After some difficulties, I finally received the game I had long awaited, Supreme Commander, the spiritual offspring of Total Annihilation. And boy I gotta say that I really love it, therefore I'm going to start writing SupCom related news from this point on to Cadred!

Supreme Commander was released just a few weeks ago. It's the "sequel" of Total Annihilation, a great RTS from around a decade ago. Like it's predecessor, it provides huge scale metal bashing. Everything starts with the Commander unit. You'll build a base balancing between the two resources, mass and energy, to create an economy, and gather an army to defeat your infidel opponents.

I won't go into bigger details in the game but here's a short explanation. You can google for more answers.

In Supreme Commander everything starts with The Commander. Units and buildings are divided in 5 technology levels. Tier 0 is The Commander, tier 1-3 are the basic units and buildings, tier 4 is the tier of super weapons. Commander can build tier 1 buildings. The factories (air, land, sea) can build engineers to build same tier buildings, and naturally war machines for some butt kicking. Factories can be upgraded to tier 2 and 3 to get their respective units, and engineers to build that tier buildings.

Units are pretty generic and they don't differ much between the three factions, Cybran, UEF and Aeon, except for few differences. Each faction though has it's own tier 4 super units, 3 per each faction. These are awfully powerful and hard to build units, but one of these can decide the winner. In small maps there isn't usually time to build one (or two :) though. In the smallest maps you usually have to do some lower level unit management, but you still have tens of units. The small maps are good for understanding the usage of every unit, since in the big maps where you have hundreds of units, losing 100 doesn't matter that much (unless they happen to be all your tier 3 units).

I gotta remind that the nukes are really pretty, and you'll see at least one going off in each match! The Commander explodes with a nuclear blast when it loses all it's health. In the smallest maps it's around half of the map. If you're (un)lucky, you'll see two, when your own Commander is standing next to the other fellow. You can also build nuke silos that can bring carnage straight to your friends front door, unless he/she has built anti-missile protection.

Supreme Commander has also an awesome user interface, though after getting such a great environment to command your army, you'll want more. I hope some new handy features will be added in the upcoming patches. You'll really have to try it out (download the demo at the end of the article) to see what I mean, since explaining doesn't display it's superiority.

Here are some promotial shots from the developer GasPoweredGames, with short captions telling what the picture is about. The game looks pretty, though there isn't time to watch the pretty scenes if you want to win in the multiplayer matches.

Click to enlarge - Cybran faction supre unit: Monkeylord (tier 4). It can singlehandedly sweep hundreds of tier 1 units without a problem.

Click to enlarge - UEF faction's unit carriers loading tier 1 units for airtransport in their base.

Click to enlarge - UEF air superiority fighters (tier 3) captured in the same picture with Cybran's walking destroyer ships (tier 2)

Download the demo! If you are interested in RTS-games I really encourage you to try the demo. Though it doesn't provide multiplayer, you can still get some idea of the scale and game mechanics from it.

Download Supreme Commander demo from Peliplaneetta.net

If this link doesn't work, you can try googling around or then search the demo from some torrent site, since they often provide far better bandwidth than free download sites.

You can also check (for example) Gamespot's Supreme Commander review to get more in-depth analysis of the game. My conclusion is that it's really worth trying, since it really brings something new to the modern-day RTSes.

If you're a Finnish player, be sure to join #supremecommander.fi at Quakenet.

Let's share some devastation in the upcoming battles!