I’ve never liked the RTS convention that a new base must be built on each new map that you play. That is not how the military does it, so why do we do that in our military games? We have staging areas like in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those are controlled by the Central Command.

I like the idea of planet sized maps. I would like to make one or two main bases and create staging areas to mass troops for tactical assaults. I like the idea of having far-flung resource areas that must be protected. Supreme Commander seems set to radically change the way RTS games are played.

Chris Taylor says as much in his interview with Gamespy. Most RTS games are actually Real-Time Tactical games. The difference between tactics and strategy being, as I understand it, tactics are what you use to win the battles, strategies are how you win the war. I’m really looking forward to a game the puts you in command of the war, and you have to make strategic, as well as tactical decisions.

Plus, as others have said, the makings of a terrific story and planet-scarring nukes are pretty awesome as well.

The game does indeed look good. I can only hope they improve the 2d looking terrain, and create some good AI which uses strategy (i.e. ambushes). TA’s AI was pretty poor to be honest, even though it was a 1997 game.

Oh, the nuke looks pretty fun too.

My current (and only PC) strategy game is Dawn of War. While one of my biggest reasons for buying it was a desire to see my childhood love of the Warhammer 40,000 universe acted out, I’m really enjoying it at the moment. The detail unit level is very close to WarCraft 3 (no bad thing in my books as I really enjoyed that as well) but you get much more control over your units. Specifically you can choose things like the weapons load-out of your indivdual troopers (if you so desire) and this can have a major impact upon how well they do against specific targets (missile launchers for demolition/vehicles vs. flamers for weakly armoured massed infantry). The story seems a little pish at the moment but passable sci-fi stuff, although I understand that the main campaign is a little short. Anyway, it’s pretty much all good at the moment so I’m happy with it.

I never played Total Annihilation, but I’ve heard and read a great many things about it, and I’m now anticipating Supreme Commander even more than Civ4, and perhaps even more than AoE3. I’m a big strategy freak, so that’s saying a lot. At first the screenshots looked a bit silly to me - the grass textures and foliage looked a bit dated, but since looking at GameSpy’s in-depth preview, I’ve changed my mind, and I can’t wait. The naval units in particular have me drooling.

It says the people at GPG have put a lot of effort into making it simple and relatively effortless to zoom in and out for controlling the battle at what level you desire, and I’m actually quite eager to see how they’ll do it. It’s something only the demo will really be able to demonstrate though (as demos do… thus their name), though I’d imagine it’ll be quite different in the full version with bigger maps and such.

A grand-scale RTS is what I’ve been hanging out for though. WarCraft 3 took a step in the other direction (less units, more micromanagement) and I didn’t like that. Supreme Commander, however, looks like my kind of game. The whole idea of the game is to do away with irritating micromanagement, and that’s something I am really looking forward to.

Such a big map size and so many units makes me worried about system requirements though. Dungeon Siege ran horribly on my PC at the time (and even after I upgraded it), so it makes me doubt the abilities of GPG’s programmers. I don’t want another fantabulous RTS that chugs along at piss poor framerates, ala CnC Generals.