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PC Beyond All Reason

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PC Beyond All Reason

Unread postby icycalm » 14 Dec 2021 03:48

https://www.beyondallreason.info

Someone should try this out.

It's running on the TA Spring Engine, whatever that is. And they recently achieved 5,000 units.

I hate that they call themselves "the ultimate RTS".
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icycalm
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Beyond All Reason impressions

Unread postby ChevRage » 27 Mar 2023 05:07

I played some of this with some friends before our Ready or Not session on Saturday.

The game is basically Supreme Commander with a higher unit count, and a much uglier design. There are a couple of decent looking units, but nothing even so much as approaching the Tyr. Even the UI is ugly and it's much harder to make out what everything is at a moment's notice. It's also back to square maps and there are no orbital units (even the original Supreme Commander had an experimental orbital unit, kinda like the laser platform in PA). All of the maps are square/rectangle-shaped, and symmetrical too.

There are some more utterly stupid design decisions, like why the fuck are there graves next to dead commanders? Not to mention that dead commanders don't prevent you from controlling the rest of your troops. No shared armies too, and while I don't think Supreme Commander had that mechanic, they could've learned from PA at least. It's possible that some of this stuff could be changed in the lobby, but I couldn't see any settings for it. Not that I looked particularly hard, the UI gives me a headache.

In general the game is missing a lot of the micro-reducing features that even Supreme Commander had. For example, if I was to right-click a bunch of builders to help another one build something, they will just swarm his location as if I've ordered them to repair him, and won't attempt to help him build at all unless I right-click on his half-completed building. To be fair, there are a lot of buttons I haven't learned yet, so maybe there's a separate button to help build or something, but why would there need to be one?

And why don't some of the huge missiles fired by the T2 units track their targets? By the time the missile hit the location the enemy was, they've already moved. We had the tech to track targets with missiles in the 1950s, and these self-replicating robots apparently can't?

There's still some neat stuff that I would like to see in PA at least. Like a stun mechanic; dedicated EMP troops, which will completely disable an enemy for a short time. Stealth capability, which I didn't really explore at all yet. There's a really cool repair mechanic, where troop hulls that litter the ground can be rebuilt, with minimal metal cost, and can fight for you. Though that last one is stupidly called resurrection lol, and the "resurrected" unit has a daft-looking halo above their head. There are three different sizes of mines you can lay, which I didn't really play around with since the game is already micro-intensive.

There are also some PvE modes, where you can fight a group called the Scavengers that seem to specialise in reclaiming stuff, and also a bug wave survival mode. From what I can tell, you might even be able to put those in alongside a normal VS match as the AI for them is called "BARbarian" or something, and playing those modes seems as simple as just placing that AI on a team by itself.

It's possible some of my smaller complaints would get fixed down the line, but there's no way the game would get better than PA if this is its baseline so far.

I'll probably end up playing another session some time, even if it's just to capture a stream of it.
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