so I've been playing Company of Heroes pretty much every day at lunch with some other guys here at Raven. I do well sometimes, and sometimes I get owned. We play pretty casually, and our strategies aren't really more advanced than 'I'll go here, then use tanks'...

So it came as a suprise that one of our replays was submitted to be video reviewed by one of our regulars, and it was. I play horribly this game though :(

WMV here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/tohvideo/~5/86597970/ToH-19_Montherme_Madness_2-4-07.wmv 

nice :) 

why did they choose tiny soldiers and boring ww2 setting in CoH? I prefer the bulky spacemarines and and other scifi stuff of DoW, but apparently CoH gameplay is better and has more depth to it

Two guys here are hardcore CoH players.
Some others play CS and Joint Operations (rather yawn) 

Supreme Commander demo came out earlier this week, and I've been playing that like crazy every night. Tons of fun once you break into the thought that you need 5 factories to pump out units, not just one, and 10 or so defensive guns at a position, otherwise 100's of units will simply walk over things. Thankfully, you can easily set up multiple orders and cancel parts of them so you can just set up units to do a ton of shit and forget about them.

Glad to be playing it at work too, since it supports dual monitors, so your main screen can be zoomed into the action and moving your dudes, and the second monitor can be zoomed out to be a 'minimap' and give you a good overall view of the fronts.

Oh, and Giant Spiderbots are just awesome.
http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/article/632/632026/supreme-commander-20050707115342377.jpg 

I have to get SC going at work where I have a decent enough PC to run it AND two monitors :)

Everyone else is waiting fo C&C3, but I've irrationally hated C&C since the first game (Warcraft 2 was waaaay better) and don't play many RTS games anyway... only TA, WC3 and DoW when they were new. Never finished the SP campaigns of any of them though ;) 

I dunno about this, I guess I've been spoiled by Blizzard RTS too much, and this is nothing like them so I'm having trouble enjoying it.
There's not much new compared to TA really, there's pretty much no micro management, and the games quickly turn into giant wars where you're looking at little unit icons moving across the map and dying... Doesn't seem to be much strategy involved, just having a fast build order. 

Didn't the demo come out months ago? Or was that the beta?

And, SC = StarCraft.

Maybe SupCom = Supreme Commander? 

dude you got to play oblivion i knw so many glitches hers one a man named dorion in the in the imperial tempel district first find him in his house he is always there bribe him alot then when cant you no more hit him once with your fists then bribe him again so on son but do it only about 5 or 6 6 times.when you are done kill him but fast or he will run then go to his gold and press a. his gold will never go away.dont press take all or the game will freeze but his body will disapear after a few days.i got about maybe 1 million $$$ in about 20 min.but......never mind youll have fun 

fgyykriuiry 

You're just a bit overtaken by the action, theres fukken loooooooaads of strategy involved in supcom, once youve mastered controlling the fuck you doing :P 

If Supreme Commander is anything like TA, there's tons of strategy, don't let the fact that TA always included/allowed actual economic/territory management be enough of a factor to influence the outcome even sometimes without strategy, eclipse that. As for Blizzard, I never saw the point of their games. Seemed a lot like C&C, but without as much action. I'm not a blockheaded action freak, but controlling 12 units only at a time seemed like such an arbitrarily limitation, of the exact kind Chris Taylor wanted to do away with. Also their art style never really flew with me (though Diablo's art style always ruled). C&C was small scale, stylized like a really simple Chess kinda, pretty fun but once TA came out I never looked back. I'm looking forward to Supreme Commander, the whole scope of land/air/sea/submarine, radar/sonar/jammers, would just be so awesome on an even bigger scale than TA. 

playing and mapping for TA. Although Starcraft was/is more fun on a competitive level (in TA, it kind of sucked having 500 units on a side with nearly unlimited resources), maybe supcom will blow my panties off and just make me freak out!!13 

Bought a GeForce 7900 GS for $160, now I can run more recent games - Hitman: Blood Money rocks and runs great at 1440 x 900, 4x AA, 8x AF 

With TA, the engine seems like it's hardware-scalable: obviously, the unit limit was increased by Cavedog from 250 to 500 a while after the release, and larger maps became possible (the original game had like TWO maps that were 64MB, the rest were all less - now 128 MB are the norm), and the unit limit has since been increased to 5,000. 5,000 is basically beyond one's own ability to organize and control even with enqueing (some refinements to the system are hopefully present in SupCom), so essentially TA has had for years now an nonexistant unit limit. Furthermore, there is never a situation, playing with Cavedog-only units, where resources are truly infinite. There is always a way to use or abuse resources, whether that's 500 construction planes (this is possible) or 100 tank factories (also possible) - and the enemy, whose resources may approach or exceed your own, also has these choices. In other words if each side had truly infinite resources it would become fairly meaningless. Luckily that's not the case.

I really like how TA is based on real war. Not as in, your guy gets shot in the leg and has to be flown out and you send an apology to his family, but rather in the emphasis on economics, strategy, and scope. All Blizzard RTS, and C&C games, are tiny, simplified almost arcade-type games in comparison, where you just save up 200 bucks to buy one or two special types of unit that screw the other guy. In these games, you don't need to both outproduce and outmanuever your opponent. It's enough just to do one or two things they weren't expecting and wipe their "base" off the map. In TA, shit can be built anywhere: territory is based on whoever can control it, not arbitrary rules. Aside from Myth, which is entirely different and I worship for entirely different reasons, I have yet to find a better RTS. 

When an "army" is 10 of unit X, and 20 of unit Y, with an air support of 5 planes and you need to blow up the other guy's construction yard to completely fuck him over... how is that strategically related to what you'd do with actual (multiple) armies, production centres, ports, mountains (not wall-like ridges), resource-rich terrain, barren plains, and non-arbitrary unit types (ie, instead of rock-paper-scissors simplicity, it's more just: scout, fighter, bomber, torpedo bomber).

Alright, end TA worshipping rant. I suppose it's ultimately the reason I'm posting here, but when I like a game, I really, really like it. Quake, Rune, Myth, TA, etc. 

was also revolutionary when it was released. I can't be bothered to list all the things TA did before all the other RTS games that were trying to ape C&C managed to do them, but there is a lot on the list, and some things TA did so well (the interface and queuing system), for example) that it still beats the shit out of most games today.

If I had a better PC I would give SupCom a whirl, but as my notebook was creaking under the strain of a 3 player online game when the beta was running I think I will give it a miss for now.

BTW, Tronyn, did you play Blade? It came out around the same time as Rune and was a similar game but with more depth but hobbled by a totally shitty control system. Had posh graphics with real-time shadows and stuff. Personally I thought Rune was way more fun :) 

Starcraft is still the best RTS ever, TA doesn't come close to rivaling it in my opinion. =D
So I've played more supcom, it's fun but it just doesn't grab me the way Blizzard RTS do, really feels like I'm always doing the same thing. Yeah it's vast, and there's lots of action all the time and hundreds of unit running and stuff, but it feels mostly like a speed race, whoever can get the best economy going first, to pump out a continual flow of tech3 units, but I guess lots of people just prefer that.
As for C&C, I never really liked those so much... The live cinematics made me giggle though. =) 

I'm curious how serious, creative tactics come into play with supcom.

After all, if you're a commander of some IRL military and you're fighting a war, don't you have to maximize your organization's strengths and minimize weaknesses? If yes, then when playing supcom, everyone has the same strengths and weaknesses at the outset => it's a race. 

that in WW2, Germany had a certain type of weird tank that shot anti-air missiles and could go underwater, while Russia had personnel carriers, and specialized anti-infantry helicopters (which Germany lacked)...

I think in actual war, it's not rock-paper-scissors, and each side does, in fact, have units that are roughly equivalent. Sure, one side's heavy tank might be really good and the other's crap but it has a better bomber, but never the less each side has basically the same range of units.

In TA (I can't speak for SupCom yet) it's not some arbitrary limit on the types of units your side is _capable_ of building, it's the ones you choose to build and how you choose to use them. I tend to be a huge prick with submarines. You could win without a standing land army at all and just a huge air force, although that would be a strange way to play...

The economic factor is there, meaning it is partially a race, but that's also indicative of actual war. 

I never actually played Blade, I should probably give the demo a spin if it's at all like Rune. While Rune was pretty simplified, it was damn fun. 

is the best strategy 

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/gs/action/bladeofdarkness/bladeofdarkness_screen005.jpg 

Warcraft 2 is still the best (and only good) RTS game for my money. I say this mainly because it was the only one I could even attempt to play - the other ones just have too much stuff going on at once and I can't deal with it! 

because it was the only one I could even attempt to play

Amen brotha. Speaking of brothers, my own bro is good at the RTS thing and I can't play them even if I wanted to. They ressemble accounting with all of the stats you have to keep up with, and accounting is a chore, not fun. 

way to pick a really great looking area of the game to show off.

Whilst the graphics might not be awesome today, I do remember them being generally pretty nice at the time.