6 vs 2: Part I

Not long ago (last post in-fact) I mentioned that me and Arazmus were considering taking on 6 of the hardest AI there is on Supreme Commander. We did it. It took a couple of hours, orphan blood, dodo sweat and fairy tears, but we did it. If you have Supreme Commander installed, you can open this file and watch the full replay.

From looking at the map, I knew water was going to be the way to do maximum damage with minimum resistance. Land was narrow with lots of bottlenecks – easy to defend, hard to attack. This inspired me to get a dockyard quickly set up with lots of engineers helping it out. After knocking up a small line of defense with some little tanks to hold the land, I got my first lot of subs out of the dockyard and sent them off to the middle of the map. This gave me some decent anti-naval weaponry, and an early warning system of anything headed our way.

So far so ordinary, and so it progressed. Nothing much exciting happened for a while to be honest. Because we were against six AI, we really had to pick our moment. Rushing in with a load of tech 1 units wasn’t going to do anything, so we really had to wait until we were running smoothly at tech 2 until we could make a move. The tension slowly mounted.

The first move was made by Arazmus with a small force of rocket bots. They broke the Blues defenses and damaged a lot of their base, but ultimately failed. Wise man say the only way to follow up an attack with rocket bots is with more rocket bots though, so wave 2 went in. This time, I supported him with some gunships, and the Blue commander went down. 1 down, 5 to go.

I started spamming engineers from my docks, as boats take a long time to build, and I needed some big boats. When the docks were supported enough, I had one making tech 2 destroyers (boats that can walk with a massive range) and the other build big nasty Tech 3 battleships. These took 14 minutes each to build, but they were well worth it, as will become proven.

My first Battleship eventually built, and I set it after the elusive Dark Greens. I think it got a bug though, as it got stuck doing laps of my docks. Silly robot programmers. After getting very frustrated and suiciding some units, it got out and off it went supported by a load of fighter planes just in case of a surprise air attack. When it finally knocked on the Dark Greens door (quite heavily and using bullets) it started shelling, and beautiful it was. It was nailing the Dark Green base so I sent in my reasonable army of ground units to help mop up. While Battleships are hard as nails, they are not indestructible. I was forced to send some engineers from my docks to help it stay alive, a sacrifice worth making but it meant my next battleship would take longer to build.

I had the resources by now to start building some uber units. I cued up four Sould Rippers (big gun ships) to be going on with. Meanwhile, my Battleship is still alive, and pummeling the Dark Greens. Eventually it landed a lucky shot on the Commanders head and Boom! Dark Greens are down…4 AI left. Just as we think this is a bit too easy, something big starts hitting my battleship and ground units. It’s out of sight, so god knows what it is, but it’s hitting hard.

Experimentals are going to be coming thick and fast now, and we haven’t even won half of the battle. Will we be able to fend off the remaining teams? Will they launch a surprise attack together, screwing us over? What is hitting my Battleship? Find out in Part II.