Supreme Commander 2’s Largest Multiplayer Match Balance Shortcomings And How I Would Fix It
Supreme Commander 2 is one of my favorite real time strategy games of all time. It features massive scale in production and economy and pairs it with huge battles and firefights that are near incomprehensible to the unseasoned eye. This game is insanely fun but in other ways it is also aggravating to play online, especially the way that the game balances its mid to late game advanced strategic buildings. I’ve never been more frustrated while gaming before than while having faced down an onslaught of long range artillery in a game that refuses to treat the weapon with the same grace as it does each of its other main offensive strategies. So after hours and hours of playing this game I think that I have come up with an elegant solution that would elevate my favorite RTS into a game that would have earned it the modern sequel that it was robbed.
My first issue with Supreme Commander 2’s match scaling is the way that artillery is balanced. When you look at some of the other main tech trees in the game you will notice that land, sea and air all seem very fair, locally that is. Land units have decent defense against long range sea weaponry and can actually be fairly decent offensively against air. Sea is also given that range advantage making them excellent harass units while still getting decent anti-air. Air has all of the tools to exceed offensively in every situation with excellent movement speed and high damage output while still having minor defensive tools to aid their high movement based game play. When you start a match and you build your first factory you always feel the rush and excitement of seeing what factory your opponent has built and then getting to decide how to react to the challenge. This adds tense moments in planning and early game decision making in production that make the early game of Supreme Commander 2 really special. There aren’t just those three tech trees though, there is another one labeled “structure”. This is where the match starts to go sideways. There is currently no proper defense strategy to out-do long range structure tech builds other than using your early game economy advantage to rush units into the opposing base while frantically gauging how long your shield infrastructure will last. This just leads to any type of late game experimental unit planning getting hijacked by a sudden need to respond by building as many shield generators as you can while pulling together any sort of offensive against a base that has put most of its resources into defense and strategic long range weapons. In my opinion this is the least fun way to lose a game of Supreme Commander 2.
As the title suggests I have a fix for this part of the game. The main goal of this is to balance artillery defense into the game in a way that could allow an easier reaction to the most detrimental offensive. The idea is that each shield generator will have a separate defensive that will drain your power supply to give a boosted defense against artillery shots, both fortified and long range. The new shield generators will use power because now the defending players reaction to artillery will be to have to manage real estate in their base to accommodate more power, this in turn will create an economic vulnerability that the artillery player can still take advantage of if the defending players power buildings are all centralized. There will also be a naval upgrade that allows normal anti artillery defense for all units to make up for their slower movement speed, for land they get a specific unit type much like the other defense land units that specifically prevent artillery shots that costs similar to the anti-air unit. Lastly for air, the bomber would get a much needed buff mostly because the units lasting match length scaling is absolute trash. The bomber will receive extended damage mitigation toward anti-air turrets and a damage buff when bombers target offensive structures but not toward defensive structures to maintain the usefulness of shields in air raids. Air gets the offensive bonus mainly because of their increased mobility they already have the highest offensive response capability toward artillery.
Now that artillery is more fairly situated in the game I want to talk about something that me and my friends often just turned off, and that’s nukes. Having nuke’s on in a match creates an elephant in the room when the game starts, you instantly belong to one of two minds of thought: nuclear offense and nuclear defense. Are you going to rush nuclear missile production for do you simply budget for nuclear defense. The main problems with either of these strategies lies in the fact that there is one method of accomplishing both, it is long to enact and it is expensive in every resource while other ways to manage your hard earned resources through unit production and defense management are more dynamic and fun. In my best guess, the developers (and of course I don’t know) either made costs so high to make the nuclear route harder to juggle with other strategies (i.e. land, air, naval, structure), to make it so that it was only an achievable end to the game after a long match time, or to dissuade players using them in general. Losing a stand off because your opponent fired one more nuke than you had prepared for is the second least fun way to lose a match.
So here’s what I propose, a rework of the entire system. Astonishingly, the first thing I would do is reduce the cost and build time of nuke silos but this only slightly with the nuke defenses, mostly because waiting for things to build in games hasn’t been fun since I was 14 building my FarmVille town. Instead what changes is that each map is given a centralized location to gather a new resource which we can call Uranium or whatever makes the most sense. When this resource is collected it has to be transported on a ground transport that causes a nuclear detonation if destroyed while carrying the Uranium. This makes it a little harder to get nukes because it would include forward land control and simple vision would allow the other players to know that a player is looking to use nukes giving them time to react and budget defense silos into their plan. This would involve adding a new land unit relatively early in the tech tree and editing every single map so while this is the least practical fix to implement I believe it to be the one that makes nuclear silos the most interesting.
I don’t necessarily have a strong desire to actually implement these myself or reach out to a modder to actually make these changes but I suppose the issues I have with the game are so blaring that I couldn’t help but speak out an interesting change when I thought of it. A fun strategy game never leaves you feeling helpless, you should walk out of each loss with the insight into what you might have done differently and seek to improve and try new strategies, a game about out thinking your opponent should always leave you feeling smart or engage your mind rather than leaving you feeling confused. I also believe that waiting for buildings to build is boring and it is not interesting to have your main offensive include defending and waiting for something to build so that you can win in a key stroke. It’s also true that my frustrations may be a product of my own shortcomings as a player however hopefully still my ideas cause you as a reader to think about how economy based war games create engaging battles that tug back and forth to create tense and memorable moments rather than have you stare at a build queue and ram the unit caps worth of tanks into the enemy base. Even given these new insights however, Supreme Commander 2 will most likely still occupy a large portion of my spare time and continue to be one of my favorite RTS games.
