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If large scale battles are what you're after, look no further.This one has been top of many people's "one to watch" lists for a while. Designed by Chris Taylor, Total Annihilation extraordinaire, Supreme Commander has promised the world from the get go. Offering you a sense of scale that's unmatched on the marketplace, the game looks to set itself apart from the rest by "putting the strategy back into real time strategy", offering the player massive war zones, a fully scalable camera and the freedom to execute whatever strategic manoeuvres they wish.
Supreme Commander has a scale of warfare the likes of which has never been seen before. At any time during play, simply by scrolling the mouse wheel, you can pull the camera right back as far as you'd like, giving yourself an incredible view of the territory below you. While it may sound gimmicky, this feature is the engine in Supreme Commander's war machine and it really affects the way you play. Allowing you an incredible level of control of your armies, the view lets you plan waypoints and sweeps, organise co-ordinated attacks and execute grand strategies across a landmass the size of an entire continent. The only flaw is that you'll often find yourself playing fully zoomed out, as it's the only way to keep track of what's going on. There isn't much of a middle ground that lets you view a large portion of the battlefield, yet still see your units - instead, the camera's either too close, or too far away, leaving you to play in the 2D zoomed-out view far too often. However, as games such as DEFCON have proven, you can still have an enjoyable RTS that's played purely from a 2D tactical view, and the ability to zoom in here is an added bonus.
AdvertisementThere's really no way to describe in words just how enormous the terrain you'll have to cover is; even the word enormous doesn't begin to explain. With a scale as vast as Supreme Commander's, it was always going to be a challenge to make the scope seem convincing but every last detail fits into the battlefield perfectly. Hulking battleships crash through the seas as sneaky submarines glide below them; your gigantic commander unit crashes through a forest, scorching everything in sight with its microwave laser as hundreds of tiny mechanised infantry units run underneath him to assault the enemy base. Everything looks and feels just like it should and, for once, your units actually seem proportionally sized. When you first catch sight of the enormous experimental units crawling towards your base, you'll instantly know that your time on this earth is coming to an end, just by the sheer size of the thing. This allows for some awe inspiring cinematic face-offs, as thousands of your units valiantly defend your base as a giant enemy ominously lumbers over a hill.
As you may have already guessed, unit caps and squad limits are a thing of the past in Supreme Commander. Each vehicle here has been designed to be mass produced - without an army that's at least a hundred strong, you won't last very long past the first few levels. Getting your head around the fact that you no longer have to build units in groups of about ten can be quite a challenge, and it takes a while to realise just how insignificant and weak some of your units are when they're on their own. Thankfully, there's even a shortcut to order units in groups of fifty and factories can be set to repeatedly churn the same units out, fuelling your frontlines with a never-ending supply of fresh blood. You can also set your factories to produce, say, fighters, which then automatically circle and protect your base - a very useful thing when you find yourself under constant attack. To this end, the running and defence of your base can almost be automatic - even your engineers let you queue numerous build orders for them, making manual construction a thing of the past. Simply hold Shift, design your base and go and do something else as your engineer constructs the buildings for you, one after the other. In a brilliant touch, once all your buildings have been constructed, you can set your engineers and commander to assist one of your factories in the construction of units; a feature which speeds up the building process immeasurably.
Large units can change the course of a battleA lot of emphasis has been put on resource management in Supreme Commander, an aspect of the RTS genre that's been taking a back seat in other titles as of late. There are two resources on offer here that you must balance: energy, and mass. Mass is harvested both through building mass extractors on mass deposits, which are scattered across the map, and through sending engineers to harvest trees, rocks, and carcasses of enemy units; whereas energy is generated through building power generators. Creating a healthy balance of the two resources is a delicate process and one of the first stumbling blocks you'll have to get your head around as you start out. If you build a power generator next to a unit that uses energy, such as a factory or a shield, the building will receive a discount in power usage, making it more energy efficient. High power usage objects, such as shield generators, can quickly drain your energy supplies, meaning you really need to think about how you build your base, and where you place your resource generators and stores, to ensure a healthy and steady flow of energy to all your buildings.
There are three main unit types that can be created: land, sea and air. Your utilisation of these unit types is key to your survival in Supreme Commander, so much so that you'll find yourself regularly having to pause the game to issue orders, as you try to keep track of your troops on all three levels. Gaining and maintaining superiority on at least one of these fronts is essential, and achieving it can be a foreboding challenge on even the smallest of maps. Each unit type has a dedicated factory to produce it, each of which can be upgraded to one of four different tech levels - the standard I,II, III and the "experimental" level IV. For the standard tech levels, it's pretty much business as usual, with each level giving you access to similar units, just stronger, faster, and more powerful. It's when you get to the experimental level IV, however, that things get interesting. It's here that the monstrosities you'll have seen in the screenshots and demo videos can be produced, from the spiderous "Monkeylord", to the UFO "Czar", each of which is as deadly and devastating as the last. Having one of these under your control can sometimes guarantee your victory on a map (as they are incredibly powerful, if a tad unbalanced), and just sitting back and watching as they trash your enemy's base is a very rewarding experience.
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Syl wrote at 00:47 on 17 February 2007
"Dual Monitor is Nice?"
Having played the SupCom demo; the dual monitor feature is far more than "nice". I'd even go as far to say that the dual-monitor feature has made playing every single other RTS game seem almost primordial.
When playing with dual monitors; you can have one screen set to the fully zoomed out tactical map all the time. The other map can stay close for easier; more specific instructions and building queues. It's an amazingly simple thing but it adds such an amazing amount of versatility to the game.
Of course; it's more painful to my videocard than any other game has ever been. (2560x1024); but the game looks good enough on low-mid settings i don't mind too much.
bobthe wrote at 22:01 on 05 March 2007
underrated
First off, I totally agree with Syl about the dual monitor support. Amazingly useful.
Secondly, I think some aspects of the game mentioned were simply not explored enough in this post. For example, the experimental units were declared overpowered, but they really aren't. If you're not prepared for them sure, they'll lay waste to your base, but once you learn what you're doing you'll realize that they're just the next level of units to support your army. Sending in 2-3 Galactic Collosi is no big deal late game, and I wouldn't expect them to always even make it to my enemy's base.
There are also some more subtle differences between the sides. Yes, they look fairly similar, but there are a lot of differences in the strengths. Even the power and shielded area of the shield generators is different for each race, as is the area shielded by stealth generators. While the types of units are generally the same between the sides, each side's units have different levels of armor, firepower, range, and movement speed making different combinations more effective for each side.