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Forged Alliance doesn’t change one fundamental thing about Supreme Commander. This is still the RTS for players who like to think big. If you have the computer to run them, it will let you play on massive, massive maps, and it’s easy to build an army massive enough to fill them.

Obviously this is a two-edged sword. If you like micro-managing a million units all over the map while playing SimCity back at the base, this is the game for you. If you don’t, it may just give you the mother of all migraines.

Regardless of your personal preference in scale, the game delivers as advertised, and Forged Alliance helps it deliver a more exciting, smoothly-paced experience in multiplayer. It may not be the best starting point for newcomers to the Supreme Commander experience, but veterans are going to love it.

This I Command

Just how the expansion works could stand a little clarification. It is a stand-alone product, but without the original Supreme Commander, you can only play the Forged Alliance campaign, and only play online as the new race (the Seraphim). You need the original game to play the original campaigns or to use the three original factions in online multiplayer.

The new campaign has six missions, but they’re largely the same regardless of which faction you pick. While each of the three has a few different side objectives, it’s not as much as they got in the original campaign (four common missions, plus two exclusive missions for each race). The campaign also kicks off with the entire tech tree unlocked, which means that some missions – especially the early battles – are very slow-starting, as you spend a while on the defensive while building your base up to Tech Three. Most of the time, attacking the AI’s defenses with anything lower on the tree is suicide.

That’s not to say the campaign isn’t fun to play through, though -- it makes a good tune-up for getting back into the multiplayer game, and there’s a pretty decent new set of bad guys, too. While the Seraphim aren’t especially well-developed as personalities, they’re very impressive as a visual design. Their smooth lines and colorful highlighting contrast in some cool ways with the drab, chunky, “military” units of the existing factions.

Mass Effect

The multiplayer game shows the effect of many balance tweaks, but the big one has to do with how you gather certain resources. It’s proven a serious change for the better.

Here, as in the original Supreme Commander, you gather the Mass resource with two different buildings. Extractors suck Mass out of specific points on the map, while Fabricators crank it out wherever they’re placed (usually as part of a base). The difference in Forged Alliance is that Extractors now offer a significant advantage over Fabricators, whereas before most players stuck to Fabricators exclusively and saved themselves the trouble of roaming around the map.

This shakes up the game in a couple of exciting ways. Now, aggressive players will usually steamroll defensive opponents. They’ll explore the map early, lay down Extractors, gather more resources, climb the tech tree faster, and otherwise gain a significant advantage. It gives the game a feel more like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes, where you can’t sit still and “turtle” while building a base.

The need to be aggressive in the early game also means that units at the bottom of the tech tree are more useful than they used to be in multiplayer. Those bots and aircraft from Tech One and Tech Two are now vital for scouting, skirmishing, and building up a resource network.

Sim Slaughter

In general, Forged Alliance shifts the balance of gameplay towards combat and away from economic jiggery-pokery. You still have to put real effort into building a well-designed base, but that isn’t all you do in the early stages of a game. In particular, a new template system streamlines base-building – once you have a particular building layout that you like, you can save it and slap that whole collection of structures down without building each individual item separately.

That makes it easier to let the computer handle the SimCity stuff and keep your attention on more important things, like blowing up the other guy. A boatload of new units helps with that particular goal. The air units in particular are more fun to use – Forged Alliance adds smoother, more efficient flight mechanics for fighters and bombers.

Most players will gravitate instinctively towards the online game, but if you like sparring with the computer, the expansion has a bigger and tougher collection of AI opponents. There’s even a set of “cheating” AIs for an especially ridiculous challenge – by all accounts, they’re mean enough to give top-ranked competitive players trouble.

Over By Christmas

In short, while this is not necessarily a bigger game than the original Supreme Commander, it’s definitely a better one. Meanwhile, given that the original’s available at a pretty fair discount nowadays, it shouldn’t be too hard for new players to gather a complete set for a reasonable price. True, those newcomers are going to have a rough time of it for a little while, but they’ll have a good time if they stick with it a while.

Review by:
Video Produced by: Joel Rubin