Played on:
Windows
Pentium M 2GHz CPU
2GB DDR2 RAM
GF Go 7800GTX Video
Minimum System:
1.8GHz CPU
512MB RAM
PS2.0, 128MB Video
Recommended:
3GHz CPU
1GB RAM
GF 6800, ATI X1300,
or ATI X800XL video
Strategy gamers have had plenty of treats over the last few months. We got to "play a game" with DEFCON, take control of hordes of swordsmen and archers in Medieval 2: Total War, and then we got to take WW2 tactics to a new level with Relic's Company of Heroes. Now, we're ready to dive into yet another strategy masterpiece. Gas Powered Games has released Supreme Commander, an excellent futuristic RTS title with a massive scale and plenty of depth.
Supreme Commander was designed by Chris Taylor, the brains behind the excellent sleeper RTS game Total Annihilation back almost ten years ago. And with the same style but bigger scope, better graphics, and more options, this truly is a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. With massive battles and a huge range of robotic infantry spanning land, sea, and air, you'll feel right at home here if you had fun with TA.
It'll help if you've got a fast computer, too. Supreme Commander is the most demanding strategy game to date, and on larger maps no modern computer - even one that costs thousands to build - will be able to handle it when four players all build up and then fight at once. You see, each player can build hundreds of units and then send them all into battle, which generally is a pretty good idea from a gameplay standpoint as there are a lot of rock-scissors-paper fights here. But your computer's horsepower might prove to be the loser for you in a big match if it's not meeting the recommended system, so upgrade if you're serious about this game.
Once you get into it, you'll find that Supreme Commander is a joy to play. Micromanagement has largely been minimized, as you can queue up tech upgrades alongside units with no problem. You can set up a specific build order of troops and then hit a button to have that factory just repeat the full order over and over. Got nearby factories? Click one of them and then right click on another factory and it sets them up to "assist" the building of the original factory's orders. This allows you to quickly set up a highly customized army with the minimum number of clicks - set up 3 tanks for every one shield gen, AA, and mobile artillery unit, punch the repeat button, then set your 3 nearby Land Factories to assist the building. If you change the build orders at the first one, the rest will figure it out.
Little bits of convenience permeate the whole game's interface. Holding Shift allows you to set up waypoints or just queue up orders for units, and you can even set up your transport aircraft to automatically transport any ground units that come near. Just park your transports at the starting spot, click Ferry, then click the destination across the water. You can even set up a rally point for nearby Factories, and troops will automatically be built and ferried. You can queue up tech upgrades or units to build at a factory even while it's still being built, and if you have extra Engineer units they can be set to help out on production at your factories as well (at a cost of more resources). There are a few annoyances I found, like having to micromanage certain small aspects of the game, but overall it's still better than just about every strategy game I've played.
But this game isn't just about fiddling with the interface and admiring the usability. This game has huge amounts of destruction built in and you'll need to know which units beat which in order to pull out a win. Do you send in your gunships first to take out enemy AA guns first, or do you roll your tanks in first and get fired upon while going around sections of wall? Should you park your cruise ships nearby and try to withstand the enemy Torpedo emplacements, or should you quietly send an Engineer nearby to build a nearby tactical nuke launcher on the sly? And this is just the start, as those are only the permanent emplacements. There are a ton of interesting choices and if you make the wrong ones, the game tries to make it less of a matter of frustration and more of a learning experience.
Weapons are calculated and shown to the player as real projectiles, and they can actually miss as well - that's why it's important for your mobile or permanent artillery installations to be set against targets that either move slow or aren't moving. Sending in highly agile fighters to distract the AA guns while your bombers make a run can also be a worthwhile tactic. The whole thing is really interesting, though, because most RTS games consider every attack an automatic hit and some virtual "dice" are sometimes rolled to calculate damage. Here, things hit for a more constant amount if they do hit; it's up to you to make sure they hit, usually by making good choices as to bringing the right units into battle and picking targets more carefully. While units can certainly do plenty of good stuff without any micromanagement, taking manual control allows for some unique maneuvers to make the most out of the "true" weapon physics.
