My buddy recently started casting Forged Alliance Forever

[theonlyshaft]

I don't know very much about this game, I only heard of it today. I'm actually kind of excited to try it, I'm about to (it's downloading!) I was watching his video on YouTube and it looked really compelling. There's a lot going on. I've got a history of RTS, playing like Civ4 and War3 and SC2 and stuff. Is this similar to that? He said not really, but I wanted a second opinion.

[everywhere116]

Civ4 isn't an RTS so that's right out. It's a great game but its a different genre to actual RTSs.

If you're coming in from Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2 then you should be able to pick up the controls rather well, but you don't need to learn 5000 hotkeys or have a 90 APM count in order to do well. The biggest difference between one of those games and SupCom is the sense of scale. As you probably saw on your friend's casts you can zoom in from the very highest level of the map all the way down to zooming on on a single unit. In some games you will be in control of hundreds of independent units (by independent I mean they're not part of a squad or something. You can control many dozens of Stormtroopers in a game like Empire at War but you can't control each one individually) so being able to multitasking at the higher strategic level is more important than controlling units at the individual level (although in many situations it can still help, so still learn some useful micro tricks if you pick some up.)

The other main thing is the economy. In Warcraft and Starcraft you gather resources that are then stored in a repository, and you purchase units for a set cost from whatever production building you have. It doesn't really work like that in SupCom. You gather resources at a fixed rate depending on how many power generators and mass extractors you have, so for example your income could be 30 mass per second and 300 power per second. When you build units or buildings, you don't spend all of the resources up front, instead you spend a certain amount of resources per second on whatever your building until it is completed. So if you build a tank in a land factory, you'll spend three mass per second (is it three? I forget) for about 30 seconds until the unit is completed. If you're total resource expenditure is greater than your income then you'll eat through your storage until you run out, at which point all of your factories will still function but they'll build at a proportionally slower rate (so if your income is 30 mass per second and your spending 60 mass per second then all of your factories will work at 50% speed). If your income is higher then your expenditures then your storage will fill up until it overflows, any overflow will go to your teammates. If everyone on your team is overflowing or you are in a 1v1 then the resource is wasted. This isn't a big deal for power since power generators can be built anywhere but mass is precious so you want to spend every drop of it that you can.

Other than that the game functions similarly to other RTSs. There are of course specific strategies to this game you can learn and I'm sure you will, but that'll come i time as you play and learn. Welcome!

[tatsu]

I don't know very much about this game, I only heard of it today. I'm actually kind of excited to try it, I'm about to (it's downloading!) I was watching his video on YouTube and it looked really compelling. There's a lot going on. I've got a history of RTS, playing like Civ4 and War3 and SC2 and stuff. Is this similar to that? He said not really, but I wanted a second opinion.

welcome to this community!

It really wouldn't be just to say they are the same of even similar so I'm going to say they're not.

you just really really have to try it is all. there is no real barrier to start trying it's a near-free game on steam. Just add it onto your wishlist and wait for one of those regular 75% off sales on this title. in the meantime have your friend (if he has it on steam and unless he's cracked it that's the only possibility) add you to his list of friends who's steam library he shares with.

then install faf (the game is technically and very literally 3 years of dev time apart (not counting the work already put in by then by the faf community))

and you'll see.


FAF is a rare kind of welcoming for an unusually (exceedingly (insanely)) large content in proportion to the type of product.

sup com was extremely popular at the time of it's release but even that isn't really enough alone to justify that despite the common notion that games are supposed to die out with time it's endured and even flourished.