OVER 9000!!!

Team games in Supreme Commander 2 are very different from 1v1 games. When you play a team game, it’s usually good to “divide” roles between the players.

This means that on a land map, it’s very useful to have a dedicated player for “air” and dedicated player for “land.” Alternatively, on maps with water, depending on the situation, it’s good to have a “naval” player, an “air” player and a “land” player.

Why, you may ask? You might just want to play combined air/land or anti-air/land and have your teammate do the same!

Well, as it happens, it’s much more streamlined from a perspective of managing your units to only control one unit “type.” In addition, and possibly the biggest reason why “dedicated roles” work, is the investment of research points into a specific category of the research trees.

Think about it – if you are playing a 2v2 game on, for example, Fields of Isis, and are both playing Cybran and you’re encountering heavy air resistance or attacks (using gunships and/or bombers), from even just one of the opposing players, you simply cannot continue attacking until you’ve built anti-air units or air of your own – otherwise you simply get destroyed.

Let’s imagine that both you and your teammate have decided to go land and already have many land factories, so switching to air is not really a viable option.

This means that you have to both make anti-air defenses evenly throughout your base and/or spread adaptors out throughout your base(s) WHILE still making enough adaptors to cover your land attack, and keeping them non-clustered so that they’re not an attractive bombing target. An effective air defense is an overwhelming investment of mass and research points for both of you. Adaptors require 6 research points to unlock for each one of you, or if only one of you unlocks them you have to produce enough of them to cover your ACU, engineers, and your teammate’s land attack. Meanwhile, the “air” player on the other team is attacking your mass and taking out your engineers, investing research points heavily into his planes and/or gunships and making them stronger and stronger.

Even if you do succeed in building a flawless air defense, you will have likely lost a few mass extractors (which cost upwards of 100 mass each, as well as time to replace), and the “land” teammate on the other team will have invested all his/her research points into a land experimental or structural attack which you cannot counter effectively anymore, because each of you has lost so many research points and resources building an effective anti-air system throughout your “claimed area.”

There are some commonly occurring player role combinations for different maps. For example, on “Van Horne Core (3v3),” usually the back player goes “air” while the two front players go “land” or “turtle/structure.” Alternatively, on “Fields of Isis (2v2)” you will almost always see one of the players go land and the other air. However, on “Powderhorn Mesa (2v2)” you are not likely to see air at all due to the closeness of the starting positions. Air does take a bit of time to build up, so it is not very popular on very “close” maps. On naval maps, such as “Igneous (3v3),” it is often seen that one player will go air, one land, and one naval.
As always, there are exceptions, so one of the teammates should always, in my opinion, start with an air factory on most team-based, and why not even 1v1 maps, for scouting and assistance purposes. Always have some air on your team to scout with so that you know how to counter what your opponents are doing effectively.