Supreme Commander

The last time I played an RTS, it was R.U.S.E., a game which I praised for its approachability, citing it's basic economic system,  instant build time, and simple upgrade system, even going so far as to suggest it as a great game to introduce someone to the RTS genre. So of course I followed that up with Supreme Commander, a massive game that is the complete opposite of simple and easily approachable, and that should only be someone's first RTS if you want to make them swear off the category all together.

As the successor, but not sequel, to Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander includes those same elements that make it stand out in the RTS genre with it's unique twists on classic ideas. While the basics of resources, unit construction, and tech trees are there, they aren't quite like anything I had ever experience before.

The scale of this game is huge. Take the above screen shot as an example. This is just a small corner of a map, and I've got a flight of 124 bomber's ready to start making runs into the enemy base.

Resource gathering isn't too strange, consisting of two - mass and energy.  To acquire mass, you must construct a mass extractor at one of a handful of designated mass points. Energy is acquired by building power plants, either a special one called a hydrocarbon plant on a specific point, or higher level ones later in the game that can be constructed anywhere you'd like. Resources are also infinite, so it's not like you can only harvest so much gold from a mine or there is a limited amount of vespene gas before that resource node collapses.

What really makes the resource system different is the way it's expended. I can't think of a single RTS I've ever played, though that number is small enough, where the resources weren't immediately deducted from your supplies when a unit started building, basically having you pay for the unit up front. That's not how this game works. Instead, units consume resources over time as they are built, starting at a basic rate that can be increased by dispatching more builder units to assist in construction. The result is that you're not simply banking large amounts of resources, until you ultimately have enough to construct a major unit. Rather, you strive to strike a balance between the rate at which your resources are increasing, and the rate that you're expending them, avoiding either wasting resources by exceeding your storage capacity or starving your construction output, bring that to a crawl.

Part of striking the right balance is ensuring you don't waste anything. According to this level wrap up screen, I certainly failed at that.

The units you can build can be broken up a couple of ways. First, there are three tiers of units, and an additional experimental tier. While each of this game's three factions have a different take on certain units, adding in abilities that make them amphibious, or sometimes have a unit that the other races don't, they are mostly the same, so you'll have access to a few combat units and scouts at tech 1, transports, gunships, and shield units at tech 2, and spy planes, battleships, and siege bots when you get to tech 3, no matter who you are playing as, making the game fairly symmetrical, unless you really want to get into the kind of theory crafting about unit hp versus damage, etc, you know, the kind of stuff that won't matter unless you're really hardcore. The same can't be said for the experimentals though, where each race has it's unique set of three different units that can only be described as massive. I'll get into those later, but it's really the one place where it felt like the three races actually differed by more than a few quirks in building upgrades or unit special abilities.

Then there is simply building the units, which also bucks the norm. In this game you don't have to go through all of the trouble of constructing an armory, then researching a new unit, then building that unit at a factory. In Supreme Commander there are three different factories - air, land, and naval - with each building it's respective type of units. To make higher tiers you just upgrade a factory to that tier, as any factory can build units of equal or lesser tiers. So, just to be clear, if you want to build a tech 3 spy plane to find out what your enemy is up to, you just build a tech 1 air factory with your engineer or commander unit (more of those later), click the upgrade to tech 2 button, wait, click the upgrade to tech 3 button, wait, and then build a plane. I do prefer this system to the much more convoluted ones I've seen before in some games, as it allows much more direct unit production, and generally less memorizing of some complex tech tree.

One of the more unique abilities in this game. The Cybran race has amphibious destroyers. So those bad boys can come waltzing into the enemy base, proving you're not shipping around.

There are more buildings than just factories though. What I ended up building the most were defensive structures. Those would be your anti-air turrets, your point defenses, and your torpedo launchers. Those guys are, when deployed properly, an extremely potent means of securing your base from unwanted intruders. Later on you'll be looking at defenses such as tactical missile or strategic missile defense, which would protect against short range high damage missiles or nukes, or a shield structure to catch artillery or enemy unit attacks that makes it through your walls and other defenses. There are also the offensive counterparts to those things - your missile launchers and artillery, as well as support structures like air refueling stations that will keep your air units flying or sensors that detect incoming enemies.

Taking things to another level of complexity is the way certain buildings interact with each other, through something called adjacency bonuses. Place certain buildings next to others, sharing a full edge, and you'll get a nice little bonus, depending on what you combine. If you place mass or energy storage structures next to your mass and energy producers, you'll increase their production, so for example, you can make a tier three mass extractor 50% more productive by surrounding it with 4 mass storage buildings. Other structures, like shields or sensors, have their resource tax decreased by putting them next to your energy reactors, making it a good idea to place shields next to your reactors to reduce the cost of keeping your base protected, as well preventing some damage to the highly volatile structures.

When I say highly volatile, I mean it. Here is a before and after shot. All it took was two salvos of three tech 2 tactical missiles - one to bring down the shield, and another to take out the generator. The explosion also destroyed a tech 1 land factory, a tech 3 shield generator, and a tech 2 power generator, as well as severely damaging other nearby structures. As deadly as this is, when your commander melts down, it's even worse, so try and avoid blowing up your own base.

Now say you do want to make short work of an enemy base. A great way to do that is with some of those experimental units. The three races in this game are the UEF, Cybran, and Aeon, roughly making each the humans, the cyborgs, and the alien powered humans. Each maintains 3 experimental weapons, which are built not at factories, but by tech 3 engineers. The UEF have the land based Fatboy, with it's massive range on it's four mounted turrets, and it's ability to double as a mobile land factory; the Atlantis submersible aircraft carrier with it's own compliment of sensors and weapons; and the Mavor strategic artillery, which, if built, means you've won the game, since it's range encompasses the entire map and it's damage in enormous. The Aeon have the CZAR  flying aircraft carrier, which can build and store units, and packs a nasty punch itself, even in death, where it can crash land and deal massive damage to whatever is underneath it; the Tempest battleship with a high damage oblivion cannon; or the Colossus assault bot, which is amphibious, and so massive that it can crush units beneath it's feet. The Cybran have access to the Soul Ripper flying gunship, which is great for razing your enemy's front lines, so long as you don't encounter too many aircraft; the Monkylord, which is amphibious, hides from sensors, and has a powerful laser to cut through shields in seconds; the Scathis is a mobile rapid fire artillery, that, while inaccurate, has a large damage radius, and will fire so long as you have the energy to power it. Experimentals are perhaps the most enjoyable part of the game, though they require massive amounts of recourses and time, such as the Mavor, which takes 300 minutes to build if you don't stack plenty of extra engineers on it. These massive units aren't indestructible though, and a good force of tech 3 units can take all of them out - they just make the game that much more enjoyable, because the outcome can hinge on a few well used experimentals.

Yeah, this thing takes 300 minutes to build, though you can stack plenty of engineers and your commander on it to build faster, consuming resources at a faster rate as well. Or you can do what I did for this screen shot - turn on cheats.

So I hope you're beginning to understand just how massive this game is, since currently, in MS Word I'm almost done with page 3, and I'm still on the basic mechanics of the game. I haven't even mentioned things like your commander, which is an extremely powerful engineer and combat unit early on in the game, but that can be upgraded to keep pace with the other tech tiers, the ability in this game to reclaim everything from trees to downed units to greatly increase your mass and energy, capturing resource nodes and other buildings, how you can chain orders, set patrol paths, make your factories build a certain sequence of units forever, dispatching them to a certain location where air transport units are waiting to ferry them to the battle - all without any additional input from you. So yes, massive is an appropriate to describe the underlying game, which should be evident when you search for the keyboard short cuts and realize how long this list is, covering things like using Shift + Control + Alt + Right Click to move a group with the slowest unit.

You can see what orders you have issued. There are several air transports moving units from my factories in the upper right to the lower center, along the purple line. Two sets of engineers to build structures, along the yellow lines. A unit patrolling an area over my naval fleet in a blue loop, and some other units that are moving from naval factories to join the fleet.

While the mechanics are there for a potentially great game, where everything starts to fall apart is when you try and play it, particularly the way I play games - the single player campaign. Each faction has it's own 6 mission campaign, which covers the end of a 1000 year war. The UEF makes a last ditch effort to defeat the Aeon, the Cybran fear's the Aeon's victory will result in the Cybran being hunted down as abominations, and the Aeon have an internal spat between a war leader and a peace seeking princess. All three campaigns culminate in the firing of a weapon known as Black Sun, modified for each faction's goals, creating three entirely separate scenarios. While this could be interesting, and I enjoyed the little twist with the Cybran's ending, there aren't actually 18 unique missions, as many of them overlap, having you take on the same or a similar battle from a different side, resulting in something like 8 or 9 unique maps. Furthermore, the campaign just really sucks, with it's slow pacing that acts like an extended tutorial, not even unlocking your final units until the absolute end of the last mission. Were I to simply rate the game based off of the campaign, I would maybe, *maybe* say that campaign is mediocre, particularly when compared to what I've seen accomplished within the RTS genre with games like Warcraft, Starcraft, or even Company of Heroes, giving it a 5 out of 10 for the 45 or so hours it takes to beat all this missions, given the interesting balance in this game between strong defensive structures and the length of time it can takes to construct some serious units capable of overcoming a turtling enemy.

With a 500 unit cap, which includes buildings, the scope of the game is surprisingly large. Just a single group out of 2-3 I had moving around this map.

However, I will concede that the reason you should get this game is absolutely not for the campaign, but for the multiplayer or skirmish mode. Set up a game with another 7 people, taking advantage of the differences between the factions that, while there, are something that will really only come to light when you get to be far more hardcore than I am, and have a good time duking it out. I actually ended up playing this game specifically because I had been playing a lot of the expansion - Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance - in multiplayer matches with two other friends against a cheating adaptive AI, and that was quite fun.

So, in closing I will admit that I was impressed with the mechanics, and overall massiveness of this game, even though I found it a bit overwhelming. I do recommend it with the caveat that you should only purchase this game if you plan on playing against other people, or trying your hand at the variable AI settings in skirmish mode, because the single player isn't worth it. I would even advise you do some research on the game, learning the shortcuts and special commands, because sometimes the default way in which the game moves units around can be a major pain, such as when ships spread out in a massive formation, allowing your front units to be destroyed over and over again, rather than remaining tightly grouped together to quickly overwhelm the enemy. What you should really look for when buying this game is the Gold Edition, which includes both this and the Forged Alliance expansion. I have seen it a few times on sale for $5, so go for that, especially if you don't have anyone else to play with. If that isn't the case, then you can be in for a very fun time - 8 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Suggested Price: $5 for the Gold Edition

Score: 8/10

*****

For more Supreme Commander images, check out this collection of various screenshots otherwise unused in this review. Click any one for a full sized image.