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.
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