Supreme Commander

Sure it doesn't look too flash, and you need a quad-core CPU to run it - but how about that gameplay!

Real time strategy games are in a rut. Worthy or not, Relic’s distinct flavour of RTS games continues to dominate, with Company of Heroes being a prime example of how the genre has become edgier, fast-paced, and tactical rather than about high strategy and intricate resource management. It’s not a case of being inundated with fewer games, or even poorer games, but there’s an obvious boilerplate that’s pumping out the same derivative titles. Fortunately, Gas Powered Games is fighting the good fight by wrapping up its new traditional grand scale RTS in an interface that’s so obvious it’s hard to imagine anything else.

It’s fitting that GPG’s Chris Taylor should be the one that kicks the genre in the pants, given the universal appreciation for his previous opus, Total Annihilation. It was a monster of a game, with masses of units, a new take on resource management, pioneering line of sight, and tweakable AI. Yet evidently mainstream RTS developers are a little slow on the uptake, as what should have been the spark that set off a revolution in real time strategy games turned out to be an anomaly instead - TA hasn’t been matched in scope in the past nine years, with only Taylor’s Supreme Commander now a contender. 

 SupCom’s core gameplay has had work done on it since Total Annihilation, with freeform base building, tech trees, and armies consisting of land, sea and air units. TA’s plus-minus economics model is back, where resources simply flow into your base’s grid, ready to be diverted into powering (in the case of power generators) or building (which is based of extracted mass from key resources). 

Resource management is inextricably linked to every part of the game, where a poorly thought-out resource strategy will grind your entire war engine to a halt. For example, building too many units will put your mass extraction into the negative, meaning that the point defense towers you desperately need to get up and running will take another four minutes to build. No problem, you’ll just build some mass extractors, but that, of course, drains a lot of power - and if you run out of power, how are you going to keep those shields up? These noodle-scratching compromises are pervasive throughout the game, so you better make sure you have a sound resource strategy.

The units themselves are fewer in number, but more carefully crafted than TA. The land, sea and air balance is superb, meaning you can’t just pump out one type of unit and have them roll over the enemy. In fact, the army building element is intricate in itself. You’ll need to make sure you have the right mix of arty, shields, flak and power depending on what you’re up against. And like the resource model, you’ll need to carefully craft a military strategy as you won’t have the resources to create all-powerful high-tech armies. Instead you’ll need to decide how you want your military campaign conducted, and invest appropriately in air, land or sea, or a combination. With such an emphasis on careful strategic planning you need a clever interface to help put your strategies in action – it’s here that SupCom shines. You’ve seen the action shots and gameplay videos of the zooming option, but playing it is a revelation.

 It’s elegantly simple - the scroll wheel zooms in and out depending on where the mouse is pointing - and when you really hit the clouds the map abstracts your units into military symbols. There’s also a heavy use of map overlays that can highlight economic yields, firepower ranges or waypoints. Holding Shift will show every active way-point and ETA, letting you see in a glance where your units are going, what projects are lined up, and how long it all takes. With the end game being filled with hundreds of units per side, you could be faced with a potential micro-management nightmare, but SupCom delivers the goods. If you want to coordinate an attack with two armies, grab your first one, send it to attack, then grab the others and double right-click on the same attack waypoint - the armies will automatically coordinate their attack to arrive at the same time. Other touches like transport units automatically ferrying armies to and from a location, also make management easier without making you feel like you’ve lost control.

After such glowing praise, it’s an absolute disappointment to get lumped with an unexpected hardware tax. The early game kicks along smoothly, lulling you into thinking you’re going to be zipping around, watching your upcoming gargantuan armies gracefully roll over the map, and basking in a way that only a true interstellar military commander can. But when you hit around 200 units you’ll see the ugly side of the game as it jerks, grinds, and eventually crawls so bad you’ll find yourself glad when the game speeds up after half your units are wiped out. We even found ourselves altering our strategy so we could knock over the game early, rather than have it creep along towards the end. This is definitely a quad-core game - consider a chip dual-core as the absolute minimum, and if you go that route, be prepared for tears. The hardware strain aside, SupCom still reigns. No particular element is outstanding in its own right. The graphics aren’t amazing, the units are standard RTS fare, and the gameplay is almost too similar to TA. But how they fit together is a work of genius. And in the end, it makes every other RTS feel shallow and restrictive, which is as much an indictment on current RTS games as an acknowledgement of SupCom’s greatness. Get it now, but make sure you pick up a quad-core CPU on the way home.

NAME: SUPREME COMMANDER
SYSTEM: PC, XBOX 360