Supreme Commander (PC)

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Preview
It may not be quite as famous as Command & Conquer or WarCraft, but for many real-time strategy connoisseurs, 1997’s Total Annihilation is more than a match for its better known rivals. This is the long awaited, unofficial, follow-up by Chris Taylor, creator of the original. As in Total Annihilation you don’t take the role of a nameless overseer, but instead you directly control a giant nanobot dispensing robot responsible for building all major buildings. From these are manufactured a dizzying array of specialised meachanoids, from infantry and artillery robots to repair droids and special construction bots.

The units in the original Total Annihilation ranged greatly in size but here the difference is profound. While many units are roughly human in scale others seem to be the size of a small village, as gigantic spider bots stroll through forests as if they were walking through tall grass. Aircraft carriers are just as massive and function properly as mobile cities with repair and production facilities. The game’s scale is reinforced even further by the new ability to zoom the camera so far out that individual units become icons on an overhead map. This is no gimmick though as you can still control multiple units on this new strategic scale, as well as deploy nuclear missiles and other weapons of mass destruction.

Total Annihilation’s superb waypoint system is replicated and improved here, allowing you to micromanage in exacting detail every movement of every unit. Patrol routes can be plotted out (as useful for repair units as for combat air patrols) as well as strategically circuitous routes around any terrain. All of which is perfect for fighting on multiple different fronts at once. After years of stasis the real-time strategy seems finally to be evolving to the next level.
HARRISON DENT

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-10-10 rating:
Really good fun and a good buy
If you like RTS games than this game is great the grafics are good and the scale of it all is impresive one small down point i couldn't get it to work on my computer because it didn't have enough ram (1.2GB) but my laptop did. If you buy this game make sure you have more than 1.5GB of ram.

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review by: date: 2008-03-21 rating:
The true RTS king!
Supreme Commander lives up to it's name, it is a Supreme game!

As mentioned in the other reviews this game is huge. Once you get over the sheer scale of the game and overcome the learning curve (Not too bad if you've played TA or other big RTS's like the Total War games). SupCom deals with macromanagement instead of micromanagement. Enabling the minimap is recommended (Or press HOME to split the screen in two to give yourself a virtual dual monitor), but SupCom makes it easy to see which units are which even when you're in orbit over the warzone, each unit type has a specific icon which appears as you scroll all the way out.

The game is big and demands a strategic approach rather than a C&C rush style of play simply because the maps are so big that they're measured in kilometres (20x20 up to 80x80+) and so rushing actually takes a while :)

One thing Supreme Commander is rarely congratulated for is that it's the very first game with complete Quad Core support. To be honest, if you get a Quad system SupCom runs perfectly. It'll work on Dual Core systems but the processor strain becomes more noticable on big maps. SupCom does not like Single Core systems at all.

Something I'm often asked about Supreme Commander is what sort of system is needed for smooth gameplay. It's pretty simple really, the more Cores the better. I couldn't run Supreme Commander on my old system but my new rig allows for smooth play all the time.

Cost just £550:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz (O/C 2.71Ghz)
1x2GB RAM 667Mhz
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT 512MB
500GB HDD
Windows Vista Premium 32bit

Obviously that's high end and I'm not suggesting we all need Quads to play games now, I didn't buy this setup for SupCom :) I actually HAD to upgrade it wasn't a case of wanting to but having to. So anything above a 2.4Ghz Dual Core will run this fine, obviously the visual settings should be tweaked to get the best performance. Without wanting to go into detail the processor is more important than the graphics card for this game until you want to play this with Dual Monitor support on, then two graphics card are recommended as you're asking for two full motion displays of the game and one card will struggle (unless it's high end).

In terms of the game, it's an RTS masterpiece. Maybe I'm saying that because I loved Total Annihilation (which SupCom pretty much is but on a much grander scale), but if you're an RTS nut then SupCom is for you. Everything from the massive land battles to the aerial dogfights to the epic fights out at sea, this game has it all.

But like I said, you need a good PC to run this properly. If you have a Quad Core system this will run no problems, if you have a Dual Core system it'll still work fine depending on how fast the processor is, if you have a Single Core system it's most probably not going to run or will have trouble getting through a game.

This game gets 5/5 from me and thoroughly deserves to be crowned the king of the RTS genre!

Now I need to get the Expansion...

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review by: Spider date: 2008-01-02 rating:
A Big letdown
I love Total Annihilation & still play it on occasion. With TA you relate to your individual units, you can see when they're damaged & repair them. You can see what they're doing and tell them to do someting else if you want. In Supreme Commander if you can see individual units you have no control over the whole battle. I mean that, none at all- you probably aren't even aware one is going on. Zooming in sounds fun; but what it means is that you either see a few (beuitfully rendered) units and miss the battle, or you see a horde of tiny, ant-like, indistinguishable and/or almost invisible units (or just icons like some scaled up minimap). But then (and only then) can you run the battle with the hordes of units that you will need to defeat the hordes that will be thrown at you. So the battles all end up fought between green blobs and blue blobs, with none of the visual excitement of any other strategy wargame. It doesn't help that the smaller units all look very, very alike at anything other than maximun zoom (if you can pick them out from the background); meaning that there is no way to see and hear the battles as with TA.
I also have major issues with the interface. My main problem is that most of the time you right-click to accomplish a task, but sometimes you left click! I the heat of the action it's all too easy to use the wrong click and leave them doing nothing.
I seem to have a problem in my setup which is not mentioned elsewhere: The scroll speed is so ludicrously fast that postioning the view over anything is next to impossible by scrolling, I HAVE to click on the minimap (with all the inaccuracies that brings up)! There are briefing (and in-game) videos - The lip-sync is so BAD the video is regularly still moving it's lips 10 seconds after the sound has finished!
Just not fun. Yes, it is TA (commands are almost identical) with all the good functions turned on & some nice extra commands, but it utterly misses what to me is the point of it all- the immediacy and precision of TA 1. This game is a massive disappointment. I've played 2 campaign missions (several times each) & uninstalled it!!

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review by: rts fan date: 2007-12-05 rating:
good game but waaaaaaaaaaaay to demarding
I recently brought supreme commander and couldn't wait to play it yet it wouldn't work on my pc which is 1gb ram, pentium 4ht and a ge force 5200FX. this was very annoying and i warn anone with a ge force series 5 or below not to by this game unless there preperd to upgrade there pc.i was thinking about what could be wrong and as i had suspected it was the grapics card.i then installed a ge force 6200 (found at maplin recdued from £[...] to £[...])and installed xp servies pack2.After all this inconvenece I finaly manage to get the game running the first think that hit me was he incredable emence grapics that this game supported. i then went on to the toutoral and was a bit dissapointed to find it wasn't achly a toutoral mearly a small map in sand box mode. but being a fan of rts games it wasnn't that confusing to work out as the concepet is rather simple. my favorite part of the game has to be the experermental units which were immencely powereful (although i quickly painfuly discoved that some units have lots of hit point yet very little defence after my spider bot was scrap in 15 seconds). my favorite e unit has to be the gunship as by sending 2 of them in you can destroy a whole base by blowing un a fusion recactor. Overal this game is preetly good and i would recomened it to anone who has pc broght in the last 6moths-a year


review by: date: 2007-10-24 rating:
Supreme Commander ROCKS
This game is one of the best games i have ever played...and ive played over 1 Thousand games in my life time...and im only 13 for crying out loud but still i would highly recomend it.

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Accessories

Inno3D GeForce 7300LE 256MB DDR2 PCIE Graphics Card - I-7300LE-G4E3
Inno3D GeForce 7300GT 256MB DDR2 AGP Graphics Card - I-A7300GT-G4F3

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