I had a chance to sit in a demo of Supreme Commander 2 developed by Gas Powered Games.  Supreme Commander 2 is set 25 years after the original game, beginning with the assassination of the newly elected president of the Colonial Defense Coalition (CDC).  The members of the CDC including the United Earth Federation (UEF), the Order of the Illuminate, and the Cybran Nation all deny any involvement and point the fingers at each other which results in a massive galactic war.

This sequel is published by Square Enix and with this partnership they hope to take the RTS genre to the next level by integrating more story elements and characters to the game.  A comparison of the History Channel vs Saving Private Ryan was named as an example – by going more into their lives but still keeping the focus on the strategy and the military.

I have to admit, I’ve not played a lot of strategy games…ok…I’ve not played any, unless Civilization Revolution counts and from what most people say, it doesn’t.  As the demo moved on, I understood why.  First off, even though the game is not polished and is in its earlier stages of development, the game looks magnificent.  They’ve introduced a brand new rendering engine for the game with massive verticality.  Typical RTS games have a rather awkward boundary where you can’t really get a feel for the world around you and here, you have access to all of it. You can zoom into battle right away – as you could in the original game.

They really focused intensely on performance. The demo was run on a computer that was over 2 years old and it looked and performed great.  One of the reasons why I don’t PC game was that I could never keep up with the never ending costs of upgrading my PC which is why I stick to the console.  With Supreme Commander 2, they wanted you to be able to play the game on a 3, 4 or even a 5 year old computer with out too many issues – we all know that there is always something!

We were shown one of the new units in the game – the NOAH Unit Cannon.  You can build units in it and fire them clear across the map.  Another unit was the UEF Armored Command Unit – which is like a giant robot that can be upgraded with jump jets, torpedos, anti-aircraft guns, shoulder artillery, and more.  You can upgrade the head to detach and become an escape pod to fly back to the base to rebuild your Commander.  You can also add Core Dump so that your commander doesn’t become a nuclear bomb in your own base.

There are now three diverse factions – the UEF, the Cybran Nation, and the Illuminate.  They have all been redesigned since the original game.  New designs and enhanced looks along with new tricks that can be unlocked by doing research.  Research is one of the new features in the game to learn more and discover new technology and will offer more playability to the game as well.

The game will be available on the Xbox 360 and the PC and the content between the two will be the same with the exception of the User Interface and they are focusing on making sure that the game will fit for optimal performance.

Seeing that RTS games can go for hours, I was curious if there was a quick play mode and they are working to get games to play on a smaller scale like 30-60 minutes instead of 2 or more hours.  The campaign is run linearly so you play one battle after another.  There is one story and one timeline so that at the end of the third leg of the campaign, you have finished the whole story and have one outcome for the galaxy.

The economy system has been improved so that you will have to have Mass and Energy on hand in order to purchase a unit.  In the previous game, you could purchase units regardless and then there would be a stall in the economy if you didn’t have enough mass and energy.  Now if you purchase something, it is done.

With the improvements to the economy system as well as the readability of the units, the campaign should introduce the player to all the elements of the RTS genre.  The game also features a detailed tutorial for beginners.

They use neural net AI and run hundreds of thousands of simulations in the game and before the game ships , they will do it one last time to educate the neural net with the latest data for balancing and tuning.  The game will have the ability to change strategies on the fly using the neural net versus scripting, as it has been done in the past.

No DLC is planned at this time, although it will be supported, so we will have to keep an out out for new maps possibly.

Multiplayer will follow what was done in the first Supreme Commander.

Supreme Commander 2 will be available in 2010 for the Xbox 360 and PC.

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