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 the recent 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.