Supreme Commander - PC/General Strategies

From WikiCheats

Avoiding a Stalled Economy

Units in Supreme Commander require two resources: mass and energy. These are acquired primarily through with mass extractors, mass fabricators, and power generators. When you build or upgrade something, it costs both mass and energy. This cost isn't deducted when you command the unit to be built, it is deducted over the course of construction. If you order many new units to be built, it is possible for your consumption of resources to exceed your production of them. If this situation continues for too long you will run out of resources. The combination of a negative resource production rate with no stored resources is known as a stalled economy. Once an economy stalls, it is difficult to restart it because there are no available resources to build mass extractors or power generators. You should suspend construction of new units and have your engineers focus on building up your resource production. Pull the engineers off existing construction projects and build mass extractors and power generators. You can resume normal construction once you have a positive resource production.

If possible, try to avoid a stalled economy by building plenty of mass extractors and power generators. You should also limit the number of new construction projects you start at once. A good way to do this is to have your engineers work together to quickly build one unit at a time rather than separately building multiple units concurrently.

Economies often stall due to a lack of mass during the tier 2 phase of a battle. At this time, players run out of places to put mass extractors and they don't yet have access to tier 3 mass fabricators. One possible solution is to use tier 2 power generators with tier 1 mass fabricators. This should provide enough mass until tier 3 production buildings can come online.

The most common cause of a stalled economy is creating too many engineers. If you find that you have made too many, send some of them out to reclaim resources from destroyed units or natural features.

Unit Types and Roles

Units in Supreme Commander come in four basic types: mobile land units, sea units (ships and submarines), air units (airplanes), and buildings. There are also several different types of weapons, and each of these weapons is good against one type of unit. Mobile ground units are best destroyed with direct fire weapons, naval units are best defeated with torpedoes (anti-naval weapons), etc.

When confronting an enemy, it is important to match the correct weapons to use against the type of unit you are facing. Some weapons cannot hit some units types at all; direct fire weapons can't shoot down aircraft at all. Some weapons can be used against some units with only a limited effectiveness; artillery can fire at moving targets, but almost always misses. To defend your own units, a good mix of weapon types is always a good idea to defend against any type of attacking unit.

Notes:

• Naval units come in two varieties: surface ships and submarines. Surface ships can be destroyed by direct fire, but only dedicated anti-naval weapons can hurt submerged units.

• Direct fire weapons will also destroy structures, but artillery has the firepower and range to do it more quickly and from a safer distance.

• Artillery can hit stationary or slow moving targets.

• Although there is no naval artillery unit, the weapons on battleships are so powerful they destroy buildings very effectively.

Technology Tiers

The game has four technology levels, called tiers. Tiers 1 and 2 have a wide variety of units. Tier 3 has a more limited number of units, but they are more powerful. The fourth tier, called experimental, are units unique to each faction.

At the start of the game, you can only build tier 1 units. To be able to build tier 2 or 3 units, you must upgrade your factories. These upgraded factories can build higher tier mobile units, including higher tier engineers. These higher tier engineers can build higher tier buildings. Experimental units are build not in factories, but built individually by tier 3 engineers.

Nuclear Missiles

The tier 3 missile launcher is a nuclear weapon so powerful it must not be overlooked. If this weapon successfully hits an enemy base, victory (for the side that fired the missile) is all but assured. The only defense against it is the tier 3 missile defense. You should build a missile defense soon after you reach tier 3 to prevent your enemy from destroying all the buildings at your base. If your enemy is inexperienced, build a tier 3 missile launcher just in case he or she fails to build a missile defense.

Using Enemy Units

Much of the strategy in Supreme Commander involves using the right units for a given situation. If you have access to another faction's units types, you'll have an advantage that comes from a greater variety of units.

If you're playing against enemies of a different faction, try to capture an enemy engineer or factory. The best way to grab an engineer is early in the game, when tier 1 engineers are often sent unescorted to build mass extractors. While the engineer is stationary building a structure, capture it with two or more of your own engineers. Enemy factories are harder to capture, but they are valuable enough to try to capture rather than destroy them.

Captured engineers create units of the same type of their old faction. Use this engineer to make a factory, and you will have access to the other faction's combat units. You can use the factory to produce a tier 3 engineer, and this engineer can start work on an experimental unit. You can use your other engineers to complete this experimental unit.

Adjacency

A group of buildings with adjacency bonuses. Note the power lines showing the energy connection, and the bonus.

When constructed next to each other, some buildings will grant a bonus to the buildings next to them. Mass extractors and fabricators will use less energy when built next to power generators, and will create more mass when built next to mass storage units. Power generators create more energy next to energy storage units.

Exactly how much of a bonus depends on the unit type, level, and number. A single higher level structure gives a higher bonus than multiple lower level structures. A power generator fully surrounded by energy storage can increase its production by 50%. A mass fabricator can boost it's output by 50% when surrounded by mass storage, or decrease its power use by up to 2/3 near enough power generators.

In taking advantage of these bonuses, many players build their production buildings in a tightly packed group. This isn't a good idea, because when a building is destroyed, it will explode with a limited blast area. This explosion is just enough to destroy nearby buildings and start a chain reaction. If a large group of buildings is close together, one minor attack could destroy all of them. Build your buildings in small groups, so that you take advantage of bonuses but the space in between these groups will prevent a deadly chain reaction from spreading.

Build Times

Higher level units build things faster than lower level units. The following table shows exactly how fast, and gives an example of the time difference.

ACU Suicide Charge

If you're playing a game of annihilation against a single opponent, you can have your ACU charge into your enemy base. If your ACU survives, it will take out the enemy base. If not, the explosion will destroy the enemy base. Of course you'll be without an ACU for the rest of the match, so you'll need to have a functioning base of your own. This is a risky, but often effective tactic.

Constant Pressure Attack

A small map against a single opponent tends to be a difficult scenario. One effective strategy is the consonant pressure attack. As soon as practical, build a land factory and set it to build tier 1 ground attack units. Send these units to your enemy base. Your goal is not to destroy your enemy at this time. The goal is to force the enemy to build defenses. Once one area has defenses, attack a different side. Continue attacking for as long as your attacks do damage. Send some units on patrol to destroy any stray engineers or undefended buildings. Eventually one of two things should happen: either you'll break through his defenses with your superior numbers, or you can lay siege to his base and keep him contained until you are ready to destroy him.