Supreme Commander
Preview
Command astonishingly huge armies
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on PC
Waging the war (cont.)
Also your command unit, called ACU, differs according to the faction that you work for. They are all equipped with shields, teleporters and weapon upgrades to make them relatively balanced against each other, but they also have some unique special equipment, such as tactical nukes on the UEF version, cloaking technology on the Cybran ACU, and the Aeon ACU has a stun-field generator, among other things.
Multiplayer
In addition to the single-player campaigns, the Supreme Commander will of course also offer a multiplayer experience. There's a special matchmaking service set up for the game that will pit a player against someone with more or less the same skill level, making the games more balanced and fun for both players. These ranked-ladder games will also include a 2vs2 version, where you can team up with someone and battle it out against two enemies at the same time. At most, the server will support eight players fighting it out in a single game. And the server will also have clan support, so that you can form clans with like-minded gamers and progress on the charts as a team.
Personally, I think it will be great fun to be able to start a multiplayer game and be pitted against someone that you actually have a chance to compete with, instead of meeting someone who's played the game 24 hours a day ever since it was released and kills newbies faster than they can log onto the servers.
Graphics and gameplay
This may be a needles little paragraph of the graphics, given the screen shots that go with this article, but I have to say that despite the heavy action and pretty graphics on the screen, the game runs very smoothly. There was no lag whatsoever on the decent, but not over-the-top, gear that the game was played (Intel core duo, 1GB mem, ATI x1600) and zooming in and out of the battlefield worked wonderfully, giving you instant access to the strategic map. Unfortunately, I was unable to experiment with the proclaimed dual monitor support that the game has.
Just around the corner!
And what is the best thing about this game, then? Personally, I've always felt that games have a lot longer life if they allow the gamer to adjust and tweak them to their liking. Moddability is not a feature that you would actually expect from an RTS, however, but Supreme Commander changes that and promises that many aspects of the game will actually be moddable!
Supreme Commander is going to be released later this month! So, we can all start planning our campaign against the enemies of the pretty young princess of the Aeon (or someone else if you so choose).
