Supreme Commander

• Platform: PC
• Published by: THQ
• Developed by: Gas Powered Games
• Release Date: Q1 2007
• Genre: Strategy
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

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Trailers and Footage

Chris Taylor Interview Continued..

Shack: Can you say anything about airborne combat? We haven't heard too much about that.

Chris Taylor: I like to call the game a fully functional land, sea, and air game. This means that we didn't just focus on tanks and throw a couple of planes in. You've got scouts, bombers, fighters, then you've got torpedo bombers, gunships, multiple technology transport systems, heavy bombers, and large reconaissance like the SR-71 Blackbird, which in our game's future is the spy planes which go way up high and fly recon on your opponent's position.

That ties heavily into what we call our intelligence war, which is where you can't truly play a game in a large theater of war unless you know what your opponent's up to. Why would you build a nuclear defense system unless your opponent is building nukes? Or, if your opponent is building nukes, by God you'd better get some anti-nuke protection. If your opponent builds heavy long range artillery, better reason than ever to put together a bomber group and nail that artillery when it comes online--but don't destroy it until it's almost online, because you want your opponent to invest maximum resources before you take it out. It's about having intelligence, not in the IQ sense but in terms of having knowledge. Isn't that a funny split in military nomenclature? Intelligence in the military really means knowledge. Knowledge of your opponent, actual facts. What your opponent is doing right this minute. We do that in spades, we have wonderful intelligence warfare systems.

And the CIA shouldn't be called the Central Intelligence Agency, it should be called the Central Knowledge Agency. It's funny I just realized that now, it just hit me today. Mark the calendar! Central Knowledge Agency. Make it so, make the change.

Shack: I'll be sure to put in that request. [laughs] So in terms of resources, you've got the infinite resources thing going again this time around. How's that work?

Chris Taylor: We do have infinite resources, because infinite resources are way more accurate to reality. You don't usually run out of things when you're fighting a war, you usually run out of manpower. Manpower is your resource, that's the first thing to go. The thing about our resource model is that we have mass and energy. It's a simplified system that allows players to focus on the front lines, on the strategy element of the game rather than on the resource management. There is an early game where you have to keep an eye on resources, but the weight transfers from one foot to the other. Still, you've always got a weakness. If an opponent comes in and takes out your economy, that is a viable strategy for them and it's something you have to be very wary of.

Without the economic backbone of the game, it's not a very interesting game. Many people have tried to make a strategy game without an economic component. It does not work. But if you have a resource system that's finite, what it ultimately means is that the game will eventually turn into one of those other games I described that just focuses on battles. You lose that wonderful balance between guns and butter, the traditional military yin and yang. Do I reinvest in my butter, or do I spend my money on the guns? The economy versus the military effort. That's where we landed, and we like it. We like it being infinite; it makes resources meaningful to the end of the game, it doesn't fade out early on, but the weight is very heavy on the military and strategy in the closing hours of the game.

Fundamentally, military organization is where 98% of where your sum costs are, so of course it's a natural conclusion that the emphasis is going to be on the military organization and not your economic infrastucture, at least in the closing hours of the game.

Shack: Is it fair to say that since resources last throughout the game, it's more about resource bandwidth than resource volume?

Chris Taylor: Yeah, and while that analogy is totally correct, it's better to just look at real life. So the United States military, for example, has all these planes and boats and tanks. If they didn't make another dollar the day the war has started, it doesn't invalidate what they've already bought. In the very latest parts of the game, in the eleventh hour, it's the infrastructure you've created that decides the fate of the game.

It's closer to reality. If you want to build a high rise, you don't have to write a check for the full amount before the cement trucks come in to pour the first floor. In Supreme Commander, the economy comes in and you expend money as you get it, which means you can start incredibly large mega-projects when you don't have the resources to pay for them. You're just getting them started, which is wonderful. As you get more resources, you can put more engineers on the project, and they will continue to spend at a higher rate on that unit, so you see the results of this real-life analogy that flows out of the economic model.

Shack: So on to an entirely different part of the game, nukes are obviously very powerful but there are presumably countermeasures and vast amounts of efforts that must be expended to use them. What's the system around that?

Chris Taylor: Well, I love nukes. I love nukes that do massive amounts of damage, but like anything there should be an easy way to counter it--relatively easy--meaning that if you build nukes, and your opponent builds anti-nukes you're never going to win the game that way. What people forget, though, in terms of strategy, is that nukes are not just meant to knock out your opponent's base. Let's take a scenario. I build up nukes, and you build anti-nukes. I fire five of them at you, and you knock them out of the air, and for every dollar I spend on the nukes you spend twenty cents. I'm losing this arms race. However, when you think you've got me beat, you have this invading army leaving your base and there's no anti-nuke capability escorting that massive army, and I drop a nuke on them and you say, "Oh."

As a strategist, I like to create what I call a red herring system, where people do something because they think it's going to be a slam dunk, and then they realize it isn't. That creates a lot of deeper strategies, because people start to say, "Well, my friend is not going to think I'm going to build nukes, because he knows that I'm going to build anti-nukes, which means he's probably not going to build nukes, which means I'm not going to bother building anti-nukes." You get into this whole "I know that you know that I know that you don't know" rabbit hole, which allows these chess-like games to evolve. You'll find the guy nuking the other guy and he'll say, "I can't believe you built nukes! You never build nukes! I've played you twenty times and you've never built nukes! Where did this nuke comes from?" and the first guy says, "Exactly." [laughs] It's just fun. It takes the game to a whole new place.

Then you can also drop nukes on ships in the ocean, and someone might say, "God, I never thought about you knocking out my ships with a nuke, I should never have kept them still," because if the ships are always moving you can never hit them. You'd never know where they're going to go. A nuke takes quite a while to get across a world, a nuke is in the air for a minute or two minutes, and you could move the slowest thing in that time. Nukes just really dress the game up and take it to a very exciting and interesting place.

Now, of course we have shield systems too, which take out all of your traditional projectiles--long range artillery can be protected against, the shields absorb various impacts. Then there are sorts of cool countermeasure systems. You've got stealth field generators, you've got spooking systems for your mobile units that can make it look like there's a massive army approaching on radar when there isn't, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of systems that make it all come together in interesting ways.

Continue to the next page for details on dual monitor support and the game's strategic zoom feature.

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