Having messed about installing the must have mods and add-ons that we’ve all been instructed to download and install I must say that I’m starting to really enjoy this Armed Assault. Last night we played two custom missions. Being more experienced now, Simon and Alex’s missions were complete with briefing, way-points and other cool things that made the mission feel right.

The real-time day cycle feature is also really really cool. I mean this must be seen to be appreciated. We began our mission parachuting in near the beach front and had to hike around 600m to our way-point on the top of a hill with a good view of the small outpost. Upon checking the time on our landing it was around 19:10 hours. After clearing the outpost it was more like 19:30 and nightfall was beginning to set in all around us. The flames from the jeep we destroyed; the BMP that I set ablaze with the AT missile were all casting real-time lighting effects and casting long shadows from all the trees in the nearby area. It was around this point where we kept loosing some of our unit as their was generally an officer left hiding somewhere who would pick one of us off when we assumed the outpost was clear.

Moving further on lead us to more units and a need for night vision goggles. The HDR effect when switching to and from the goggles is really quite annoying but very realistic and very much a cool effect.

Setting these missions up takes time, and often you find out that a lot of the enemy actions (like the reinforcements falling to arrive) are not properly set-up. Getting a game going takes an age -possibly as long as setting up a game of Supreme Commander, but it’s well worth it in the end. I think I’ll go off now and start reading through the Armed Assault Mision Editing Tutorial by Rick Rawlings.

Download Title

I was reading up on the Gas Powered Games forums about the current BETA testers and their comments on the upcoming expansion Forged Alliance, when I noticed someones signature had a link in to some kind of Sup Com Mod:-

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=4142

The “4th Dimension” is a modification for Supreme Commander which adds new content like (completely) new designed units, explosions and other effects. The goal of this mod is to make SC feel more realistic (as long as it is better for the gameplay) and to improve the balancing and optics of the game. Nearly all muzzle velocities have been increased a lot, and a few units move much slower now.
Another big aspect of this mod is the fact, that in 4th Dimension nearly all units have their right to exist, even in later tech levels.
Beside a new veteran system, which lets stronger units count more than weaker units and which gives units bigger buffs, the mod changes also the tarmac sizes and explosion effects.

Sounds real interesting since not only does it change a lot of units stats, but they’ve also got more units in there too. The only questions I want to know is is it compatible with the latest build of sup com? and if so, can you simply switch to and from this and vanilla as and when you want?

Edit: doh, if I read what was there I’d of seen:

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.8 here:
http://files.filefront.com/4th+Dimension+18zip/;8708717;/fileinfo.html

Unzip the “4th Dimension.zip”. If the unpacked file is a *.scd file, you must put it into the …\gamedata\ folder.
If the unpacked file is another folder called “4th Dimension”, put it into your mods directory in supreme commander
(if it doesnt exist, create a folder “mods”).

Okay, so we finally decide we’re going to get another session of Supreme Commander in this Sunday - after all, it’s generally only on a Sunday that we can all get together with enough hours to play a game! The teams were already decided from our last battle - this time it was me and jof against Simon and Ridgway - the only snag was that AmathusUKX decided that he would join us. Great. The more the merrier I say, and I can’t wait until Mr.Unhappy gets his copy as then we’ll finally get to try some 3v3 like we once did back in the BETA.

Anyhow, Chris goes with Simon and Alex - seeing how Alex generally always wins ;0\ This means the sides are as follow: gav (EUF), jof (Aeon) vs Si (UEF), Alex (Cybran) and Chris (Aeon). After looking through the available maps we finally settled on the classic “Sechon’s Clutch” for it’s nice balance of land and water. It’s spawn point placement also allowed both teams to expand in a safe area with most of the action taking place in the narrow bottle neck or the sea/air.

Anyway numerous skirmishes were had between the regular players. I had some major sea battles with Simon while jof went to-to-toe with Alex’s spiders. I used a heavily upgraded SCU to build a heavy torpeedo/SAM firebase in the southern waters while the Atlantis was being constructed. This proved to be quite useful later when the torpeedo bombers came in after my naval fleet.

About 1 hour 30 minutes into the game jof said t me in team chat:

I have a teleportable SCU, should I hit Ridge?

I thought, yeah why not? Alex is always a strong opponent. It’s been our plan to finsh Simon and Alex off first, leaving Chris until last. Chris was not in the BETA and thus missed all of our “play tests” where we would see what worked and what didn’t. For intance - how many T3 Strategic Bombers does it take to fall a Monkey Lord? Anyway, you get the idea.

I think in this game someone had been sending Nukes our way, and we’d tried to spot it using T3 Scout Planes, but had failed. Jof wanted to send in his “telefrag” SCU to do some serious damage to Alex’s economy, but upon setting the SCU going, he went off to queue more stuff up while the clock ticked.

A minute later all we heard was a nuclear explosion and a message popped up on all of our screens:-

The_Ridg has been defeated.

Opps, that was a tad cold. Jof’s SCU had teleported in right next to Alex’s ACU and when it died had obviously taken him with it. I’m not sure if it was really an accident or whether in fact that jof had indeed spotted Alex and went for a quick kill. Either way, with Alex dead we began to concentrate our efforts on Simon. It was already late when we started this game and time was getting on. Chris decided it was time for bed (work in the morning) and promptly disconnected. Simon now had a 2v1 situation. To make things fun me & jof decided to upgrade our ACU’s for combat and to stroll them into Simons base with the intention on finding his ACU and bitch-slapping him.

Remind me never to upgrade me commander for battle ever again. At least not after 1 hour into the game. They are so vulnerable to artillery etc it really is annoying. In total annihilation you could always rely on your big boy to take down any real trouble. In Sup Com the ACU is a real wuss. Sure he’ll kill most units, but he’s best left hidden, somewhere safe with all of his engineering suites used to build more useful units!

Looking forward to next week.