accessOne of big shifts you have to accept when you start playing Supreme Commander—which I shall now name Greatest RTS of All Time—is adjusting to the sense of scale. Most real-time strategy games are focused on small-scale battles on relatively small maps. In Warcraft 3 and Starcraft, for example, you’re limited to a mere twelve units per control group, and the population cap ensures that a single army never gets particularly large. In the Command & Conquer games, it’s pretty rare to have more than twenty or thirty units in an army. I can destroy an entire base in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 with just nine units. Even in Command & Conquer Generals, ten Comanche’s (properly utilized) is usually enough to obliterate nearly any enemy force.
Not so in Supreme Commander. The scale is too grand. Thirty units might not even comprise a single assault party. It took me awhile to adjust to this, but now that I have, other RTS’s just don’t feel right. There’s really nothing quite like two Monkeylords marching towards an enemy base, shaking the earth as they go, with hundreds of smaller siege bots, mobile artillery platforms, and anti-air support vehicles bringing up the rear. Don’t forget the interceptors, gunships, and attack bombers flying overhead. And the attack submarines defending your amphibious destroyers off the coast, ready to attack.
I would’ve taken a screen shot, but there’s really no way to do the game justice in a screenshot. You can’t capture the awesomeness of three or four hundred units marching in formation, descending on an enemy base and wasting everything in their path. There’s nothing else like it in any RTS game I’ve ever played.
A lot of other little things help. The strategic zoom, which allows you to zoom out all the way and view the entire battlefield at once, is a feature sorely missing from every other RTS ever made. Order queuing, while not technically missing from most other modern RTS games, is so much better in Supreme Commander it’s an embarrassment. You can actually queue the construction of entire base in the first few minutes of any game. Mass extractors, power generators, factories, defensive structures; everything can be queued. You can lay out an entire base within the first few minutes of a game. And as soon as a factory is being built, you can start queuing up units, all the way up through the tech tree. If you were fast enough, you could have your entire base and army planned out and in construction–through all tech levels–within the first ten minutes of play.
I haven’t lost my love for other great RTS games, but Supreme Commander really is one of the biggest leaps in the RTS genre in many years. If you have a computer that can handle it’s ridiculous system requirements, I highly recommend it.