Supcom Battle - 5/22/07

So, I'm gonna layout my battle this morning with some dude in Supreme Commander. Here is an overview of the map we played, Emerald Craters. I'm the red team on the North, and he's the Green on the South. A basic thing you should know about the game is that there are 2 resources. Energy, and Mass. Energy, is easy to get. You just build different generators. You have different levels of technology (3 of them) so you start out building level 1 generators. Eventually you upgrade one of your factories to build a level 2 engineer, which in turn can build a level 2 generator. Then again for level 3. There is also a special type of way to get energy, and that's through that yellow lightning bolt you see on the map, which you build a Hydrocarbon Plant on.

Mass, on the other hand, is a lot harder to get. All those green patches across the map are your mass deposits. You have to build a Mass Extractor on them to get any mass. Thing is, being a large map, my engineers can't get to all of them quick enough, so I mainly grab all the ones near my base, and upgrade those. An alternate method to receive mass, is through a fabricator. The fabricators (only level 1 and 3) use up a LOT of energy to make some extra mass. For every Lvl 1 Fabricator you should have 2 Lvl 1 Generators. Hopefully, you caught all that.



Here's my base a few minutes into the game. Already got a land and air factory up. I wish there was some indicator that let me knew when a factory finished, many times I losing valuables seconds/minutes because I didn't realize one was done. I could of started building something earlier...-_-



Here's an overview of my scouts (those 3 diamonds across the center) doing their recon work. Just to make sure they (the enemy's armies) aren't there. I should of built a small base on that eastern (right-side) mound, but didn't, and eventually lost it to my opponent. :P



Here's his base after 5-10 minutes in the game.



And here's my base. Not bad either, but maybe a little less organized.



Here is his little army, he set them up in a line in front of the base he started constructing near the center.



At his main, he built a LOT of fighter jets. :P Later to destroy all of mine, protecting his gunships.



Dundundun! I send my first wave to his little, yet quickly growing base down near the center.



Here is the closest I got to winning. Our first armies meet, but interestingly enough his Commander was out there in the open, ready to build something. however, he quickly retreated as my first wave gave attack. They were all destroyed as his little defense line was bigger than my attack was.



Here you can see our respective bases so far...



Here's about the best I was able to get my base to. Right now you see a Level 2 Shield being built in the top-right. I was able to get about 4 all around my base at the end. However, that whole section in the top-left was taken out by a surprise ground+air attack. He had sent about 20 gunships across the left of the map, and then attacked from the North, but even worse was the fact that he had loaded half of those Gunships with a tank underneath! So I had about 10 tanks eating away as a bunch of Gunships attacked from above. I lost a lot of my power plants and fabricators (they turn energy into mass) which I had to rebuild later on.



My problem: I did not have any of this at my main. After that attack I was left rebuilding what I already had, which was older level 2 technology. He already has level 3 shields, power generators, and fabricators running his main base.



Here is a final overview of the map. As you can see, I did a fair job on expanding, however, the key is inside the enemy's main base, down in the south. That's where all his power was coming from, and from there he was able to amass an army near the center.



Here is his final wave, the army that eventually destroyed me. Noticed how he strategically position a bunch of shield tanks throughout the formation, as to give maximum coverage to all his bots and tanks.



Here you can see his huge army eating away at the south of my base. I'm in trouble...



See that floating ship near the top? That was a transport. I tried to build it as fast as possible to fly my Commander out of my base, but they shot it down quick, so you can see my Commander (the robot on fire :P) running away...



but they caught him so...I died. :P

Blurbizitation

No, that word does not exist. Oh well. Here goes my random thoughts for the day (and throughout the past weeks :P)...

I really suck at the large maps on Supreme Commander. I've been playing this one, called Emerald Crater. A huge green map, with one big circle in the middle, and 4 smaller circles on each cardinal direction. Then there's also a nice chunk of land with some resources on each corner on the map. Anyway, I can't seem to expand fast enough, which leaves me with low resources, and with my enemy able to build his army ALL around me. I just finished a game, this time I did a lot better at expanding, but I hit another problem I have which is advancing my technology (level 1, 2, 3). So he had these HUGE power plants (Level 3) before I did (though I had quite a bit of Level 2), so he was able to build larger armies than I was able to counter with. I saved the replay to check out how he worked his stuff. I'll make a separate post showing our battle, since describing it is a lot harder, than staring at some of the beautiful screenshots I could be taking instead. :P

I've been finalizing some stuff with my website, and thanks to Justin's help, I've been able to get my layout completed! I'm testing out some stuff with the scripts and junk for my comic system, so that's what I'll be working on for a bit. I set up a test page here. here you can see my original mock-up for it, I got it pretty close eh? :D



School. It rears its' ugly head once again. I have a week to decide whether I'm gonna sign up for Graphics Design at "La Universidad del Norte" and start in June (or July) the classes. Ugh...I'm gonna have to pray hard for this one, because if I miss it, I'll be schooless for another year, which isn't necessarily bad but...you know. It would be better to get in school again...I guess. I wish God could send me an e-mail, to let me know what he wants...

We'll be visiting a youth group on Saturday, checking it out to see if we like it. We finally were able to check out the small youth service they had on Sunday, not a lot of people, maybe about the size of REEL, but with a couple more little kids. :P

I'm hungry.

If I didn't mention this already, we bought an apartment. After we move out (I think next month, or July) we will be staying at an apartment for a while (few years or so, unless we find a nice house or something :P).

Pixtures

Here you can see some of my huge base. There's my commander there with the name tag "mastastealth" on it.



Here is on of MY races' experimental units, the Fatboy. It's pretty much a mobile factory (which I used to build all those anti-air tanks next to it). You can see the wreckage of one of the enemies' experimental units, the Monkeylord, A huge spider bot, in the background.



One of my little Anti-air points. You can see the guns firing at some of those enemy green planes on the right.



Here comes one of the biggest, baddest experimental units in the game. I believe it's called the "Czar" and it's pretty much a UFO with super laser beam underneath.



And here you can see that UFO blown up. I had to send every fighter I had to take that punk out.



So that's Supreme Commander. Here's a picture I drew for a contest on Deviantart:



I'll get screenshots of my Linux desktop later.

Squito Chart

Call me obsessive, but I've added a little flash "chart" (right sidebar, on bottom) where I will keep track of my mosquito bites from now on. You can believe it or not, as you will see it's just an unreal amount of bites. The red ones are "officially" recorded bites. When I made the chart, I looked in a mirror and marked every bite I could still see. The dark red ones, are older ones I had scribbled on a pad, but only go back a month or 2. So there are still about 3+ months of bites worth that I'm not even showing! PLUS that doesn't include the small bites that might of disappeared fast enough that I forgot to record them that day.

Click on the pink face to show my face bites, click the face to make it disappear again. That "green zone" is where I hope I never get bit, and shouldn't, because I'm wearing pants you know? ;) So no bites from my waste to above my knees.

That is all. I still need to get some photos of something from some days ago right? Bleh....

Geeklog

Well, I'm gonna share some of my recent PC activities, which may be a nice change from my usual "I hate mosquito rants". Although, FYI, I got bit 12 times in the past few days, in odd patterns. It's a line of 3 bites each, going up both cheeks, a line down my neck, and then a line across the middle of my forehead, each one consisting of 3 bites. Really weird stuff. Anyway...

...

You know what? I think I forgot most of the stuff. :P You see, I wrote that above paragraph one day, and had to save it because I had to do something...and now, 3 days later, I try to finish this darn post (which I know was gonna be pretty big) and can't remember what the heck I was gonna say...darn it.

So, I'll start with:

I've been playing some more Supreme Commander lately. I bought that game a while ago, and had played a couple times, but now I play about every other day. It's really awesome (and works so beautifully on my new machine) and I've won a couple multiplayer battles. Although in the past few days I've been trying to finish the campaign (single-player) mode. I probably shoulda taken a screenshot...:P

I've also been doing some WINE work in Linux. WINE creates a type of translation layer to Linux, converting Windows functions and calls to use native Linux ones, so that it can run programs. The developers have done an amazing job at getting DirectX stuff into the code, and I've been able to get Battlefield 2, Total Annihilation, and Soldat to run in Linux quite well, though Supreme Commander gets an error during install for some reason...

I installed the new Ubuntu Feisty 4.07 on a spare 80GB I had, so it has plenty of room. I have it all nice and setup now with Beryl and everything. I should get a screenshot of that too...;)

I also am working on some art stuffs...but I will post all those pictures (and some more stuff on a recent trip we had) in another post...

Farm

We went to a farm Saturday. Check out my photos!



Other then that...I've won a couple games of Supreme Commander, but I'm still a noob at it. The game rocks though.