First, just the name: Supreme Commander. Not "Modest Commander." You are the Supreme Commander of your units. You call the shots. You tell them what to do, and they obey.
Second, one of the main ideas behind this game was that you could focus on strategy and tactics, and worry as much about mechanics. StarCraft was long in existence when Supreme Commander was being developed, and that game was known for requiring intense amounts of APM to move units around in order to get big advantages. One philosophy behind the game design was that you either shouldn't spend time making small adjustments to your units. You either wouldn't get any benefit from it, or you wouldn't get enough benefit to be worth it. That idea obviously was not realized, because unit micro is important (and I'm sure not everyone on the team felt that way--unit micro can be fun to a lot of people). This meant that the UI was supposed to be very "friendly," not just to noob players, but to power users who wanted to get every possible advantage.
Obviously there is a line, sometimes clear, sometimes blurry, between having not-dumb units and having units that are "too smart" (meaning: the computer plays the game for you).
One change they could make: if you tell an engineer to build a mex, and the engineer arrives at the mex, and discovers that there is an enemy mex built there, the engineer should automatically try to capture it. That would not be "playing the game for you." But if someone made a UI mod where engineers on patrol would look for nearby open mexes to build, and just build them for you, that would cross the line for me.
"Press a button to find the t1 mex nearest to your cursor's position on the screen that is not in the process of upgrading" to me is a great convenience function (one that I haven't started using). "Press a button to turn on an economy manager that will automatically upgrade mexes for you based on how much mass you have in storage and how close they are to your main base" would be way over the line. Different people are going to have a different idea of where the line should be.
I don't think it adds to the game when you have to constantly alternate between giving units move orders and attack orders, switching back and forth to make sure that they travel to the right place and also attack the right target. Being able to tell your destroyers "prioritize enemy destroyers" just seems like a nice quality of life function.
"Auto overcharge," which automatically tries to pick the best targets for overcharges by the ACU and then fires them off as long as you have enough power in storage, I think is a great addition, you should learn it. You shouldn't have to babysit your ACU to use overcharges.
There is a convenience function that was added: if you select an engineer (or an ACU with T2/T3 engineering) and right click on a fully-built T3 mex, or a T2 mex that is NOT upgrading, the engineer will receive orders to build four mass storages around it (assuming there isn't already a building in the way). You can also do this with a any mex (t1 or t2) that is in the process of ugprading, except you have to right click twice (once to "assist" the upgrade, and a second time to get orders to build the storages). This is a great convenience function that eliminates the need for a particular template. (It doesn't work on mexes that are under construction, and it doesn't work on t1 mexes that are not upgrading, because you're not supposed to put storages around those).
Also, since you're coming back, you should take some time to learn about what "snipe mode" is and is not. It was introduced to the game, and then it was nerfed, because people felt it was ruining games. It is still part of the game and it can be a useful tool, especially for certain units that are able to prioritize targeting the enemy ACU (gunships LABs T4 ACUs and T2 fighter/bombers). That is another example of a tool that gives the player more control over the army. It fits with the theme of the game. (It was nerfed, not for being anti-thematic, but because a lot of people felt it was ruining games...you can read about that if you want, my point is just that it fits with the theme of the game, so I don't consider it to be any kind of cheating).
For example, if you're going to drop light artillery in your opponent's base, you could select the artillery and turn on snipe mode before loading your transport. then when the artillery unloads, it will prioritize targets like mexes and pgens over enemy units, which presumably is what you want them to shoot at. Just having units that do what they ought to do is a major plus to me. SupCom isn't supposed to require high APM to play.
One of the major ideas behind SupCom was SCALE. That's why units come in many different sizes, from the modest mech marine to the giant battleship, from t1 light artillery to strategic nuclear missiles. To allow for scale, they needed UI features like strategic zoom. And they wanted UI features like patrol, attack move, ferry, etc. to make it easy for you as the commander to give lots of orders to lots of units without doing a ridiculous amount of clicking. We couldn't have scale if we had a cumbersome UI. It's nice to be able to run a naval battle knowing that your battleships will prioritize enemy battleships and you don't HAVE TO tell them which units to shoot, that creates a lot of problems (what if the enemy battleship retreats, is your battleship going to follow them in? what if you want your battleship to dodge enemy shots, but every time you tell it to attack a specific enemy unit, it stops moving?).
It's really nice to be able to tell your fighter planes to prioritize enemy fighters. This can be very useful if you want to kill off enemy ASFs before trying to take down a Soul Ripper. Otherwise you might end up sacrificing your entire air force, shooting into the bug while enemy ASFs kill all your planes. It's nice to be able to tell your ACU "prioritize targeting enemy units instead of their ACU" so early in the game, you don't waste shots hitting an enemy ACU that is just going to regen the damage, you can kill off their units first. I don't think any of that is cheating. It just makes the game much much nicer.Statistics: Posted by armacham01 — 18 Jul 2020, 00:19
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