u/XComACU

My favorite examples of this are the mainline games of the modern XCOM series.

https://preview.redd.it/493bx3m7u6yh1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=918d7732f4100cca638a0abb245698d0a076a4dd

In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, you're a multinational organization overseen by a hidden council of shadowy representatives for various governments tasked with defending the Earth from alien invasion.
When the aliens show up, though, we're insanely outclassed.

So outclassed, the only reason we can really "win" is that the aliens aren't outright exterminating us, but experimenting on us, possibly even feeding us technology as part of some "test."

That, and because XCOM leverages various asymmetric warfare tactics in the background of the full-scale invasion. While the traditional militaries and cities are fighting on the front lines, XCOM is sending in small squads of special forces to counter abductions, save vital assets, and find the real key to defeating the aliens for good.

It's a tough game. Some timelines we win. Most... most we don't.
The game was notoriously known for being so hard that the sequel just assumed you lost. 😅

Which brings me to my second (and arguably stronger) example of asymmetric warfare:

XCOM 2
In this, the Aliens destroyed XCOM and Earth's militaries, toppled the existing governments, and setup the "Advent Coalition" as a totalitarian world-government intended to manage Earth's population. Twenty years later, you lead a rag-tag remnant of XCOM and Resistance fighters attempting to overthrow the aliens' puppet government, stop their evil plan, and save humanity.

With limited resources at your disposal and facing alien monstrosities that can literally cut through a squad of human soldiers like tissue paper, you have to carefully build your resistance movement, pick and choose where to strike and when to run, and slowly establish connections with local resistance cells across the globe.

The only way you can win fights initially is by carefully applying guerilla tactics, performing ambushes, and engaging small groups of enemies with overwhelming force before their reinforcements can arrive. Even as your soldiers get more experience and better gear, Advent's armies are always getting stronger, and the creatures they dispatch more horrifying. You're almost always on the backfoot.

All the while, the aliens are slowly progressing their own nefarious goals. If you take too long to build your resistance network, or leave too many alien facilities operational, humanity gets another "game over."

Anyway, it fits, IMO. XCOM 2 is literally a game about running a global insurgency.

So yeah, the mainline modern XCOM series (and XCOM 2 especially) are my favorite example of this trope.
All are on sale right now, btw.🤣

Think that's weird, in the XCOM 2: Factions comic, Bradford and the Resistance just had a fleet of Black Hawks that they'd kept hidden for a rainy day, too.🤣

To be fair, at least in Enemy Within it's implied that we always had more than one Skyranger, but that the game's limited window into the XCOM universe just couldn't show that.

After all, the Tactical Legacy Pack's missions/maps seem to imply that XCOM had quite a few at their disposal (and that XCOM even got up to Firestorms). Plus, there's the books stating there were more than one Skyranger in-use by the original XCOM in 2015.

XCOM 2... it's likely we only had the one by the time of the game. 🤔
I mean, Lily Shen confirms in XCOM 2: Resurrection that the Skyranger in XCOM 2 was based off a prototype for a lighter, faster, newer model - which would be perfect for the Avenger given its limited space. Also, the "Avenger's Assemble" TLP missions indicate that, while getting the Avenger up and running, they were still struggling to get Skyrangers.

Lastly, in the Official XCOM 2 “Inside the Avenger” 360 Video, while it does show a much larger and... "complex" Avenger than we see from our Strategy-layer view, we do only see one of the new Skyrangers.

So, where did the other two go?

https://giphy.com/gifs/y65VoOlimZaus

They're either in use by other Resistance groups, in storage like the Black Hawks, or they were destroyed in-between the end of Escalation and the WotC intro cinematic.
But as far as I am aware, we don't know. 😅

Actually, a crow.
I didn't realize I had been beaten to the punch, so I just put the relevant quote in my own reply to the OP. 😅
Here:

"Since the massive alien supply vessel was discovered at a jungle crash site in the shadow of India's Western Ghats, the Avenger had been secured (at great cost); overhauled with front-edge stealth absorption and refractive index technologies, reducing its airborne spectral signature to that of a large crow; then retrofitted and transformed into XCOM's flying operations center. The Avenger and its small Skyranger fleet - by then XCOM had recovered and refurbished three of the old troop transports - were virtually invisible in terms of both optical and electromagnetic wavelengths." - XCOM 2: Escalation, Pg. 65

Per XCOM 2: Escalation, Pg. 65,

"Since the massive alien supply vessel was discovered at a jungle crash site in the shadow of India's Western Ghats, the Avenger had been secured (at great cost); overhauled with front-edge stealth absorption and refractive index technologies, reducing its airborne spectral signature to that of a large crow; then retrofitted and transformed into XCOM's flying operations center. The Avenger and its small Skyranger fleet - by then XCOM had recovered and refurbished three of the old troop transports - were virtually invisible in terms of both optical and electromagnetic wavelengths."

Essentially, all of XCOM's air fleet is intended to be cloaked to such a degree that only direct investigation by the Chosen or close contact with a true Ethereal UFO will allow it to be found.

Ooh, I may be weird for this, but I am actually a fan of the Holdout missions. Especially surprise ones.

I don't know, there's just something about it, where you're going through a normal mission, maybe a skirmish or a Destroy/Capture Objective mission, and then the rug is pulled out from under you. Suddenly you're surrounded by countless new enemies, and maybe even some sort of high-tier "boss" unit is moving towards your base.

You're just left rushing to turtle as fast as you can, building more defenses, more units, more everything, and just desperately try to hold out long enough to escape. It's super fun!

My least favorite would ironically be time-limited missions. I say ironic because holdouts often have a "survive X minutes" component, or at least some sort of soft-timer ( such as if you don't have enough defenses before an enemy wave, you die); however, there's something fundamentally different for me between not being able to survive for the requisite amount of time, and dying because a timer ran out.

If I don't build enough defenses to hold off a wave, or have enough damage to take out a "boss," or just get myself killed early - that still feels bad, but at least it's something that I can actively fight up until the end, and if feels more like the result of my agency. I lost because of something I didn't try, so I can always try something else. It's an encouraging death. 🤣
Plus, it feels amazing when you just squeak by with a win.

With a timer, though, it still feels bad, but it also adds unwanted stress to the fight that's not part of the fight itself, sucks your hope out sooner since it's usually easier to tell failures approaching, and honestly takes the agency out of the loss. True, it's still the result of not trying something, but it feels like some uncaring, badly implemented clock is messing up my fun.

I'm just not a fan of timers - at least hard ones. They have their place in things, and soft timers can be fun while encouraging specific desirable playstyles, but I just really dislike when they are hard timers, especially with a "time's up, you lose" sort of implemention.

Listen, all I will say is that I immediately froze at this scene because it made me feel things. 🤣

https://preview.redd.it/uwapm1vvsvxh1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9aed3b01ce27354f32de69e5ee9f773a986937c3

I mean, I still chose "No." I'm an annoying guy after all.
But damn if that didn't get me to pause. 🤣

Intriguing. It has been a while, but I vaguely recall Fox warned Xanatos, who in turn immediately began planning his defenses and contacting potential allies.
Oh well, I guess I'll just have to re-watch it. 😁

Thailog definitely felt like a misstep, though. 🤔

I didn't edit it in, but it's all good in my book.
Your comment makes it easier for people to find, so you got my upvote!

Oh, thank you! Glad you enjoyed! 🤣

"Pay a man enough and he'll walk barefoot into hell" -David Xanatos, from Gargoyles.

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Voiced by Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes), he's sort of an evil Tony Stark, or who Lex Luthor wants to become when he grows up. 🤣

Every plan he creates has a a dozen contingencies, and even when he loses, he doesn't actually lose. He's literally the origin of the Xanatos Gambit, or "a plan for which all foreseeable outcomes benefit the creator — including ones that superficially appear to result in failure."

He frees the Gargoyles in the hopes of using them to further his goals against rival corporations, which initially works. When the Gargoyles start to turn on him, he turns it into an opportunity to test his robotic Gargoyle counterparts (plus his own battle suit). When seemingly defeated, it turns out he's just using his time in jail to conceal more aggressive criminal activities (and even turns it into a PR stunt).

He literally could have killed the Gargoyles at the beginning of the show, smashing them in the daytime while they were sleeping. Owen, his assistant, even asks why he doesn't do it, and the answer is simple.
They're more useful alive.

They're a rare, one-of-a-kind asset that can still be turned to his own ends; but, he's not stupid about it. He tests some of his more expendable agents against the Gargoyles, and uses it to get a better approximation of their capabilities. Later, he tests a newer robot model against them, and it's a monster, with the Gargoyles barely coming out victorious... except not really, because the outcome of the battle didn't matter. All that mattered was testing the robot against a known skilled enemy, and using the battle as a way to get his romantic interest an early parole.

She even asks him "But what about your revenge?" and he replies "Revenge, as they say, is a sucker's game. Robots are nothing, Fox, my dear. I can build a dozen more like this one. True love is so much harder to come by."
Bro built an overpowered boss monster, could have built a dozen more to guarantee the win, but realized it would be wasteful since winning was never even the goal in the first place (just a potential happy outcome).

Near the end of the series, he even fights a Fae god, and he prepares for that fight. Layers of smartly chosen defenses and redundancies to weaken and incapacitate an opponent that up until this point appeared unbeatable.

David Xanatos was the king of smart decisions, and is my favorite example of this trope.

I dunno about trusting Cybrans, though...

https://reddit.com/link/19rnm5kaap9j5/video/q8whik2lapxh1/player

These look pretty cool! Good Job!

Ah, yes. McDonalds.
I am familiar.

No, but that was a planned feature! Unfortunately they couldn't get it working prior to release, and then never added it in (though SupCom 2 did have a unit with similar capabilities).

There may be a mod for it now, though... 🤔

It really was a different time.

I remember watching the original E3 presentation of this demo fight on Google Video back in the day. I think I looked it up after reading about it in a PC Gamer magazine. 480p, filmed from a phone camera, and it took forever to load 'cause we still had dial-up.

I immediately fell in love with Supreme Commander, and it did not disappoint when I finally got it. It's remained my favorite RTS ever since.

https://preview.redd.it/04721zdb2bxh1.png?width=496&format=png&auto=webp&s=27d166c2c6837af1153a8852c4625d2cbf039f07

Just as planned.

OP, r/FAF is for Forged Alliance Forever, a fan client for the game Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. You appear to be in the wrong subreddit.

Given their previous comments were in r/DokkanBattleCommunity, I believe FOB refers to "Festival of Battles," which according to Google is a high-difficulty challenge event in Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle, and has certain free-to-play (F2P) units.

Both.

Advent Soldiers come in two types, the former humans who are turned into Advent Troopers through extensive genetic engineering and reconditioning, but also lines of pure clone soldiers who are vat grown from human DNA.

This was nebulously hinted at in both XCOM 2: War of the Chosen and the XCOM 2: Escalation novel, but XCOM: Chimera Squad outright clarified that both theories were correct (with Zephyr being a former human from Australia, and Cherub being part of the Bellus Mar clone line).

The Alien species (outside of the Ethereals) are also alien slaves; however, over the 20 years since XCOM: Enemy Within, human DNA was incorporated into their genetic code to improve their capabilities. So, not pure alien, but genetically modified much like Advent. In fact, in XCOM: Escalation, there are a few points where The Resistance actually fought both EW and XCOM 2 aliens at the same time, as they were in the process of being transitioned out.

Funnily enough, the EW Muton Autopsy hints at aliens also coming in both the modified and cloned variants, as Mutons retained tribal markings and tattoos (indicating they may have at one time been free); however, as we know from X2: Alien Hunters and Chimera Squad, they eventually transitioned to cloned variants. Torque herself claims to be an Earthling since she was technically created on Earth.

....so, both.

My favorite IP is Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.
My sweet summer child, the question isn't "How screwed is my favorite IP?"

https://reddit.com/link/19rh8dtbti4w2/video/2rcnig8drzwh1/player

The question is "How screwed is The Combine?" 😎

Fantastic Answer!
Great game, and you can practically recreate half these pictures in SupCom: FA.

The battlefield may be a bit too big for Infantry, but damn I would love it if someone modded in 40K units. 🤣

Ehh, not really? The missile looks good, but the blast feels off? 🤔
The blast looks big and rocks are thrown everywhere, but there's really no environmental "oomph" to the hit.

I understand this is an early prototype, but only having one building destroyed by a blast that large feels weird, and paired with no visual remnant of the blast (the other buildings being unharmed) it sort of undercuts the power of the explosion.

I'd suggest a quick damage decal on the blast-facing side (cracks, black marks, etc), and a crater decal at the blast point. Maybe even have a building wreckage model eventually. That'll add some "oomph."

As to the blast itself, while I think the the smoke going through the buildings like a fluid is a cool idea, ironically it is part of what is weakening your blast. It could be the slo-mo, but the smoke is just puffing through the buildings like a campfire when it should be being forced out constantly like water escaping a dam about to burst.

Not sure how you're doing the simulation, but I might reduce the particle size and up the count, and give it a far higher initial velocity or acceleration away from the epicenter to really force a stream between the buildings.
Oh, and in all directions. It kind of feels like it's only emitting in a circular plane that rises with the smoke, rather than an expanding dome? Maybe a couple planes for your different shades of smoke? Like, at 0:03, we see a steady stream of smoke coming out between two buildings, but only at the bottom for some reason, at least until a darker shade cloud starts streaming out at the top around 0:06. It feels like that should be a quickly rising vertical line of smoke pushing out between those buildings at speed as it is forced through, dissipating in different directions as it gets further away.

I'd also leave smoke emitting from the impact spot a little longer, so you're not just left with a floating cloud. Clear the ground smoke first for visual clarity, but leave the tower of smoke following the fireball going to the ground until that it done. Then, once the ground smoke is gone, slowly fade the cloud away from the bottom up. 🤔
Oh, and don't phase your rocks out so quickly. Separate them from the cloud phasing out, and make that the slowest to clean up.

I dunno. I'm just rambling, but that's my suggestion. 😅
Decals on the ground and buildings to show impact effects better, smaller and more numerous particles pushed out at higher speed in all directions, and keeping the upward smoke emissions tethered to the ground a little longer while the ground-level clouds clear up.

Glad to help, and I hope you enjoy!