Supreme Commander

While the niceness of being able to queue and level-up units before their manufacturing building has even been completed streamlines war-making, it doesn’t mean you can spend as recklessly as George W without the means to support your war economy. Everything needs to be paid for in resources, being energy and mass. The building won’t be completed or the units queued built unless you have energy and mass at the time. SC’s economics are a major part of strategic gameplay, and another reason why this game is a true simulation. You can’t pay for anything in advance. Instead all construction draws on resources available at the time of building. A unit or building can remain partially built, with building progressing a bit at a time as more resources become available.

Both energy and mass are not accumulated and banked, as with most RTS games. Instead you build an infrastructure to constantly generate these resources. You’ll have an income of each that you can grow by building more generators. When you build, your income is diverted until the building or unit is complete, then your income shoots back up again and is available for other projects. Overspend and you run into the red and building slows to a crawl as your income is strained.

Being a hardcore RTS, SC demands that intricate base building and resource management be mastered. Chris Taylor views this as a fundamental part of RT ‘strategy’, and takes a dim view of RTS games that simplify this process in favour of ‘action’ based combat. In time, we will see true masters of this game emerge in tournaments and what a sight to behold it will be. Playing SC is the sum of its parts, and creating an effective base, while carefully harvesting resources, is the engine that enables you to put into play combat strategies.



‘The economy is just as important to the game as the strategic decisions,’ says Taylor. ‘If you make an RTS and take out all the “boring bits”, as far as I’m concerned you’ve ripped the heart out of the game.’ Right on!

Game economics being so fundamental, there’s a nice overlay option that shows exactly how much a building is producing and consuming in resources. Apart from structures that generate each, you can also build mass or energy storage buildings – a ‘bank’ for lean times. So much depends on a constant stream of each that these structures are key to the war effort, and will make very effective targets to be attacked, and will be yours to defend as absolute priorities. As you level up, more effective resource harvester buildings become available.