not the only one that struggles with it.
Actually I started with FAF first, as my friend basically introduced me to that and skipped... basically everything. Also I shouldnt be surprised the AI maphacks, it does that in supcom2 too :/
But thanks, Ill try that
Example with made up numbers:
-factory with 100 construction speed + adjacency bonus that reduces mass cost for constructing units by 50%
-if you'd assign any amount of engineers that have a combined construction speed of exactly 100 then half of the construction would be done by the engineers that neither offer nor benefit from any adjacency bonus, causing the unit production to run at full price, while the other half would be done by the factory that benefits from the 50% mass cost reduction due to adjacency (100 out of 200 combined production speed in each case)
-the efficiency would go down from 50% mass cost reduction to 25% mass cost reduction only while the production speed would double
-if said engineers only had a combined production speed of 25 then 20% (25 out of 125 combined production speed) of the production would run at full price, while 80% would run at 50% mass cost
-with only 80% of the production gaining the 50% mass cost reduction the effective value of total mass cost reduction goes down to 40% (0.5 x 0.8); alternatively: with 20% of the construction running at full price this skips 20% of the 50% price reduction during construction (0.5 - 0.5 x 0.2 = 0.4 = 40%); in the end 60% of the unit's full mass price has to be paid per unit construction if the engineers assisted from start to finish while getting a 20% faster unit construction that way
**depends on map
The lack of proper engineer behavior is one of the major issues of the game next to the pathfinding:
-they don't use their full reclaim & repair range but always drive right in front of everything
-they're slower with gathering when they're automatically chosing their targets to reclaim, all just because they don't auto-mark everything in range when stopping to move to gather
-they don't update their orders properly, causing engineers to block another over and over if some wreck(s) needed to be removed from the construction area
-they don't update their orders for construction properly, still trying to reach a spot with an assigned construction order where said building already exists
-they skip orders if attackers manage to interrupt the construction process by destroying the structure instead of starting over
-they can't be forced to only follow specific engineering tasks, causing them to stop reclaiming and instead contribute to an uninentded waste of resources by starting to assist production they weren't meant to
-they won't ever refuel aircraft on their own despite capable to, unless they're repairing a damaged one, causing this to happen automatically
-they won't ever help recharging shields in the area they're ordered to patrol, even though they're capable to
-engineer units with a weapon will always prefer an attack-move as attack order, even with their weapon disabled, which makes no sense and is wrong unit behavior, so you can't order armed engineers to assist a shield if any unit is nearby that they could attack, because then they'll go into battle mode and even ignore specific assist orders or direct right clicks onto the shield and focus on whatever enemy is nearby, unless ordered to assist the shield before any enemy contact - then all works as it should
-the game really lacks on-cursor information for the selected engineers for how long reclaiming a specific wreck would take and how much that'd contribute to income, how much that'd speed up a production but increase the resources drain
-you can't force engineers to use the other side for naval unit production and can't rotate that structure either
-while they automatically stop acquiring new wrecks to gather from while there'd still be storage room available but it's close to full they don't halt (without aborting) any gathering from wreckage while no more resources can be stored; instead they completely drain whatever wreck they were working on while they should actually just slow down to 0 construction speed, and speed up again when there's room, so that the player doesn't constantly have to step in to cancel their order(s) and assign the exact same orders again; currently they finish and just drive to their final point, destroying all trees in their path
The absolute minimum to be at peace with the engineers would be
-fixed pathfinding (impossible: game flaw)
-proper order updates (no longer blocking another, no longer trying to get to already completed tasks)
-proper use of maximum construction & repair range
-fast gathering (auto-marking everything in range for gathering once stopping), after that moving on, as was initially ordered
-being able to assign them only to their intended orders instead of having them perform all kinds of not intended tasks if left unsupervised or having them act like the terminator, merely because they have a weapon, being more eager to chase and attack enemies than assisting a given structure or unit; in fact they can't be made to while anything is in attack radius - no matter what game command and unit order you try
-no order skipping (be it for destroyed construction objects where they need to start over or for gathering wrecks where gathering should just slow down to 0 instead of wasting available resources if the storage units are full)
The UI also has its flaws:
-you can't restrict or allow engineers only intended tasks (same for repair stations)
-any missile construction has absolutely no info about total cost in mass, energy, time per missile and no default resource drain information it comes with ahead of construction
-structures like T2 & T3 artillery don't mention that they draw energy per shot or how much
-structures that can grant or benefit from an adjacency effect don't mention it in the tooltip and neither any values
-no passive mode for artillery / area damage units (does nothing unless specifically orderd to), instead forced on/off weapon toggle (clunky, reaction delay)
-no option to enable or disable individual weapon types of a given unit or unit type or set target priorities (requires a mod)
Unit stupidity is also an issue:
-units attacking the terrain sometimes because there's no line of fire check ahead of making shots (especially critical if that happens with an overcharge attack)
-lots of overkill damage being pumped into the first unit a ground of units locks onto
-bad default target priorities (almost all units)
-friendly fire with siege weapons
-AA fighters chasing enemy scouts into the enemy base to be shot down by AA turrets and defending units
-units with turrets dropping their assigned target(s) and chosing their own instead when ordered to move after that (the whole point of having a turret is that they can move and keep their targets)
-bombers by default flying right over a target and into enemy air defense instead of making an U-turn after dropping their load
-some units are on auto-aggressive behavior that can't be turned off ("Supreme Commander" - can't command) and that the UI (unit tooltip) doesn't provide any info about
-delayed unit movement is a thing, unrelated to buggy pathfinding
Hopefully the fan game Sactuary does better. Supreme Commander FA is still in a beta state to me.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheGreenSquier/videos
For example there is a mission where tactical missile launchers and defences are out right talked about.
One of the biggest differences I found from 2 is the sheer scale of things. Once you get to tier 3, combat will be between large armies that start engagements long before they even see each other. You don't build stuff like a single artillery piece, you construct whole batteries of them.
If you want, we can have a coop vs AI skirmish or campaign (FAF introduced coop into the original campaigns, so that's neat) and I will answer all your questions about the game. Just send me a friend request. I'm CEST (european) timezone, but usually stay late at night so other timezones are possible.