How to Spot a Psychopath

The StarCraft II cinematic trailer is mainly about the awesome and terrifying technical processes involved in the production of the pissiest unit the Terrans have. Which is a great gag, and one which I've often found myself thinking would make for a good Supreme Commander promotion.

Not that it makes any real difference to gameplay, but SupCom's scale is the biggest of any real-time strategy game in which you still control individual units (check out the old '06 E3 trailer for some soul food for the 14-year-old boy inside all of us). Even little cute units like the spherical basic Aeon construction bots are half the hight of an adult tree, and they hover far enough off the ground that they'd whiz way over the head of StarCraft's battlesuited Terran Marines.

The Tech 3 siege bots that everybody uses in hordes if a SupCom game lasts that long are BattleMech-sized (this is 0.38-scale!). It has also been observed that the biggest gun in Supreme Commander is about as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

Nobody's going to be making any more official trailers or full-sized trade show models for SupCom now that it's out, of course, but I hope some nutty fan will work something up. A crowd of Siege Tanks desperately attempting to hold back the unstoppable might of four tech-1 light assault bots would be entertaining.

People who don't have the slightest interest in Supreme Commander must be getting pretty sick of these posts I keep making about it, but at least this time there's something to look at for people who don't have the game (or the demo, which is a mere one gigabyte download...).

This fan movie (a) is very cool and (b) also shows you what SupCom will look like running at a non-stop 25 frames per second on the PCs of 2012.

In Supreme Commander, some units can fire when they're hanging from some transport planes.

It's all a bit inconsistent, but it's explained in this post on the Supreme Commander Talk blog (now with a nascent wiki!).

I took these pics from the replay mentioned therein...

...which concludes with a particularly humiliating end for the green Commander.

One thing this strategy, and transport aircraft in general, show up is the artificial imposition of scissors-paper-stone rules in SupCom, compared with Total Annihilation.

Scissors-paper-stone is the standard arrangement for real time strategy games. With few exceptions, units have their own single Type (land, air or sea, usually), and their weapons have one Type that they can target. The scissors-paper-stone chart is more complex than that - there are lots of intermeshed X beats Y interactions, with intransitivity all over the place - but the basic unit and weapon classes form the overall framework.

This makes perfect sense if the units in question are dudes with swords, who cannot reasonably be expected to attack dragons flying by 500 feet overhead.

It makes less sense for dudes with assault rifles, though. If those guys have got nothing better to do, they might well be able to score some hits on a passing helicopter. Especially if they're RTS units who never run out of ammunition.

In TA, pretty much anything would have a go at shooting pretty much anything else. You could use fighter planes to attack ground targets. Tanks would try to shoot passing planes. Neither were any good at it, but at least you couldn't direct one piddly bomber to attack 50 tanks and feel confident that it would never, ever get hit by a lucky shot from one of them. And the mainstay of base defense in TA was the missile tower, which fired on both ground and air.

SupCom has dispensed with this. It has some units that can take care of themselves against any threat (destroyers, for instance), but that's because they have a specific weapon for each function, not because they can just elevate their single standard gun and use it to take pot shots at air threats. There aren't any all-purpose towers any more, either.

I'm not as annoyed about this as I expected to be, because the anything-versus-anything stuff in TA was seldom actually very useful. Quite the opposite, actually - it caused units to be distracted from their real mission by enemies they almost certainly couldn't kill. No doubt this is why the developers took the feature out for SupCom.

But when land units are hanging from a transport aircraft way up in the air, then, and only then, land units down on the ground will suddenly discover that they can, in fact, shoot up in the air, and will do so in an attempt to hit the airborne "land" units which they're allowed, by the game code, to target.

(Late edit: I think the best example of scissors-paper-stone code working in unintended ways has to be jet fighters shooting down submarines.)

You know, I think it's perfectly fair to track the decline of modern society to video games.

Why, this instructional video doesn't even use the word "cheat" when it tells you how to make Atari 2600 Space Invaders allow two bullets on screen at once.

It's a small step, I tell you. A small freakin' step.

Actually, apart from the fact that 2600 Space Invaders was so good (though no Solaris, sure), I was attracted to this clip (and the others in the same series) because of its extraordinarily fine video quality. YouTube's sub-Google-Video resolution is pretty much a perfect match to VHS transfers, but most VHS YouTube uploads are from awful old flaky tapes, badly digitised, replete with noise bars, horizontal wiggling and poor deinterlacing. Oh, and terrible audio, too - I don't know about you, but I can tolerate a lot of video crappiness, but only if the soundtrack is clear.

This, in comparison, is perfect. The resolution's still low, but it's clean as a whistle in both audio and video. So either it's from an untouched VHS tape stored in nitrogen, or it's been processed and stabilised out the wazoo, or someone dug up their Ampex master reels.

Excelsior!