This is not a review per se. After a month of technical and preformance issues I am posting my experiences with SC.
Is Supreme Commander pretty? Yes, but not as good looking as Company of Heroes or other RTS games released in the past 6 months. The preformance issues lessen when playing with limited numbers of units or if you decrease the map size. But, I paid fifty bucks to play ALL of the game not half or a quarter of it. Be warned, to try and play the game without a "monster" system is a very under whelming experience. I was able to play the first two missions of one of the factions. During the third it was a nightmare. When the maps or unit counts became any larger or higher I experienced major stuttering and severely choppy game play. My frame rates would go from 29fps to about 3fps and would never go higher than 6 after passing that point. So that you know I am not running a substandard PC here is my machine specifications:
Athalon 4600+ Dual Core (AM2) Asus M2N-E Motherboard 4 Gb 6400 Ram (Corsair XMS2) GeForce 7950 GT X2 (512 Mb) 50 Gb free HD Space (10000 RPM Hard Drive)
X-fi Xtremegamer (I have disabled it, lowered it, and removed it from the system with no significant improvement) Vista Ultimate 64 bit (I formatted my PC and installed my old XP professional edition with no change)
All my drivers are up to date as of March 18th. Nothing is in my startup nor is anything else running or running in the background.
I do not have a "monster" system but I do not have issues playing games, until now. Even when playing multiplayer on a LAN and over the internet or even playing a skirmish the framerate was horrible. Unless of course you play on the smallest map, against only one opponent, with all of the video options turned to the minimums. I will get a whopping 25 or so frame per second but never higher. That does not sound like the game that it was billed as "Ground breaking in its size and scope" to me.
As I said before this is not a review per se. It is more of a frustrated consumer who cannot get technical help. I have called and left messages for a call back and I have sent several emails. Only the sales and customer service people have returned my emails or calls at this time. Sadly I am going to try and return the game and all I truly want is to play the game. So as for my scoring it is based on the falsehood of the box requirements and lack of support. That and the deception that all of the game is fully playable on anything less than a machine that is ABOVE the recommended requirements.
I hope you do not mind if I share what I have learned from the various forums and help forums. Here is a suggested "To play the game like the creators INTENDED" Requirements, solely based on those who do not have any issues with the games preformance. I hope you enjoy yourself if you can play the game, I will enjoy it next year sometime when I upgrade my computer again. Until then Buyer Beware. To play Supreme Commander you need:
CPU
AMD Athlon FX 57 or higher Single Core AMD Athlon 5000+ X2 Dual Core or Higher
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4Ghz Single Core
Intel Core2 Duo 6300 or Higher Dual Core
RAM
2 Gb 800mhz DDR2
VIDEO
ATI Radeon 1800XT 512mb or GeForce 7800 GTX 512mb (Older cards than this I would not recommend nor would I recommend any that do not have the initials XT, PE, Pro, GTX, or GT. The last one is only if it is a 8800 GT)
Again thank you for the time you took to read this.