Supreme Commander

Written by Jason Cisarano  on February 12, 2007

Hands-On Preview: Sci-Fi RTS Supersized

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Late in 1997, an RTS called Total Annihilation was born into this world, and it was good. The game redefined the genre, as they say. Players loved the eye candy of the realistic 3D terrain, but even more they respected the fact that the terrain mattered in the battles. To this day, die-hard fans stick with TA because it is offers a tactical challenge, rather than being just another build-rush-repeat game. Its forums are still active all across the Internet, and the DIY types are still cranking out new maps and mods for its eight-year-old engine. Ain't love grand? But Supreme Commander, a game some call a spiritual sequel to Total Annihilation, isn't looking for your love. SupCom is coming at you on February 20th, looking to knock you down with everything it's got: huge maps, three playable factions, a slick interface, and brace of nukes just to keep things frosty. At E3 2006, a year before its launch date, it took a basketload of best of show and editor's choice awards home to Gas Powered Games. So when I finally got my hands on the single-player demo, I knew that it was time to put this contender to the test.

At first glance, Supreme Commander has a lot in common with every other RTS you've ever played. The galaxy is at war, and three powerful, but relatively balanced factions are ripping each other apart in the attempt to come out on top. The story might be a bit different in that this is a thousand-year war in a hard science fiction setting nearly two thousand years into the future, and all the factions are humans of one flavor or another.

For starters, there's the United Earth Federation. When the Earth Empire collapsed some 600 years ago, the military took over to keep what was left of the Empire running. The problem is, the UEF likes things their way. Their totalitarian government keeps Cybran slaves, and their goal of reuniting the galaxy means pretty much one thing: UEF rule.

The Cybran Nation is the second playable faction, and not surprisingly, their primary goal is to free the enslaved Cybrans and free themselves of UEF oppression. Cybrans are a special kind of symbiont: a human brain combined with an AI mind. The symbionts were originally people who volunteered to be УtwinnedФ with the AI in order to serve as leaders and explorers, but when they broke away to form their own colonies, it became clear that the Empire saw them as slaves, not equals.

The third group, the Aeon Illuminate is the most mysterious of the three. When all the colonies in a particular sector lost contact with Earth after humanity's first contact with an alien race, they were thought to have been lost. In reality, they had assimilated into the alien culture and taken on the alien religious and social beliefs. These Seraphim, as they call themselves, now offer the UEF and Cybran Nation the chance to become part of this great unionЧeither by choice or by force.

So what's going to set Supreme Commander apart from the rest? First off is its massive scale. The battlefields here cover thousands of square kilometers of terrainЧthese are distances that require you to move troops by air transport. The terrain in the demo is rather blandЧlots of desert stretching out to the horizonЧbut the game promises a variety of battlefields on a variety of planets, from tropical forests to swampy wetlands to icy tundra. One map in the demo includes a wide, navigable waterway that the Aeon enemy can use to quickly move battleships and submarines in range of your base.

As you'd expect, the huge maps mean that you'll be able to amass huge, varied armies. The scale allows for plenty of room to maneuver dozens of units, and the developers capped the number of units at 500. You canЧand shouldЧbuild a combined-arms force that includes ground, sea and air forces. Early levels in the demo have you playing as Cybran and allow you to build several types of assault bot, tank and mechanized artillery. Also available are scout planes, bombers, fighter jets and transports. Since they support one another's strengths and weaknesses, you'll want to make sure your army has a mix of all of these types.

In order to help you deal with these supersized maps and armies, Gas Powered Games has given Supreme Commander an interface with plenty of features that make your life easier without oversimplifying the game. The scale of the game screams out for a long-distance view, but instead of giving you just a traditional minimap (thought that's there if you want it), SupCom includes a seamless zoom from an extreme closeup of a single unit out to a strategic map that covers the whole battlefield. It's like the zoomable views in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War or Rome: Total War, only with the emphasis on going further out rather than in. The strategic view is so useful, that you'll likely find yourself using it more than the closer views and missing out on the eye candy built into the units. The game offers a solution in that it includes native support for both widescreen and dual-monitor setups. In dual-monitor mode, you can set up different views on each screen, using one for a strategic view and the other for detailed views of the battlefield. Just the idea of playing the game across two monitors had me ready to pre-order on the spotЧit gave me the feel of being at a command center somewhere deep under the Rocky Mountains. In practice, though, the dual monitor setup wasn't quite as slick as I hoped. It added a small glitch in which mousing to the edge of the screen no longer scrolls the map left and right. And the mouse controls in general didn't work as smoothly on my second monitor. A similar split-screen mode for a single monitor has been talked about, but isn't present in the demo.

There is also a slew of handy control options that take the pain out of managing your troops. For instance, you can program flying transports to ferry units automatically from one location to another. Combine this with the ability to loop factories through a construction cycle and you'll end up with a continual supply of fresh bodies anywhere on the map. It's worth noting, though, that the only actual human body in the game is the Supreme Commander, one per faction. All other units are AI-controlled machines. Other movement commands are made easy by the ability to set units to patrol areas or by the ability to set multiple waypoints for any movement with a simple shift-click system. One tool, though, is brilliant and essential for coordinating your combined assaults. By first ordering your slowest unit to a destination and then hitting shift before selecting and ordering subsequent units to move to the same location, you'll get a devastating coordinated attack in which all units arrive on target at the same time.

At the early levels, the units will be familiar to anyone who has played any RTS. Each faction has its own version of these basic unitsЧit isn't until further along in the tech upgrade system that the firepower starts to build, the factions really start to diverge from one another, and the game really gets interesting. At the highest tech level, each faction's tech tree culminates in УexperimentalФ units that are extremely expensive in terms of resources and construction time, but fielding one of them can turn the tide of a battle. Strategic nuclear weapons, long-range artillery that can reach across any map, massive, mother-ship style flying saucersЧthese super-sized units promise to add a lot of excitement to the SupCom endgame. The diversity here means that you'll need to know your enemy: if a faction's weapon tree includes nukes, you have to plan for that by building the proper shields.

All of this building, though, takes time, and as you'd expect, can slow down the pace of the game. I'm not a hurried player of any gameЧI enjoy the journey of play as much as the victoryЧbut the campaign maps in the demo each took me at least two hours to play. Building a sizable army takes plenty of time, and certain units and upgrades can take even longer. Upgrades to a Supreme Commander to get him a better weapon, shield, or eventually a tactical nuke can tie up all of your resource production unless you've already amassed substantial reserves and upgraded your various resource generators. Experimental units take even longerЧwithout a serious number of upgraded engineer units and advanced power generators devoted to the project, they can take an hour or more to build.

All of this background, though, doesn't have much to do with how the combat actually plays out on the ground. When I hit the field for my part in the Thousand-Year-War, I was ready for a high-adrenaline experience. A couple of my favorite RTSs are Warhammer 40,000:Dawn of War and Close Combat: Invasion Normandy, two games that throw you into the fight right away and keep the action coming. Both of those games put you close to the action, and in the case of Close Combat, each of your troops has a name and follows you from one fight to the next. Combat in Supreme Commander feels more sterile, at least in the Cybran faction, which is the only playable faction in the demo. The tanks and robots blast at one another with laser cannons and missiles from a distance, and using the strategic map keeps the player at a distance from the units, especially when it's zoomed out enough that individual units are replaced by red and green icons. The Supreme Commander experience was more about organizing forces, laying out their movements, and planning a long-term strategy. It's about orchestrating the deployment of a huge army in order to conquer lots and lots of ground.

Managing so many units is no small affair, but add to that an AI system that promises to model personality, and you've got a challenging game. Some AI will tend to build and rush, while others will favor turtling. The idea is that you'll never know what to expect when you go up against the computer. The early levels available in the demo aren't too difficult, but later levels are said to be more demanding. And if that's not enough for you, the game offers multiplayer co-op and skirmish modes for up to eight players at a time.

Grognards will love the fact that realistic trajectories are modeled for every projectile in the game, creating a much less canned experience than gunfire elsewhere. Since bullets and missiles actually have to travel to their targets before hitting them, unexpected things can happen on the way. Another unit could move in the way, for instance, or the target could move out of the line of fire. Most games don't simulate ballistics, they simply calculate a hit or miss at the moment of firing.

I can't let this preview end without letting you know that this is one good looking game, from the opening cinematic to the menus down to the smallest units and the ground underneath them. Most impressive are the explosions, especially the larger ones, which are handsomely devastating and accompanied by suitably weighty sound effects. The ground and water also deserve mention. For such large maps, there's plenty of detail and texture in the look of the ground when you're zoomed in close. And the water shows a realistic sense of depth with moving waves and reflections.

As you might expect, all of this graphics and physics processing means that Supreme Commander will demand some beef from your PC. For instance, the processor requirement is 1.8 GHz min and 3.0 recommended. SupCom is somewhat scalable, however, so those who haven't upgraded lately should be able to get by with turning down the eye candy. On the other hand, owners of higher-end rigs will be pleased to know that the game will make use of some of those Уnext-genФ features. For instance, Vista users will see some DX10 effects. Even more exciting is how the game will make use of multi-core processors. It will automatically divide tasks up depending on how many cores are available. One might be devoted to AI while another is spending its time calculating bullet physics and so on.