Our verdict on Gas Powered Games' prodigious real-time strategy title.
The long anticipated unofficial follow up to Cavedog's Total Annihilation is finally upon us, and it turns out to be a truly mammoth real-time strategy experience. We've had the final build in the office for a few weeks now, and have been regularly eschewing normal work duties to get in just one more skirmish. Along with Supreme Commander's dizzying depth and balancing comes a significant learning curve, something that may unfortunately turn away the casual gamer. If you're an RTS fan at all, you really owe it to yourself to check out the strategic juggernaut Gas Powered Games has created. Though its single player campaign is far from spectacular, the multiplayer and skirmish modes in Supreme Commander deliver some of the deepest, most refined RTS gameplay in recent memory.
If you've played the demo released a few weeks back, you'll know what you're in for. Gas Powered Games created a mob of units for each of the game's three factions, the Cybran, United Earth Federation, and Aeon. Though each may seem similar at the lowest technology levels, there still exist a number of differences. As players proceed through up to the maximum tech level 3 (T3) and beyond to the experimental units, more variety becomes apparent. A few Aeon units can hover, for instance, letting them traverse the watery canals snaking through many of Supreme Commander's maps. The Cybran get T2 naval units that can sprout legs and march across land, albeit extremely slowly. The UEF get one of the most powerful non-experimental units, the T3 gunships, which boast devastating air-to-ground attacks as well as anti-air defenses. Despite their ferocity on the battlefield, can easily be wiped out by a force of T3 air superiority fighters or a battery of SAM launchers.
That being said, it's not like creating a sprawling troupe of units to mount an attack is a bad idea. It's actually highly entertaining, and one of the great payoffs of this game to see the fruits of all your technology upgrades, delicate resource management, and build queuing mature into a rumbling mass of robotic assault bots, boats, and planes moving with the singular purpose of obliterating your enemy. Getting to that point is a beast of a process, however, something the hardcore strategy gamers will be sure to appreciate, whereas more casual players might not be willing to invest the time.
Resource management, for instance, approaches near scientific heights when trying to balance rates of mass and energy accumulation, along with adjusting your storage capacity for each. At a game's outset you'll be striving to capture as many mass extraction points as possible, while setting up a big energy surplus. As T3 is reached, your advanced engineer units can set up power plants that yield much more significant energy bonuses, and can also construct what are known as mass fabricators that convert energy to mass. Since each unit in the game requires energy to run and mass to construct, keeping your resource reserves properly stocked is vital for producing your attack and defense forces in a timely fashion. It means nothing if you've pumped all your resources into erecting a T3 artillery station when it causes everything else in your base to build five times more slowly.
Effectively controlling the battlefield is achieved chiefly through the all-powerful Shift key. By pressing and holding, players can queue up unit movements, build orders, patrol waypoints, and combine move and attack orders. Should you decide to change movement patterns or build locations while the action is already underway, hitting shift again brings up an interface where you can drag around the waypoints as you see fit. Every unit construction factory can be given build order while it's still being built. Even after telling it to upgrade to the next technology level, you'll be presented with the next set of build options so you don't have to keep checking back in. Different types and amounts of units can be queued in the same construction facility, and a repeat build order function lets you move on to something else once you're happy with a factory's production pattern. Since you'll find a significant amount of water and hilly terrain across the game's many maps, there's an unusual emphasis on air transports. Thankfully these units can be set along ferry routes, where they'll automatically scoop up waiting units and drop them off wherever you so designate. If you set a factory waypoint to the starting point of the ferry route, units will automatically be ferried as soon as they roll or crawl off the production line.
These kinds of accommodations for unit production and defense construction automation become increasingly important as the map size increases. Since you can build a base anywhere on a map, which you should certainly be doing with a lot of available terrain, you'll need to keep track of a near overwhelming amount of information. For anyone thinking Supreme Commander's scale and powerful experimental units are the finale of any game experience, you're wrong. An Aeon Czar, a giant flying saucer with a devastating air to ground laser, can be taken out in seconds with adequate SAM defenses. With proper base shielding, T2 point defenses, and a supporting force of T3 assault bots and artillery, nearly any ground based attack can be pushed back, assuming the Cybran Monkeylord or Aeon Colossus doesn't get close enough to disintegrate everything with their sweeping energy beams. Since base construction and defense is just as important as what kind of assault units you're building, a multi-pronged attack is often most effective. This means sending in the land force only to distract your opponent from the massive battleships moving into the other side. It can mean sending in a squadron of interceptor planes to divert SAM defenses from your T3 bombers arriving to rip up resource production farms. It's a game that forces you to consider nearly every unit available, which is in large part why this game's learning curve is so high, assuming you never experienced Total Annihilation.
As excellent as Supreme Commander online is, the single player campaigns suffer. In short, it takes too long to get to the entertaining missions, and the narrative is nowhere near compelling. With six lengthy missions for each of the game's three factions, you're in for around a 20 to 30 hour single player experience. Since you're limited to only T1 and T2 units for the first few missions, the experience grows stale rather quickly. Unlike Company of Heroes' emphasis on highly versatile handfuls of units, Supreme Commander's focus on large-scale combat means the units don't have all that much flexibility. Tanks shell ground units. Artillery attacks from afar. Bombers bomb. Missile launchers launch missiles from long range. At higher levels the units' individual functions start to diversify by more significant amounts, but at lower levels most units are strictly straightforward in their abilities. When you're limited to mounting an attack force restricted T1 and T2 during the course of a mission lasting more than an hour, it gets boring, plain and simple. The single player campaigns only really pick up during missions five and six, when significantly more powerful T3 options finally open up and you can amass more interesting assault forces and construct better base defenses. Had the story been less derivative and contained sympathetic, rounded characters that elicited more of an emotional response on the player's part, these early campaign doldrums could have been alleviated to a degree.
If you're turned off by the single player yet too timid to experience the intensity of online play, the game offers up a substantial skirmish mode. With variable unit caps, win conditions, 40 well designed maps, and the ability to load in mods, the skirmish mode is highly customizable and entertaining. After a while you'll find a single Supreme AI (the most difficult AI setting) opponent is toppled easily enough, but drop in four or more and you'll be engaged for hours. Once in a while we noticed the Supreme AI had a strange tendency to march their commander unit out into the midst of our forces, seemingly on a suicide run. This didn't make all that much sense a few times, since they still had significant resources on hand as well as numerous factory setups. During longer games AI experimental units became stuck next to structures, like Monkeylords stalling underneath naval bases, at which point they were quickly wiped out by torpedo defenses. For online play, you can either compete over LAN/IP or match up with others through Gas Powered Games' feature heavy but somewhat clunky server list and chat program, where lifetime statistics are tracked for each player.
Though some may argue the robot designs are generic, zooming in close enough reveals an excellent attention to detail on the units, structures, landscape, and water. You'll see trees pass a fire along to each other if there's been an explosion nearby, boats slowly sink below the waves, and all sorts of moving parts activate on units as they enter battle. The user interface itself may be larger than most are used to, but you'll eventually get used to it and appreciate all it has to offer. Even if you don't own two monitors, you can split a single screen in half with the Home key to gain even more control over the battlefield, and widescreen monitors will be able to move the interface to the side of the screen, opening up more screen space for gameplay. Taking advantage of all this graphical beauty is going to require a powerful rig unfortunately. Though anything built within the last few years or so should be able to handle Supreme Commander, even the most powerful computers will likely have issues with eight player online battles. We ran the game on max settings with a Pentium 4 3.40 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM, and a 512MB Radeon X1900, and had a generally smooth experience, though it really started to bog down as more participants jumped into the fray.
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The creators of Total Annihilation offer a demanding, but ultimately rewarding, real time strategy game.
You are not ready for Supreme Commander. That statement is both a challenge and a warning. This real time strategy game is a hardcore exercise in scaling a steep learning curve and then finally being able to enjoy a spectacular view and a deep strategy game. But it's going to take a while to get up here, and it's not a climb for the faint of heart, much less the average non-committal RTS dabbler.
Supreme Commander was created by the same developer who made the 1997 classic Total Annihilation, and the connection shows. Both games are about queuing up build orders to create a booming economy based on mass mined from the ground and energy produced at generators. These aren't accumulated and spent like you do in a typical RTS. Instead, they're maintained as a careful balance between income and expenditure. If you don't know what you're doing, you're liable to stall your economy faster than George W. Bush with a budget surplus (don't worry, we'll take a stab at the Democrats later in the review).
You then use this economy to amass dozens, if not hundreds, of the robots, tanks, planes, and ships that Supreme Commander offers. Perhaps you'll also build fearsome artillery or missile silos to pound the enemy base from a distance. There are even powerful game-busting experimental units, which are generally giant robots that shrug off damage with their thousands of hit points. All the while, you're building defenses to protect your base and radar to keep an eye on your enemy. You might even dabble with setting up shields or hiding under a stealth generator. In Supreme Commander, knowing is half the battle.
It's an epic game, and it's a strange combination of complexity and streamlining. The mandate behind the interface seems to be automation. You can chain together complex series of orders and then leave a unit alone to fulfill them, whether you're pre-building a base, setting up a patrol, or coordinating two separate groups to attack a single target at the same time. You can tell units to help other units with an all-purpose "assist" command. You can lay out formations and automate air transport routes. For the most part, this works wonderfully, and it creates the feel that you're laying out plans instead of holding hands. This is a game about being a commander, and it feels more like managing a command center than playing with toy soldiers.
There are times when the interface breaks down, and hopefully the developers will be able to patch these shortcomings. But even worse, Supreme Commander does a terrible job of teaching you how to play. The tutorial consists of extended and dull non-interactive videos that play over a sandbox set up with nothing to do. It's almost as if they forgot to actually put in a real tutorial. In a game so complicated, and one that relies so heavily on know how to use the interface, this is particularly disappointing. Woe to the poor newbie who jumps in without doing his homework. At least the campaign (speaking of extended and dull) gradually introduces you to new units and buildings as it progresses.
Unfortunately, the three different sides don't differ much. Next to the difficulty level, this is one of the biggest shortcomings of Supreme Commander. There's no hook here, no personality, nothing beyond swarms of little robots, each side almost exactly like the other. At a time when real time strategy games are brimming with personality and character, Supreme Commander is a bland and sometimes boring throwback.
At least that's how most players will feel about it. The truly hardcore will see the subtle differences among the sides. The United Earth Forces, for instance, gets a heavy tank with a lot of hit points, but the Aeon get a heavy tank with shields. The Cybrans have mobile stealth generators, while everyone else gets mobile shields. But these things will have almost no impact on how the average person plays each side. Instead, there's going to be a lot of drag selecting and throwing swarms of armies around just to see what sticks. There's almost zero feedback in the game about why some units are better than others. At a time when the favorite buzzword for real time strategy is "visceral", Supreme Commander opts for "cerebral".
Furthermore, there are all sorts of esoteric economic tricks that the average player will miss. For instance, an adjacency bonus means you'll want to put mass storage next to all your mass extractors, and generators next to all your factories. Or is it mass storage next to your factories, and generators next to your extractors? Time to flip through the manual, although you won't find it all in there. Time to rewatch the tutorial videos. At a time when real time strategy games are getting more intuitive, Supreme Commander has decided to play by its own esoteric rules.
The size of the battles is such that the game actually lets you zoom all the way out, converting the elaborate graphics into a swarm of tiny strategic icons. It's easy to go back and forth with a flick of the mousewheel, but sadly, there's almost never any reason to actually see the graphics, which look wonderful. All this artwork and all these effects of shimmering shields and exploding artillery shells and arcing plasma blasts and burning trees for nothing. They're almost completely beside the point. At a time when real time strategy games are pushing visuals, Supreme Commander makes them superfluous.
What's more, the game's performance is as erratic as John Kerry's stance on the war in Iraq (there you go: equal opportunity political jabs). Even the most powerful computers can't keep up with the epic battles without the framerate taking a nose dive faster than a scout plane overflying a bank of flak guns. It's ironic that, for many people, the best way to enjoy the size and scope of Supreme Commander is zoomed all the way out, with the detail cranked way down.
But the bottom line is that there's no other real time strategy game that creates as grand and broad an experience as Supreme Commander. There's a wonderful amount of choice among different types of units, and buildings, and economic options, and map sizes. Do you focus on air power? Do you swarm with lower tech units? Do you build up your economy or upgrade your units? Do you bother with a navy? Should you get started on one of the experimental units? Do you grow your economy by spreading out and controlling the map, or do you hunker down and invest in mass fabricators?
The answers to these questions are compared to the answers given by the other side (or sides, given that you can have up to 8 players, human or AI, in a game) to create many different types of games. In some games, you'll be overrun by little assault bots. In others, you'll be swallowed in a grand nuclear fire. In yet others, you'll crush the opponent's base with your enormous mechanical spider bot.
In the final analysis, the climb to enjoy the game at this level is well worth the effort. At a time when real time strategy games are often appealing to the lower common denominators with streamlined interfaces, simple gameplay, and elaborate graphics, Supreme Commander is doing something deep, complex, and uniquely rewarding. Are you ready?