Core Competence

The Core... I mean UEF, Commander - er, ACU

Although Supreme Commander is being advertised as Total Annihilation's "spiritual sequel", so little has changed in the game's play and feel that the game could even be called Total Annihilation 2007. It is obvious that Chris Taylor believes in his classic design: unit and building trees, interface decisions and map design all show TA's heritage. The game engine is certainly new, with great and innovative support for available technology, but what it does is very familiar. Despite "all-new intellectual property (IP), game and universe" (quote from the official Supreme Commander FAQ), the game still features human and cyborg nations fighting in an unending, galactic struggle, armies created from nothing but mass and energy by huge, biped, mechanical commander units by means of nanolathing, and so on. The most immediately noticeable unit balance changes compared to TA are Shield Generators and Omni Sensor Arrays, which make it possible to defend against super artillery and cloaking in the final phase of the game, and the lack of flying constructor vehicles. Instead of looking at unit types and balance - the technology in Supreme Commander - in this review we're going to concentrate on the technology behind the game, and how it affects your experience.

Zooming in

You may have noticed that most of the screenshots so far have been from the intro movie, campaign cutscenes and the strategic map, rather than showing the map zoomed to tactical viewing distance, a typical RTS point of view. The reason for this is twofold: we wanted to simulate the nice first impressions you get when actually playing the game, as well as the fact that you actually spend relatively little time watching your units up close. When you do, though, this is what you'll see (depending on your hardware configuration):

Lowest settings. The publisher's recommended system runs this scene just barely adequately at 15 frames per second.

Medium settings. The game looks much better with shadows and more realistic lighting, but the recommended system renders just 10 frames per second.

Graphics fidelity at high presets. The ground textures and shadows are slightly more detailed. The frame rate stays at or slightly below 10, but any scrolling over different units or areas drops it below 5, as new textures are loaded.

Let's get this out of the way right here: there is no way you'll be playing Supreme Commander with a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, even though the publisher claims you can. You know there's a problem when the pre-rendered opening demo stutters, and sure enough: even the first campaign missions are practically unplayable simply because of the processor bottleneck. In fact, to enjoy most of what the game has to offer, your system must be up to the recommended spec. Even then, be warned: you will probably drop graphics detail to low (and ugly) settings just to keep your machine from choking in skirmish and multiplayer games. With the recommended 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 plus GeForce 6800 combination, tweaking graphics fidelity down a little from the medium presets made the game just about playable, even when zooming in on the action. That is, until the later stages of the game, when there can be close to 1000 units on the map, even in two-player games. In such a situation the poor old CPU just couldn't keep up, and frame rates dropped to below ten frames per second. Having your system bog down just when the game events are heating up is a painful experience. Supreme Commander lives up to TA's legacy by choking on most contemporary systems, but the publisher should have been more honest about it.