Game designer Chris Taylor has been best known for his 1997 realtime strategy title Total Annihilation, but he's likely to become better known for his upcoming Supreme Commander, which looks to one-up Total Annihilation in as many ways as possible. I recently had the chance to chat with Chris about a number of features in Supreme Commander, as well as his thoughts on the strategy genre, how he ended up making games, and why he decided to explore RPGs with Dungeon Siege. Prepare yourself for a hefty read, then check out this five page interview.

Chris Taylor: The way we're working is that we have a pool of units, so that if you're playing with fewer people, you have more units [per person]. We've toyed with two to four thousand units in a pool. So let's say you and I play head to head and it was four thousand units, we'd get two thousand each. If we played eight player, we'd get five hundred each. What that final unit count is, it's not yet been decided, but in all fairness whatever it is when we launch the game in January it will be different in June. The powers of the machines will go up, it's fully moddable, people can change the number of units to whatever they want with a mod. So if you and I get together and we know a little something about how to mod the game, we can change it to ten thousand units each. There's really nothing about how the game is architected that limits that number. It's an arbitrary limit that will be set at release, and it will probably be within two and four thousand units total.