Posted June 06, 2020
In the last days of Gas Powered Games, they took a special effort to release one last patch to address some of the criticisms that the community had with it. A wonderful gesture, but ultimately destructive to the game.
One of the big changes in Supcom 2 was the change to an up-front payment system instead of the gradual resource drain of TA and SC1. This was done to make it easier to understand for console players. Ironic, given that the gradual drain was originally put in Total Annihilation to make it easier to manage compared to Command & Conquer. You see, when you pay all the resources all at once, queuing up units or buildings means you have less resources to spend on other things until the queue is empty. Starcraft pros always recommend not queuing things up for that reason and that's why they spend a lot of time using hotkeys to select their production buildings and building just one unit at a time. This is obviously not "easier" as such. But with a gradual drain, it's easier to overspend and run into bottlenecks and have everything build in slow-motion, or to underspend and waste resources. So there's pros and cons to each system.
At first you couldn't even queue up buildings at all if you did not have enough resources in the bank, exacerbating the problem described above. A later patch only subtracted the cost of the building when that point in the build queue was reached, so you could queue them up ahead of time again.
Compared to the first game, you can only assist with a few builders at a time, and the assist is generally less powerful, but since the resources are already spent, it is also free to assist. You could also only get a single, fixed amount of resources from a given mass extractor, and no more than that. Overall this was seen as a big downgrade to the complexity and flexibility of the first game. The scale of the game is also smaller, with smaller maps, smaller and cheaper super units and smaller unit caps. Overall, you can probably see where the accusations of consolitis came from.
So to try and compensate for this, the final patch made two major changes to the game. First, all ordinary units were shrunk down a bit, making them harder to see, but without actually making the maps any bigger. Second, it made mass extractors gain veterancy over time, giving you more resources the longer you hold onto them.
The second change breaks the game in two massive ways. First of all, the game was carefully balanced so that with the mass points you have available at the start, you had just about enough resources to get started. The new extractors start off giving less resources than normal, meaning you no longer have enough resources. This slows the early game to a crawl as you inevitably stall, waiting for resources. But as they level up over time, they start giving more resources than usual. So many more in fact, that without any of the major resource sinks that the original game had, you have no way to ever spend them. It is possible to fill up every square of the map with factories and still reach 9999999999 mass. In the late game, the upgraded extractors are almost the same as having an infinite money cheat (which already is in the game as a game setting). This totally breaks whatever was left of the gameplay.
So to recap, units are harder to see for no good reason. The early game is slowed down terribly, and the late game is totally destroyed. The patch was a nice gesture, but ultimately destructive to the game. I don't know of any way to roll back the change except to buy it at Blackbeard's, if you catch my drift.
One of the big changes in Supcom 2 was the change to an up-front payment system instead of the gradual resource drain of TA and SC1. This was done to make it easier to understand for console players. Ironic, given that the gradual drain was originally put in Total Annihilation to make it easier to manage compared to Command & Conquer. You see, when you pay all the resources all at once, queuing up units or buildings means you have less resources to spend on other things until the queue is empty. Starcraft pros always recommend not queuing things up for that reason and that's why they spend a lot of time using hotkeys to select their production buildings and building just one unit at a time. This is obviously not "easier" as such. But with a gradual drain, it's easier to overspend and run into bottlenecks and have everything build in slow-motion, or to underspend and waste resources. So there's pros and cons to each system.
At first you couldn't even queue up buildings at all if you did not have enough resources in the bank, exacerbating the problem described above. A later patch only subtracted the cost of the building when that point in the build queue was reached, so you could queue them up ahead of time again.
Compared to the first game, you can only assist with a few builders at a time, and the assist is generally less powerful, but since the resources are already spent, it is also free to assist. You could also only get a single, fixed amount of resources from a given mass extractor, and no more than that. Overall this was seen as a big downgrade to the complexity and flexibility of the first game. The scale of the game is also smaller, with smaller maps, smaller and cheaper super units and smaller unit caps. Overall, you can probably see where the accusations of consolitis came from.
So to try and compensate for this, the final patch made two major changes to the game. First, all ordinary units were shrunk down a bit, making them harder to see, but without actually making the maps any bigger. Second, it made mass extractors gain veterancy over time, giving you more resources the longer you hold onto them.
The second change breaks the game in two massive ways. First of all, the game was carefully balanced so that with the mass points you have available at the start, you had just about enough resources to get started. The new extractors start off giving less resources than normal, meaning you no longer have enough resources. This slows the early game to a crawl as you inevitably stall, waiting for resources. But as they level up over time, they start giving more resources than usual. So many more in fact, that without any of the major resource sinks that the original game had, you have no way to ever spend them. It is possible to fill up every square of the map with factories and still reach 9999999999 mass. In the late game, the upgraded extractors are almost the same as having an infinite money cheat (which already is in the game as a game setting). This totally breaks whatever was left of the gameplay.
So to recap, units are harder to see for no good reason. The early game is slowed down terribly, and the late game is totally destroyed. The patch was a nice gesture, but ultimately destructive to the game. I don't know of any way to roll back the change except to buy it at Blackbeard's, if you catch my drift.
