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Night10194 posted:Watching the latest mission, I am very glad to see I am not the only fan of Massive loving Swarm of Gunships. edit: UEF's handling of teleport technology just further enforces my theory they're the descendants of Veruna. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 08:58
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anilEhilated posted:gently caress no, gunships are the best. Especially giant ones. When the game was first in beta and a friend and I were messing around with the multiplayer against each other, he built a massive set of fortifications and layered defenses, carefully digging himself in. I built like 30 Tier 3 UEF Gunships and decided 'gently caress it, I'm gonna lose since I was dicking around, just send all those in and try to assassinate his ACU.' I believe that foundational experience of watching the shields collapse and the ACU get pasted in seconds before the swarm could be shot down formed the core of my desire to assassinate people with airship swarms to this day.
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Jun 23, 2015 09:10
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Yeah large numbers of UEF T3 gunships are some terrifying poo poo. They can't really defend themselves against air units but 20+ of them will SPLATTER anything on the ground.
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Jun 23, 2015 09:19
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Neruz posted:Yup that was because of the short sonar range; if I'd had a torp bomber right over the ACU I'd have been able to see it and give an attack order, but the bombers would lose target when they flew away from the ACU to begin their attack run. Of course then you run into the issue of them dropping the torpedoes on land trying to get a ship just off the coast. Just use gunships.
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Jun 23, 2015 11:30
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DFlux posted:Yeah large numbers of UEF T3 gunships are some terrifying poo poo. They can't really defend themselves against air units but 20+ of them will SPLATTER anything on the ground. That's what ASFs are for. Strat bombers, particularly Cybran ones, are far more terrifying in my experience.
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Jun 23, 2015 13:59
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Neruz posted:Yup that was because of the short sonar range; if I'd had a torp bomber right over the ACU I'd have been able to see it and give an attack order, but the bombers would lose target when they flew away from the ACU to begin their attack run. Which still makes them not so useful as per my original comment. Kind of wonder how THAT one slipped through QA...
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Jun 23, 2015 20:12
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Cythereal posted:That's what ASFs are for. Strat bombers, particularly Cybran ones, are far more terrifying in my experience. Strat bombers will snipe your commander. T3 gunships will destroy your entire base, AA be damned.
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Jun 24, 2015 00:10
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Gunships are all well and good, but my preferred strategy is almost always to turtle and then send a conga line of Fatboys. Enemy has air? Build some AA onsite faster than any (unsupported) factory in the game.
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Jun 24, 2015 01:38
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This may be a touch odd to ask, but Neruz were you a regular on the GPG forums back in the day?
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Jun 24, 2015 18:20
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Best part of the UEF gunships is carrying t2 aa and getting messages about being a cheater when aircraft get gunned down too. Alternatively load transports with as for a flying dual flak turret.
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Jun 24, 2015 20:24
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A jargogle posted:This may be a touch odd to ask, but Neruz were you a regular on the GPG forums back in the day? Yes. I forget whether I used this handle or PheonixIV back then though. I was one of the lesser modders who actually produced something; never managed to put together anything huge but I put out a dozen or so vaguely balanced 'extra' units for various factions and had a few unrealized plans like a Netstorm mod that I'm still sour about not managing to finish. e: I think I might have been PheonixIV back then and then I stole this handle from someone on the GPG forums when I went to the Bay12 forums, but I honestly don't remember where I picked up Neruz from.
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Jun 25, 2015 03:56
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Whoops its well past time for another one of these! Today I successfully play Supreme Commander while a cat is sitting on my keyboard; I am the best at video games. Cybran Mission 3 - Youtube
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Jun 27, 2015 10:55
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I think the next Cybran mission introduces what is probably (concept-wise) my favorite unit in the game.
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Jun 27, 2015 12:22
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I never saw any reason to put fragile buildings that explode next to artillery. Artillery installations are priority targets and the power plants WILL take damage take from any attacks and when they go up they take chunks of the cannons with them.my dad posted:I think the next Cybran mission introduces what is probably (concept-wise) my favorite unit in the game.
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Jun 27, 2015 14:26
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Poil posted:I never saw any reason to put fragile buildings that explode next to artillery. Artillery installations are priority targets and the power plants WILL take damage take from any attacks and when they go up they take chunks of the cannons with them. That's what shields are for, and putting power gens next to artillery increases the rate of fire. If your artillery is taking direct fire you have bigger problems anyway.
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Jun 27, 2015 14:30
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I've got to say I always found mass storage much more useful than energy storage. It's much easier to run temporary mass shortfalls than power due to the relative numbers involved.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:19
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The important reason why its okay to run at 0 mass but not okay to run at 0 energy is because at 0 energy your radar and shields stop working as we saw earlier in one of the UEF missions when I built a bunch of mobile shields. That said storing mass can be useful too as it allows you to rush build things. Energy storage becomes more useful if you're employing lots of T3 artillery as they consume a big gulp of energy when they fire.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:21
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And running deficits to rush build is a key part of why I enjoy the economic conducting of this tactical industrial action game. I love that, actually. That everything in SupCom is, in setting, expendable except for lives and time. All the units are automated, all the structures can easily be rebuilt in minutes with enough power and mass. It's a sci-fi RTS set in a sci-fi setting that has actually in-setting turned war into an RTS and it makes sense.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:27
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Neruz posted:Whoops its well past time for another one of these! Today I successfully play Supreme Commander while a cat is sitting on my keyboard; I am the best at video games. I'm going to watch this video just in anticipation of you saying, 'Go away cat' in a commonwealth accent.  (I don't actually know where you're from)
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Jun 27, 2015 15:28
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Night10194 posted:It's a sci-fi RTS set in a sci-fi setting that has actually in-setting turned war into an RTS and it makes sense. And this is the case in the fiction, too. SupCom takes the conceit that the screen you see as a player is what the commander sees in the ACU, though optionally with more sophisticated controls. The white lines you see most Aeon have on their face are makeup - Aeon ACU pilot suits read their commanders' facial movements and gestures, made possible by the intense discipline and emotional control the Way promotes, and the facial markings help the computer track and read the commander's facial movements. It's part of why the Aeon are not actually telepathic despite how they sometimes seem. The Way promotes the exercise immense self-control and coming from a culture of subtle social interaction, Aeon find the body language of UEF and Cybrans incredibly easy to read. Princess Rhianne's abilities are very, very rare, and in-setting are explicitly not supernatural. They're the product of Aeon genetic engineering and nanotechnology based on Seraphim physiology, slowly breeding into themselves an innate ability to interact with the quantum realm. Rhianne is among the very, very few Aeon who expresses any form of that ability, and Marxon in-setting is speculated but not confirmed to be another. The Aeon are being extremely cautious about this program, explicitly trying to avoid a repeat of the Cybran/Symbiont mess.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:41
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Like, when they talk about the enemy having a 2-hour head start on Luthien, in setting that is actually a huge deal because that's enough time to build a giant fuckoff base with overlapping shields like she has. I really appreciate the base idea of an RTS where nothing actually has to be abstracted because that's how war works in a post-scarcity society.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:45
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Might as well ask since you talk about in the final video: what the hell is the "reclaim everything in the area" command in FA? I can't for the life of me remember or find it and it's getting annoying to have my base surrounded by fields of junk.
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Jun 27, 2015 15:56
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Poil posted:I think they're kinda dumb myself, and they're just too drat slow to be worth using. On maps that have large, separate bodies of water, they're a godsend. Also, stick 'em under a shield and they're basically an artillery turret that can move and is also a tier 1 AA/tier 2 PD.
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Jun 27, 2015 16:22
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anilEhilated posted:Might as well ask since you talk about in the final video: what the hell is the "reclaim everything in the area" command in FA? I can't for the life of me remember or find it and it's getting annoying to have my base surrounded by fields of junk. Engineers on patrol will reclaim; you actually see an engineer reclaiming some trees while on patrol at some point during this video, but I think the command is either click and drag on reclaim orders or use one of the modifiers (shift, alt or ctrl) when issuing the order. Night10194 posted:Like, when they talk about the enemy having a 2-hour head start on Luthien, in setting that is actually a huge deal because that's enough time to build a giant fuckoff base with overlapping shields like she has. I really appreciate the base idea of an RTS where nothing actually has to be abstracted because that's how war works in a post-scarcity society. Yeah the nanolathe technology allows a Commander to literally build an entire army in a matter of minutes with an exponential rate of growth once you start putting up fabs, this is in-universe how it works which I think makes this the very first RTS game to not have any layers of abstraction between the setting and the gameplay; what you see is what war has become in the SupCom universe. Some people have also pointed out the scale stuff; an ACU is something like 80 - 100 meters tall depending on what you use for scale of measurement; a puny Mech Marine is the size of a small house. If you are familiar with 'mecha' shows the standard size for a mech (say a Gundam) is basically about how big a Mech Marine is. poo poo in SupCom is biiiiiiig, atomic level manufacturing plus exotic alloys and power generation lets you build some staggeringly massive weapons of war.
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Jun 27, 2015 16:30
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Neruz posted:Engineers on patrol will reclaim; you actually see an engineer reclaiming some trees while on patrol at some point during this video, but I think the command is either click and drag on reclaim orders or use one of the modifiers (shift, alt or ctrl) when issuing the order. Well, now it makes sense why things called 'Gauss Cannons' shoot their shells in an arced trajectory - those things are loving huge.
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Jun 27, 2015 16:52
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Yeah those trees scattered around the maps aren't tiny; those are normal sized trees they just look small in comparison to the juggernauts you are deploying.
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Jun 27, 2015 16:56
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Rick_Hunter posted:Well, now it makes sense why things called 'Gauss Cannons' shoot their shells in an arced trajectory - those things are loving huge. Wait till you see the really big guns.  The history of the Infinite War in the game fiction is a thousand-year-long escalating arms race. There's mention in the background that at one point infantry, robotic drones and otherwise, once served a strategically useful function. Black Sun doesn't surprise anyone in the Cybran Nation or Aeon Illuminate because every faction has been contemplating planet cracking weaponry for a while now as a logical escalation of force. Up until now, all sides have refrained mostly because habitable worlds are one of the very few resources in the Infinite War that aren't expendable. Or they weren't until the UEF got backed into a corner and decided those were acceptable losses in the name of survival.
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Jun 27, 2015 17:04
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We also get to see the kind of time scale that the nanolathe tech has resulted in; this war is going to be over in 22 days. The reason for this is because a quick Commander could potentially invade and conquer half a dozen planets in a single day thanks to the nature of the tech so once the balance started tilting in the Aeon's favor it tilted real fast.
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Jun 27, 2015 17:23
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Neruz posted:We also get to see the kind of time scale that the nanolathe tech has resulted in; this war is going to be over in 22 days. The reason for this is because a quick Commander could potentially invade and conquer half a dozen planets in a single day thanks to the nature of the tech so once the balance started tilting in the Aeon's favor it tilted real fast. The fiction also explains that this is why Marxon is getting so aggressive - like most Aeon he's an excellent student of human behavior and can read non-Aeon like a book through their body language. According to Forged Alliance's fluff, Marxon realized that President Riley was working on something he thought could end the Infinite War, and with the setting's tech it only takes a few weeks to develop and build something like Black Sun even if you're decentralizing its research and construction. So he's beelining for Earth and annihilating anyone who gets in his way because the margin for victory is so thin. Even if he was inclined to, there is no time to consolidate, convert, and garrison planets. The Aeon and Cybrans are rushing for Earth because the line between stopping Black Sun and getting annihilated by it will probably be down to hours if not minutes, and everyone knows it.
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Jun 27, 2015 17:41
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Marxon is also a genocidal psychopath. To elaborate, one reason the enemy is willing to use means like the Black Sun is primarily because of the (correct) perception that if the Aeon win, it's going to get incredibly ugly under Marxon and he's probably going to be catapulted to the driver's seat by being the winner of the culture-defining conflict.
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Jun 27, 2015 17:51
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The Cybrans aren't actually rushing for Earth yet; they're running around in various outer systems trying to finish the Quantum Virus and Liberation Matrix. Rest assured however they will make a rush for Earth just like everyone else once the pieces are in place. It's also worth noting that QAI just casually analyzes the entire strategic situation including name dropping Black Sun and showing technical diagrams of the machine. QAI is a one-of-a-kind truly sentient artificial intelligence built by Brackman out of stolen Seraphim tech; earlier in mission 2 Brackman made a comment about how amazing Seraphim tech is and the reason he knows that is because he already worked on a bunch to make QAI. QAI is a motherfucking electronic god and he is basically all up in the UEF systems and can even make a reasonable run at Aeon systems, though thanks to the Aeon's usage of Seraphim tech QAI can't dominate their systems like he can the UEF's. This is why the UEF are having such difficulty with their gate targeting; QAI is all up in their poo poo ruining their systems and stealing their intelligence. The Aeon don't yet know exactly what Black Sun is (I think) but as Cythereal mentioned Marxon has already deduced that something like it exists and that is why he has kicked the Infinite War into full gear and is now pushing hard for Earth.
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Jun 27, 2015 17:52
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Night10194 posted:Marxon is also a genocidal psychopath. SupCom's fiction has tried to make Marxon more morally grey, for what it's worth, giving the explanation that at least when he started his tenure as Avatar of War he decided that the current form of the Infinite War was untenable if the goal was actually to win in any sense. The three factions had become isolationist from each other and embittered by centuries of war. Something drastic would have to change for anyone to even think about a negotiated end to the war. The alternative, that Marxon pursued, was a massive reevaluation of military practice in the Infinite War and what it would take to actually secure victory. The Aeon civilian leadership rejected Marxon's plans as a betrayal of everything the Aeon were supposed to stand for, which lead Marxon to condemn them as cowardly fools who want to win the war without getting their hands dirty, wishing for victory but completely unwilling to work for victory. The status quo prior to Marxon's ascension was one of grinding attrition warfare in which the Aeon were slowly making headway against the UEF and the Cybrans merely raided without taking territory or really accomplishing anything. Marxon was a game changer because he saw what would be necessary to actually win the Infinite War without turning the galaxy into something like Total Annihilation, and when he started making those changes he set a whole lot of dominoes into motion. At least at the beginning, Marxon being a genocidal psychopath was "merely" a side effect of him having the vision, will, and means to finally end a thousand year long war of brutal attrition. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jun 27, 2015 |
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Jun 27, 2015 17:59
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I still generally feel like 'I need to betray everything I stand for and become the killer of billions to win' is sort of the kind of thing that makes you the main antagonist, which is what Marxon is. He's the avatar of the Infinite War, and it's the main villain of the story. Why his title within the Illuminate is so fitting.
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Jun 27, 2015 18:08
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Night10194 posted:Marxon is also a genocidal psychopath. No, the main reason the UEF is willing to use the Black Sun is because they're basically Space Nazis. Genocide? Check. Xenophobia? Check. Mass exploitation of slave labor of "lesser humans" (AKA Cybrans)? Check. Brainwashing and indoctrinating of military forces for maximum psychopathy and loyalty? Check. And they're currently at the brink of destruction. Let's face it, if the UEF manages to get Black Sun operational, they're not going to stop after a single warning shot. They're going to fire again and again and again until there's nothing left that will ever threaten them ever again. And the Cybrans and Aeon know it. We have no idea what Dr. Brackman is planning to do with it, but galactic-scale genocide doesn't strike me as his kind of style even if he doesn't seem all there. And as for the Aeon... Optimally, the Princess' Champion can resolve the conflict into an Aeon Victory credited to her and the Princess rather than Marxon, which might be enough to break his hold on the Aeon military and political power. I think it's a relatively safe assumption that whatever surrender terms Princess Burke will offer the UEF will be a great deal better than anything they've a right to expect from any of their former victims.
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Jun 27, 2015 18:15
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Oh wow you are going to love what the Aeon endgame eventually turns out to be 
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Jun 27, 2015 19:03
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Nevermind, spoilers to even hint.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:10
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Cythereal posted:Nevermind, spoilers to even hint. Yeah, it's one of those things people should see fresh.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:25
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Cythereal posted:Wait till you see the really big guns. To give a real sense of scale for people more familiar with the other big daddy of Epic Galactic Ground Warfare, Warhammer 40k: ACUs are nearly twice the size of the Imperator-class Titan. And ACUs are hardly the largest combat machine the Infinite War has produced. Not by a long shot.
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Jun 27, 2015 20:34
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Well, we have seen a light artillery installation, right? That's a good starting point.
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Jun 27, 2015 20:39
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Time to do UEF Mission 3 from the Aeon side! Today we boat the poo poo out of UEF Commander Arnold after relieving a rather battered and slightly on fire Commander Rhiza. A couple of missions are 'mirrored' like this and I think it's kind of neat. Aeon Mission 3 - Youtube It's amazing how much of a difference actually enjoying the game makes to the speed of production
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Jun 28, 2015 11:29
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