Again, Chris Taylor on how Supreme Supreme Commander can be

Chris Taylor, He Who Must Break Some Conventions Of RTS Games, talks to Gamespot about his supersized baby, Supreme Commander.

Again he talks about a game so big, players will have to carry bedpans with them to relieve themselves of pee, and the temptation to be even more nuke-hungry than the North Korean government shall be ever-present. But in talking over gameplay with Gamespot, strategy wargame vets will find familiar ground with an ancient yet hallowed Chris Taylor title, Total Annihilation – only scaled up to supersized proportions – and also find that to win a game of massive scale, it’s the small details that count.

Small details like terrain. Terrain is implemented in some of the more popular RTS titles around, and Supreme is no exception. But the fully 3D and Newtonian (as opposed to dice-roll like C&C) game that it is, with varying grades of cliffs, slopes, and shoreline, players will have to pay attention to where their units can travel through, and where they’re gonna be sitting ducks.

The next small detail really shows that a game that covers “thousands of square kilometers” of hell doesn’t need an army huge enough to cover thousands of square kilometers – though it helps. Chris believes that the future of the RTS genre really lies in super-large maps big enough for savvy commanders to outflank entire armies, or exploit weaknesses in the enemy’s control of their territory to slip in special operations teams to raise hell behind enemy lines.

Would you like jumbo fries with that big-bottom of an RTS? Full article, please: this is a self-service cantina.

Chris Taylor, He Who Must Break Some Conventions Of RTS Games, talks to Gamespot about his supersized baby, Supreme Commander.

Again he talks about a game so big, players will have to carry bedpans with them to relieve themselves of pee, and the temptation to be even more nuke-hungry than the North Korean government shall be ever-present. But in talking over gameplay with Gamespot, strategy wargame vets will find familiar ground with an ancient yet hallowed Chris Taylor title, Total Annihilation – only scaled up to supersized proportions – and also find that to win a game of massive scale, it’s the small details that count.

Small details like terrain. Terrain is implemented in some of the more popular RTS titles around, and Supreme is no exception. But the fully 3D and Newtonian (as opposed to dice-roll like C&C) game that it is, with varying grades of cliffs, slopes, and shoreline, players will have to pay attention to where their units can travel through, and where they’re gonna be sitting ducks.

The next small detail really shows that a game that covers “thousands of square kilometers” of hell doesn’t need an army huge enough to cover thousands of square kilometers – though it helps. Chris believes that the future of the RTS genre really lies in super-large maps big enough for savvy commanders to outflank entire armies, or exploit weaknesses in the enemy’s control of their territory to slip in special operations teams to raise hell behind enemy lines.

What’s probably frightening about a game with maps that big is that there are some artillery cannon in the game that WILL HIT ANYTHING ON SUCH A LARGE MAP. But again, with a supersized game comes a big menu of options for the savvy commander.

Chris did mention the presence of shield units or structures to protect your units from a rain of fire. At the same time, it comes back to details. If the enemy is willing to invest so much of his time and energy in creating that weapon, that means that he must have neglected something – which the smart commander would be wise to find and exploit.

By the way, a couple more details on how supreme your PC would have to be for Supreme Commander. The max unit cap on-screen is a theoretical 500 – but the devs never expected that any real-world game would have that many units, rendered to their highest quality, on screen all at the same time. And second, while the game’s graphic quality is enough to cause a stream of profanity from the appreciative, Supreme Commander should come with a bevvy of rendering options so that while the resulting graphics won’t be up to profane scratch, the gameplay will still be.

There may be hope for a few weaker rigs yet.