Say hello to the RTS evolution.
Incredible sense of scale; three interesting campaigns; many ways to finish a map; profound sense of accomplishment.
NAYS
Takes a while to get used to; can become mentally exhausting.
I'm not usually a big fan of RTS games because of many reasons, most importantly them requiring you to mundanely use brute force to accomplish a mission and their focus on "survival" - where the only strategy comes from managing your very limited resources rather than actually bringing down the enemy.
Supreme Commander is a RTS player's dream come true. A game that really is an evolution to RTS games, not only because it redefines basic mechanics, but introduces new ones that should, one day, become the norm.
In SC you choose to play one of three different factions, all of which refuse to co-exist and wage war against the other. The good part is, however, that no faction is the "good" faction as each is fighting for their own cause, which is the point of a war if you put any effort into looking at all perspectives. That said, it doesn't matter really which faction you start with since there isn't one that would be offensive or racial in any way - basically you'd be choosing your faction on how cool looking the robot is.
In typical RTS fair, you progress through the game by completing maps. In SC though, the concept is redefined as you are not put into one map and you slowly clear the fog of war as you scavenge where the enemy base is. Rather, you are dropped onto a small field and you have a set of objectives to complete on that field. There is no fog of war, technically, since you can see the terrain, but you need to move your units around so that you gain visual of enemy units in the area. You start typically by building your base, building some engineers and then expanding your base functionality and army quickly. This is made easy and quick since you don't need a base to build other buildings. Your Supreme Commander, the giant robot, is actually the multi-functional engineer. You can instantly build your war machines factory, have it build a few other secondary engineers while your commander is building power plants, then have the engineers build other structures while your factory builds the army. All this takes around 2-3 minutes, which is phenomenal.
Upon completing this task you are required to finish the objective of the map - whether it be protecting some buildings or wiping out a fleet of enemies, or just building a specific, time consuming structure. Once the objectives are done, instead of moving on to the next level, the map increases in size. This adds a whole new dimension to RTS and makes you think in multiple layers, since, when the map doubles in size, you don't know what you would be up against. So if, for example, the first objective was to finish off a fleet of enemies, and you have a few surviving units, and the map expands with the objective to defend your base for 10 minutes of attacks, you will be royally screwed if you don't act fast. Adding tot he fun, though, is that with the larger map you also have more room to unleash your tactics. So for instance if you thought your only choice is to go head to head with the enemy base, the map expands and, to your delight, you find you can go attack from the rear. The map keeps expanding with every objective finished, until the whole level is completed. There are a 5-6 maps for each faction, but rest assured that each map takes around 1-3 hours to finish.
It wouldn't be an RTS of course if there isn't unit variety. With three factions, units are a lot different and each compensates the weakness of the other. So even down to the basic level, even if your units have a firepower disadvantage against your opponent, your units would probably be faster, more versatile or have a higher attack rate. This allows you to have different combos of units for you to base your strategy upon.
Thankfully, you can have different strategies to finish an object. For example, you can have a full frontal attack or send some long-range tanks to the mountains behind the enemy base and bring down their defenses. Or, if you're completely sadistic, you can build 150 heavy gunships and send all of them to the enemy base and let them all attack the enemy commander, which would then explode in a nuclear graphical delight to wipe out the enemy base and your gunships.
There are also experimental units, which are of a level so high that they cost a huge amount of resources (more on that later) and time. However, once completed, the experimental unit by itself can finish off half the enemy base. Have a couple or more and watch your enemy frantically trying to protect the base.
Speaking of resources, there are two: Mass and Energy. Building anything, from structures to units, require some mass and some energy. Without mass, your building speed is slowed to a cripple. Without energy, you may be able to build but your shield generators and sonars would not work. Energy is generated by power plants you build, mass, however, are available only in specific spots (but infinite quantity) and you need to harvest the mass from those spots - which are often places in strategic places for you and the enemy to try and control. Eventually however you would not be worrying about neither resource and would focus on your battle strategy.
All that said, the game is presented in cutting edge graphics. The models all look great and the landscape is phenomenally large - so large in fact that all other RTS should be ashamed of their scale. THIS game has true war maps, stretching kilometers/miles in all directions. You can zoom in up to the unit level, and zoom out all the way to view the whole map and iconic representations of units and structures. This gives a much easier control and an overview on what the heck is going on, and, most likely, you'd be spending most of the time zoomed out (not all the way) rather than zoomed in. Acoustically the music is usually "background" and muted, and jumps up only when a great battle ensues. There are plenty of sound effects though, although to keep it in a "realistic" manner, the more you zoom out the more the audio is hummed down. Which can be a bummer because on maximum zoom in, it is an entirely different world of carnage.
All in all you cannot go wrong with Supreme Commander. It offers a good challenge with an intelligent AI, deep gameplay and lots of options for you to fiddle with. Best of all, you can switch graphics options on the fly without needing to restart the game - which is good if the map and craziness get too hogging on your graphics card.