The Supreme Commander team will always side with fun over realism, which is certainly the case with air combat. So even though the game takes place in the far future where giant robots slug it out on alien planets, air combat itself takes a few pages from the history books. The design team structures air combat more like World War II (with slower planes, pilots that would dogfight, and heavy bombers that had to be escorted) as opposed to modern air warfare (where pilots would push a button to launch a missile miles away from the target, then veer off and zoom away at several times the speed of sound.) [Read More]

During our demo (and brief hands-on time) with Supreme Commander, by far the unit that stole the show was the Battleship. As mentioned in our preview, it dwarfed land units. It was massive. It bristled with guns: 4 AA guns, an anti-air phalanx machinegun, and multiple turrets bristling with cannons intended for shore bombardment. A battleship could fire it's explosive ordinance several miles inland -- you did not want one of these lurking off the coast near your base...[Read More]

As Chris Taylor puts it, "you can't just build in Moscow and click on Paris." Air units and even certain naval units can traverse the massive Supreme Commander maps quickly, but the biggest guns that you can produce in bulk will have to travel across the land. So the question becomes: how to get them there? [Read More]

Taylor: As a game designer I have my own view of what I think an RTS is all about. When I sat down to design Supreme Commander, I tried to visualize the experience in fresh and interesting new ways. The first was my realizing that although we call this genre "Real-Time Strategy," it should have been called "Real-Time Tactics" with a dash of strategy thrown in. The goal with Supreme Commander was to really deliver the strategy, by opening up the game to an enormous theatre of war, with some incredible, never-seen-before Super Units...[Read More]

Total Annihilation was one of the best RTS games ever created, and to this day still has a following in the mod community. Yet, despite all the fanatical loyalty behind this futuristic game, even the fans agree that one of the weakest parts of the game was the story. While some may argue that you don't need a solid story to have a good RTS, the popularity of titles like StarCraft and the Warcraft series are enhanced by a story that followers of the various sides can sink their teeth into.
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Imagine, if you will, a tank. It's a full-on beast: wide base, massive treads, two enormous cannons, independently rotating turret, surface details including antennas and whirling radar dishes, you name it. As it rumbles powerfully along the 3D landscape it leaves twin tread marks in the sand. Smaller vehicles will skitter around it, powersliding across the terrain, but the tank is a rock: it moves with weight and power... [Read More]