This is annoying in a heated firefight as it can be hard to pick out non-experimentals, and this places the emphasis on force mixture over momentary tactical decision-making. Oddly, it’s harder than ever to zoom in on the action – even all the way in, most of your units are tiny little boxes meandering around, and your experimental units are the only distinguishable ones. Supreme Commander 2 is a vast departure from the ideas Chris Taylor sold us on for this franchise only a few short years ago. It feels like a small step backward given that the epic scale of play was what the franchise was originally built for. The scale has shrunk across the board – where Supreme Commander 1 and Forged Alliance focused on giant-scale battles, galactic conflict, and enough firepower to level a continent, Supreme Commander 2 gives you moderate battles in merely a planetary conflict. Supreme Commander 2 still allows for this gameplay, but it no longer feels like the point. You didn’t launch a single nuke, you launched five nukes while simultaneously barraging the enemy base with artillery. Supreme Commander was a game about doing things en masse you didn’t send out a tank brigade, you sent out ten tank brigades. I can’t say I missed SC:FA’s set-up specifically, but I did miss the intrinsic sense of scale that set-up implied.
However, it’s hard to say if this is relevant to the game or not. SC2 does reduce the number of things you have to concentrate on by a small amount. In essence, SC2 has just decided to do what RTS games have been doing for years – including its own predecessor. You grind up resources, invest along the tech tree, and boom, you have access to new units. Your bases are a little tighter, as you no longer need nine factories just to have access to all unit types, and likewise you don’t have to worry about distinguishing between level 1 and level 3 engineers and whatnot, but in practice, the gameplay hasn’t really changed significantly. It’s an interesting decision, but I’m not clear it makes a tangible difference to the gameplay on average. Distinctly, however, SC2 introduces a research tree to the game and gets rid of the higher tech manufacturing facilities. Supreme Commander 2 replicates much of the same gameplay of the first game, and like Forged Alliance, focuses each unit into specific roles, so you can easily make force composition decisions. Supreme Commander 2 is now on the scene – and has continued sanding down the gameplay, presumably hoping to create a perfectly smooth gameplay surface. It was not until the expansion that they smoothed out the gameplay. Supreme Commander 1 was an overcomplex affair – a good game, definitely, but it had a lot of fiddly bits going on for a game happening at a gigantic scale. We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction…
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