In 1997, designer Chris Taylor helped create Total Annihilation, which is revered to this day as one of the greatest real-time strategy games ever made. But aside from a Total Annihilation expansion in 1998, he hasn't made a real-time strategy game since. That will change next year, though, because Taylor's company, Gas Powered Games, is working on Supreme Commander, a real-time strategy game that has many earmarking it as the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. We had a chance recently to visit Gas Powered Games' offices in Redmond, Washington, to get an early look at Supreme Commander. And from what we saw, this is a game that takes some of the core concepts of Total Annihilation and applies them on an unprecedented, awesome scale.

Supreme Commander is one of the most exciting real-time strategy games on the horizon.

Supreme Commander is set in the future, one in which humanity has split into three warring factions. There's the United Earth Federation, regular humans armed with futuristic versions of modern-day weapons and vehicles, such as tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines, and jets. Then there are the Cybran, humans with microchips implanted into their heads. The Cybran use mech-style robotic units, ranging from two-legged walking tanks to the gigantic mechanical spider seen in the screenshots. Finally, there are the Aeon, humans who have adopted alien technology and believe that they have to cleanse the world of the warmongering UEF and Cybran factions. While Gas Powered hasn't revealed the Aeon yet, Taylor hints that the faction believes in simplicity. "They'd be the ones who would design the iPod if they could," he said.

Having three distinct and unique races is fairly par for the course for a real-time strategy game, but it is how they fight it out in Supreme Commander that makes the game stand out from the rest of the pack. Taylor is a fan of history, and when he compares real-time strategy games to actual wars, he finds them lacking. His problem is that the genre thinks too small. Battlefields in real-time strategy games don't really feel like battlefields, due to the sense of scale. "They don't give you a sense that you're fighting in this big place with waters and mountains," Taylor explains. And he's right. Tactical concepts such as distance and time are irrelevant in most real-time strategy games, as you usually have two bases on opposing corners of the map and just enough room in the middle for a big battle. Supreme Commander, on the other hand, is all about distance and time.

To give an example, he showed us a naval engagement featuring battleships and destroyers slugging it out with an enemy naval force. When zoomed up-close, you don't even see enemy ships on the screen, since it's a long-range engagement. You do get a sense of scale, though, as the battleships are considerably larger than their smaller escorts; they also convey a sense of power, as they're armed with multiple turrets and weapon emplacements. Yet when the camera was pulled back to show the entire map, the naval engagement took place on an incredibly remote part of the map. Far to the south of the battle was the main land mass, where all the action was going on. You could have multiple large-scale battles going on in this map, and there would still be plenty of room to maneuver units. This is important, because to Taylor, far too many real-time strategy games confuse tactics with strategy. Tactics are what you employ when your units are in battle, but strategy is the movement of units on a large scale. In Supreme Commander, you'll be able to conduct sweeping movements with hundreds of units, and you'll get a sense of being a real military commander.

Naval engagements are in the game. Just wait until you see how many ways a battleship can sink.

If this sounds a bit complex, don't worry. Supreme Commander won't be mistaken for a wargame. It's very much a real-time strategy game with a science fiction feel to it. As with any real-time strategy game, you'll gather resources and build up a base to support a large army. The resources in this case are mass and energy. While you'll be able to place generators in your base to produce energy, you'll only be able to mine on certain areas for mass, and these strategic points will become very important in the game. (Or, if you get really desperate, you can also turn energy into mass, but this is a very costly method.) Your primary construction unit is your "supreme commander," a huge robot that also serves as a mobile command center. However, you can also create smaller construction units when you construct a factory.

Once you have a functional base going, you can build hundreds of units, ranging from tanks, robotic infantry, transports, warships, and more. Like with any good strategy game, you'll have to make decisions as to what kind of force you want. You can create lots of cheap, low-level units, or you can build a smaller number of more powerful units. It's up to you. In addition, you can tinker with units to make them more useful. For instance, if you put a mobile shield system onto a transport, it'll be more survivable on a battlefield. Or if you load up that same transport with mechs, it'll turn into a mobile gunship as sorts, as the mechs can fire from the sides of the transport.