Main problem of Supreme Commander
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I learned about this game a few years ago. My first impression was very strong. I thought this game had the potential to be way ahead of everything I had seen. But over time, I began to notice that the game had serious problems, primarily related to the linearity and monotony of the gameplay, as well as the dominance of economics over war (actually, this is one of the main reasons for the linearity, but more on that later), when everything comes down to upgrading extractors and creating super units. But at the same time, I still had a feeling that the potential of this game is much, much higher. For about two years, I tried to find and solve the problems limiting the capabilities of this game through modding. And today I have a more or less complete understanding of the problems of global balance, the main one of which I want to explain here. So...
Build Time.
In my opinion, this is the main problem of the game. This problem literally DESTROYS the gameplay. What's the matter? The Build Time for different branches of the military is different, but the most important thing is that the Build Time of buildings, including economic ones, is several times less than the Build Time of units. This creates a huge imbalance between the economy and the war. The prices of units and buildings themselves are quite balanced, but the fact that with a comparable price for a T2 extractor and T3 mobile artillery, the latter takes more than 4 times longer to build with the same Build Power, leads to the fact that investing in the economy is much more profitable, simply because it is faster. This is what leads to linearity and monotony, because war cannot compete with the economy, and the economy is always the same. As a possible solution, in the "Advanced Bases" mod (available in the FAF repository), the Build Time increased: fleet - by 1.5 times, air - by 2.5 - 6 times, buildings - by 5 times, and the Build Time of some individual categories of units additionally adjusted. Moreover, the adjustment was made taking into account mass cost and energy cost.Remember that the most important resource in game is TIME. I suspect that if this problem is solved, Supreme Commander can become better than Starcraft 2. I am not exaggerating at all.
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If I look at the right player, you have played 13 games, over half of which were with your mod. I'm not sure if you have seen enough of the game to make a good point about core issues of the game.
"Design is an iterative process. The required number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time."
See all my projects:
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It’s pretty common for absolute noobs to overflow both mass and energy because they barely understand what icons are moving on the screen
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@IndexLibrorum So instead of thinking about what I wrote, you just looked at list of my games? Constructively. It's probably just a habit that helps save time.
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@Sainse It seems like people have forgotten how to read.
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A good chunk of what your mods does is just making the game clunkier with added restrictions and increased costs. What can I do in-game with your mods (Advanced Bases or others) that I can't do with the current FAF balancing?
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@Razana With vanilla balance you can't have good balanced gameplay on large (20-40 km) maps. That's why the percentage of games played on them is very small. If players could play on such maps, they wouldn't crowd into tiny squares of 10-16 people. You can't have good battles because spamming megaliths, stationary artillery, nukes and shields is not gameplay. You can and do get "turtle" gameplay because game-enders and shields are imba in relation to all other units, but apparently this is necessary so that at least something can compete with the imbalanced economy, which is what the post is about. I can't claim to have solved these problems, but I am trying to solve them.
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It's highly map and playercount dependent. There are some maps where people will get full T3 mex before their first combat unit, and some maps where getting their first T2 mex before a T1 tank is basically an auto-loss. Perfect balance for both situations is impossible.
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If you know how to play the game well then this poses no issues. Even if you were to half the buildtime on eco buildings you would just use that extra time gained to scale your unit production faster with the extra resources so you can raid your enemy sooner.
Funnily enough increasing the bp like in your mod will just make it almost impossible to properly balance your eco at the start because a single air fac will drain like 300-500 e/s with your proposal. It will make early game aggression insanely strong because u can rush out the units so much faster, which btw is the complete opposite thing that sc2 went for when they increased the starting workers from 6 to 12 to make the game not be 80% earlygame 15% midgame and 5% lategame
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@thinker No, I've read your post. I am saying that your lack of experience playing the game (with or without mods) means you have not seen enough of the game to make any sweeping statements. Moreover, your inexperience is a big part of the problems you're facing. As Theweakie and Sainse explained, we suspect that a big part of your issues is your inexperience with the game, rather than any part of the design of the game itself.
This is not meant to be dismissive or insulting.
A comparison between a T2 mex and a T3 mobile Arty for example, makes no sense, if only because one of the two can move. If you take from this that it's 'more profitable' to invest in economy over units, you're not considering that mexes don't shoot and an enemy that made 20 tanks instead of a T2 mex will kill your mexes. Sure, in a vacuum it might be better to just invest in economy, but that works only when you get no pushback.
You're welcome to come play a few games against me where you can show me how "investing in the economy is much more profitable" and "war cannot compete with the economy". I predict that you'll find that having enemy tanks in your base does few wonders to your economy.
