Supreme Commander Review

Supreme Commander’s single player campaign is a series of missions that are connected with a primary end target for each of the factions. The story is sometimes interesting but can be fairly generic and predictable. Missions are often seen from multiple sides allowing you to already have an understanding of the world layout based on your experience as another faction. Usually a mission starts off with only a small portion of the game world revealed, after a few objectives are completed more of the map is revealed usually with a larger opposing force and possibly a few upgrades unlocked. This map expansion usually happens around three times during a mission. Not only does this mean you need to expand your base but often it means time to rethink your defenses now the enemy is elsewhere. Then you need to transport your existing units elsewhere, thankfully the ability to drag patrol and ferry points makes this easy. Mass and energy need to be managed carefully throughout base and unit construction. If mass is in short supply buildings and units will take much longer to construct putting you at a heavy disadvantage. The assist feature for engineers and other units helps construction and other coordination. You can set up a series of production queues to get your economy going and you can focus on other things requiring more management. This includes having several patrolling engineers repairing any damage taken to structures or units in order to keep your base well maintained. Very few of the single player missions will have your base under constant barrage forcing you to attack, you can usually attack when the time is right.

The battles themselves can take minutes to commence due to the large distances that need to be traversed, transport ships and a ferry system can greatly reduce this time. Once the battles start your units can be wiped out quickly if you opponent has good counter units. After the battle is complete you may again need to churn out another score or more of units and the process repeats. When you decide to move into an enemy base your units might be swatted like flies if the defensive setup is solid and you present them with low tech units. Over time this can become frustrating but progress is inevitable and the opponent slowly reduces to cinders when they have to maintain their base and you set about extending yours. Experimental units are only allowed to be built on the last mission for each faction. These behemoths have insane health amounts and can do some serious damage to a base. Often the mission ends with one of the commanders succumbing to an overwhelming amount of firepower ending the game with a huge explosion. Sometimes the AI commanders are a bit suicidal and will rush your wall of tech 3 units instead of staying in the safer confines of their base. The downside is that if they are not the final commander of that mission all of your units go nearby down with the huge explosion.

There is more to Supreme Commander than just making mass units and the game gradually attracts you until you are hooked. You need to set up anti-missile defenses, load nuclear missiles and watch your radar for incoming units. Shields need to be managed in terms of power and damage sustainability. Formations become incredibly important, heavy balances between units and the direction of attacks are possibly more important than other RTS games especially when shielding and stealth of units come into play. Patrol routes and attack times need to be coordinated or the battle will be lost. The AI is not poorly scripted so you can’t set up defenses on one side and get away with it during missions. You need to pay close attention to a huge battlefield and constantly zoom in/out to determine the next course of action. Supreme Commander does suffer slowdowns when unit counts continue to rise, most of these slowdowns occur when in battle and the units are thinking on their own and the trajectory of every missile/laser is calculated. When you have reach max unit count and have numerous units on patrol, dozens of shields active, production commencing and nuclear explosions going off prepare to suffer some serious frame rate drops. Although it needs to be said that I kept wanting to play the game even though I was getting single digit frames per second in several of the missions. Even on low settings the game is rather CPU bound and the graphics will not astound. The most drastic frame rate drops are noted on the last missions involving the Black Sun super weapon where there are a considerable amount of units and structures.

The game is so large that at times you’ll want to be zoomed out to see a great deal of the battlefield, in this view the units are all different icons and the missiles are all single pixels but the game play itself does not seem to suffer because you are viewing such a huge battlefield. In fact the missiles are often easier to see contrasted against the background and can help you determine what your units are attacking. During the single player game the CGI characters “assisting” you tend to pop up while you are playing and repeat the various objectives you are trying to achieve. This happens far too often and because the objectives can be viewed easily this just serves to annoy just as you prepare a huge force to attack. Some of the time the reminders are not at all friendly depending on the characters. Couple that with the rather rude takeover of your camera when you destroy a minor objective in order to focus on that objective, ignoring the fact that you were focusing on it anyway.

Missions can easily last hours which is great but the unit traveling times are probably more than many would prefer to sit through. Sometimes you might feel helpless if the enemy has breached your base. The AI is a little funky when it comes to sending units to where you want, especially the naval units when they have to navigate around tight spaces together. Low tech units are somewhat bland and hard to distinguish but the different factions have a fairly unique look. The save system does not include mission number or time of save which means you need to carefully label all of your saves or have a good memory, once unlocked missions and videos can be played at any time. In some ways I felt the game only really started to get going in the campaign once you start building tech level 3 units and above, only then did I feel I had some serious firepower.