Best huge-scale RTS?

I've been playing a fair few 'RTS's at the moment, and I feel like there's something missing.

I want an RTS where, at a gesture, I can commit battalions to an attack, thousands to suicidal rearguards, send stream after stream of reinforcements into the meat-grinder of war (as you may have guessed, I love 40K IG, but no preference for actual 40K).

So far, Supreme Commander looks like the game, but I want to know if anyone knows of a better/more suitable game.

Supreme Commander

Total War

• Supreme Commander
• Total Annihilation
• Total War

Upcoming: Ashes of Singularity.

Sins of a Solar Empire

act of aggression :P

Supreme Commander, no doubt.

Love that game, it is a turtler's dream lol. Semi-infinite resources, tons of defensive emplacements and capabilites, and superweapons.

Avoid Supreme Commander 2.

If you can find a copy of Total Annihilation (swear I saw GOG had it, maybe?) buy it! Pretty much same as SupCom, just older and classier.

Total War is hard to recommend because it is half-TBS, half-RTS. Not 100% RTS. But if you like huuuuuuuge battles with tons of units, go for it.

Homeworld and Homeworld 2 feel huge in scale because of their excellent execution, but in reality take place on average-sized maps.

Supreme Commander kicks so much ass. It's exactly what you want. Send a squad of air fighters to battle with another, and watch them actually break formation and dogfight. It's sweet.

Ok, so SupCom seems like my best choice.

Any advantage to buying FA, or not really?

Might as well get Forged Alliance. Its a proper expansion, not a DLC, in my opinion.

*Also I forgot to mention Planetary Annihilation. Plays pretty much like SupCom, though to be honest I have not played it since late beta so I am sure a lot has changed. Was actually gonna pick up the DLC today and reinstall it.

@mrbojangles25: Is FA and standalone DLC, or addon?

As for PA, I have it, and it kinda fell flat.

1) Titanic units (experimentals) are in a separate, standalone DLC

2) The multi-planet thing basically adds map-warp, and a second higher level of aeroplane

@nedmund13: I am not too sure. SupCom is around 6GB, when I tried to dl FA it was 8GB....so maybe standalone?

Thanks for the warning about PA, I went to the store page. Looks like they didn't enjoy the negative reviews because they got rid of stock PA and now there is just a page for the expansion lol (which includes stock game).

@mrbojangles25: Yeah, they worked out that one of the major things people played for was the HUGE KILLY THINGS OF DEATH!!

Fortunately the hugy killy things of death in SupCom take forever to build, and a lot of resources.

But they are so cool

SupCom is awesome. I remember there was this huge artillery cannon that could shoot across the entire map. You don't often get stuff like that in RTS - everything feels gimped to make the game balanced, but in SupCom you could build units there were realistically powerful.

This. You can't get much more large scale than Sins.

Hell yes. The nukes. Oh, the nukes... I'm gonna reinstall supcom right now.