Hiya, recently discovered Zero-K and I'm very excited by it. As a longtime member of the SupCom / FAF community, it's interesting to see the contrast. Although I've heard someone say FAF has three times the average number of players online, the FAF forum is almost completely dead and there is very little gameplay discussion (and zero offtopic discussion.) The forum here seems much more active, with strategy and gameplay discussion still occurring quite frequently. I wonder why that is? Is it the difference between an open source game still in active development, versus a fan mod for a legacy commercial game? Is it because a large chunk of FAF players are non english speakers that don't involve themselves with english forum? No idea.
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Your guess is as good as mine. You've stated probable causes I agree with, although the activeness of development has toned down a bit after steam release boom expired but I'm certain it's temporary. We're all excited with Zero-k and that's why we're here (on the forums and playing it). Hope you find the community welcoming and stay with us for longer, welcome to the forums. I've recently tried supreme commander out of curiosity and I liked many things but I missed interface features and strategical depth zero-k has. I've certainly liked supcom's striders or game-ending units. Their coolness level is way higher than any Detriment can reach. Also it was fun to have an economic victory in form of a building that provides you unlimited resources. @edit: Also probably the fact that people here know they have some influence on shaping the game in the future by discussing it here helps with keeping discussions alive.
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I wanted to get into FAF not long ago but I was totally put off when I realized it was icon wars. If theres more active discussion about ZK its probably because ZK is less figured out than supcom and probably more conflicting opinions. Also discussions do sometimes lead to change so when you see threads like the one discussing OP bertha its probably motivated a lot by people wanting to see it get nerfed rather than because they want to have a debate about it :P
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I don't know too much about FAF, but I think the zero-k.info website is nice for what it is. I have a profile page with an account level, and an accumulation of awards in games I've played. Notably, when I'm looking at my homepage profile, I can see the forum on the right side, below unit tips. I can find a replay then click the watch replay button with the lobby open and it will automatically download and start the replay. I used to be able to do the same with missions, but I think that's broken now. Also, this website is nicely Dark-themed. A long time ago accessing the website was important for building your com, where you could unlock diffferent commorph pieces based on your account level, and it was not configurable in game, so I had to come to the website frequently.
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zero-k is different from many rts, me I go back to the old starcraft for the memories but zero-k becuase it's opensource there can be more things u can add more updates it's more adaptive gameplay. New units, more artwork, and new stories. That's the thing that makes zero-k special ;D games like starcraft, supcom and other are more overpriced rts that have been made get stuck easily in same repetitive gameplay. where they cannot change thier format completely. Zero-k used to have chicken queen that only walked but changed it later to a flying queen and other units have been changed. that's a dynamic that starcraft changes in it's game like taking away siege tanks makes players leave the game.
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anyway if you like bring your buddies here -_- we got the best rts players in the world looking at godde and bluesteel and winking at them before making myself the idiot now. just bring your foo's here and will whoop them i was a lot better at starcraft but now i suck at it. and here at zero-k i whooped some of the best and supcom all the players that come from that community are girly players. Go watch those stupid unicorns or horse cartoon everyone is watching, no here are real men -_-. figihtnig with toothpicks and bullets. taking down a whole army but with thier bloody hands -_-. go back to momma
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quote:
've recently tried supreme commander out of curiosity and I liked many things but I missed interface features and strategical depth zero-k has. I've certainly liked supcom's striders or game-ending units. Their coolness level is way higher than any Detriment can reach. Also it was fun to have an economic victory in form of a building that provides you unlimited resources. |
Yeah, certainly SupCom is much prettier, but it's not just the professional art, there's also some perfect ratio of unit and world scale, that makes SupCom look "realisticish" and epic. Whereas most other games like TA, the Spring games, Planetary Annihilation, etc just look a bit toylike or gamey. Even now, I still like to stare at the beauty and wonder of Rake's SupCom music videos, every now and then: I often wonder if the Spring-derived games could look a bit better and closer to SupCom even with TA or community models, if they managed to get the unit vs. world scaling just right, like SupCom does. As a UI modder and UI fanatic, though, Zero-K is wonderful that I don't feel any need to mod it, it has all the UI stuff I could possibly want, hahah. And the flat tech tiers with all the factories available is a fascinating gameplay puzzle for a beginner like me.
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well you can make almost everything exiting by putting some upfront-music over it.
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Supcom videos look really cool sure but its totally misleading lol, the game doesnt look like that when you play it. You dont fly around in some artistic zoomed in panning camera, nope you just move blobs around and run them into other blobs. Totally gay.
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Let me take a guess you are quite good at it Drone?
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Like I said, I watched a bunch of videos like the ones linked here and thought "wow I could get into this" then proceeded to waste my time downloading it but I quickly realized you dont actually see the units, you just see icons and all the icons look super similar. Not only that but its really not much different from ZK in that you can spend ages in MM and find no games and then when you do get a game its against some 5 year veteran lol.
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Most booring part in FAF is eco, upgrading mexes is so boring but very important. and so cool that in ZK i not forced to do this.
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Wanted to see what FAF is looking like. Pfew who can find this appealing? As drone said, icons war with no micro importance. Am I dead wrong?
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It's better to find a video with good frame rate to represent the game properly: SupCom actually has a lot of micro. And I don't mind the abstract representation of the units, if you are familiar with how they look close-up and know their icons in the game, you can easily fill the details with your imagination solely based on the icons. One thing I like SupCom better than 0K is it has really smooth tilt-zoom, which as you can see in the video, allows you to position camera accurately without using minimap or panning. Shadowfury333 once attempt to make the tiltzoom in COFC smoother, but found it too difficult and gave up, he explained it's because there's no way to get screen->world projection data in Spring without adjusting the camera. But Silentwings commented that Spring.TraceScreenRay should be able to do that. Whether that's true or not and whether it has anything to do with camera projection data, it would be great if someone with the right skills can look into the problem again and fix it.
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from the video, it seems FAF doesn't have area reclaim. Does it have line formation? (spreading out groups of units by using click-drag with move or fight)
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FA is about as old as CA, I'm not sure line formation was even invented in the Spring community by then. The modders in the SupCom community probably have never thought of this idea so you most likely won't be able to get it via mods either. As for whether it's possible to implement in FA, I think you would need to ask one of those modders for that. There's a mod for area commands such as area reclaim, but it has not been incorporated into the modded version of the game FA Forever used for their ranked matches: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=8471
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quote:
Supcom videos look really cool sure but its totally misleading lol, the game doesnt look like that when you play it. You dont fly around in some artistic zoomed in panning camera, nope you just move blobs around and run them into other blobs. Totally gay. |
This is a bit of a silly place to say such things, isn't it? All the strat zoom games suffer from the "war of dots" effect, unless you deliberately choose to stay zoomed in. ZeroK is no exception. Anyways, there's two ways to play these games. If you're in a competitive match, then you'll be using the view that gives you the best advantage - usually zoomed out, possibly with overlays, etc. Just like a competitive FPS player might have all graphics options turned down for best FPS, have textures or grass disabled to increase visibility of enemies, etc. When you're playing casually or watching replays, you have plenty of time to zoom in, pan the camera around, and enjoy the graphics. quote:
from the video, it seems FAF doesn't have area reclaim.
Does it have line formation?
(spreading out groups of units by using click-drag with move or fight) |
Well, the base SupCom / FA didnt even have rebindable hotkeys! It had to be added via modding. Area reclaim is also useable via modding. Although SupCom is far more limited in area-style commands than Zero-K (or even the much maligned SupCom2.) Since the community took over and started FAF, many UI mods have been integrated into the "base" game. Unfortunately, there's a very vocal and influential faction of players & devs who are from the "Starcraft" school of RTS design. They actively resist features like area commands as "dumbing down the game." Which I think is a stupid point of view for fans of the TA-lineage RTS games, since advanced UI is one of our main features.
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Zero-K is mostly played zoomed-in, because of the smaller scale and the more detailed unit interactions, but I suspect the unpopularity of COFC camera for various reasons also being a factor. The players will probably zoom out a lot more often if a zoomed out view also works like a bigger minimap.
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Ah k. Well, I think the point stands that zoomed in vs. out is pretty much a matter of preference and comfort. I don't think it's fair to malign SupCom for being very playable zoomed out, any more than criticizing Zero-K for forcing you to zoom in to improve control.
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The few Supcom players i've talked with who also saw ZK complained that ZK has very small ranges compared to unit sizes - more than Starcraft, of course, but nowhere near the "epic" scale of Supcom. This is a deliberate trade-off to decrease the amount of time a player spends in the icons mode.
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