SupCom vanilla was an OK game, not great, mostly because of multiplayer. The single player always sucked, and the multiplayer had potential, but had serious problems with the way it was structured. As a competitive RTS player, I didn’t really care about the SP but the MP had to work.

SupCom Forged Alliance is a much better game (multiplayer wise). The SP probably still sucks, I didn’t even bother playing it. The AI is horrible in skirmish mode- it doesnt really bother me, but it will bother some. Multiplayer though, is good. Not Starcraft good or Company of Heroes good, but good enough.

Fighting the SupCom hardest skirmish AI: tense. You’d get odd, probing attacks, and then an experimental would show up and say hi. You actually needed to do a bit of intel, which sounds dangerously like strategy.

Fighting the FA hardest (non-cheating) skirmish AI: yawn. It sets up a bunch of factories and repeat-builds a trickle of tier one units into the gaping maw of your defensive line, and will be lucky to get that up to T2 before you can steamroll it with a Monkeylord. It can be a little exhausting if it starts to overwhelm your engineering resources, but it’s never really challenging.

And, as always, neither can build sensible bases, save for some prescripted defence outposts.

The singleplayer campaign is a joke, with the usual SupCom dichotomy of being bitched about the need for haste which, as the PC GAMER review observed, is a great way to make the following objective nigh-impossible. The whole unite-against-red-team’s-AI-gone-bad thing is such a direct rip from CABAL that it’s cringeworthy. I ended up playing Firestorm after this and, frankly, it did it better. TibSun, the unloved runt of the C&C series, outdoing the direct descendent of Total Annihilation. What the fnord.

The reason why SupCom adds strategy is because it expands the play area and how you interact with it. Much the same way Total War is more than just two lines of units in any other RTS. I think there’s quite a lot to SupCom that you’re missing Gap Gen. The spectacle is not point.

Hopefully the same team will be working on Demigod.

And yeah Duoae, a lot of us left after DS, althought more left after DS2 than DS1. Taylor talks big, but in the end he really is just full of gas.

No doubt the multiplayer is different, but the AI at least isn’t very convincing.

Seriously, Dungeon siege 2 was rubbish compared with the original and Space Siege always looked like an empty shell of a game devoid of something that you could learn to love. Even Demigod looks pretty lacklustre and i have no intent of even renting that game when it comes out. I just feel that since Total Annhilation and Dungeon Siege all of their other games designs just aren’t working. I didn’t like Supreme Commander though i bought that because i loved TA so much.

I don’t know what’s happened to the studio but has there been a big change in staff within the period following DS 1?

Chris Taylor turned the RTS into space invaders

I never get this argument. Clearly Dungeon Siege was a waste of time and could have benefited from better characters and story, but I fail to see how SupCom needs that. I never understand the criticism that allowing a strategic overview is somehow a strike against an RTS. God forbid someone tries to add some strategy into the genre.

I don’t like story cutscenes interrupting my gameplay as is. Most RTS games that try to tell a story fail miserably, because the format is not right for story telling. You have to concoct completely unbelievable reasons for why you’re always rebuilding that barracks or rediscovering that tech. The alternative is to sacrifice gameplay and freedom for story, and that’s hardly a positive imo.