Supreme Commander 2

Zitat

"If I start the game and the first 60 seconds I build a tank; I want that tank to be able to
deliver the killing blow to my opponent to 90 minutes later."
That's Chris Taylor's goal for Supreme Commander 2. It's Completely counter to the philosophy
of both the beloved Total Annihilation and the mighty Supreme commander. Both strategy games
revolved around a stark stratification of combat power. Tech 1 bots were tiny gnats next to
the state of the stark killing machines you'd be charging for half an hour into a match.
But Chris and his team are fresh from their success with Demigod, the small-scale strategy/RPG
hybrid (revived on P84) where hero units level up and buy equipment on the battlefield. It's
a save bet we'll see Supreme Commander's Veterancy system expanded, in which units become
tougher as they score more kills, but that's not all. Their objective, Chris says, is to en-
sure that "every one of them has the ability to sustain themselves throughout the entire game,
so we need each of them to be much more complex and have many facets."
Elsewhere, though, Surpeme Commander is getting simpler. In the first game it was challenging
to set up a functioning economy as it was to win a given skirmish. Now, Gas Powered Games have
decided to "take economy management off the table... You'll be able to play this like any other
RTS." Chris says, worryingly.
It wasn't always fun to deal with a crashing mass infrastructure in SupCom, but that challenge
was half the game. Even Chris sounds upset about it: "The nerd in me died a little bit." he con-
fesses, but said, "That's OK Chris because many people are going to have fun with the combat
aspect of the game, and not get bogged down in the economic management."
Bizarrely, Gas Powered Games have chosen to partner with Final Fantasy creators Square Enix for
the sequel.
Chris says this is part of their push to give Supreme Commander more character.
"We're going away from iconographic units to a living, breathing RTS game - Square Enix has this unbe-
lievable ??? for creating stories and characters and they're experts at this."
Hard details are currently to scarce to get a clear idea of where Chris and his team are going
with this, but it's already clear that SupCom2 is going to be a very different game. It'll sill
have hundreds of units on screen, though, and as a final deal-sweetener, Chris promises
"spectacular visual change" that'll run well on a 500 (Pfund) PC.