HAHA.

How dumb are you?

If FA is standalone AND gives you everything vanilla did why would anyone buy vanilla EVER? Also the people who did kinda feel screwed when the other guy gets everything but cheaper plus extras.

You can play FA easily 4vs4, so that untrue too.

SUPCOM WAS already made with multicore proccesing in mind. What sort of problems are you experiencing?

"FA is a stand alone expansion"

Does it play better than the orginal? Did they optimise the game so that it consumes less system resources?

If they're going to market it as a being Stand alone then everything should actually be stand alone. At the very least the box could actually tell you that you need the original to play all the races in MP. But it doesn't, it just says "Does not require the original Supreme Commander" which implies, guess what?, that you don't need the original SupCom for all the features.

An expansion does not lock you out of features of the original game. And it was not originally sold at expansion price. When it had just come out, it cost $39.99. That's an expensive expansion.

Huh, that's wierd. Here full games cost around $40-$60, depending on how "big" the game is, etc. Expansions are around $20-30.

The requirements are fitting for the campaign in both cases. What you seem to forget is, that Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander have this massive, technically unlimited scale. Naturally you can't put a system requirement for every situation.

Ran like ass in the campaign too.  And Skirimish is a pretty standard fearture in RTS'.  Being able to play on a 4 player map with bots should be covered under 'recommended settings' IMO.  The game was slowing down long before the '500 units' phase.  ~40 units fighting at once usually did my system in. This wasn't a total POS system either, it was a Pentium D 3.0, 2 GB RAM, and a 8600 GT; at the time more than enough to handle any game out there.  Including vastly nicer looking RTS' like Company of Heroes, and the nearly as large scale Sins.  Except SupCom apparently.  I don't mind if you need a really powerful computer to run it, but at least TELL me so I don't waste $50 on something I can never play.  They ammended the requirements in the expansion, but it was too late for everyone who bought it at launch.

By what are you able to tell that the game has been dumbed down for the multiplatform release? All the important factors are still there. Unlimited resources, massive amounts of units, full simulation, etc. The only thing that has been dumbed down for both platforms are the polygons of the units. But that's because GPG saw that there were simply too much for a game of that scale. This reduction is one of the things that will make Supreme Commander 2 playable on machines with lower performance as well. (As you surely have noticed the maps are completely new and contain a lot more detail and are available as such on both platforms.)
Other things, like multiplayer limited to 4 players, are specific to the 360 version and do not apply to the PC version.

The 360 has 512 MB of RAM.  Average gaming PCs have 4 GB+ these days, and more powerful video cards.  You can't tell me they didn't scrap features during development that the 360 couldn't handle.  They also have to come up with a UI and control scheme that works with a 360 controller.  I have nothing against the 360 user base, but saying that multiplatform releases aren't watered down so the consoles can handle them is incredibly naive.

They removed the flow-based economy where units took mass and energy over time?  What the fuck GPG, that was one of the most unique aspects of Supreme Commander.  You actually had to take care and manage your economy carefully, now it has the same economy system as every other RTS.

"dumbing down" doesn't necessarily refer to a game being "dumber" for consoles, its a generic term that refers to games having less options or content. games ARE dumbed down for consoles, because they have sh1tty control options and far less power. any cursory experience with recent games shows this (ie no lean in CoD or operation flashpoint).

that said, i think supcom is getting "dumbed down" because GPG were confused about the primary reasons for the game (FA at least) not selling well, rather than due to it being made for the 360 as well. the system requirements for supcom were too high, though they were improved with the first big patch.

somebody found supcom's eco too complex and now we're all paying the price oh well, it could still be a great game. i have my doubts though.

Back to SupCom, smaller more focused gameplay will be good only if they incrase the actual challanges I have to make choices to overcome. 300 units and only one choice isn't really... fun.

In the original and FA I often used lower tech units when I really didn't have to just to add SOME fun (I'm talking single player btw, the vastly more popular part of the game). Staging combined arms ground invasions with those awesome carry units was great fun, I could have just spammed aircraft or nukes or whatever.

What I noticed was you couldn't really play SC/FA in a interesting way other than spam. I tried hard to have balanced groups of units shileds, AA, tanks supported by repair points and artillery batterys etc but the they didn't give you anything useful at the endgame for ground warfare, that was purely for the build up stage. Once you got those experimentals out or nukes it was game over and the fun lef.

Maybe they will fix that, maybe not.

I have exactly the same problem with most stratergy games, once you are over the curve there is nothing stopping you and thus no reason to play other than to see the 'VICTORY!' screen. I often wonder why 2 or 3 province factions in Total War don't band together for mutual defense when your 30+ province empire comes knocking.

They try limiting your resoruces, your time or putting massive combined faction armies DIRECTLY ABOVE YOUR BASE WITH NO WARNNING... That is not good design, thats is compensating and its not good enough!

Ahhh those times were an AI incursion would actualy break down a shiled and blow up some important defenses so I had to roll in some tech 1/2 units as a stop gap measure. Fun.