Anyone pick up Supreme Commander yet? Looks pretty sweet but I hear it’s a real resource hog.
I played the demo. It looked quite good, but not fantastic. It was a resource hog, and unfortunately, it became harder to control the action once you got too many units cranked out. You wound up zoomed way out, which wasn’t terrible but lacked any detail. It looked like a text game with a few dots zooming around.
Beta tester, demo player, and retail purchaser here. Been playing since the day it went into public beta and brought the game home this afternoon.
It’s certainly one of those rare games where the demands from the software exceed the current threshold of most computer hardware … kinda like Windows Vista. It’ll be some time before the processors catch up to the level required to really get this game to play smoothly. Well, the processors exist, but by that I mean, it’ll be some time before they’re reasonably affordable (i.e. less than $700).
Can’t argue it isn’t a resource hog. My CPU’s a bit lacking in the horsepower department … it’s about the cheapest Core 2 Duo around and I knew this game would bring it to its knees. It’s only 1.8 GHz and it’s definitely the bottleneck in my system so far as this game is concerned. My graphics card is an nVidia 7950GT and I’ve got 2GB of 800MHz Corsair XMS2 memory as well as dual 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptors in a striped array, so my system’s up to snuff for even the most current games, but the unit control, physics, and AI demand significant juice from the processor and anything less than a dual core just won’t cut it. Even the trajectories of your units’ projectiles have real paths that can miss their targets if the targets move fast enough to get out of the way. All this detail chokes the processor more than anything else in the system. I thought about upgrading to a 2.4 GHz with 4MB cache just for this game and after playing it, it’s probably not a bad idea because I know my graphics card is no slouch and could handle all the rendering quite well.
As far as gameplay goes, I can’t think of any RTS that lets you strategize on such a grand scale like this. The point is to zoom way out to coordinate your forces, and then zoom in to enjoy the visual fireworks. Chris Taylor’s entire objective in developing the game was to be able to view things on a grand scale like a real general would, as opposed to having your view restricted to a “sandbox” which forces you to pan the camera around or click on a minimap. I barely pan or use the minimap at all … the mouse wheel takes up that role by allowing you to zoom all the way out to reorient your view. Saves time and it’s much more accurate than panning. The game even takes advantage of dual displays and widescreen displays by allowing you multiple views of the battlefield at different altitudes. It looks breathtaking on my 24" LCD. 
If this style of viewing the battlefield somehow turns you off to the gameplay, then I guess the game isn’t for you.
I think the last big RTS to beat was Company of Heroes, but I think most will agree this is the new king of the hill. Whereas most strategy games will restrict you to a unit cap of 100 or 200, this game lets you command up to 1,000 mechanized warriors across maps that are hundreds of square miles in size. You need to constantly expand and consume more power and resources because if you just hole up in your starting area, you’re dead because your opponent will outproduce you. The focus is on resource management, production queueing, and coordinating the flow of your units on the map, and it sets the benchmark pretty damn high. My biggest complaint outside of the steep processing requirements is that the most powerful units and structures in the game (like nuclear missile silos and those giant Spiderbots) take an absurd amount of time, builders, and energy to produce, but it’s understandable since they are absolutely lethal when put to use.
That’s what I was afraid of. Fortunately I’m in the market for a new PC (mine’s about 5-6 years old)
Compaq Presario
2.5 GHz Pentium IV
1GB Ram (max)
nVidia card
I may just pick up the game and get a new PC when I get back from vacation.
Yes, your system’s a bit lacking, but then again, I don’t know what your video card is. Saying you have an “nVidia card” is like saying you drive a Ford product … is it a Mercury, or an Aston Martin? I guess the anology doesn’t really apply anymore since Ford is selling AM, but getting back on point, I would assume your nVidia card is probably a GeForce 5 or 6 series based on the specs you gave.
You could run the game on that system, of course, with all the fancy details turned off. But then what’s the point, right? It’s kinda like, um … getting an Aston Martin with a V6, no air conditioning and no CD player. 
Beta tester, played the demo, grabbed the final version and have been playing it non-stop since. In fact, I’m having a hard time being at work, cause I really want to be at home playing it.
One thing you have to get used to is that the average game is going to take a while. For example, I had a skirmish against the Balanced AI that lasted 8 hours. Luckily, I could save, so I played it over a few evenings (this was the demo). If you played Total Annihilation, it will feel like coming home.
System hog? Yeah. I had planned to upgrade my computer this year anyway, but I moved it up to the beginning of the year cause I knew I wanted to play this game. You can change a few settings and get great performance though. I’m getting great performance, but I’ve got a decent hefty system (Core 2 Duo E6400 OC’d, Nvidia 7950 GT card, 2 GB Ram). I turned off shadows, turn off AA, but I’ve got everything else on high, and it runs great.
anamnesis, one tip to increase your build speeds, upgrade your Commander. Seriously, playing the Cybrans, I upgraded my Commander to the Tech 3 level of building, and I could crank out a Spiderbot in about 3 minutes. Uses a ton of resources doing it, but worth it. I had an army of six demolish an AI bash in no time flat.
Woah. Six Monkeylords? Heaven help the guilty! :eek:
Yeah, uh … I know about upgrading the ACU but it takes so long to build enough power generators and power storage units to supply the kind of juice needed for the Tech 3 upgrades. The commanders suck it down at an astonishing rate.
Is there a good site with build order strategies for maximizing/balancing economy growth and productivity in a short amount of time?
I forget which GeForce card is in it. The card I bought about a year ago, maybe two. Either way, I do want to get a new PC in a few weeks.
I actually prefer a nice long RTS game so I have no problem with an 8+ hour match.
Check out the Gas Powered Games forums. http://forums.gaspowered.com/.
I’m just mostly using my build strategies from TA.
Since I can’t figure out how to edit my post, I’ll add this in:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/562001543831
Good thread on Ars about build strategies. Guy has a good handle on adjacency bonuses.
Do you think the retail game has significantly greater requirements than the demo? I hear the largest maps tend to chug quite a lot when there are a lot of units about, but I didn’t have any problem running the demo with some stuff turned down. Here’s my specs:
Intel P4 3 GHz processor
Intel 865 PBZ mobo
nVidia 7600 GS AGP video card
2 GB PC 3200 memory
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS sound card
Don’t remember the exact specs on my hard drives, but they’re fairly old - no SATA or 10,000 RPMs or RAID arrays or anything like that. They’re big, anyway; I have about 400 GB total space.
The guy living in the White House plays it every day. After six years’ practice, though, he’s still not very good.
You know what’s really interesting … I just got a Dell XPS M1710 notebook and installed the game on there. Lo and behold, it runs faster on the notebook than it does on my rig. The specs are admittedly pretty close (both machines have 2GB mem and an nVidia 7950 video processor, but the laptop only has a single 7200rpm drive), and I’m shocked at the difference in performance and quite honestly, I think I know the real culprit.
Windows Vista.
The notebook is running XP and it is a lot smoother. The CPU is only a slightly faster Core 2 Duo running at 2.0GHz whereas my rig is 1.8GHz. The difference makes me angry. Creative still doesn’t have finalized Vista drivers for my sound card, and nVidia is still in beta with nVidia Forceware drivers for Vista, so the game pops, glitches, scratches, pauses, and gets unbearably slow later on.
Some are saying (hoping) that DirectX10 support patches will accelerate gameplay in Vista in months to come. Yeah, maybe. What do we do until then, and why the hell haven’t huge companies like Creative and nVidia had enough time to develop the software for Vista in time? Did they just get Vista last month too?
Therein lies the irony. If I buy a new PC, the fucker will be stuck with Windows Vista. :mad:
Is it necessary to keep lower tech engineers and buildings around? I noticed that the level 2 engineers can’t build walls, and the level 2 navy building can’t build subs…
I’m no expert, but I’ve noticed I do a lot better when I don’t produce on a deficit. Often, I get too stuck on building my defenses that I put way too many things into production and get stuck at -100 mass.
If you don’t know yet, there is an adjacency factor to placing buildings. When you place a power generator next to a mass extractor/fabricator or factory, it’s power consumption will go down (you will notice that there are lines connecting the generator and extractor.) When you place an appropriate storage unit next to the appropriate producer (energy/energy, mass/mass) you will get an additional bonus to the producer, up to 50% I believe if you surround the production building.
You can upgrade the ACU’s first level of engineering pretty early on, it only costs a little mass and a few 100 energy. The second upgrade requires a lot of mass and about 5000 energy, meaning tons of level 3 energy and mass producers, but it is a huge, HUGE upgrade in fabrication speed. Something like 10 or so level 3 engineers (very helpful.)
I just click the engineers to my ACU or an important factory and forget about them, no point in wasting a good engineer.
Higher level units can still build earlier level stuff. On the left is a selector thingy for choosing which tech level you want to use. The top is level 1, and below it are level 2, 3, and experimental. To the right of all those is the upgrade selector, but not every unit is upgradeable.
I can’t find the original article, but I’ve read somewhere that they’re recommending 4GB for Vista. The article, IIRC, said that all MS’s demo machines go with 4 GB.
Come to daddy!
Unfortunately I don’t think a 1GB P2D-2.6 with a Geforce 7600GS will cut it.