Supreme Commander lets you build five nuclear missiles and keep them all in one silo. Edge, previewing it at the end of 2006, picked out that detail as the game’s character in miniature: “That’s not an incidental fact; it’s a hallmark.” It was Chris Taylor’s first real-time strategy game since Total Annihilation almost ten years earlier, and it took that game’s kind of war, massed robot armies on huge maps, as far as a 2007 PC could carry it.
Its signature feature is the camera. “A twirl of the mouse wheel pulls the camera back to reveal the entire battlefield, polygonal troops becoming simplified into icons,” Edge’s review explained. “The game can be played entirely from this high level.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Gas Powered Games, the studio Chris Taylor founded after leaving Cavedog in 1998.
- Publisher: THQ.
- Released: February 2007, for Windows PCs.
- Factions: the United Earth Federation, the Cybran Nation and the Aeon Illuminate.
- Expansion: Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (November 2007), which added a fourth faction, the alien Seraphim.
- Sequel: Supreme Commander 2 (2010), published by Square Enix.
A spiritual sequel
Taylor had designed Total Annihilation (1997) at Cavedog, whose parent company belonged to GT Interactive, and the name stayed behind when he left. Edge’s review opened on exactly that point. Publishers owned “names and characters”, it observed, not “mechanics and themes”, and Supreme Commander showed that the design of Total Annihilation still stood apart, whatever the game was called.
The inheritance is everywhere. As in Total Annihilation, there are only two resources, energy and mass, and production depends on the rate at which they flow in, not on stockpiles. Weapons fire real projectiles across real terrain. Each side starts with a single, self-sufficient commander unit that can build a base and fight off an early attack on its own; if it dies, it explodes like a nuclear bomb, taking nearby enemies with it. Naval warfare, which most real-time strategy games of the time had dropped, was kept, with destroyers, submarines and battleships.
Edge’s preview admitted that for a veteran of the old game it felt less like “a brave new step for the genre” than “a return to genius”: “If you’re a TA veteran then you’ve played this, loved this before.”
Fighting at scale
What was new was size. Edge measured the largest skirmish map at more than 80 km across, and a single campaign mission could take a couple of hours. Scale is why the zoom matters: on a map that large the player spends much of the game watching “simple geometric shapes move across distant terrain”, directing armies from a view closer to a general’s map table than a battlefield.
The interface helped with that. Players could queue up their building from the start of a match, set long chains of waypoints for flanking moves, and send two separate armies so that they arrived at one target together. At the top of each side’s technology tree sat its most extraordinary weapons. Edge described a spider-legged robot about 20 storeys tall whose legs skewered the smaller robots beneath it, an even taller walker “with a giant laser for an eye”, and a flying saucer that hovered over an enemy base with a death ray.
The three sides came out of what Edge called “a 1,000-year war between three equally abhorrent sides”: “alien-artefact worshippers”, “the dregs of cyborg post-humanity” and “the slightly-fascistic remains of common-or-garden humanity”.
Reception
Edge gave it 8 out of 10 in March 2007. It found the game demanding of both machine and player: “one of the most demanding games currently available on the PC”, and “the polar opposite of lazy Sunday-afternoon strategy, the anti-Civilization”. Two months later, reviewing Command & Conquer 3, the same magazine set it beside Company of Heroes as one of the “modern genre-definers” that made C&C’s mass assaults look like “Fisher Price stuff”.
Afterwards
Gas Powered Games released Forged Alliance as a standalone expansion in November 2007, adding the Seraphim. Supreme Commander 2 followed in 2010, published by Square Enix. Gas Powered Games was bought by Wargaming in February 2013 and became Wargaming Seattle.
The original game outlived its official servers. Players built their own: Forged Alliance Forever, which describes itself as “a community to keep the multiplayer community around our beloved RTS Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance alive”, runs its own lobby server and client and keeps patching and balancing the game, much of its code published openly under the MIT licence.
Sources
- Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006: preview (five nukes in one silo, “a return to genius”, the build queues, waypoints and synchronised attacks, the experimental units).
- Edge issue 173, March 2007, pp. 77–79: review (THQ, £35, 23 February; the spiritual sequel; energy and mass; the commander and its explosion; naval units; the zoom; the 80 km map; two-hour missions; the three sides; “the anti-Civilization”; 8/10).
- Edge issue 175, May 2007: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars review (“modern genre-definers like Supreme Commander or Company Of Heroes”).
- Edge Christmas 2007: Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance advertisement (Gas Powered Games, THQ).
- Edge issue 212, March 2010: Supreme Commander 2 advertisement (Square Enix).
- Wikipedia, “Supreme Commander (video game)” and “Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance” (web, secondary): release dates, the factions, the Seraphim, Supreme Commander 2’s release, Forged Alliance Forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Gas Powered Games” (web, secondary): Square Enix’s partnership on Supreme Commander 2; Wargaming’s purchase of the studio in February 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Powered_Games
- FAForever on GitHub (web, secondary): the project’s description, its lobby server and client, and their licences. https://github.com/FAForever