Supreme Commander

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 waypoint 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.