Supreme Commander

[Aranthos]

Ok, so it's not axectly new, but having been released this year I can't really call it classic. Anyway, here we have a game that features 3 teams, the UEF, the Cybran and the Aeon. (people who know the game, or have played it or whatever, might wanna skip forward a few paragraphs, or leave this thread altogether, this is mostly background information and a review).

The UEF are "normal" humans, with big, well armoured tanks and guns that fire proper bullets. They are seeking to wipe out the other two factions, and in general their units are tougher than the other factions' kit. They like lead, armour, blocky shapes and the colour blue. The Cybrans are humans + AI + robotics. These guys are more versatile than either of the other factions, as displayed by their destroyers. Think big boat with guns. Then give it legs so it can walk on land. Cybran units are more general purpose than the other factions', and are also faster than the rest. They like lasers, sharp points and the colours red and black. The Aeon are religious fanatics. Their lives revolve around their religion/way of life called the Way. Apparently the Way was meant to bring peace to the crumbling Earth Empire (which collapsed and gave way to the UEF) and was tought to the Aeon by a now extinct alien race called the Seraphim. Their units are usually quite poorly armoured, but have more powerful weapons (mostly plasma and quantum distortion projectiles). They like powerful guns, smooth curves, hovering stuff and the colour green. (<and peace, ironically)

These three sides also have different goals. The UEF want to unite all of Earth's children (humans BTW) under a single banner, namely theirs. THe Cybrans want to be left alone. The Aeon want everyone to shut up and live together, while they spread their "Way". Of course, they can't all coexist peacefully, so there has been a bloody great big war going on for the past millenium between the three groups, and the game Supreme Commander puts your ass firmly in the pilot seat of a several hundred meter tall Commander suit. Then tells you to blow some shit up. It's based in the closing stages of the war, where the UEF have built a dirty great gun that can deliver any kind of payload to any planet in the known galaxy. The Cybrans want to nick it so they can transmit their liberation matrix to all the enslaved Symbionts in the galaxy, and blow up the quantum gate network (the system used by the factions to fly stuff around space) so they can live in peace for a few years. They Aeon want to nick it so they can stick the Princess's mind "into the quantum realm" and from there she will be able to tell every human in the galaxy what the Aeon wants to do (and brainwash them at the same time).

After the final cutscenes roll, there are a few short clips of what comes next...

Storyline over. When you play a game, you start off with your big metal commander suit being "quantum tunnelled" (fancy name for hyperspaced, warped, teleported etc.) onto a map somewhere. Commander builds some metal extractors, some generators and a factory, and not-quite-as-suddenly as he got there, the factories are building engineers to build more stuff, the commander has built a nuclear missile launcher into his backpack, and you've got an artillery gun firing shells some 10Km to the enemy outpost an eigth of the way across the map. The biggets maps the game comes boxed with are 6400 square kilometres. But that's ok, because each player (of up to can populate them with some 1000 units. And then any number of those could be a factory with 12 cannons, each capable of throwing houses out of their barrels, caterpillar tracks and an aircraft repair pad on it's back (The UEF Fatboy). Or they could be a Cybran Monkeylord, a dirty great walking beastie that can go underwater, shoot down aircraft, level whole bases with one swing of it's microwave laser, blow up tanks with any of its 8 defense turrets (that fire rounds the size of small cars) or just sit there and be pretty.

Or they could be Mech Marines, 5 meter tall cannon fodder, but they're no fun, so I'll keep talking about cool stuff. A nuclear/antimatter/quantum disruption missile, that takes a few minutes to build, can level areas of about 10Km diameter. The flash of light can be seen illuminating the world 20Km away, and the mushroom cloud reaches up some 5 or 10Km. I'm not sure, you don't get tapemeasures in this game.

My favourite feature (which I now end up yelling at every other RTS I play for not having) is the zoom. If you don't think you can see enough, pull the camera back. Still not enough? Pull it back some more. And so it goes. Want to see the whole map? Go right ahead, just scroll back further and further. Then, put your cursor somewhere you want to go, and zoom in. THe camera zooms onto the cursor. That might sound gimmicky, but believe me it's effort saving. Then there's scale. The cannon on a heavy tank is about the same size as the anti-tactical-missile chainguns on a boat, which in turn are smaller than the anti-air guns. Of which a battleship has 14. A fairly large part of the tank could fit down the barrel of one of the battleship's main cannons, of which there are 9, in groups of three, and eahc group can attack a different target, meaning some serious hell for any single unit that gets in the battle ship's way. A submarine is about as long as this ship is wide, just for the record.

The little 5 meter tall Mech Marine (A.K.A. cannon fodder) I mentioned earlier, becomes about 1 pixel big when zoomed not-very-far-out-at-all. So every unit has icons to represent it in the Strategic view. Underneath the icon are little white bars to show what tech level it is, so you can tell your level 3 siege assault bots from your level 1 cannon fodder. Buildings are squares, boats are semicircles, ground units are diamonds, planes are triangles, and big contraptions are circles. If a unit is seen on radar, it is a grey square. If you get visual contact with that unit and it leaves vision range (but is still seen on radar) you can see the proper icon for it. Should it leave radar, your systems lose track of it so it becomes a grey square again.

In all, an AWESOME game. Only issue is that it is pretty much unplayable on any single core rig, not that many people have them anymore...

Oh yeah, and the AI is good without cheating, unlike practically every other RTS I've ever played.

I'm gonna end it here so poeple actually have something to talk about, I don't wanna create a dead topic.
_________________
Blake: "Tally ho, chocks away old chap"
Me: "What are you, a 1920s pilot? Cram it."

Yes, that actually happened. In Algebra 1. In the States. To me.

[Parsifal]

My question to you would be, how similar is it to "Total Annihilation"? I know its from the same creator (people?) and I played quite a bit of TA (heh), especially with this really kicking "Star Wars" mod that changed the fleets. That game was all about massive swarms of troops, constant production built off of metal extractors and various other buildings, and there were these mega-mega super weapons that you'd get rushed hard for even considering...not that you weren't anyway, it was just more concerted at that point.
Chode 1: "Dude! He's got 2 missile pads up!"
Chode 2: "Dewd! Get his lame ass!"
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<(@_@<), <(@_@)>, (>@_@)>, <(@_@)>, <(@_~)>, <(@_@)>, <(@_@<)

[Aranthos]

TA = awesome
SupCom = TA + more awesome.

Seriously, I can't actually think of a single thing about TA that SC didn't improve on. The factories that would once queue up hundreds of units with shift click can now be told to repeatedly build a set of units. The nukes that were sometimes used to crack defences have been made bigger and more explodey. The commander that held the whole game together is upgradable (by the end of the game he will be able to repair himself/blow stuff up better [right arm], launch nuclear missiles/teleport/have engineering drones [back], and build any building in the game/something else I can't remember. [left arm]). Sadly you only get one upgrade choice per area, but I guess there's gotta be limits.

SC is about unittypes too. On TA you couldn't (or I couldn't anyway) win by spamming unit X. SC is pretty much the same. I'll same the explanation (unless you want it) and say that if you're attacking a base you'll want artillery/ballistic rocket launchers, tanks, anti-air, radar jammers, engineers and probably some air support. It's also fun to send in some naval units to help the fight, but since there's not often enough water to warrant it...

About unit production - by the late game I usually have an economy going that can spit out a tech level 3 assault bot every second ro two. If you throw 100 of those at an enemy, they usually know about it. My favourite thing though is that you can mix and match unit construction orders. Factories can have their orders queued up, for example 4 light tanks, 3 artillery, 2 anti air and 2 radar jammers. THen you can set it to repeat those orders. When the orders are given they appear on a bar at the bottom of the display from where you can add more, subtract units and drag them around (dragging of orders courtesy of an interface mod) to fit your needs. If you have one factory set to build unit combination X, you don't have to set other bewly built factories to build unit combinaion X either, you can select them and right click the first factory (giving them an assist order) and they will start building the next unit in the first factory's build queue.

And yes, SupCom is about constant streams of units flowing from your base, fueled by an neverending economy.
_________________
Blake: "Tally ho, chocks away old chap"
Me: "What are you, a 1920s pilot? Cram it."

Yes, that actually happened. In Algebra 1. In the States. To me.