Square Enix Announces Supreme Commander 2

arcticstoat writes "Supreme Commander 2 has now been officially announced, but with a surprise publishing partner on board — Square Enix. Gas Powered Games' original RTS game and its expansion pack, Forged Alliance, were published by THQ, who is no stranger to the RTS genre, but Square Enix has previously specialized in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Explaining the move, Square Enix said in a statement that it 'has previously worked exclusively with Japanese development companies, so the decision to form strategic partnerships with developers located outside of Japan serves as a new cornerstone of its strategy to create games targeted primarily at consumers in Europe and North America. Additionally, Square Enix Group's foray into the real-time strategy genre is a significant expansion of its product lineup.'"

Comments

Front Mission

[Enderandrew]

The Front Mission series is incredible. Not to mention that I'm more interested in the developer than the publisher when it comes to experience and game design.

Supreme Commander

[ShakaUVM]

Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.

It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.

Re:Supreme Commander

[moderatorrater]

The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game.

Then your enemy's not playing right. A horde of small/medium units should have been able to wipe out your base while you were building up to your uber units. Unless you were only playing against the AI, in which case you probably shouldn't have been expecting a challenge anyway :)

Re:Supreme Commander

[WDot]

My friends and I would play against the bots and ended up in this same situation. We downloaded the Sorian AI mod, which fixed the problem. Seems odd that a modder is required to fix the catatonic AI, but the guy does a really good job.

http://code.google.com/p/sorian-ai-mod/

In this case, simply building uber units won't work, as the enemy bases will almost certainly have enough shields and defense to bring them down before they even reach the defenses. While you may be able to hold your own, you can get stuck in nasty stalemates, so try experimenting with new strategies.

Re:Supreme Commander

[kesuki]

"But that's how you play it..."

so boring playing just one game and just one way. i've got about 6500 games on battle.net and i could not have done that with a single strategy for each race. heck i couldn't even remain sane playing that much and there were many people pulling me away from warcraft.

but just imagine how much happier say for instance pigs in some giant factory farm would be if they could play warcraft all day. sure with a short life span they're not going to learn how to play games that well, but if while in the womb they get training in how to play while their minds develop... but then all the factory farms need to have a good data network so all the pigs can play video games all day.

and maybe they don't all have to play war games, maybe a variety of games they can be trained in, so they can at least live and die happy.

sure beats the hell out of smelling the awful shit smell and knowing you live in a cage, being force fed food for someone else who likes pork... in a factory farm the methane can all be collected and used instead of venting outside (natural gas and methane are compatible exchanges)

and we don't have to stop with pigs, cows, chickens, turkey... don't get me started on what i can think of, I'm labeled paranoid schizophrenic, but I'm also labeled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Re:Let me get it out of the way

[cbhacking]

I suppose I'd call SupCom2 the grandchild, not the great-grandchild, but yes. please do let it be so. Also, please let it not require hardware in excess of what, say, StarCraft 2 will need (although TA had its taxing moments as well - I remember thinking that the 256MB needed to play the Four Corners map was completely unreasonable). SupCom will only barely run on one of my computers (though it's fine, if not any where near maxed out, on another).

oh noes

[hort_wort]

Square Enix? an RTS game? HA! Hahaha! I can see it now, all the units with have spiky hair, and all the engineer units will be named Cid.

Re:Let me get it out of the way

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This is vaguely off topic, I suppose; but I think that TA Spring the weirdo timeline defying clone of the TA/SupCom family deserves a mention. It brings classic TA mechanics(assuming you use the appropriate mod) into a modern 3D engine, all with fairly modest resource requirements.

Re:Supreme Commander AIs

[DuncanE]

Not to blow my own trumpet, but I also did a fairly successful AI patch for SC.

Get it here:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929

The AI script was all in lua so it proved quite easy to mod.

Unit and map tools!

[Sabriel]

I no longer care how good it is. Unless they include decent unit and map making tools as part of the game, I'm not going to buy it. I'm sick of hearing "they'll be released later" and then getting crap or nothing.

You hear me, GPG? Unit and map tools. Good ones. No more excuses.