Every possible toy vehicle or tin soldier that you could imagine was there. Battleships. Fleets of bombers with swept-back wings and sleek fighters to escort or intercept them. Spy planes, radar installations, scout bikes and mobile artillery platforms. A breed of tank for every situation. Short range missile launchers. Long range missile launchers. Fixed artillery positions that could hurl shells for miles. Nukes. Anti-nukes. And the baby pee-wee with its laser pop gun.

It was rightly lauded for its complexity. Not only were you asked to manage straight fights, but you’d have to look after a hefty recycling program (retrieving the steel carcasses of dead tanks and rebuilding them), a navy, an air-fleet and an information war.

Most of all though, it was lauded for its almost extreme sensation. No game made you feel as much a part of a real war as TA. It was functional, almost austere. No hero units, no link to the fantastic. Just cold metal and hot artillery. Total future war. The good news is that all of the good of TA is present and correct here. TA is SupCom ’s jumping-off point. It only gets better from there.

Second: some fiction. Some time in the future, humanity has diverged into three races. The UEF (United Earth Federation) are the most recognizably human - they are the meat-head army with commanders who Emphasize. Every. Word. The Aeon are what happened after humanity met ET: zealots who worship abandoned alien artifacts, wanting to spread their “way” through peaceful conversion if possible, but with nuclear force if needed. The Cybran sit somewhere in between: they’re almost indistinct from the computers that power their forces, wired and ready to fire.