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Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance pages!

	Caution: work in progress! This page/section is in the process of being updated or developed. Its half finished, and its layout is almost certainly going to change. Mind the sawdust!

Supreme Commander (SupCom), developed by American developers Gas Powered Games and published by THQ in 2007, is the long awaited "spiritual successor" to Total Annihilation. Actually, its not so much like Total Annihilation than - it is Total Annihilation. Its quite obvious that the developers have not only reprised TA in all its glory, but they paid close attention to the extraordinary output of the fans over the years as well. Supreme Commander appears to be the distillation of every custom mod, unit pack, add-on and custom race built by the TA modding community over the last ten years, with all the repetition and dead wood stripped out. What you get is a very polished, if not demanding game, for your PC that has at least five years of life built into it. Thus far, its all been rockin'.

SupCom's Strategic View takes the whole concept of the minimap and propels it deep into the stratosphere. You can effortlessly zoom from a single unit filling the screen all the way out to a global perspective. You can practically play the entire game from here.

While you can zoom in until even small units fill your screen, most games seem to be zoomed out to the point where each unit is barely a few pixels. The whole package clocks in at something like 8 gigabytes, which when you consider you're viewing all those units as small points and most of the visual effects become all but invisible, you start to wonder what on earth all that data is being used for. Most of the bloat is stored in massive high definition animation files (tutorials and single player campaign vids) and equally huge sound banks.

You can move the camera around by holding down the SPACE bar to orbit clumsily around units at ground level, but this is NOT a Dawn of War camera. In-game, SupCom's orbiting is absolutely woeful - and it will get you killed - and even in a replay, its clumsy at best and seemingly designed to be as difficult as possible to use.

Nevertheless, SupCom has that killer gameplay that the old Total Annihilation had. There's a wealth of strategies, styles, tricks and tactics that you can use. While it does have a single player campaign, I have to confess I have absolutely no desire to play it, since it falls into that horrible rut of bad RTS writing. Losing gigabytes of disk storage to cliche and "well done brave commander" feels more than a bit of a waste - I just wish modern game packages offered the option of installing campaigns rather than just dumping it all on you, as they did not all that long ago (okay, okay - like they did ten years ago). SupCom's big attraction really is its multiplayer.

It comes with three races, but really, they're all but the same as each other, give or take some nuances and design ethics. You can boil down the three sides as the Blue Squarish robots, the Red Pointy robots and the Green Roundish robots! The expansion simply adds the Yellow Diamond shapish robots...

	Supreme Commander OVERVIEW
	Version & Install		Auto-updates. Gas Powered Games will automatically patch you to the current version simply by using their GPG.Net Online Service. Updates seem to be small and numerous, both for SupCom and the GPGNet application. Give yourself some time to fully upgrade, as it'll cycle through three or four upgrades and need a lot of spare gigabytage on your hard drives for each one.
	Spawns		Nope. But what does, these days?
	Demo		Yes! A 1.05Gb download from FileFront.
	FAQ's		THQ's first port of call for Supreme Commander Technical Support. Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander Support page. GPGNet's SupCom Frequently Asked Questions and their own Technical Support forums. Port forwarding for Supreme Commander 2, for those behind a firewall or router. Test your Supreme Commander network connection and make sure everything's running properly with the excellent NATTrace tool. Wikipedia description of Supreme Commander.
	Networks		Up to 8 players on LAN TCP/IP or through the Internet via GPGNet.
	Maps		Proper maps with proper 3D terrain. And about bloody time, too!
	Units		Ground units, naval units, aerial units, static structures, strategic weapons (oohh!), automated transports (aahh) and of course, your very own Supreme Commander. And strategic weapons. And big experimental end-of-the-world weapons.
	Resources		Mass, found in Mass deposits, unit wreckage and rocks. Energy, produced by energy producing structures and reclaimed vegetation.
	Research		No research model, although you can upgrade Mass Extractors and Factories. Basically, if you want something, you simply build the facility for it.

	Supreme Commander LINKS
	Supreme Commander		The official Supreme Commander web site for the original game and the Forged Alliance expansion.
	Gas Powered Games		Developers of Supreme Commander.
	THQ		Publishers of Supreme Commander.
	Supreme Commander Universe		The Supreme Commander version of the venerable old TAUniverse fan site, which served Total Annihilation so well over the years. It has news, forums, a beginners guide (written by a gnug no less!), and a lot of information about the game and its units.

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Page modified Wed, Jan 9 2008 by Lindsay Fleay.