But nothing says "distinct armies" like bringing a tier four experimental unit to a fight.
Tonight was the last straw. I'm fairly certain that the computer-controlled enemy commander just played a trick on me. The bait was a small group of light tanks leaving its base and the cover of its anti-air flak cannons, heading toward a remote resource point. I couldn't sit back and ignore them. On these battlefields, every scrap of metal and every power-plant matters. As soon as I felt safe, I ordered a fleet of gunships, the future-war equivalent of Apache helicopters, to take them out. They were met halfway by double their number in interceptors. Watching detachedly as my aircraft fell out of the sky was fascinating. Knowing that I'd been outplayed, out-thought, and out-flanked... That at any moment a wave of tanks would leave the enemy base, free to drive, unchallenged, to the front wall of my defences, and victory. I'd been humped by the steel-clad equivalent of Deep Blue. God, it felt good. First, some history. Supreme Commander has been in gestation for nearly ten years. It's the unofficial successor to 1997's Total Annihilation, the most forward-looking strategy game of all time. TA's vision of heavy metal war was lauded for its scale: its battlefields dwarfed those of contemporaries such as Starcraft or Red Alert. It was equally lauded for ambition; while most RTS games let you play with bizarrely limited armies, TA set you free. Every possible toy vehicle or tin soldier that you could imagine was there. Battleships. Fleets of bombers with swept-back wings and sleek fighters to escort or intercept them. Spy planes, radar installations, scout bikes and mobile artillery platforms. A breed of tank for every situation. Short range missile launchers. Long range missile launchers. Fixed artillery positions that could hurl shells kilometres. Nukes. Anti-nukes. And the baby pee-wee with its laser pop gun. It was rightly lauded for its complexity. Not only were you asked to manage straight fights, but you'd have to look after a hefty recycling program (retrieving the steel carcasses of dead tanks and rebuilding them), a navy, air-fleet, and information warfare. Most of all though, it was lauded for its almost extreme sensation. No game made you feel as much a part of a real war as TA. It was functional, almost austere. No hero units, no link to the fantastic. Just cold metal and hot artillery. Total future war. The good news is that all of the good of TA is present and correct here. TA is SupCom's jumping-off point. It only gets better from there. Second: some fiction. Some time in the future, humanity has diverged into three races. The UEF (United Earth Federation) are the most recognisably human - they are the meat-head army with commanders who Emphasise. Every. Word. The Aeon are what happened after humanity met ET: zealots who worship abandoned alien artefacts, wanting to spread their 'way' through peaceful conversion if possible, but with nuclear force if needed. The Cybran sit somewhere in between: they're almost indistinct from the computers that power their forces, wired and ready to fire. Each side is plotting its own apocalypse; thanks to their tech, the Aeon are closest to completing their war and subjugating the rest of the human race. The UEF are building the Death Star-like 'Black Sun', while the Cybran are programming a 'quantum virus', designed to isolate each world from the point-to-point teleport gates of humanity's space-faring future. The story that powers SupCom is silly, pleasing guff: memorable because every side is both threatened by, and ultimately guilty of, genocide. Sci-fi! It's probably an analogy!
Central to this fiction are the Supreme Commanders themselves. They are men in mech suits, the only living things on the battlefield; he's your first unit and is usually mission-critical. So: a skirmish in SupCom begins with your commander warping in to a lush island paradise, empty desert or red-dust world. These arenas are massive, far bigger than what you'd be used to playing in other strategy games. Emphasising the scale is a neat interface. Rather than cluttering your screen with a mini-map, you can simply scroll the mousewheel outward, further and further, until the entire conflict is on display. The 3D models of the units disappear, replaced with icons. Vehicles and positions you've scouted are marked with small icons: triangles represent air units, squares land, and semicircles for naval power. Markers also tell you what type of unit it is. Those you have yet to identify are represented with grey squares. You know something is out there - but what? Zooming all the way out gives you two powerful sensations: the first is a sense of total awareness. What you know, and what you need to know are clearly marked. You'll realise that you need to position radar outposts at key choke-points, and send out spy planes to spot bases and their defences. Second: it's just cool. In one naval battle, I spotted a fleet of submarines threatening a group of frigates, themselves bombarding enemy positions. I put my finger to my ear, Uhura style, and mouthed 'picking up multiple contacts on sonar, moving to intercept'. (Incidentally, there is further nerdcore thrill to be had. If you've got a second monitor lying around, you can dedicate one display to a full-screen radar display. You'll need a graphics card with two outputs - most modern ones do - and an acre of spare desk space. We've tried it, and it's hilarious, but you will have to explain exactly why you want to re-arrange the furniture to flatmates, spouses, family members or the cat. They will not understand. Be strong.) For those who want more structure to their play, SupCom offers three campaigns, one for each race. But these aren't filled with the strict half-hour, one-off missions that we're used to. Instead, each level begins on a small map, with a story-focused objective. In an early Aeon level, you warp in to help a beleaguered commander defend a small island. What begins as a simple siege ends, hours later, with a massed attack. The UEF begin their charge in waves - first with gunships and bombers, later landing tanks at the northern peninsula and attacking south. You rarely have a moment to think properly - you just send your engineers to reclaim any metal to supplement your resource pile, while erecting and repairing defences.
Eventually, the UEF give up attacking from the air and bring up a navy - the map's borders expand, and the naval base from where the attackers came from is marked. With that invasion repelled, you'll have to take out a separate air-base, another navy, and another factory. Each is a separate island hop, each requires a destroyer bombardment before landing your troops. Each needs to be reinforced and covered, and each needs replacements on hand to fill the gaps left by losses. Even then, your job isn't done - it's just getting started. You're given further space to play with: a new island to the west is revealed, where the enemy commander has been building a last-ditch attack force. Defeat that and your way will be clear for one final landing, and an assassination on the commander. I spent a good (read: great) afternoon methodically clearing every UEF position, using each captured atoll as a staging post for the next assault. Each time, the excellent AI kept finding new ways to beat me back, inflicting horrendous casualties on my dear robot armies. This could be a criticism. I don't think I've played an RTS that's this demanding. It's not just the intensity of battle and the constant, belligerent noise. It's also down to the sheer scale of the management required. There's so much to think about; constantly balancing your resources and production. Remembering your long-term objectives (winning, and explosions) while assessing current threats (aerial attacks, or a long-range bombardment) and building a proactive defence (nuclear missile defence program, flak cannons, walls and shields). Managing your route up the tech-tree, ensuring your engineers and commander are constantly busy. And that's before you even reach combat - where you'll need to select targets, order advances, and organise retreats. Even harder, the economic decisions can't be put off: you're frantically multi-tasking as you manage your front lines and supply lines. The three difficulty settings don't offer much respite. I was well beaten even on Easy at first, and you'll always face an intelligent, imaginative foe.
It's similarly demanding on your PC. Even the dual core monster (sporting two Gb RAM and two Geforce 7900 GS running in SLI) we keep in the back of the office to scare freelancers saw some slowdown - particularly toward the end of a game when a couple of hundred units were trading blows. On a lesser specced PC - in this case a not-unreasonable P4 3GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM and an X1950 3D card - I fought a dogged, constant battle, not with Cybran infantry, but with framerates. Even the opening, smaller maps ran at about ten frames per second until I was forced to drop the resolution. The reason? SupCom is the first PC game we've really seen to be built for multi-core processors, and it eats them like cornflakes. Beware. Another upgrade cycle is inbound. Having said all that, when you begin a map, you might be surprised just how staid, how close to a standard RTS, SupCom feels. All this tech, for the same game we've always played? Securing resources by dropping down mass extractors on defined points, whipping up a power-station, and a few factories? Yet gradually, as you take care of the early house-keeping, SupCom begins to show its ambition. Once a factory is up and running, you can play with some of the automation built into the interface. A repeat button on your factories lets you queue up construction tasks indefinitely. In SupCom's Einsteinian world, mass and energy are interchangable, and there's no resource cap. You can throw down as many power stations, as many factories, and as many mass fabricators as you like. Infinite resources are yours, if you wish. I've been in battles where I can produce a heavy tank every ten seconds. It sounds like the domain of the pure tank rush, but consider this: it takes a good two minutes to move an early force to your opponent's base. And by the time they've got there, your enemy has invariably invested in a tier 2 defensive line (SupCom's units and structures are built in tiers - each improving accuracy, range, potency, speed, and armour) that outclasses your expeditionary force. In fact, it's easy to 'turtle'. Resource production is both infinite and fixed: you don't have to leave your base, and you can still be swimming in energy. For some players, that's the perfect excuse to turn their entire economy over to defence, investing in gun emplacements, bubble shields, even walls. To crack that shell, you're going to need quite the tactical hammer. Welcome to tier four: experimental units. SupCom's greatest victory is in the sharply defined feel of each side. Despite the fact they have mostly similar units - boats, tanks, planes - they feel distinct. That's partly down to form: the Cybran forces are dark, scurrying, eight-legged robotic insects. The Aeon are sleek futurists; all moulded edges and slick metal. The UEF are bulky, brutish and belligerent: robots with a Rambo complex. But the feel is also a product of function. Take the tier one artillery. The Cybrans just lob shells that may or may not hit their target. No matter; a direct hit is devastating. The UEF have a similar idea - but their shells air-burst into four cluster-bombs. Any army caught in a sustained barrage will be in real trouble. The Aeon's artillery is my favourite, with its accurate slingshots of laser blue energy: a real fireworks display. But nothing says "distinct armies" like bringing a tier four experimental unit to a fight. These are the big boys, the toys you wheel out during the end game. They have titles like 'Maver', 'Galactic Colossus' and 'Fatboy', and they have the potential to shred every other unit in the game. They also take an age to construct, so they represent massive investments in resources and time. You could pump out 15 or 20 heavy siege bots for the same cost. Personally, I have a soft spot for the UEF's Fatboy: it's a heavy artillery piece, welded to a factory, and dropped on treads. In one skirmish game, it took about ten minutes to s-l-o-w-l-y inch its way across the desert. Ten tense minutes after which I realised that while its energy shield (a bright blue defensive bubble) could probably hold off a brief air assault, without any air cover, it was doomed. As it reached the first wall of a Cybran base, I was panickingly sending fighters to protect it: I needn't have worried. By the time they arrived, the Fatboy had won all by itself.
What's remarkable within these melees is the honest physics. We still see, in many strategy games, shells that redirect themselves as they fly, homing arrows, and missiles that pass through walls on the way to their target. SupCom has no truck with such fallacies. It fires shells the size of caravans at any point on the map, and what gets in the way, gets hit. I fell victim to such specific physics early on, when a wing of my bombers moved in on an artillery position - directly through its arc of fire. One shell clipped the leader, sending it into a death spiral. I've seen assault bots take tank shells aimed at the missile launchers behind, tanks skewered on the legs of a Monkeylord, and chain nuclear reactions as one nuke hit a power-station, which blew up another, which finally engulfed a commander. Sweet.
Worries? I'm most concerned about a balance issue. It's quite possible in the early game to put an opponent out of contention with a sneaky trick. This is fine; it's called good strategy. What's less fine is the revenge wronged players can wreak by marching their commander into your base and detonating the backpack nuke. It's funny the first time, a rare chance to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. But it can be inordinately frustrating in four player free-for-alls - condemning those who win an early fight to losing the late game undeservedly. My only other real worry is about the landscapes. Their massive scope has cost Supreme Commander the kind of detail and interactivity that we've seen in Company of Heroes. The only objects you'll really see other than your buildings and units are trees and cacti. There's nothing that can give you a sense of scale or theatre. It's only once a battle has been fought, when the deserts and islands are pockmarked with craters, or covered in the carcasses of dead tanks and transports, that these landscapes become places. You'll always remember the level that ended with a crashed Aeon UFO, proud even in defeat, its silver corpse pointing to its former home in the sky. Nevertheless, SupCom is a remarkable piece of work, and a worthy successor to Total Annihilation. Strategy games don't come this big, and this ambitious, and they never demand this much from you. Take command - if you think you can handle it.