This is one of the better threads I've seen around these parts in a while. Good show, so here goes my entry for Supreme Commander and I'll probably throw up a couple for Rise of Nations and Age of Empires 3 later.
V. Supreme Commander
Release date : 20 February 2007
Set on the backdrop of a millennium-long galactic war, three distinct factions (the UEF, Aeon Illuminate, and Cybran Nation) are fighting each other for their own reasons. The player takes the role of the controller of an Armored Command Unit (ACU)-a mech whose sole purpose is to provide the logistics and command and control functions to allow for theater-level engagements with commanders of the other factions. ACU mechs are easily deployed through a galaxy spanning transportation network to any terrestrial locations and construct robot armies and bases quickly, filling the role of a mobile,efficient,portable, and low-manpower solution to intergalactic warfare.
Core gameplay is centered around broad strategies and larger scale tactics taking place on large scale maps. The command and control of your units is facilitated by the innovative Strategic Zoom interface, where you can use the mouse wheel to zoom all the way into the individual details of a unit, or zoom out to see the entire battlefield from a low-orbit positioning. Orders can be given to units from any position, allowing you to zoom out, quickly grab a fourty or so newly built units, and send them in formation to their target, and then go do something else. Individual unit micromanagement in combat situations is usually only rewarding in the first few minutes of a game.
The game has a strong emphasis on economy and automation. Engineers can have orders easily queued up for a good fifteen minutes, and assisting an engineer with another one is easy to speed up construction of the queued buildings. The game only has two resources-energy and mass, and the increasing collection and production of these two resources is key to staying competitive with your opponent in the game. Energy is generated from buildings, while mass can either be extracted from specific points in the map (rewarding territorial control) or produced at great energy cost through buildings. Managing your economy is challenging and requires a lot of attention to prevent generation of excess resources (which are wasted instead of spent) while not generating too few resources (which impedes overall construction).
Three types of factories exist-land, air, and naval-and each can be upgraded up to tech 3 to produce more powerful-yet more expensive-units. There is very little rock-paper-scissors in the game-instead, the game has counters but they are are not "hard" counters as you would expect in a game like Age of Empires. You can spam one type of unit prolifically and win, though if the opponent sees it coming developing an overall strategy (and not just spamming a counter-unit) to defeat it is doable provided you have the economy and time to roll out that strategy. In addition to factories, the game features a wide variety of buildings-short and long range artillery, shield generators, anti-aircraft batteries, land-based point defenses, radar to see unscouted units, and what not. Construction of forward bases with many of these tools allows the player to take control of the flow of the game and reduce the choices that the opposing player faces. Unlike most games, expansion bases rarely serve any point in terms of resource generation.
Units in the game are not extremely varied-you have mobile artillery, tanks and variants thereof, mobile anti-aircraft on the ground, fighters, bombers, and gunships in the air, and subs, cruisers and battleships on the sea. The factions do not vary a whole lot outside of some of the minor details of these units. Each faction also has a set of a few "experimental " units-large, extremely costly late-game units that can tip a battle one way or another if constructed, supported, and used effectively. These units are very unique to the factions and provide the only real diversity between the factions. All shots fired have their trajectories and speeds modeled and can interact with terrain, resulting in more tactical options than are available in a usual die-roll combat system. The game heavily rewards long-term goals such as ground control of a key area/chokepoint or naval/air superiority.
The game's single-player campaign is terribly uninteresting and tedious, by most accounts. It serves as a long tutorial to the units and strategies of the game, but does little to prepare you for a multiplayer match. The story line is very bland as well, and the campaigns are linear and in a classic mission-to-mission format. The only interesting thing about them is that they tell the events of the same time line differently and weave together pretty well, so by the conclusion of the last campaign all the encounters that occurred make sense. The game also features a skirmish mode, but the shipped AI with the game is not very good, though fan-made AIs have made much progress in this area and they provide a much more interesting challenge.
Multiplayer is where the game really is at its best-both players will develop and execute numerous plans and strategies during a match in order to win, and this entails both strategy and reflexes in the early game, giving way to more thinking and less reflexes as the match progresses into its middle and end phases. High levels of actions per minute and build orders are only marginally helpful and smart thinking and planning usually beats out both without too much problem, provided that you are basically competent at the RTS genre. Games can drag on a bit-team matches especially-and it is not uncommon to see a team game break the 90 minute mark or a one on one break over an hour.
PROS
*) Huge scale conflicts with an interface more than capable of easily managing them.
*) Multiplayer is not dominated by build orders and micro, even at the highest of levels of play.
*) Unique balancing breaks free of rock-paper-scissors designs. Strategies to counter other strategies are more varied than spamming the counter unit.
*) Territorial control and economic advantage are not necessarily linked, resulting in some interesting middle-to-end game scenarios.
*) The high health and firepower of the ACU makes early game rushes far easier to stop than in other games.
CONS
*) Game is extremely taxing and poor performing on non-dual core systems.
*) Single player anything in the game is very weak. Mods are starting to roll out to provide both decent AIs and single-player alternatives ("Tower defense" mods are all the rage right now).
*) Game is very complex, especially in multiplayer. It takes a while to learn, and has many strategies and mechanics that are not immediately apparent to the new player.
*) Economy micromanagement ramps up in the middle to late game pretty rapidly.
*) Factions are generally balanced, but hardly unique.
Level of complexity: 9. The game is shamelessly hardcore in its design and very deep in terms of strategic options. Unexperienced players will meet a very steep learning curve while starting out in multiplayer games.
Screens:
Here's a shot of me in a team game. This is my base-I am building power plants and mass fabricators to bolster my economy in specific layouts to maximize efficiency. These sort of advanced strategies are all over the place and take a little learning to get used to.
Here I am, in red, repelling an assault. Note that I don't have a ton of a specfic unit built to counter the opponent, but I invested in shield generators and point defenses to provide more killing power per mass spent that my opponent to accomplish my goal of holding the territory.
I'm going to do a writeup for RoL later tonight, it gets no love for being such an amazing game.
