Square Enix Announces Supreme Commander 2
arcticstoat writes "Supreme Commander 2 has now been officially announced, but with a surprise publishing partner on board — Square Enix. Gas Powered Games' original RTS game and its expansion pack, Forged Alliance, were published by THQ, who is no stranger to the RTS genre, but Square Enix has previously specialized in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Explaining the move, Square Enix said in a statement that it 'has previously worked exclusively with Japanese development companies, so the decision to form strategic partnerships with developers located outside of Japan serves as a new cornerstone of its strategy to create games targeted primarily at consumers in Europe and North America. Additionally, Square Enix Group's foray into the real-time strategy genre is a significant expansion of its product lineup.'"
Let the great grandchild of Total Annihilation be as great as the original!
Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.
It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I also did a fairly successful AI patch for SC.
Get it here:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929
The AI script was all in lua so it proved quite easy to mod.