What Are Zero-K Advantages over Supreme Commander?

the problem is wholly related to the new engine 97, which is not enforced on common room [but recommended] 91 engine run perfectly.

the thing is this game focus a lot on pure strategy and constant engagement. If this is not your cup of tea, it's fine, but for me it's the most riveting thing about the game. It's a whole new philosophy in RTS no research, no OP late game units, no pure spam, no mindless rush. Only pure strategy and awesome is left, each match is a mind engage upon a mind, with movement and terrain and units ability.

I saw a few game from Supreme Commander, my general opinion it that game become tech race and entrenched while player build up massive IDLE army. Again this is a matter of taste, but it is quite dull for me.


also it's opensource so it will last until the end of time [or so we hope]. with updates and fix and patch.

What I find especially remarkable is how ZK is aiming to remove tedious micro when it can be automated away easily. Units on fight command will automatically kite, dodge projectiles etc., the economy is streamlined (yet another marketing term :D) and things like line move and unit states allow fine-grained control of how your units behave without ever being complex or inaccessible.

You can really keep your mind on the strategy.

To expand on what Sortale said about performance; we don't write the engine (that is done by the people here http://springrts.com/ ). The last few engine releases have been not that great and we are currently trying to test and update to the latest one. It is looking better than the ones before it but has a performance problem when people try to play 8v8 teamgames. In any case the issue is temporary because either the engine devs will fix the problem or we will have to go back to the old engine. The old engine works quite well but lacks some features and has some annoying bugs. The forums are useful in coordinating this effort.

We've had a community for longer than SupComm has been around. In the last 3 years we have averaged about 300 unique players ingame per day but I don't know how that relates to total playerbase. It may look small to you because somehow our community came to consist mostly of Europe and Australia timezone people. Our lowtime for activity is an 8 hour or so gap which includes the Americas evening. From what I have seen there is always a coop game going on and teamgames for most of the day every day.


As for the game itself I wrote a lot of the Steam description so would probably repeat it even if I tried to come up with one here. But I can do a bit of a comparison to SupComm. The main differences are in unit diversity, technology and economy. There is also a UI difference and maybe a pace difference.

To me the units of SupComm are quite boring and similar compared to those in ZK. The focus in SupComm seems to be on making increasingly large and high tech generic armies and bringing them to bear at important locations. From what I have seen most of the units in SupComm have much more range than they have speed.

There are a lot of units in ZK and they are very diverse, there are no double-ups between factions or better and more expensive versions of units. Maybe it would make sense to say units have more personality through their attributes and this personality changes the way an engagement feels. They take full advantage of a physics based projectile system with slow projectiles, wobbly missiles or large area of effects. Positioning within a battle is important because units can be quite fast compared to their range and they cannot shoot through each other. There are also quite a few non-gimmicky semi-special abilities that some units have such as EMP damage and jumpjets.

Personally a big advantage is the terrain deformation. Explosions deform terrain which may make vehicles worse over time and constructors can terraform. I have found the terraform to be quite powerful in controlling the shape of a battle and I think it is underused.

Zero-K does not have factions that you choose between before the game starts. Instead we have 11 factories with their own set of about 8 units. Your first factory is free and factories are relatively expensive for the first several minutes of a game. You can branch out and construct more factories but your first factory acts as a soft faction choice. There is also a factory which produces large experimental type units. This is the extent of technology in ZK. Almost all of the units are able to be constructed from the very start of the game so there is no tech race with obsolescence that occurs in SupComm. Players don't rush large units because they take a long time to build on your starting income and are generally slow. Large units are bad at spreading out and taking territory. Every structure can be produced from the start as well, superweapons are just poor choices when there is free territory to capture.

The economy is quite different (and I think quite a bit better) SupComm. Both games have Metal which comes from extractors, Energy which can be built anywhere and constructors which make Build Power. ZK does not have tech levels and upgrades so there is only one extractor. We also don't have metal makers. Every economy structure can be built from the start but it is often not efficient to boost your economy by +35 Energy when early on you only need +4. We have a system called overdrive which, broadly put, spends Energy to multiply Metal income with diminishing returns and better efficiency to those that control more mexes. If a constructor has X Build Power it will always drain Metal and Energy at a maximum rate of X. This is to let people focus on deciding what to build instead of scrambling to balance the drains with their current constructions.

I have to mention the UI because by comparision the UI of SupComm is bad. My principal is that the player should be fighting against their opponent using their units and strategies, not competing with their opponent in who can use the UI better. Some micromanagement has snuck in but it at least seems to embody rapid decision making.

• Constructors have a priority state to decide who has fist access to resources so constructing something ASAP does not require large scale pausing of other constructions.
• Units have basic intelligence which can be enabled to make them keep enemies at their maximum range or try to dodge incoming projectiles.
• Placing units any way to want is easy with custom formation line moves.
• Area commands for everything (mexing in an area, attacking units, attacking units with split targets, reclaiming, repairing, construction).
• More stuff that is probably so ingrained I have forgotten it is missing elsewhere.

Hmm that was a bit long, what does SupComm do better? It can be a matter of taste because I'm sure there are people who like tech races and economy balancing.

the post by @googlefrog covers the story pretty neat.

i have to add the interaction with the terrain.

1)
i dunno if supcom has terraform. zk has it and i absolutely like this feature. every unit with buildpower can start or assist terraform. walls, ramps, spikes/holes, whatever you like. (unit's pathing adaption is sometimes poor though).

2)
technology/factory: beside the "normal factories" , there are some specialized factories, which interact with the geography of a map. hovers can pass water but cannot pass hills. amphibious units walk on ground of sea, if its flat enough. jump-factory's units can pass steep walls with a jump command. spider factory can pass any terrain. the rest is more or less default, tanks, mechs, ...

there is a trailer on youtube which describes some features:


more media you find in the media tab of the menu on top of the page.

I've noticed there was a lot of tech discussion, so...

quote: What Are Zero-K Advantages over Supreme Commander?

1) UI, automation, and war on tedium. Though i heard supcom got better on that front, does it have line moves now?

ZK UI is as extremely powerful as you probably can get without becoming a programming language, while mostly being very easy to grasp.

Oh, and i can't play starcraft now because i expect hydralisks to auto kite enemies.

2) Physics: dropping ships onto land with air transports, defenestrating enemies into holes with gravity guns, terraforming, and - of course - dodging projectiles.

3) Diversity. There's so many stuff around, and it all works differently. Combine with above, and there's always some smart craziness you can invent which nobody even thought of before.

To me, the biggest advantage of ZK over supcom is the scale. Imo the scale of the battles in ZK is absolutely perfect. Microing even single regular units can pay off big time, especially in the early game (see, for example, the projectile dodging that was mentioned). In the mid- and lategame, armies get bigger and you get the grand strategy feel with armies clashing. Manual micro still pays off even with bigger armies, but most of the units are smart enough to manage alright even without constant babysitting.

Personally, I like the small community, you encounter the same players multiple times and get the chance to get to know them better. Zero-K is a great game, but the lobby/1v1 room(filled with old sleeping dudes) is also a nice play to hang around and discuss strategy or unrelated stuff. There's a bunch of people who haven't played for months but still hang around in the lobby or spectate 1v1 games of newer player in order to give them advice.

While I'm mostly a Zero-K player, I still play FA for several reasons:

1.I prefer assassination as a victory conditions, in FA it provide some very dramatic moments in high level plays.

2.Units in FA need more time to travel across the map, so distances matter more and unit positioning has bigger impact than in Zero-K.

3.Moho engine handles the details of unit movements better than Spring, like how units collide with each other, how ships turn, how gunships climb over a cliff etc.

4.FA has better camera controls for gameplay due to it has a trend to center the map in zoomed out views and center the point under cursor in zoomed in views, which is a huge advantage on UI.

You can run it on linux with Wine.
http://www.faforever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4507

qwerty3w

quote: 1.I prefer assassination as a victory conditions, in FA it provide some very dramatic moments in high level plays.

Exists as a game option.

quote: 2.Units in FA need more time to travel across the map, so distances matter more and unit positioning has bigger impact than in Zero-K.

This is possible in ZK too. Just have to play bigger maps. The problem is that when map makers created them they added more total metal instead of increasing distance between metal spots. Thus games end with very low fps, especially in 10v10.

quote: 4.FA has better camera controls for gameplay due to it has a trend to center the map in zoomed out views and center the point under cursor in zoomed in views, which is a huge advantage on UI.

This is an option after enabling the mod specific custom camera.