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For example, I recently played against a guy who loved to rush. I set up some point defence towers while I upgraded my resources as fast as possible, reaching tech level 2 while he was still building more factories to throw more and more units against me. I built an artillery emplacement to fire on his island only a short distance away across a river. This was working great until I noticed a group of icons moving up the river towards me. He had secretly built a fleet of destroyers, which promptly wiped out my base. My point is that rushing is just one tool in the shed.



The graphics are nothing special. They do the job, but really they couldn’t be called “next-gen”. I think this is fine for two reasons; to get full control you probably won’t be looking too closely anyway, and any better detail with this many units would require the kind of computer geeks dream of after too much spicy food. Most of the game is spent zoomed out quite a distance in order to command all of your troops. You won’t spend much time looking at the units, although they do look decent. When zoomed out, the units become represented by icons which have a shape, symbol and tech level number. At a glance, I know exactly what that unit is.



Technical requirements for Supreme Commander are more determined by the number of units than anything else. Calculating all of those units moving, aiming and firing at once, plus production and resource calculations, takes quite a toll on the CPU. A multi-core processor, decent graphics card and a nice chunk of RAM (1 - 2GB is considered the minimum) will serve you well in this game. Still, the game can chug in large fights. Though this can be explained by the above excuse, I wonder why Total Annihilation ran quite nicely with similar quantities of units and similar projectile calculations.



Supreme Commander uses real ballistics. Each shell, bullet and laser beam is a real entity which flies until it hits something. If it hits a friendly unit on the way, bad luck. The system leads to realistic battles, introducing some randomness to each fight. Simply having one more tank than the enemy in a fight does not assure you victory.

The weakest part of the game is undoubtedly the AI. I regularly see enemy engineers standing stationary against a cliff face for no apparent reason. Turrets fire at enemies who are clearly behind a mountain, wasting their time. They do not break off their useless assault on the mountain’s flora even when enemy units walk right up to it and blast away at it. Large groups of units have huge problems moving with each other, though simply holding the ctrl key when clicking will send them in formation.