Supreme Commander

By: Sarju Shah and James Yu - Posted on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2007

Supreme Commander pushes the real-time strategy genre forward by introducing gigantic maps and new unit-design concepts to transform mere battles and skirmishes into epic conflicts. The size of the maps forces players to use the game's camera control to zoom in on the map to watch over a single battle or to zoom out for the big picture. You need all the information you can get when the enemy has artillery that can hit targets from across the map. Multi-monitor support lets you keep track of two separate areas on the map--one view on each screen.

Gas Powered Games built Supreme Commander to be the RTS game for the next five years. The game will come with a map editor and a customizable user-interface system specifically designed to increase the game's longevity by giving users the ability to evolve the game. It's specifically designed to take advantage of hardware to make sure that game performance can scale as new hardware hits the market. Supreme Commander is the first game we've seen that actually takes advantage of multiple processor cores.

Game Settings

Even if you have the most powerful computer on the block, Supreme Commander will make it buckle. Fortunately, a few quick changes to your settings will right your frame rates in no time--but at a graphical cost.

Graphics

Weak video cards need not apply. If you want to play Supreme Commander and make it look even remotely pretty, it’s time to start shopping. We tested out 14 cards to help you narrow down your search.

CPU

Supreme Commander wants power, lots of it. If you want your computer to keep track of hundreds of units in a timely manner, you might want to consider a CPU upgrade.

Memory

Supreme Commander plays well when you feed it lots of RAM. We tested the game out with 1GB, 2GB, and even 4GB of system memory.