Steam: Supreme Commander & Forged Alliance

[pauldarkside]

Looks like they're about to appear on Steam. Links aren't active at time of posting but here they are:

Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

Don't know how much they'll cost yet or whether they'll be fully patched up (please!).

[cptwhite_uk]

So how will multiplayer work, since the game uses GPGnet for lobby and match making, not to mention the vault which is the online repository of mods, maps and other downloadable content only accessable through GPGnet.

Having said that the community for Supreme Commander are an amazing bunch, not only are there 100's of mods from full game make overs to new game modes, new maps, high res texture packs, UI enhancements and many other things. There's also PlayerTrack (PT) which is an onlien statisitcal database of EVERY GAME EVER PLAYED of everyone, recording your performance and giving you a score for loads of areas compared to the average mean score of all players. This records you whether or not you know about it, and anyone can check you performance and ability.

Also, they have now released Forged Alliance Forever, a community made, updated, and auto-patching (community released patches) for multiplayer games with a lobby, tournaments, it's own vault. It's small and streamlined and way better than GPGnet, and it's getting new features for co-op modes etc.

This game is the new Total Annihilation, I'm just not sure if you'll have access to all this through Steam.

Edit: Seems they might have taken those pages down as your links now go to the steam store homepage.

[pauldarkside]

No idea if anything will change with the Steam version. Might well be a straight dump of the originals, warts and all. If they're reasonably priced, I'll get them - I regularly play FA and the convenience will be worth another purchase.

Those links are from the main store page - they keep appearing then disappearing. The only change I noticed was the release date changing from 23rd September to 22nd. Destinations aren't ready yet.

[pauldarkside]

[cptwhite_uk]

Well it can only be a good thing really. Even a dump of the game files would still allow Forged Alliance Forever to work (just point it to the .exe), GPGNet works in a similar way so you could always download it manually. Fingers crossed it's a decent price (i.e. less than £10) and it might inject some players into the community.

[pauldarkside]

Indeed, price it right and I'll have one of each for myself and my nephew. We both play FA through Steam already since multi-monitor with overlays recovers nicely when alt-tabbing.

What's the performance like with those mods?

[G4Z]

Ohhh interesting.

[Bagnaj97]

Does Forged Alliance Forever have anything to fix the game slowdown issues? I tend to play at LANs where we all have a very similar playstyle - turtle! The problem is with enough units/buildings the game slows to the point where 1 second of the in game clock takes about 5 seconds of real time. With everything taking so long the games drags on and gets boring

[pauldarkside]

@Bagnaj97 Core Maximizer 1.03 might be your friend

[Bagnaj97]

@Bagnaj97 Core Maximizer 1.03 might be your friend

That certainly looks like it's worth a shot. More time to nuke CAT before things slow to a crawl!

[kalniel]

Does Forged Alliance Forever have anything to fix the game slowdown issues? I tend to play at LANs where we all have a very similar playstyle - turtle! The problem is with enough units/buildings the game slows to the point where 1 second of the in game clock takes about 5 seconds of real time. With everything taking so long the games drags on and gets boring

That's a hardware problem, specifically, lack of grunt! Sup Com is a resource monster, you need fast CPU and lots of RAM for large battles.

Still my favourite RTS though.

[cptwhite_uk]

The trick is to do the following:

Stick to 20x20 maps (there's also a nice map called Coastal Conflict 2 which is 20 x 40)
Make sure the unit cap is set to 750
Do not play with the standard AI's, ever. If you need to play against AI then download Sorian AI and cheat mods (allows you to set the resource and build multiplier for the AI to anything you like. 1.6 to 2 tend to work best). I can upload these mods for you if you ask nicely. PM me if you want them.

In terms of hardware you need 3 CPU cores minimum at 3Ghz+, 4 is better - 4Gb RAM minimum.

There's also some very nice mods for the game - BlackOps, Experimental Wars and Total Veterancy (TVg)

BlackOps - Loads of new units and game tweaks, commanders given loads of upgrade options

Experimental Wars - Insane mod where a unit gets veterancy for every kill pretty much. So after 5-10 kills the unit is fully upgraded. A level 5 unit would probably kill 10 "standard" non-upgraded versions of the same unit, for example a single upgrade doubles it's guns. Armour, speed, health regen and range are also upgraded at the higher levels. Also tons of new units and tactics.

Total Veterancy - Unlimited veterancy, practically. My base was completely destoryed by an AI with 19 (yes 19!) Nuke silos, so I went in with my commander at about level 40. I ended up killing the computer and finishing with him at level 300. At which point he had 1.5 million hit points, 2000 regen per tick, Could jump half way across the map and take out seraphirm bombers in mid air with his laser in one pass. I also took on 5 Seraphim experimental bots at the same time, and won. Crazy mod.

[MaddAussie]

oooh oooh I probably will get this too

[pauldarkside]

They've gone live, £9.99 each or £14.99 for the Gold Edition. Think I'll wait for a sale though.

Edit: Before anyone asks, no, retail keys aren't transferable, I just tried mine and they got rejected

[kalniel]

Yeah that's a little steep, given the gold pack was available at retail for a long time at around 8 quid.

[dangel]

BlackOps unleashed is by far the best thing to have - there's also a mod for the .exe which fixes slowdowns but not limiting the simulation thread (in addition to core maximizer) so that you can still play vast maps without it taking 16-789 hours
At the end of the day FA's engine wasn't designed for multicore and that's why it suffers versus SupCom2 - but the above is enough to mitigate it for me. If I remember I'll post up a full list of my set of mods (which all work well together) along with the various fixes. BTW Core Maximizer won't work by default on Win7 as the service isn't running - you can tell if it's working because once the game starts (and after the delay in it's setting's) you'll hear a "ding" and see a slight pause in FA. If that doesn't happen it's not working - I think there's details in the gpg thread.

I mostly play 80x80 maps