What would a decent game be without all the eye-candy?

The visuals in Forged Alliance have been somewhat improved over Supreme Commander, with the most interesting change being the way the game handles the fog of war. Instead of revealing and hiding patches in a rough circular area around the unit every few moments, each unit has a perfect circular viewing range that gets updated with every frame. This eliminates the issues from the original game where you'd wait for your strategic bombers' view radius to be updated so that you could alter their course away from the enemy AA turrets and instead the revealed area travels smoothly with the units. Besides this, there have been a lot of minor changes, such as the detail being increased on each unit or more spectacular explosions / effects, all of which add up to an overall more impressive total.

The textures have clearly been cleaned up since the original release. Whilst you most probably won't ever zoom in this far, it's nice to know that those tiny icons actually look like this!

As a comparison, this is what the ACU looked like in Supreme Commander.

The space consuming old default UI is also gone, and replaced by faction specific ones, with matching themes. Unfortunately, whilst they do look great, things such as the state of the build queue loop/pause buttons aren't that easy to make out any more. The build icons have been grouped by type, so that the buildings used for resource collection are separated from those that allow for unit production or the base defences. Whilst this can be handy, it can also be slightly annoying for those that are used to the old system.

The soundtrack, once again, fits the atmosphere of the game very well, and offers enough variety so that it doesn't get annoying, but subtle enough not to distract from the game. The voice acting is excellent most of the time, although listening to Dr. Brackman say "Oh my, yes" for the n+1th time can get pretty agonising. I must admit though, that I do miss the unit acknowledgements that are typical for RTS titles - even though I do know that the ACU and the SCUs are the only piloted units in the entire game, some feedback similar to that in Total Annihilation would have been nice.

The System Requirements

Supreme Commander has always been known to be incredibly harsh, even to higher end PCs, but the situation has been somewhat improved through patches released shortly after the vanilla version's release. Forged Alliance's system requirements are somewhat similar to that of the patched Supreme Commander (although the performance seemed to be better with SC), with a few issues resolved. The game is partially scalable in terms of graphics, although a lot of the settings don't actually improve the visuals/performance all that much. The biggest difference comes from setting the fidelity option to medium compared to low, with the high setting being a barely notable difference. Whilst adding a lot of extra details such as higher texture settings are neat for taking screenshots, it hardly affects the game experience, since most of the time the player will be zoomed out far enough for the difference between for example medium and high texture detail to be basically non-existent.

The jump from low...

...to medium settings is huge...

...whilst high details barely make a difference, unless you zoom in all the way.

Unfortunately, the game is incredibly CPU demanding, and as soon as a lot of units are roaming around, the game speed reduces beyond playable levels. I'd strongly advise anyone to not try and play Forged Alliance on single core CPUs: even if you think you can cope with the jerkiness of the later single-player missions, it simply won't be enough for multiplayer. The game speed depends on the slowest CPU performance out of all players involved, and someone playing with a single-core CPU brings the game to a halt quickly, and the result will be that every player will quit sooner or later once it becomes unbearable. Even a slow dual core processor fixes the jerky gameplay and constant pauses associated with single core CPUs; beyond that, the CPU speed only defines how much the game will slow down. Another important thing to have for Forged Alliance is at least 2GB of RAM for larger multiplayer matches, although 1GB can be enough for smaller 2vs2 games.