This game is great but is not for everyone. First of all it requires constant attention, it keeps you focused on the screen for the entire duration of the game, you don't even have time to blink... ;)
Second, it needs high and very high hardware, 2 gigs ram minimum, dual core processor, and not a cheap dual core, new generation graphics card. I have friends who saw it and liked it but their 1 yr old PC's are unable to run the game with more than 2 players and only on small maps.

Anyway, for those that love the game and have the hardware, it's an extraordinary experience. I'm sure that the expansion will be even more... but it's possible that it will require even faster hardware.

""it is the continuation of our goal to move the bar for RTS gaming even higher than ever.""

I'm getting sick and tired of listening to that bs

they haven't moved a single bar up yet, in fact they lowered it.

The game is a cheap ripoff from Total annihilation and what's so bad about it is that all they had to do was basically rip it off, like they tried to- most the units look exactly the same but...they still managed to make the game so ridicules lame that units constantly get stuck in each other, they can't cross paths or they go insane and run i circles.
if you create an small army or god forbid two or more and politely ask them to move half a screen they can't- they simply get stuck and their mesh get entangled. I've been sitting with 4 small mech's and i -couldn't- get em apart no matter how much i told em to go separate ways. And to make it worse the commander have been degraded to a wannab commander with no real power.

no more fun D-gunning other peoples bases as they were building up. :/

new generation rts my behind- anything you can do in that game you could do in the old, which btw supported 10 players instead of only 8 and had a patch for 50.000 units- 5k pr player- same time on map. what did SC support again? 300 per player was it? moving bars.. suuure.. dream on kiddie

mod to play dune 2? the old game had it, mods for satellite, spacecrafts or 50+ underwater advanced buildings of tech level 3 or 4? battleships that took 60min to build and couldn't be on the screen in 1024x768? the old game had it. mods for rpg, warcraft, pacman? the old game had it.

so they can play all their songs about "omg we can mod this rts" we rock songs all they want, some of us actually remember they are not the first. Sup commander moving the frontier of RTS? right- its a 99,9% rip off from a 10 year old game in a nicely looking graphic pack. only thing new is the dual screen which is actually quite sexy- but hey- that could prolly be patched to the old one anyway.

so hip hurray they managed to get better graphics and worse game play out of putting old wine in new bottles.

Totally agree with you Lxx...I've just played the Supreme Commander demo, but when I heard that they "were making a new TA" I went haywire and dropped everything to download the (large) demo file. Now I have a 7950GX2 graphics card, but a 3700+ AMD so it was kind of interesting to see how it ran...which is to say, not so good.

After reading your entry though, I agree...TA could do all that and more, except for the graphics and the (annoying) voice acting. (if there are as many cheesy Russian accents in the full game as in the demo, I will probably go insane). I was recently introduced to TA: Spring and am really enjoying.

I'm holding off on buying SC until I upgrade everything around my video card...but it will probably make a pang in my heart for the old days. Makes me want to play some Warcraft II as well...

i ran it with 512mb ram.

seen some others go from 512 to 1 gb to 2 gb

the improvement is like 2% each time... its not ram its CPU and GPU.

Yeap, Supreme commander suck. I played it for 50-70 hours. I beat single, I tried pvp. Nothing special.

I am tired of it. everything is the same in this game. Unfortunatly. I will be waiting for Hellgate London and StarCraft 2.

BTW My rig is:
Asus a8n32 sli deluxe motherboard, 2 gig dual channel corsair 2.5-3-3-8 ram @ 220ghz, amd 4400x2 clocked @ 2.4ghz, Ati x1800xt 512 Mb eddition.

And even with this rig i have problems running game on high video with 4 people maxing all their units and fully open map. I dont realy know what kind of monster machine needed to support all 8 people and Maxed Units. Probably SLI or CROSSFIRE will help + latter Core 2 duo e6600 proccesors or quad ones with more ram... Who knows, I dont really have another 2k to spent for another rig.... but i still can sell my i guess....
Anybody want to buy it ? :))

Umm, well I think that you really should examine the game further. I played TA since way back and the day, and I was glad that the game was very similar to TA. As for not being able to move units around, sounds like a personal problem. The game I think is very well put together and only some races have some quirks in them. The game does require some getting used to like anything else, however I feel it is FAR BETTER than any other RTS out at this point at time. Not to mention the ability to zoom in and zoom out. I don't know of many other RTS's that have this ability. So Lxx, chill out, buy a better computer, and you will enjoy it a lot more. Dual core or better.

10/10 for reading to Chuck

I'm glad you feel warm inside realizing that a copy is similar to the original, better late then newer I guess. keep up the good work.

at the same time I'm incredible bored that the best troll effort you could come up with was indicating I've ever said anything about the game running slow on my box.

Strategic zoom alone is such an advance the game could suck balls and it would still further the genre (but it is awesome, mind you) Go back to playing CoH and you'll quickly realize how limiting the usual RTS zoom is.

This game has had balance and performance issues, but those have both been pretty much fixed. The game is still very CPU dependant (forget all that crap about GPU, it will run on a 9800). My E6600 @ 3 GHz can play large games very well, especially with the fan made optimizer for dual and multi core CPUs.

My only beef is with the economy management aspect of the game, and with how navies are completely countered by massed T1 subs. The latter is being fixed with this expansion, and the former could easily be modded out or fixed to put the emphasis on map control, rather than economy micro.

And to the misinformed TA fanboy above, SupCom can support 1000 units, not 300. Your weird pathing issues aside (I've never had any problems... in fact yours are the first I've heard of like that), try to at least get your facts straight before you start bashing things. I also like how you bash a new game for not being as modded as a game ten years old... smart comment there.

I was very impressed with this game. Its similarity to TA is not a weakness, but rather a strength. The ability to quickly zoom from a detailed view to a tactical map is a major improvement. I also have not experienced the pathing issues Lxx was describing, although there were some minor lag issues in the net games ive played. As far as performance, I have played 6 person LAN gameswith my gfx settings on highest with no issues. I have also done six player LAN games using dual moniter mode (which is awsome by the way) on medium settings with playable frame rates. My computer is running an e6700 core 2 duo @ 2.66Ghz, 2gigs PC6400 ram, and a Gforce 7950GX2.
I also run supcom on my IBM laptop with playable frame rates on low settings. I was impressed by SC, and I'm glad they're making another game.

Hi,

Ok, so hum, there seems to be some kind of battle here about Supreme Commander not being so Supreme as they claim....

I respect your point of view, all of them, but let me give you mine.

TA was the best RTS ever. That's for sure. It's only sad that it died so shortly...

But SC gave us LOTS of new features. To list a few :

- Builders don't jam in each other (remember when they were to "stupid" to move aside, and just blocked your command queue??), they move to make space for a construction.

- You can assign other builders to one already constructing...so no need to always check for everyone doing something....Give orders to only one person, and the rest follow...No need for patrol routines to achieve the same back in TA.

- Computer now creates anti-nukes. (the only thing he did before was building tons of nukes...which were totaly useless when you had your first anti-nuke silo (that could fire 10 anti-nukes at a time..isn't that a bug also???))

- Visual effects are UNDENIABLY BETTER than TA!! I don't remember trees falling down when rolled over in TA...

- And about those damn trees...Remember when we had to queue like a 1000 commands to remove the trees to make place for a stupid Tech 1 Metal Extractor, or to make place for our troops to pass?? (there is this one map were there are almost just trees..getting troops from A to B is really not funny. Of course I can blast every tree on my way, but spending 10 min of my game just on woodblasting is not really great...)

- You can now build better units (Tech 4 - Experimental) anywhere...So building 20 Monkeylords on the ennemy's continent is a sweet imporvement !! Even more when you build underwater!!(rather than having to dispatch support troops to cover the SO SLOW Tech 2 builder so that he can build the Krogoth Factory, and then much longer after, you finally have a Kraganeth. And I don't remember seeing an underwater Kraganeth, althought it's a good thing, because the unti was simply to powerful...So giving it the ability to go anywhere would have been the end of the world for the AI!!!)

- You can improve your Commander on the way you want..It's pretty sweet to see an FTU Commander with a shield hey?! In TA, should your commander be attacked, it would blast in no time...The shield gives you some time now (perhaps not a lot, but still...a little is better than nothing...)

- You can now see build times without having to open units with a unit editor. This helps to plan your defense/assault scheme. In TA, how am I supposed to know if I'll have time to build a Retaliator before the bad guys arrive?? Well, you just hoped. And put all your construction builders on it. And got them all blown up...

- etc...

Ok, yes, it requires a monster of a computer to play..but hey, you can lower graphics!! :)

So you see, it seems that the game has a lot of good points to it...Now common, don't be such purist guys!! ;) I've had also units jamming into ??? (some place on the map), but I mean, all games aren't perfect...SC has it's bugs (like unit jamming) but TA also had some (like the computer building construction factories in front of a tree, blocking the first built unit from getting out...and thus blocking the construction queue). And I think patches are comming a bit faster for Supreme Commander that for TA (in the time it was really active).

Hope it puts things right,

Satanic Dwarf

p.s.: Oh, and by the way, 100 new units is nothing really...I play TA with the TA Unit Compilation Pack, which adds TONS of NEW units...I even thought Supreme Commander didn't had enough :P

I have just started playing SC but so I love it. I always enjoyed TA so it is nice to see something similar.

Oh and just a quick question is it really called Ripping off if you were responsible for the first game?

As for problems I can honestly say I have not had any running this game. I haven't had any units get stuck anywhere. It seems to run great on my PC. Which is a standard clocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 with 2gig of ddr2 and a 8800 640mb GTS. Maybe some of the problems you've experienced Lxx are simply because the game is a system hog.