Chris Taylor enjoys his role as the comedian of the game industry. But underneath that facade is a hardcore real-time strategy gamer. With Supreme Commander for THQ, Taylor's Gas Powered Games is out to show that the RTS genre still has much to offer gamers. The vision for Supreme Commander is to create a game that has the scale and scope for huge battles fought by vast armies with futuristic weaponry.
- Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News
GamespotSource: http://www.gamespot.com
Supreme Commander is a game that's less concerned with the aesthetics of combat than it is with capturing a sense of awesome scale, though it does look amazing when armies clash. It's real-time strategy supersized. Instead of raising one battle group and racing across a small battlefield, players can raise multiple air, land, and sea battle groups and toss them at the enemies, or ferry an army via air transport around their defenses and land them in the rear, or send wave after wave of bombers to cripple their strategic defenses and then unleash nuclear hellfire upon them, or do much, much more. In most real-time strategy games, the act of building a factory on the battlefield is an act of utter contrivance, though in the fiction of Supreme Commander, it makes sense.
The good
Combat on an unprecedented scale: attack with unique land, sea, and air units and wage war across frozen tundras, scorching deserts and vast oceans. Devastating experimental unit will finish the job.
Genre-defining command & control: control your units from any vantage point. Issue orders from theater of war commander’s view, or zoom down into the heart of the battle and adjust your strategies on the fly.
Three unique factions battle for supremacy: unleash the most powerful weapon. In the galaxy, the Supreme Commander, and turn the tide of the infinite war once and for all.
IGNSource: http://pc.ign.com
E3 2006: Supreme Commander Update
Supersize me
The main thing to remember about Supreme Commander other than the ridiculously cool level of scale being implemented is that the development team is spending tons of time trying to improve just about everything about the genre. Some of the most notable improvements are made in the interface. Things like click and drag moveable waypoints, coordinated attacks where units pace themselves to arrive at the same time from different locations, pathfinding previews, automated base commanders, and transports that will automatically ferry units to the front are only the beginning of what these guys are adding.
Two other new features that these guys are happy about and showed for the first time today are rather simple things in theory but can potentially be really awesome features for gamers. The first is that Supreme Commander will offer dual monitor support so that players can watch two parts of the battle at once on full screens and control either one of them at any time. This could be useful for all kinds of strategic actions but probably will be most useful to keep one of the screens in zoomed out mode and control large groups of units to move on a larger scale while keeping another for tactical decisions.
Keeping with the ease of interface, the second new feature was the option for players to keep the UI on either the bottom or the side for players that have extra room on the sides thanks to the proliferation of widescreen monitors nowadays. Gas Powered even plans on releasing enough to mod makers that they should be able to create their own special interfaces along with all the other bits like AI routines and campaign maps.
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