Rather than trying to expand on recent endeavours from Relic - where the focus was on fast paced action in substitute of the slow traditional style of collecting resources and building bases - Supreme Commander will keep in place the traditional real-time strategy fundamentals, but will however change the way we look at such an approach in a number of ways – all of which that look stunning. If our recent playtime with the game is any indication, then Supreme Commander will be the perfect example in showing that traditional real-time strategy games can still work in light of these recent fast paced titles.
Supreme Commander is based in the far future, where the Earth Empire begins to slowly crumble, resulting in the Infinite War fought against the game’s three factions. While there is no evil faction, the game highlights each of their differences as each of them fight for a better world based off their beliefs. All factions begin fairly balanced between one another in the first development tier, but eventually begin to show their differences once extending into later tiers – this is when more of the devastating units come into play. The Aeon are a religious order of humans who have adopted the technology of an alien race known as the Seraphim, intent on bringing peace and prosperity through the scientific world view they have inherited. Its units mostly consist of heavy hitters and adopt a more organic look to its design. The Cybran consists of cyborgs, whose technology and units are generally much more advanced and intellectual smarter than their opponent’s, making them ideal for offensive strikes. And finally, the United Earth Federation are the generic human race that is seeking to reunite humanity to its former self.
The Aeon are a devastating force to fight against at its fullest.
We had an opportunity to check out some of the game’s campaign mode with the United Earth Federation, which are ideally your traditional faction with the most well rounded force and technology. The first level required us, a new commander of the UEF forces, to capture key buildings and ultimately eliminate all enemy forces on the map. The game opened up with some basic fundamentals where we were required to build a base including unit hubs and resource gathering buildings. Frankly, the game plays much like Total Annihilation where you must gather power and extract mass from the ground to fuel your units and building habits. This therefore turns the game into a rather slow and tradition strategy title where you’ll need to place down your resource gathering buildings and then focus on constructing more units and buildings – meaning most games will typically last an hour or two (or more) before completing.
All campaign maps begin with a rather small and constrictive area to work in, but once fulfilling the various sub-objectives laid out for you, the map area will continually grow. For instance, your first objective may be to identify the enemy forces and after doing that, the map will expand asking you to fulfil yet another objective before eventually requiring you to destroy the enemy’s main area. This structure works in providing a number of strategic incentives: one being that you’ll need to employ a number of different tactics to tackle the various objectives, and number two being that you can expect to jump into some deep campaign maps, not only in length but in scaling of battles.
Also on hand was a number of skirmish maps to indulge ourselves in, which gave us an opportunity to explore the three different factions, advancing through technologies and checking out the game’s excellent interface. Firstly, the game includes a revolutionary interface layout that not only allows you to manage your units much more effectively, but the amount of freedom and choice at hand is remarkable – a step forward in the genre. Rather than having a mini-map and selecting areas of the map in which you want to see, you can quickly zoom out to get a larger perspective of the battlefield and then place your cursor on an area and quickly zoom in on the action. Not only does this method reduce the amount of time just randomly clicking on areas of the map to see battles, but it also gives you the ability to quickly zoom in and out on certain battles, making a huge difference when juggling between several battles at once.
Sea battles are as much a part of the war than ground or flight battles.
Due to the scale of the game and the amount of units you can create (a unit cap of 500), it’s guaranteed you’ll be frequently issuing out orders to your units to hit different areas of the map. To back up this point, you will be able to create naval, ground and flight units - meaning that you’ll likely have an air battle in one area, a naval battle in another, your ground forces trying to overrun your enemy’s base and others trying to hold back enemy forces from touching yours. The flexibility that the map feature provides is simply amazing, and jumping from one area to another is seamless. For you PC gamers who own two monitors, you’ll be able to customise your game in a number of ways such as having the zoomed out map perspective on one monitor and the main action on another. Overall, the interface is much more inviting than any other real-time strategy game before it, and this map feature alone is a truly revolutionary idea.
Another great addition to the game is the technology tiers, wherein you’ll unlock your faction’s more powerful and devastating units and abilities. Each of the main unit hubs (ground, flight and naval) can be upgraded to further tiers that enable more powerful and technically advanced units and buildings. While at the start of the game you’ll begin with your core units such as lightly armoured tanks and scouting planes, the second, third and fourth tiers are the breathing place for your faction’s most powerful units – where not only will your light tanks be substituted by heavy tanks, but you’ll be able to construct units such as mammoth spider tanks, heavy artillery and units that can provide force fields for your units and/or buildings.
The only real negative we could draw from our session with the game was that it is one power hungry game. While the build we played wasn’t final, it did however highlight some of the issues experienced when hundreds of units and action is taking place. There’s a good variety of large maps, so epic battles, constant movement and rearranging of units is going to happen frequently - and if you don’t have a capable computer then framerate drops are guaranteed. The only time we noticed a framerate drop was when we were playing on massive maps with several other players, and we were juggling between flight battles and naval battles. Hopefully the final build will address this problem, and be optimised for a range of computers.
. But by god, the interface is superb.
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