If you've ever played Total Annihilation you'll know what you're getting into.
If you've ever played Total Annihilation you'll know what you're getting into, it's basically that game with 10 times the scale, detail, and strategy. For those who haven't, it's a Commander & Conquer-like futuristic strategy game, with all the typical RTS units like tanks, planes, engineers/harvesters, and defensive weapons.
The most impressive thing about it is the sheer size of the levels, this has been said by every reviewer but it really has to be seen to be believed. It can take over 10 minutes to move one ground unit from one end of the map to the other. Fortunately there is an ingenious transport system where you can build all your units behind your protective fortress in the back of the map and use the "ferry" system of stringing together transport aircraft so all you have to do is tell your ground unit to move to the ferry-point and it will load into the transport and be shuttled to wherever your ferry line ends, at which time the transport ship will return to the start of the route. It's an extremely efficient and simple to control system for getting units to the front line on a gigantic map.
The other thing that really makes the game shine is the UI and the click-control scheme for giving commands. Using a shift click feature you can set a unit to complete multiple orders, so if you want your engineer to build a bunch of power generators, a defensive wall, turret guns, and AA/SAM sites all you have to do is shift click the commands let him go. You can build your entire operation within the first 10 minutes of the game by using one engineer to give all the orders to then have all subsequent engineers assist that first one.
As you can tell I love this game so much I could sit here and type about it all day, but I'll just mention a couple more things that make the game awesome and be on my way. One word, NUKES. These aren't your daddy's nukes either, these bad boys will obliterate an entire medium sized base installation, but they aren't available until Tech 3 (the game has three upgrade stages: tech1, tech2, and tech3) and they cost a fortune in energy and mass. I find it more effective to use long range (non-nuclear) artillery to beat up their defenses then send in a huge wave of air and ground troops to clean up, and when that strategy fails (it often does) I'll either create a nuclear strike submarine on water maps or build a strategic missile launcher and nuke them into oblivion.
The last cool thing I'll mention is the scale. On the larger maps it can take up to three complete turns of the middle mouse wheel to go from no zoom to full zoom, it really feels like you're playing a game inside Google Earth. The best part is that the map control is just as intuitive (if not more) than Google Earth, all you have to do is point the mouse somewhere and start rolling the middle mouse wheel, if there are units nearby the game will auto center your zoom to quickly put your view right where you wanted it.
On top of all that the game has full support for multiple monitors, so you can have the large world map open on the right monitor with a zoomed in base view on the other, and both can be zoomed and adjusted independently, so you can have one monitor watching the ongoing battle while the other is zoomed in on your factories keeping tabs on unit production.
Sorry for the long review, but I'm head over heels in love with this game. I recommend anyone with even a remote interest in RTS games play Supreme Commander. It's not a hardcore-only type of RTS, with a good video tutorial system and tons of AI settings you can be fully versed in under an hour.