In fact, it’s easy to “turtle.” Resource production is both infinite and fixed: you don’t have to leave your base, and you can still be swimming in energy. For some players, that’s the perfect excuse to turn their entire economy over to defense, investing in gun emplacements, bubble shields, even walls.

To crack that shell, you’re going to need quite the tactical hammer. Welcome to tier four: experimental units.

SupCom ’s greatest victory is in the sharply defined feel of each side. Despite the fact they have mostly similar units - boats, tanks, planes - they feel distinct. That’s partly down to form: the Cybran forces are dark, scurrying, eight-legged robotic insects. The Aeon are sleek futurists; all molded edges and slick metal. The UEF are bulky, brutish and belligerent: robots with a Rambo complex. But the feel is also a product of function. Take the tier one artillery. The Cybrans just lob shells that may or may not hit their target. No matter; a direct hit is devastating. The UEF have a similar idea - but their shells air-burst into four cluster-bombs. Any army caught in a sustained barrage will be in real trouble. The Aeon’s artillery is our favorite, with its accurate slingshots of laser blue energy: a real fireworks display.

But nothing says “distinct armies” like bringing a tier four experimental unit to a fight. These are the big boys, the toys you wheel out during the end game. They have titles like “Maver,” “Galactic Colossus” and “Fatboy,” and they have the potential to shred every other unit in the game. They also take an age to construct, so they represent massive investments in resources and time. You could pump out 15 or 20 heavy siege bots for the same cost.

Personally, we have a soft spot for the UEF’s Fatboy: it’s a heavy artillery piece, welded to a factory, and dropped on treads. In one skirmish game, it took about ten minutes to s-l-o-w-l-y inch its way across the desert. Ten tense minutes after which we realized that while its energy shield (a bright blue defensive bubble) could probably hold off a brief air assault, without any air cover, it was doomed. As it reached the first wall of a Cybran base, we sent fighters to protect it: we needn’t have worried. By the time they arrived, the Fatboy had won all by itself.

What’s remarkable within these melees is the honest physics. We still see, in many strategy games, shells that redirect themselves as they fly, homing arrows, and missiles that pass through walls on the way to their target. SupCom has no truck with such fallacies. It fires shells the size of caravans at any point on the map, and what gets in the way, gets hit. We fell victim to such specific physics early on, when a wing of my bombers moved in on an artillery position - directly through its arc of fire. One shell clipped the leader, sending it into a death spiral. We’ve seen assault bots take tank shells aimed at the missile launchers behind, tanks skewered on the legs of a Monkeylord, and chain nuclear reactions as one nuke hit a power-station, which blew up another, which finally engulfed a commander. Sweet.

We’re most concerned about a balance issue. It’s quite possible in the early game to put an opponent out of contention with a sneaky trick. This is fine; it’s called good strategy. What’s less fine is the revenge wronged players can wreak by marching their commander into your base and detonating the backpack nuke. It’s funny the first time, a rare chance to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. But it can be inordinately frustrating in four player free-for-alls - condemning those who win an early fight to losing the late game undeservedly.