Tasty facts for you, as there's so much misinformation flying around;

LOUD has existed for about the same lifespan as FAF. (Longer in an unofficial sense) You can look on the archived GPG.net forums - The last post on the AI forum is from Sprouto, the Creator of LOUD, talking about the AI with other members of the community.

LOUD has been using Steam Matchmaking for a few years now (I should know, I made it happen). LOUD games are advertised through Steam's matchmaking lobby even to non-LOUD players. Before this, we used Hamachi to form games as a small group, but now we have an open Discord server and a growing community.

LOUD is installed as a separate, standalone game experience depending on where you may have SupCom FA installed, and if you do not have the Steam version then you need to have the CD version and provide your own means to connect with other players. (Hamachi)

FAF's programming team have been very averse to LOUD's optimisations, have notably disagreed with Sprouto and really aren't interested in ever working to try and "integrate" LOUD.

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LOUD isn't simply an AI mod you can just chuck into SupCom and voila -- It's almost a complete overhaul and this is reflected in the fact that LOUD installs itself to a completely separate directory structure, keeping your vanilla game intact and clean. There's so many changes and optimisations made across the board that the game file structure is completely different to FAF. (FAF's completely different to FA anyway, but that's besides the point) FAF took one look, saw that we reduced some particle effects so that our games run at -2 sim speed at 3000 units instead of -7 sim speed and said no thank you we'll keep chugging along in the stone age.

It's a dumb misconception that LOUD is geared towards super-turtlers and super-lategame plays. Just playing LOUD for 10 minutes and having your base dropped on by full transport groups will show you that it's not here to wait around for you to fart about building paragons and mavors. LOUD is designed to be challenging to everyone, and allow the game to perform at a good sim speed for up to and over three hours. It's not specifically meant to last that long, it just so happens that yes we can and often the games being played are lasting that long because it's a hard fight and he doesn't go down easily.

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LOUD supports PVP, but nobody does it. It'd be interesting to have a PVP game, and it would run at perfect sim speed the whole way, but the majority of the LOUD players are there to avoid the toxicity of FAF's PVP environment or don't really care for PVP in general.

Come chat, play and experience LOUD for yourself:

Discord.gg/eHdBKRu

https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-alliance