Analysis of Supreme Commander

I recently reinstalled the game Supreme Commander. I have played it for around 20 hours and feel like doing a game play and design analysis of it. I’ll do more than criticise, I’ll suggest what the designers could have done to change any issues. After 20 hours, you can say that you fairly well understand a game. Perhaps you’re not a decent competitive player yet, but you can feel that any criticism you make is valid as if it requires more than 20 hours to learn how to avoid, that in itself is an issue with the game.

Supreme Commander is a game of exponentials. I’ll describe that as it’s an important concept. An exponential increase is caused when the rate of increase of a number is proportional to the number itself. It forms a graph like this, which rises very steeply. The resources you get in Supreme Commander to spend on tanks etc, all things being equal, tend to go as exponentials. Being only a minute behind the other player can mean you are getting half as much resources.

It’s unfair to criticise Supreme Commander for this directly, this is what it is- it means you go from small 3 v 4 battle to, a few minutes later, 20 v 20 battles, and at the end of the game 500 vs 500 battles. This is its chief strength, that the game play works all the way up, leading to incredibly epic battles. It’s what the game is. However, it comes with some drawbacks.

Chiefly, the key battle occurs over the middle 20% of the battlefield. If you win this 20%, you generally have a big enough economic advantage to get yourself well defended there and secure yourself the win. When playing against 4 other AIs, I generally kill one early on, take the resources that are in their base and from then on I have more resources than any other player in the game can hope to match. To an extent this makes the fight for the middle 20% all the more exciting, I’m sure against humans, if this can switch hands several times, then you have a game that nobody knows who is going to win until the very end. However, this requires evenly skill matched players. Even then, you’re not guaranteed that one player won’t dominate the middle 20% early on and get an easy win, but with uneven skills on each team, this means games are decided early on and from then on, not much fun.

This is an issue we had with Vietnam: Glory Obscured, though to a slightly lesser extent than Supreme Commander. I came up with a concept called the golden zone of game play. This is whenever both teams have similar resources; both can throw lots of units at one another and have plenty of options because they have enough money to be experimental. Both players are having fun. It’s more fun for the winner too, because not only is the game still a challenge and the losing player a threat, but the losing player will be able to produce decent armies to throw at the winning player’s even bigger army. It’s pretty lame when you get yourself the biggest, most expensive unit in the game and find that there’s nothing left for it to fight.

In Vietnam: Glory Obscured, the sole way to get resources was the villages. On a three village map, with a village near each player and a central village, the player with the central village would have two villages to the opponent’s one village. He would get twice the other person’s income and could afford to buy two tanks for every one of the enemy’s. By spending all of his money on defending that central village, as he could produce more than the enemy could hope to destroy, the game was decided early on. What’s worse, the game isn’t even over. The loser is obliged to continue playing, despite knowing that he has lost. Some players just quit at this point – the best players would always quit at this point. Some didn’t believe it was sportsmanlike to quit, so just had a miserable time.

I proposed that we halve the money given out by the villages. We then work out how much money, with this new system, the players would get from controlling half of the map. We give this money to both players for free. This sounds complicated, but it’s not. When both players hold 50% of the map, they get the same quantity of money as before. However, if you lose an area, then you do lose the actual money from that village, but the free money for owning that village keeps coming. As the person that just won the area, you get half as much money from your newly captured village. You get rewarded as before, but you’re hopefully still in the golden zone.

Sorry for the spreadsheet, but it should make it easier to see the effect:

This also means that: games are played not just over the central 20% of territory on the map, but right from base to base. Games are not always decided before they are finally over- it’s possible to have almost nothing left and then come back to do well. It means that the skill floor is raised, and importantly that new players which come and lose every game they play at least have a bit more fun doing so.

What could supreme commander do to make territory control less important, so the game is still in the balance right up to the end?

My first actual gripe with Supreme commander is that it is 90% resource management sim (warning, this next paragraph is boring). You need to balance Mass income and expenditure and Energy income and expenditure. If you run out of either, your progress is stalled, and running out of energy means some units fail. You need to manage the storage limits of both. You are constantly thinking: do I increase my income now or spend it on tanks? Do I upgrade these mass extractors now or wait? That, by the way, is a whole new dimension to the resource simulator in that upgrading the mass extractors requires mass and energy, and so if you are running out of mass and need more, you can’t just upgrade as you can’t afford it. You have to ride out the low period you are in, THEN upgrade. It’s painless if you remember to do it when you have lots of resources, but if you spend frequently, you’ll end up running out of one or the other resource and be in financial limbo.

Generally I’m so busy working on this that I don’t get to look at any battles. I rarely get to micromanage my troops, as I am forced to micromanage my economy. Another very real issue this brings up is that as it’s such a skill, it has a very high skill ceiling. Each match I played, I got so much better at it that I would thoroughly dominate any earlier version of myself. And I wasn’t even near approaching the most efficient I could be, and that’s after 20 hours of play.

How could this be improved? I would make it much simpler, so it takes a total back seat. Make it so you are getting resources at the most efficient rate all the way through, without any micromanagement, so I can think about what is actually fun: Spending the money, scouting the enemy and of course the combat.

What I would do is make the mass extractors free. As soon as you conquer the territory of the mass extractors and manage to get an engineer out to the position, you can have a free, quick to build mass extractor. These mass extractors would very slowly, for free, upgrade themselves. Assigning engineers to mass extractors does not increase the rate at which they upgrade. You know, as far as mass is concerned, that you are being as efficient as you can be.

Mass fabricators would be relegated to tech 3, the late game stage. This is where, in supreme commander, all the extractors in the game aren’t enough to get you the income you sometimes need, and they are necessary then.

I understand the advantage of having a resource storage limit. It forces commanders to constantly spend their resources, which encourages them to build reasonable and decent armies throughout the game. Without it, it would be too easy for players to go into “economic” mode, where they just increase their economy for ages until they’ve amassed a giant pot of money, and then to spend it all. The limit forces commanders to juggle, which really is a fast introduction to a better standard of gameplay. One does learn, eventually, to set one’s cheap engineers to build long lines of storage, but the whole process is boring micro-management and all to frustrating when you get it wrong and end up wasting lots of resources.

A Solution: Storage capacity would not be purchased, it would be a fraction of the gross income.

Another issue with the exponential nature of supreme commander is that as your units increase exponentially, so does the amount of work you need to put in. In the first few minutes, there are frequently spells where there is just nothing to do. No units to micro around, just watching units build. But the real issue is later on. The number of things you need to be doing across the map increases beyond what you can manage, and you find yourself not just balancing your economy and unit output and logistics but fighting on multiple fronts. The experience is akin to plate spinning. What this means is that where corners can be cut, they are. First most, strategy and positioning with units goes out the window. Forget putting the artillery in the back, fast units at the flanks, targeting specific units – a swirling mass of crap will do fine. The only solution I could propose is that the economics is made simple, so that the player has time to spend on his units.

An issue that this issue necessarily puts in the game is that if you can’t pay attention to the battles, the location that you fight from cannot matter. And when location doesn’t matter, when you’ve seen one battle you’ve seen them all. It makes for far less interesting gameplay, as each encounter is unmodified. Sorry to plug V:GO again, but this is one area that we’ve got nailed. Height gives a defensive bonus against projectile units like tanks, trees give infantry a huge advantage to infantry and change some dynamics completely – where AA infantry used to fear attack helicopters, now attack helicopters must stay away. Villages punish those who bomb them back to the stone age, so you have to select units less likely to cause incidents of collateral damage. By micro managing your troops into good positions, a small group can fight off a large one. It’s not about the kind of “skill” micromanagement, where one unit can take out a tank battalion in the middle of the desert just by scooting around, it’s about positional micromanagement. This only works because you have enough time to micro your troops, you attention isn’t spread elsewhere. Encounters between groups are rarely the same twice, and this keeps things fresh and fun.