supreme commander forged alliance experimental units

Supreme commander forged alliance experimental units Pc#

Once players hit tier 2, it isn’t just Medium Tanks turning into Heavy Tanks – there’s now Amphibious Tanks which open up whole new attack paths.

Later during the tier 1 land battles, players tech into air factories, where they now have to think about mixing anti-air while reacting to bomber raids and air transport drops. In the early game, the only consideration for the players is to build their base and have tank battles to contest Mass Extractors. Late game isn’t just fun because you get bigger stuff and a lot more of it (although that’s certainly part of it), late game is so compelling because as you tech up and the game draws out, the level of intensity and required management escalates. The journey from early to late game along the gradual progression of tiers works in a really profound way. The late game – and all its cool toys – are a privilege, not a right, making it much more rewarding when you get there. Many games of Supreme Commander are over in the first 15 minutes, with players barely progressing past tier 1. Artillery batteries rain bombardment from the sky, wrecks of colossal Assault Bots litter the battlefield, and Battleships contest the seas the late game in Supreme Commander is epic, but getting there is a challenge and is not guaranteed. As the game progresses, the economy rates and production speeds snowball to enormous levels, fueling destruction on a massive scale. Budget matters.Īt the start of the game, the resource income and production speed is slow, with players only able to build a handful of low tier units at a time. Gameplay aside, most people would say Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is a much prettier looking game than Supreme Commander 2. But we thought, hey, if we have to really bust ass to get this game out, lets see if we can make it a more accessible and mainstream game by shrinking the scope and scale a bit, and in some ways that worked, but to our original fanbase, this strategy was a failure.” We didn’t have that big of a budget, and we had quite a bit less time.

Supreme commander forged alliance experimental units Pc#

The first reason was that times were a lot tougher in the world of PC games. “Supreme Commander 2 was criticised for being a simpler version of the first game – do you agree and if so, how/why did this happen?”Ĭhris Taylor: “It was a fair criticism, and it happened for two reasons. Here’s an interesting excerpt from a Q&A with Chris Taylor, lead designer of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, that I came across while researching for this article: As RTS games become more niche, it’s now too big of a gamble for publishers to invest a huge budget in them, unlike for other genres. How nice an RTS looks generally comes down to budget, and on that note… let’s just say that Supreme Commander was not profitable on launch, and the publisher, THQ, collapsed 5 years afterwards (coinciding with a whole host of other reasons, I’m sure). As strategy games are more reliant on CPU than GPU power compared to other genres such as FPS and RPGs, the stagnation in CPU clock speed has resulted in new RTS’ being no more visually impressive than they were 10 years ago. Instead, they just pack in more cores which game engines aren’t able to make proper use of. Fancy new CPUs don’t offer much faster clock speed compared to old CPUs.

GPU power has progressed over the past 10 years while CPU clock speed has largely stagnated. The reason boils down to budget and engine limitations, and these are not trivial matters. You may find it odd that modern RTS games struggle to surpass the presentation of a 10-year-old+ game, especially since 10 years was the gap between then and Total Annihilation. There’s not much I can expand upon here, so I’ll provide some explanation as to why that is. Today, I’ll be analysing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and exploring what made it such a masterpiece.Īt first glance, the most noticeable thing about Supreme Commander is that it’s gorgeous the visuals and sound effects are incredible and hold up even to this day.

Supreme Commander is a large scale RTS from 2007 its meticulous design, backed by a massive budget, resulted in a huge amount of depth and strategic diversity, a superb art direction, and innovative quality of life features that streamlined the interface. To this day, Supreme Commander is still one of my all-time favourite RTS games, and I play it on FAF (Forged Alliance Forever) from time to time. Although Supreme Commander is on the opposite end of the RTS spectrum, it resonated with me, and many LANs of my teenage years were spent playing it. I love the fast-paced rush of StarCraft, the tactics of Company of Heroes, and the intricate micro of Command and Conquer.