Supreme Commander Forged Alliance

[Teeth]

I recently got myself to buy this game when Corsair showed me some videos of it. It's a large scale futuristic RTS from 2007, featuring some really neat concepts like zooming out until the game looks like a map, while also being able to zoom in and watch single units duke it out. Another cool feature are enormous units called experimentals, think 100 meter tall robots with big lasers. It allows for many types of strategies and plays and gathering information about what your enemy is going for is essential, as there are dozens of ways to mess you up, each requiring its own counter.

All in all a really interesting multiplayer RTS that has grabbed me and I want to share the love. The official multiplayer servers have been taken down, but there is a decently sized dedicated community which has created a really neat multiplayer client called Forged Alliance Forever which works very smoothly. They have further balanced the game and are actually developing a Strategus esque factional war thingy. There are probably a few hundred people playing on weeknights with about 12 lobbies open at all time, but as far as I have heard player numbers have been growing, so here I am doing my share of spreading the word. This game is alive and kicking and pretty damn cool.

There is this guy Gyle who does a really good job commentating SupCom games and I find it pretty entertaining to watch. If you are in any way interested in multiplayer RTS's you should give it a glance, although the game specific terminology might dazzle you a bit. Here is a full game cast, these are top class players:

You only need to buy the Supreme Commander Forged Alliance standalone to be able to play the entire multiplayer, which is 10 euros on Steam. Then you need the Forged Alliance Forever client and you are good to go.

http://www.faforever.com/

I have played 10 games so far and attained a glorious rating of 69, which is low as hell so if anyone wants to give this a go, search my name on Steam and we can play some games together or against eachother.

[Tibe]

Its a good game, been playing it over LAN for years now. Its really playable in MP once you customize the gamerules a bit. One minus about the game is that it has a shitton of different superweapons that can destroy everything in large areas with ease, so trying to stop them is pretty close to impossible, unlike for example Red Alert.

[Teeth]

Its a good game, been playing it over LAN for years now. Its really playable in MP once you customize the gamerules a bit. One minus about the game is that it has a shitton of different superweapons that can destroy everything in large areas with ease, so trying to stop them is pretty close to impossible, unlike for example Red Alert.

There are only like 3 weapons in the game that are considered unstoppable and they cost outrageous amounts of resources and they rarely ever get built because they are hugely cost inefficient. If you allow your opponent the resources and time to built one of these, you would have lost anyway even if he used convential units. They are in the game to break turtling. All the other super units called experimentals are strong, can tip the balance of a game if built at the right time, but can be countered by a variety of things.

[[ptx]]

I'm playing through Forged Alliance SP campaign right now, great fun

What i love about this game is how it has a number of really cool features that not a lot of other RTS games have (but should) - such as ferrying orders for groups of transports or the way you can queue orders for everything and see it represented visually or a number of other things to make the game so much less of a chore.

This looks interesting, might give FAF a try.

[Kafein]

Unless it has an active pause, in the name of all strategy games please don't call this strategy

[Logen]

lol,  nice sneaky spiderbot in the end of that match

[Teeth]

Unless it has an active pause, in the name of all strategy games please don't call this strategy

I don't see why you need the ability to freeze time to have strategy in a game, but if we are going to discuss semantics than this game is indeed a real-time tactical game, but not because it does not have pauses.

I'm playing through Forged Alliance SP campaign right now, great fun

What i love about this game is how it has a number of really cool features that not a lot of other RTS games have (but should) - such as ferrying orders for groups of transports or the way you can queue orders for everything and see it represented visually or a number of other things to make the game so much less of a chore.

This looks interesting, might give FAF a try.

True, some very nice design to streamline the experience. You can play the entire FA and SC campaigns coop as well through the FAF client, but yeah multiplayer is great fun as well. Might seem a bit overwhelming at first, but if you just play noob teamgames it doesn't get so crazy.

[[ptx]]

Unless it has an active pause, in the name of all strategy games please don't call this strategy

SupCom is a strategy game.

a strategy game

a strategy game

a strategy game

[zagibu]

It's the best RTS, period. There are so many different angles of attack. Defense actually works, because of harvestable wrecks, scouting is top priority, everything is perfect in this game (in which other game can you do a combined ground forces/bomber strike without having to manually time everything?). We regularly play it on LAN parties, and it's always a blast (there's a 16 players mod and we played with 12 players this christmas...works great).

[korppis]

Ahh yes, that is by far the best RTS I've played. We used to play it in LAN, allied against AI teams (enhanced with Sorian AI mod which is very challenging). The nuke spam and T4 artillery in the end is just insane though so we always played with those things disabled. But overall they managed to make the game nicely balanced with cool unique units. 

[Latrinenkobold]

Ahhh supreme commander my old love

I was pretty sure i´m the only one on this planet who likes this game, because i could never get any friends into playing it with me

Disc is broken so i will probably buy it on steam with the prize money from the Panos tournament hueheuehueheu

[Tibe]

It's the best RTS, period. There are so many different angles of attack. Defense actually works, because of harvestable wrecks, scouting is top priority, everything is perfect in this game (in which other game can you do a combined ground forces/bomber strike without having to manually time everything?). We regularly play it on LAN parties, and it's always a blast (there's a 16 players mod and we played with 12 players this christmas...works great).

What PC-s did u use? Did it run flawlessly? I generally played it 1 vs 1 with my buddies. We once planned to do a 2 vs 2 but they sorta dropped the idea, when they watched the youtube gameplayvideos and saw the massive numbers. I mean it can run smoothly on our custommade proper desktops, but we sorta intended to do a LAN party at some guys house and obliviously with laptops. Very average laptops with around 3gb of videomemory. I cant even imagine a 12 player game. I always assumed everybodies PCs would spontaneously combust at even 6 player matches.

[Nightmare798]

When this game was released, they said that only jews and jesus have enough money to run it on maximum details.

Very average laptops with around 3gb of videomemory

Yeah sure.

Very average laptops with 8 core 3.4 GHZ processors, GPUs with 3gb of video memory, 16gb of RAM and 20 terabytes HDDs.

Wow thats so average. Srsly, tell them to set their laptops on fire.

[Tibe]

Clearly everybody has their own definition of average. You were wrong about the cores, RAM and HDDs btw. 3gb of vidmemory is pretty average. Unless you buy a laptop with a completely crappy onboard, but why would you do that when you know for a fact that you are gonna game with it. Better to save up on ram, CPU and harddrive then GPU, dont you agree?

[Teeth]

I have a 3 year old pc which was a game pc on a tight budget when I bought it and I have been playing 5 vs 5's no problem whatsoever. If you have anything that below 5 years old that was intended to be able to run video games at some point, you should be fine. Poor performance probably depends more on CPU than GPU anyway, thats the price you pay for having a game in which every shot fired is an actual physics based projectile instead of just an animation like in gay RTS games like Starcraft.