I have not been playing supcom for the last couple of years, but the things I am going to talk about are mostly general concepts that aren't specific to supcom.
However my knowledge about "the current state of the community" is not reliable so I will try to not draw conclusions from how I "feel things are".
I am also not saying that the community/game is stagnating, I don't think so but there was some talk in other threads about that topic.
I didn't play supcom but I did playing and watching a fair amount of Dota 2 instead. Now what is this, a traitor? An rts player turned casual by mobas? Well yea, supcom felt too competitive for me, but this isn't about my taste or the decline of rts games anyways.
But now to the point:
I think valve has used some very smart strategies to push Dota 2's popularity that could also be applied here. These concepts might seem obvious to you, but I believe some people are not aware of them (I wasn't a few years ago).
I am not saying the following ideas need to be implemented, but consider it food for thought.
Esports as the core of the community
Supreme Commander is at its core a competitive game. The fun and epic aspects are mostly considered to be "not the real thing" (Thermo, Rohan, most mods), which is totally fine.
We can also see this in the fact that most players heavily care about their rating.
Competitive games are hard to play though, they are exhausting. That's why the user wants more than just the game, he wants the whole competition. He wants to know who's worse and who's better and especially who's the best, and he wants all that in a consistent and reliable manner.
That is why making mods, or any significant modifications to the "pure" game, ranked is such a controversial topic (balance mods) or completely insane (LABwars ranked anyone?).
I don't want to criticize the rating system though because imo there isn't much to criticize about it. The rating accuracy will simply improve with how frequently and regularily people play ranked games.
So the goal is to give the player a feeling of officiality with those things (I don't know if this word exists in the way I mean it).
How could this be achieved?
Official tournaments
This is a topic where I might be misjudging the current situation in FAF. There do seem to be frequent tournaments (which is good) that are also relevant, meaning that the stakes are somewhat high and the best players take part. It does seem though like they happen whenever an organizer feels like organizing it and/or finally has the time. Legends Of The Stars might be a bit of an exception to this (it seems great).
I think it would be good to have official tournaments that run regularily, under the same name and with the same status. They should be the way of deciding who is the best player and incentivise the whole community to fire up FAF and play in the qualifiers. The official tournaments would be bonfires for the community where the important matches are streamed and everyone talks about their favourite player. It might be advisable to offer crowdfunded pricemoney, or other prices (like the avatars, but cosmetics could be expanded to the ingame)
This goes hand in hand with seasonalizing the game
If you have regular, significant events, then these events automatically divide the year into seasons around which the community can cycle.
This motivates players that have been inactive for a few months or longer to come back to the game since they can feel that "something is going on". By having the community activity oscillate with seasons, there will be no feeling of stagnation.
An important part of seasonalizing the game is seasonalizing balance.
One seasons one patch. Or something like that. It doesn't need to be exactly that, obviously, but it intuitively makes sense. After an official tournament everything will be clear. You know who won, you know who lost and most importantly you know how they won. The game becomes stale, the spirit of competition is gone and you become less motivated to search ranked.
That is why you need a new balance patch to change up the gameplay and make it interesting again.
But patches take many months to make and the everyone just complains.
My reply to this is the second large concept.
Balance to imbalance
Again I want to say that I don't know what exactly the content of the last patches were, but when I did follow the balance it was definetly not what I mean by balancing to imbalance.
What if balance patches were there to make the game imbalanced? What if they changed the game not with the intention of making it more balanced, but just to make a change?
But who wants to play an imbalanced game
Most games are in a way self balancing. Everyone can take the same actions, everyone can build that broken unit. If something is too weak, then it will simply not be used.
Let's say every player has 20 options. A balancing approach will probably try to make it equally viable to use all of those options, but an imbalancing approach will make imbalanced changes. As a result not all options are viable, but due to the diversity of options this is not actually a problem. Options 1 to 5 might end up barely being used for this patch but who knows, maybe next patch they are the trick to winning.
By doing this the players are motivated to play, because they see that a significant change has happened and it immediately triggers their curiosity. They want to see how the game plays out with those changes and they feel like it could be them who discovers an effective strategy that nobody knows yet.
One idea that helps with balancing to imbalance is to buff strengths, not weaknesses. IF the Titan is too weak, don't buff it's HP. This is boring. Instead, make it faster. If it is still too weak, then make it even faster until people will curse your name in aeolus!
But wait! If i make the Titan OP, then everyone will only play UEF! You don't want that!
This is a good point and to regard this I want to talk about diversity of options.
In Dota 2, or any moba for that matter, the player has dozens of dozens of heroes to choose from. If some of those heroes are utterly useless for a patch, then barely anyone will care about or even notice it.
When a player picks his faction in supcom, he only has 4 options. This is really changes the situation because the games would be significantly more monotonic if one or two of those factions were barely played at all. 4 Options is just not enough. Therefore this concept should not be applied to faction balance.
However when it comes to units, supcom definetly has sufficiently many options so that imbalancing them and making a few less useful could be done without killing off all diversity.
For example this concept could in my opinion be used as a guideline for tech tier and unit balance, (i.e. how strong is T2 compared to T1? how strong is artillery compared to tanks?) and there's more (Turtle vs ACU rush? Gameenders vs Units? etc.).
It needs to be carefully applied though, because just making the game broken obviously wouldn't make it fun. Just... balance for fun, not for balance
.Maintaining a healthy faction balance when you completely change the flow of the game is definetly hard but I think it is doable.
To sum it up, the advantages of balancing to imbalance are: More diversity, curiosity to play the changed game, creating the feeling that you can win over your opponents and: More emotion!
These points are merely ideas, but I think they shape a nice and coherent picture of how things could work if they were implemented. I am not saying that things are going wrongly somehow or that I know better in any way.
I am also aware that all of these points require
a very large amount of organizational work,
which is the largest problem I see.
If you feel like I misjudged supcom and FAF in some aspects then please, go ahead and point it out.
