Supreme Commander - Hands On Preview

Armchair tacticians should need little reminding of the significance surrounding THQ and Gas Powered Games' forthcoming PC release. Heralding the return of Chris Taylor to a genre he helped to evolve with the 1997 release of Total Annihilation (a game still being played passionately nearly ten years later), Supreme Commander comes with the expectations and demands of a fanbase that has waited patiently for his return.

With these expectations, TVG took a close look at the UEF campaign from a near-finished build days after confirmation of the game's gold status.

Set during the Quantum Age, Supreme Commander is cast against a back-story of quantum-travelling and the colonisation of mankind throughout the galaxy; a struggle to control the rapidly expanding "Earth Empire" and the subsequent collapse from escalating civil wars. Advances in technology allow a single man in a commander suit, "Supreme Commanders", to arrive on a distant planet and create an army of robots, tanks, ships, and aircraft within hours of touching down upon the surface.

Emerging from the 'Infinite War', a new government comes into force vowing to reach the worlds left abandoned by the Earth Empire. With promises of increased stability throughout the solar system, the 'United Earth Federation' (UEF) seeks to re-unite humanity. Meanwhile, a religious order of humans known as the 'Aeon Illuminate', have embraced the advanced teachings and technology of a highly evolved, yet extinct, alien species. Having learned from the alien species, the Aeon Illuminate believe that the collapse of the Earth Empire was due to the size that it has become, and that the only way to future prosperity is through the philosophical views of 'The Way'. Finally, the Cybran Nation is a race comprised solely of symbionts, humans who have received computer augmentations and outfitted with mutual AI. They fight for the liberation of their fellow Cybran from the oppressive UEF forces, who treat the symbionts as little more than human computers for menial tasks.

Recent titles such as Relic's 'Dawn of War' and 'Company of Heroes', Petroglyph's 'Empire at War' and The Creative Assembly's 'Total War Medieval '2, have put the genre back in good health after too many years of neglect. Supreme Commander should not only join this group when it's released next month, but also step outside the boundaries on one or two occasions and hint towards a further evolution of the genre.

In an attempt to put the 'S' back into the RTS, one of the most immediately noticeable features is the inclusion of a global view that presents the landscape in its entirety when the camera is fully zoomed out. Replacing units with symbols and stripping away the flora and fauna, a clean battlefield makes it easier to manage the units under your control and conceive more elaborate tactics against your opponent. Innovations continue to emerge whilst playing through this near-finished build of Supreme Commander, such as the advanced options that cover construction and transportation in the game. Chaining new buildings allows them to be constructed in a few short clicks, streamlining the tedium of basebuilding and providing a useful 'ETA' as to when everything will be completed. Even the act of getting from one side of the map to another has seen a number of innovations; with a couple of clicks, ferry routes can be established to automatically transport units between two points; patrol routes set out and attacks co-ordinated to ensure that all units from various places arrive to their destination at the same time! Routes are easily identified on the global map, and although it can become a tangled mess of lines, arrows and points that would make shame even Andy Gray and his electronic marker pen, the system is generally intuitive with waypoints that can be easily deleted or dragged around to modify the paths.

The automation of trivial tasks should hopefully ensure that Supreme Commander achieves its objective of allowing the player to focus purely on the battles themselves, something that is further assisted by what appears to be a subtle and dynamic resource system. Mass and Energy are the two resources in the game, each featuring in an unlimited supply similar to Total Annihilation. Balancing the production and consumption of Mass and Energy is the key to ensuring a steady economic rate, which in turn governs the creation of new units. Like Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander appears to reward continuous expansion, building bigger settlements and establishing greater armies.

Factories throughout the game have three tech levels to advance through, providing a variety of land, air and sea craft to take control, with a fourth 'experimental' level promising some of the most insane units you'll ever see on the battlefield. Balance is key to any RTS, but like Total Annihilation before it, Supreme Commander seems to do this in a slightly different way to the calculated method adopted by many other RTS titles.

Early missions in the UEF campaign initially take place on a restricted map, however, as the mission objectives expand with further challenges, so too the physical restrictions of the map. The 'S' talked about before could also be about the game's sense of scale when it comes to the hundreds of land, sea and air units of various magnitudes under your control that are waging a futuristic apocalypse on armies of a similar size. Objectives throughout each mission have a habit of developing and introducing various challenges beyond the ongoing war; reaching an allied settlement to repair its "" before it explodes and takes the whole place with it; escort missions for a city under siege,

Despite these features and Taylor's suggestions that Supreme Commander was a step away from the age-old tactic of amassing the biggest army and rushing, we were a little surprised to find this strategy working well during our brief playtest and actually encouraged by the mission objectives on occasions. We have little doubt that Gas Powered Games have continued to work on individual unit balance and that of the three factions since this build, and fully expect a simulated approach that feels sufficiently different to everything else around.

If Supreme Commander is to achieve the long-term appeal of Gas Powered Games previous RTS, then the inclusion of 'The Mods Manager' is fundamental to ensuring this. Unfortunately, this aspect of the game was missing from the preview build, but with the promise of creating the "most customisable" RTS ever made, TA fanatics should have something new to play with. Unfortunately, also missing from this preview build were the game's Multiplayer modes and the GPGNet system that governs Supreme Commanders online - rest assured, we don't expect Gas Powered Games to let anybody down in these areas.