Supreme Commander's gameplay is nothing but hard counters[1], especially with the reclaim system (you can harvest a dead unit to reclaim 80% of the mass used in creating it).
The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF.
[1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades.
Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs.
They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards.
I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!
SupCom has remained interesting to RTS players long past its expiration date. The official servers have been down for years! Games are played on unofficial servers now.[0]
Real military strategy[a] is all hard counters. Anti-ship missiles barrages need only one to land to knock an aircraft carrier out. Stealth aircraft are sitting ducks over integrated anti-air defense, over blue water the stealthiest plane is invisible until it's on top of you. Infantry require air superiority to occupy a territory. War is extremely unforgiving. This translates well into a SupCom game mechanic.
Not an expert, but urban warfare is more complicated and doesn't have as much 'hard counters'; they had to fight tooth and nail, door to door to (re)take cities in the middle-east.
Of course, if you take the gulf war you can see it in action, with most of Iraq's tanks and airplanes being taken out via airstrikes.
Yes, it is perhaps at a level between the tactical and strategic that hard counters mostly exist. At the highest strategic level, hard counters are nonexistent in a game theory way. Institutions like the UN and the US military prevent much of anything significant happening at the greatest levels of geopolitics. This can be seen in the abundance of world wars in the early 20th century, and their absence in the late 20th and now 21st centuries. Then at the utmost tactical level it is truly man versus man. There are few, if any, hard counters for that.
It's interesting that you pick Cybran SACUs as your example; I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units. Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses? Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
Also FAF is amazing, if anyone reading this is interested I suggest you check out some replays on GyleCast:
>I think the Seraphim ACU/SACUs are more often held up as OP units.
It was less of a statement against how OP they are and more of a statement about how they seem to exist outside of the rock/paper/scissors mechanic that almost all other units are subject to. Seraphim SACUs can of course telesnipe and wreak havok, but would struggle against a swarm of gunships or bombers as they lack AA.
>Do the Cybran SACUs have any anti-navy defenses?
There's not a whole lot they can do against naval units (apart from set up shields and TMLs), but then again there's not a whole lot that naval units can do against them if they just walk away from the shore.
>Also worth noting that the Monkeylord doesn't have any hard counters, since it is equipped with both torps and light AA.
You're looking at 50DPS with the torps and 80DPS with the AA. Not exactly comparable to the 400DPS long-range bolters and 4000 DPS face laser!
In terms of hard counters:
- It would lose to two T3 heavy gunships (3k mass total).
- Naval-wise, a pair of Salems (4.5k mass total) could complete nullify its torps with anti-torps (4 torps/4s for the ML vs 2 anti-torps/3.8s per salem) and fire back at a combined 200DPS.
(For people unfamiliar with SupCom, a Monkeylord is a giant, late game unit that costs 20k mass.)
I should get back on that one, I loved playing it at the time (against CPU, never a fan of online play), just building layers of defenses and have a constant stream of CPU forces get destroyed against it.
The one I'm thinking of had early support for multi-core and multi-screen, with the minimap / overview on the other screen. But it was still constrained; would have loved to test that defense of mine against all 7 other CPU players on a big map. Might try it again on my newer system.
Yeah, loved doing that exact same thing too :-) Turtling was incredibly fascinating in SC for some reason. Especially once you built the Tier 4 infinite power generator from one of the races.
And yes, I tried it couple years ago and unfortunately I don't think it's that well optimized for multi-core CPUs, the game was massively slowing down for me, but my i7 was at like 50% usage at most.
Just FYI, there is a fairly widespread issue with Nvidia drivers causing a slowdown (no matter how fast your PC). The game was basically unplayable for me until I found the solution.
The fix is to run 'd3d_windowscursor' in the game console.
If you're playing against AI in SupCom, try the LOUD mod. I've been playing it for a year or two, and found it's much improved (CPU usage and tactics) over the stock AI.
This is the tldr of hard counter play in most RTS games. It’s fun for experienced players who understand the rules/decision tree and enjoy learning the tricks and edge cases - terrible for new players who just get crushed by rules they don’t know and can’t know without going online for 10 hours.
In many cases, the joy of RTS for new players is map control. Hard counters tend to break this gameplay loop for them as they don’t understand how they can lose when they had 80% of the map. Conversely pure map control games get boring for pros who get tired of “take more territory, get bigger units” play styles.
Iron harvest was a recent curious entrant to the RTS genre where the game depends heavily on positioning but doesn’t grant you large bonuses from controlling territory. They allocate just enough bonus to ensure the game ends eventually with a clear winner.
Also new players might still lose with 80% of the map because they might not know how to scale their economy properly, or, in RTSes, just lack the speed to execute that.
Considering a “long game” is in the 80 hour range of play time, 10 hours for startup can be somewhat excessive.
It’s true that new players may think they are in control when they are really not - but it’s easier to understand when the other side had larger/more units.
There is a reason why new players in RTS games tend to overbuild defenses - they’re default goal is to play for and secure the map.
I don't think you're right. Really good players will sometimes stop taking the game seriously after building a colossal economy, then they do stuff like build 1000 t1 bombers and try and win with that. It's usually horribly inefficient, but it's definitely possible to win with the wrong unit, if your economy is much larger than the other player's.
Not someone who played the game much, but a quick glance at the stats suggest that the size of a SACU death ball would be limited by a nuke? I also concede it'd be hard to build a nuke without other players noticing.
The missiles are expensive and take a long time to build (I blieve around 8k vs 3.6k for an anti-nuke), and move across the map so slowly with such a huge warning (pulsating hazmat icon as a radar signature, plus a "strategic launch detected" blaring out the speakers of every player is a bit of a giveaway!) that they can't really hit anything except a stationary target.
Most successful strategies I've seen with them involve rushing T3 and firing a missile from a stationary launcher before the enemy can build antinukes, sabotaging the enemy's antinuke installations with a wave of strategic bombers, or using nuclear subs/Yolona Oss to surprise/overwhelm an enemy with antinukes very late game.
The gameplay is deep and revolves around scouting and predicting what the enemy will do and when they'll do it. It's still very active today, through to a mod called FAF.
[1]The exception to this is the Cybran SACU, which I believe has no true counter once you take into account the gun, EMP and SAM upgrades.
Mass for mass, they beat just about every land unit including Percivals, GCs, Monkeylords and Ilshavohs.
They hard counter all air units, even T3 bombers, as their SAML can fire while (rapidly) constructing and/or fortifying an ED4 which they can then reclaim afterwards.
I just wish I had the skill to deploy them in a real setting!