Supreme Commander Preview

Gargantuan

Rather than explain what each unit does and the intricacies of the attack, I simply want to convey a feeling, you’re in charge of an army on a massive scale fighting another bloke (or woman, no sexism at bit-tech) who’s also got an army on a massive scale. It feels balanced, it feels real and it feels rewarding when you win. This massive feel wouldn’t have been possible without the way the map works.

The game has previously been compared to a cross between standard RTS games and larger Risk-styled games and this is certainly noticeable when viewing the map. A scroll of the mouse wheel will zoom the camera right out (think Civilization 4) where you could zoom out to view the entire world. When you go into this mode you can still control all of your units, which will now be represented by small diagrams. From this vantage point you can survey the entire battlefield, and if you’ve built radars you might be able to see some of your opponent's units. Most importantly, though, is using this map view to devise your cunning strategic stunts to ensure victory.

Is this new gameplay type as revolutionary as it’s hyped to be? Well, yes and no. On a single monitor the usefulness is nowhere near as pronounced as when you utilise the game's dual monitor feature. With my two panels in front of me I was able to constantly have a handle on the war. On the left hand screen, I kept the far-out view so that I could spot any movements from my enemy. On my main panel I did most of my day-to-day military organisation: telling engineers what to build, manoeuvring troops around and the other operations essential to winning in Supreme Commander.


The mechanics of the game at this stage work well in multiplayer. As you progress in the game, collecting energy and mass, you advance the technology for each of your factories. A tier three naval factory, for instance, will produce far more advanced battleships and submarines and thus be more effective. My favourite unit has to be the spider-type creature. Not only does this shiny red behemoth fire a devastating laser from its head but it can crush other units as well as walk along the floor of a seabed – there’s something reminiscent of a cool B-movie when the spider emerge from the water onto the beaches and start firing its lasers into the enemy's base.

Dual Monitor

This dual screen goodness comes with a price, however. This is the first game to be designed with dual monitor in mind, but to run smoothly with that second monitor turned on and graphics turned up (not to the maximum but enough to make the game look pretty) you’re going to need a pretty beefy PC. It’s too early to run any extensive tests, but with my 3800+ Athlon 64 X2, Geforce 7800 GT and 1GB of RAM the game struggled with dual monitors. You can always stick with one monitor; however, it’s really cool to be able to use both monitors.

Oh yes, and upcoming patches are adding DirectX 10 support - hello, GeForce 8800.

High Hopes for Supreme Commander

The only problems with the game, if you ignore the problems with installing patches and what not, are the same problems you see with so many RTS games. Once the game has tipped the way of one player or group of players it’s pretty difficult to tip it back. For instance, in one water filled map, we began the game by both taking all the mass resources in our own halves. However, as soon as the opposite General destroyed one of my resources without me noticing it became a long hard slog where he always had the upper hand. After a few hours of hanging on he ended up killing me in a rather anti-climatic way. It felt, to me, as though once I had made that initial mistake there was nothing I could do to get myself back in the game. This isn’t a criticism of Supreme Commander in so much as it’s a criticism of the RTS genre as a whole which we hope SupCom can fix.

Overall, though, the feeling of excitement surrounding this game is certainly warranted. I enjoyed playing with the multiplayer despite the fact that it’s still not finished, and am chomping at the bit to get my hands on the completed game.

Then, maybe, I’ll be able to justifiably use my Gandalf the Grey voice and shout to the heavens: “I AM THE SUPREME COMMANDER!”