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The war on robotics

Words: Tim Edwards, PC Gamer UK

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We’re turning the PC off now, just in case the sentient robots inside break out. Supreme Commander does funny things to your mind; its bombastic future-war could drive you to distraction. Or outright delusion.

Tonight was the last straw. We’re fairly certain the computer-controlled enemy commander just played a trick on us. The bait was a small group of light tanks leaving its base, as well as the cover of its anti-air flak cannons. It was heading toward a remote resource point. We couldn’t sit back and ignore them.

On these battlefields, every scrap of metal and every power-plant matters. As soon as we felt safe, we ordered a fleet of gunships, the future-war equivalent of Apache helicopters, to take them out.

But our attack was met halfway by double our number in interceptors. Watching detachedly as our aircraft fell out of the sky was fascinating. Knowing that we’d been outplayed, out-thought, and out-flanked... that at any moment a wave of tanks would leave the enemy base, free to drive, unchallenged, to the front wall of our defences, and victory.

First, some history. Supreme Commander has been in gestation for nearly ten years. It’s the unofficial successor to 1997’s Total Annihilation, the most forward-looking strategy game of all time. TA’s vision of heavy metal war was lauded for its scale: its battlefields dwarfed those of contemporaries such as Starcraft or Red Alert. It was equally lauded for ambition; while most RTS games let you play with bizarrely limited armies, TA set you free.