When I first heard about Supreme Commander, I was extremely excited. I was a huge Total Annihilation fan and the thought of playing the spiritual successor to that game made me very happy in the pants! As this review unfolds, you will see just how good this game is and just how critically flawed it also is. This is a mammoth game as evidenced by the fact that it comes on a single dual layer DVD disk; total install size is in excess of 8 GB which is huge!

The game features beautiful graphics.

First, the basics about the game. The game is centred on the Armoured Command Unit or ACU, which is a kind of mech suit that your character controls personally. The ACU is the big boss of the bases within this game and is a formidable opponent on its own as it is heavily armoured and is mounted with powerful weapons. They also have the ability to construct all tech level 1 buildings, so as long as the ACU survives, you can rebuild. Missions also place the survival of your ACU as essential. Building can also be done by constructing engineer units. Each new tech level researched at a factory introduces a new level engineer to construct other buildings of that particular level. Another nifty feature is using your engineers to assist in building units faster. This is not a new feature. Age of Empires allowed you to use multiple units to construct a building faster, usually a Wonder. In Supreme Commander, you can use your engineers to assist a factory producing units to help them build them faster.

There are three factions within the game. First is the United Earth Federation, the familiar human faction that most people will default to when they begin their first campaign. They are the remnants of the Earth Empire that self-destructed. The UEF tend to be traditional in style in both attack and its units. The UEF's experimental units are the submersible aircraft carrier, mobile factory and a strategic artillery fun platform. The second faction is the Cybran Nation. When it comes to describing the Cybran, think Borg, as they are a mix of man and machine. They fight to gain independence from the oppression they feel from the United Earth Federation. The experimental units of the Cybran Nation are a special gunship, a spider-bot type walker and a rapid fire artillery platform. Their units are quite advanced as you would expect, although they suffer in a head-to-head confrontation with either the UEF or the final faction, the Aeon Illuminate. The Aeons were once a peaceful offshoot of humans from Earth. They are descendants of the original galactic explorers who came into contact with a race named the Seraphim. The xenophobic tendencies of the old Earth Empire turned into open conflict and they annihilated the Seraphim. The Aeon formed from the ashes of that conflict when the colonists of the Seraphim home world founded a civilization based on the teachings of the Seraphim. The experimental units of the Aeon Illuminate are the sacred assault bot, an airborne aircraft carrier and a submersible battleship.

Lock S-Foils in attack position ... wait wrong game!

Shield units are very handy but consume massive amounts of energy.

There is the typical research collection aspect as is common with every RTS on the market. It does work a little bit differently in Supreme Commander however. The two resources are Energy and Mass. Energy is gathered by constructing generators and mass is gathered by placing mass extraction buildings on special locations on the map or by construction mass fabrication facilities that require a lot of energy to run. Using these resources is very different though. Instead of gathering 100 of resource A and spending it on buying Foot Solder 1, the player builds up his level of both resources. Depending on what storage buildings the player has directly affects the maximum of each resource he can have at the one time. Constructing units does not cost a precise number of resources as it does in other games, rather it deducts mass and energy from your totals until construction is complete. If you run out of energy or mass while constructing, the progress will slow to a crawl.


To combat this you can use the facilities mentioned above to ensure that you do not run out while building. There are plenty of mass resource nodes placed in strategically important locations around the map. Typically, placing mass extractors on these resource nodes is enough, but for those times when you just need more, you can place mass fabricators to supplement your total mass production. Another neat trick is to place mass storage buildings around your extractors and fabricators to boost your total possible mass amount. See, you cannot just farm 1,000,000 mass and slowly use it, both energy and mass have a set maximum, which is not that large when you are building units with multiple factories. Of course, all these buildings require energy to run which is where the second resource comes along. You can place power generators wherever you want but keeping them in close to your base is always preferable as power generators are very fragile. There are also storage buildings, which boost the total maximum of the resource as it does with mass.

There are not enough RTS games with good naval combat.

Because buildings require energy to operate, and constructing units with buildings also consumes energy, managing your total output of units and the available resources is a significant challenge. I spent the better part of an hour at the end of the resource tutorial just experimenting with the possibilities. While it does seem very challenging at first, spending a small amount of time practicing before you begin the campaign serves you well in the future as there is no chance to learn something as complicated as this as you progress in the campaign.

One of the best features of this game is the ability to zoom out to obtain a total strategic view of the entire map, move the mouse around to where you want to go and then zoom back in. This saves a huge amount of time in a game such as this, which features really massive maps, somewhere in the range of 80kmx80km. When I begin playing my next RTS, I will miss this feature. Hopefully developers will notice its positive uses and will implement it in future games. Supreme Commander also supports the use of multiple monitors. You can view the strategic map on one screen while being in the thick of it on your main screen while you battle your enemies. It is feature that while nifty, might not attract that much attention due to the limited numbers of consumers who actually own multiple monitors attached to their computer.

The game also features excellent tutorials that introduce you to the key features of the game and give you enough knowledge to plunge into the games campaigns. On the flip side, the tutorials are entirely scripted meaning that you do not take part in any of it, you just watch and learn. While the scripts are very good, I found my attention drifting as all I wanted to do was play. This means that you can miss something important very easily if you let your attention wander. What is good though is that at the end of the tutorial, the game allows you to take control of the map and play around with all the things that you were introduced to.

There are a total of sixteen missions within the three campaigns, one for each faction. While this equals only six missions per faction, which seems limited, each mission can last a significant amount of time and just when you think you are close to the end, you complete an objective and the map sometimes doubles in size revealing new areas of the map to explore and new objectives to complete. This is a good and bad thing as you think you are just about finished with a mission and all of a sudden, another objective is added which can require a sizeable amount of time to complete.