This map wouldn’t even qualify as a duel map in another RTS, and here it’s rated as being able to accommodate six players. The six bases weren’t even spitting distance apart they were literally adjacent to one another. I took this to mean I could happily stack the game with five AI players on different teams and orchestrate a nice hour-long symphony of slaughter, and so I was very surprised when, ten seconds into the game, one of the enemy commanders walked out of the fog of war and started trying to blow up one of my metal extractors. For example, the above picture is a 6-player skirmish map that was laughingly labelled “FFA”. Well, that’s true sometimes, but not here. Ho ho ho, that scamp Hentzau, always exaggerating things he doesn’t like for comic effect. The dull units and boring maps are still present, it’s just that the maps are now roughly the size of a postage stamp.
However - this being GPG, the straight-faced perpetrators of the crime against humanity that is Space Siege - instead of trying to up the ante with imaginative units or colourful visual design, Supreme Commander 2 instead strips out the one thing that was interesting about the game in the first place: the scale. GPG have picked up on that particular complaint. Judging from what GPG have done here, I suspect my problem with the original may not have been all that uncommon. The scale ensured I remembered it, but the actual gameplay meant that memory was a bad one.īut now! Now (or about eighteen months ago) there is another one of it. By taking the strategic zoom all the way out to low orbit Supreme Commander severed my connection with what was actually going on on the ground, making battles oddly dispirited, disjointed affairs, and I swiftly lost interest. It took no pleasure in its wanton desctruction and it made no attempt to inject any warmth into its maps or character into its units. Everything stands out, and most (but not all) units are identifiable at a glance.Ĭompare this to Supreme Commander, where the main word that comes to mind when I try to describe it is sterile. I look back at Total Annihilation, and while there are some nothing units and some dull maps (the metal planet), my enduring memory of the game is one of Peewees, Brawlers and Big Bertha artillery duking it out with Sumo heavy kbots and Rapier gunships over lush, vibrant terrain. Arguably it achieved its aim of grand-scope real-time strategy on a scale not yet seen, but this came at a price it had no character. It had a goal – something to make it stand out from the herd of lowing, braying RTSes it would otherwise have been lumped in with - and it single-mindedly pursued that goal.
I didn’t like the original Supreme Commander all that much, but I respected it.
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