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         When it comes to real-time strategy games, few developers have followed the philosophy that bigger is better.The battlefields never feel that large, and the focus is more on economics and tactics than it is on actual strategy. Well, Supreme Commander isn’t that kind of game. Instead, the long-awaited strategy game from Gas Powered Games is everything that was promised. This 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, you 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.

The single-player campaign is divided into three smaller campaigns, letting you battle from the perspective of each of the factions. Unlike those in most other RTS games, where all three campaigns would usually be tied together in a linear fashion to tell a bigger story, the campaigns in Supreme Commander all stand alone. Each faction fights for what it believes in, and hence, no side is really “evil.” It’s a nice touch, because that mentality captures the essence of war.

The game’s biggest asset is its sheer size, which is measured in virtual kilometers. Though you can battle it out on “small” maps that are a mere 5km-by-5km, the average maps are 20km-by-20km large, and the largest maps weigh in at a whopping 81km-by-81km.  Scout planes can be ordered to patrol the periphery of the maps, engineers can be given build commands to keep them busy for a long time, and armies can be sent on a zigzag path deep into enemy territory, all with a few clicks.

Often during the campaign, you’ll achieve a set of objectives only to watch the map then double in size, and then double again after you’ve achieved the next set of objectives. Each time the map grows, it unlocks more room to maneuver and more strategy. You might find a weak spot in the defenses and send bombers through it, then target antiaircraft positions to open the way for further air assaults. If you’re building nuclear missiles, you might build artillery positions to take out any strategic missile defenses, and once those are out, unleash nuclear missiles.

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. As the game is set thousands of years in the future, humanity has figured out how to transform matter and energy in a way that’s similar to the replicators on Star Trek. That means that a single Supreme Commander can take the raw materials of a planet and quickly build factories that churn out war machines.

One of the most frightening moments in Supreme Commander is when you’ve set up a good position and think you have the upper hand on the enemy when all of a sudden an experimental unit appears and you realize that while you were building other things, the enemy was concentrating on one of those. Then it’s a desperate fight to survive.One of the really impressive things about Supreme Commander is that everything in the game is simulated. This makes combat interesting, because inadvertent things can happen.While the pathfinding gets a little confused at times, the performance of the artificial intelligence is solid, particularly as an opponent.

The single-player campaign and the skirmish modes serve as a lengthy tutorial to the concepts of the game, and you’ll really have to apply all the lessons and tactics that you learn to compete in multiplayer, which is fun, brutal, and dynamic. Supreme Commander’s gameplay lends itself well to the multiplayer realm because it’s so wide open. For every move that you can come up with, the enemy can develop a counter. For instance, create a solid defensive line, and the enemy might bypass or simply fly over it, sending gunships to raid your economic base.

At the highest detail levels, Supreme Commander is incredible to look at. Seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of air, land, and naval units battling onscreen is amazing, and large battles are littered with smoke trailers, particle effects, and explosions. Meanwhile, watching a nuclear detonation slowly expand, with the shock wave destroying everything in its path and setting off a chain reaction, is bliss. Even more impressive is the ability to pull the camera back far enough to see the entire battlefield. Limited zoom has always been one of the primary frustrations in many RTS games, because you never could feel like you were getting a grasp on the battlefield. But in Supreme Commander, you can pull the zoom back far enough and feel like you’re really sitting back in a command bunker somewhere as you watch the military icons that represent your units move and fight onscreen. If you have two monitors, you can keep one zoomed in on the action while the other gives you the strategic view, and it’s very cool, though you’ll need a fairly advanced video card to support it. The good news is that if you have just one monitor, you can do a split-screen view with one half zoomed on the action and the other giving you the strategic view.

The downside is that Supreme Commander can bring the most modern PCs to their knees. Since the game is keeping track and simulating hundreds of units over such a large area, it doesn’t take much before the frame rate will start to stutter. On our test machine with a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, we experienced slight pauses on the humongous 81k-by-81k map. On smaller maps with a larger set of AI opponents, the action slowed to a virtual crawl as the system strained to keep up with the action. It’s doubtful that a PC has been built yet that can run Supreme Commander’s largest map with a full set of AI opponents at high graphics detail. Thankfully, you can adjust the graphical settings quickly and without having to restart the game, so if the battle starts to chug, you can simply go to the options menu and lower the visual detail to smooth out the frame rate.

Supreme Commander’s audio seems a bit muted, though that’s probably because you’re always watching the action from a considerable distance. The units make all the futuristic whirs and machine noises that you’d expect, though the highlight of the game’s audio is the martial music that changes tempo whenever something dramatic happens onscreen.Still, despite the hardware headaches, Supreme Commander is one of the most impressive real-time strategy games in recent years. This is a game that dares to be big, and it succeeds because it understands what strategy is about. Strategy is more than overwhelming the other side with sheer numbers. Strategy is about maneuvering, it’s about applying the right weapon at the right place at the right time, and it’s about rewarding creative thinking, and that’s what Supreme Commander does.

* Publisher: THQ
* Developer: Gas Powered Games

Minimum System Requirements:

* Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Vista
* 512 MB of System RAM
* 1.8 GHz Processor
* 8 GB Available Hard Drive Space
* 128 MB video RAM or greater
* DirectX 8 Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader 2.0 support (Nvidia 6×00 or better)
* Sound Card, speakers or headphones
* Broadband internet connection (DSL/Cable)

Recommended System Requirements:

* 3.0 GHz Intel or equivalent AMD processor or better
* 1 GB of System RAM or better
* 8 GB Available Hard Drive Space
* 256 MB video RAM, with DirectX 9 Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader 2.0 support (Nvidia 6800 or better)
* Internet connection with Cable/DSL speeds

enjoy the game…

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