STRATEGIC LAUNCH DETECTED.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. While the base game's campaign was much stronger,narratively speaking,which is BIG points for any RTS,but Forged Alliance works out some balance issues,gives a much more refined UI,and streamlines the engine so it won't melt a Crysis-ready machine when eight thousand units start mobilizing simultaneously. It's warfare on a STRATEGIC scale,not a tactical scale. Warcraft? Starcraft? Dawn of War? All tactical. WAY too small to mean anything in the larger theater of war. Too small to actually encourage tactical thought.
SupCom? You have KILOMETERS of breathing room. An economy that won't gutter out simply by existing. Answers for everything. Even the toughest turtle can be cracked,if you have a Mavor,Paragon,Yolona Oss,or swarm of Soul Rippers. Nukes can be cockblocked until the end of time. Base design is a VERY important thing,as structures can have improved performance when built adjacently. Surround a Mass Fabricator with power plants or mass storage,and see what I mean.
Units have their role,though T1 units are,unfortunately,phased out entirely once you hit T2. But T2 units see use throughout the whole game. Anything can happen,too. Especially with a Cybran opponent,on a map with even ANY amount of water,what with their T2 Destroyers being amphibious. Every faction has its own identity,its own strengths and weaknesses. And the Experimentals are ultimate representations of this. The UEF is all about being tough as nails while rolling you over. The Fatboy has the best shield in the game,and can produce land forces at a nauseating rate. The Atlantis has amazing SAMs and torpedoes,can build,store,and service aircraft,then deploy them at a moments notice with utter impunity,being able to submerge and surface at will. The Novax enables a UEF commander to tear apart hostile forces and unprotected installations unopposed. And their Mavor is the absolute FINAL WORD in artillery.
Seraphim,all about being BETTER THAN YOU. Their experimental bomber,the Ahwassa,drops SuperNukes(TM) that a nuke defense will ignore. Their experimental bot,the Ythotha,has more unique weapons than any other bot in the game,plus it turns into a quasar when it gets wrecked. And their experimental missile launcher,the Yolona Oss,builds an OmegaNuke(TM) for PEANUTS,in a MINUTE,and the missile takes two shots from a nuke defense (five minute build time,three minute missile build time) to stop,and when it hits,it GLASSES the entire region. It can actually completely cleanse a 5*5 map.
Cybrans like to be... Surprising. As mentioned earlier,they have a boat that can crawl on land,bringing a considerable amount of firepower with it. Then there's their experimentals. The Monkeylord,with the single highest grossing DPS weapon in the game,pointed at anything on the surface,and this crawling engine of destruction is invisible to standard radar,and sonar,because it can crawl on the sea floor,armed with torpedoes. The Soul Ripper,a slow,ponderous brick of GUNS,flying in over your base,with so much gun it makes you wonder where the guns end and the ship begins. Oh,and it can laugh off a nuke. The Scathis,semi-mobile artillery that will fire three rounds a second if your energy economy can keep up,and it can go anywhere,as it is also amphibious. The Megalith,a crab-bot that drops eggs that engineers can work on to build high-end units,sports a pair of battleship-grade turrets that poke up on the surface of the water more often than not,depth charges and torpedoes,and enough health to laugh off TWO nukes. And their units in general tend to have stealth or other means to be more than they appear.
The Aeon,performance above all else. The Galactic Colossus,the single most durable unit in the game,capable of ignoring four nukes,with a tractor beam and second best DPS weapon in the game,PLUS an Omni-Radar. The Tempest,a submersible battleship that can built a support fleet and singlehandedly sink most fleets alone. The Paragon,a fusion bomb at the heart of your base that toggles resource output to put you at a profit,at all times. Finally,the CZAR. Know Independence Day? The alien ship from that,minus shields. Big fuck-off beam. Can build,store,service,and deploy aircraft. Depth charges,just in case it's flying over a pesky naval fleet. AA missiles. And then there's the fact that most Aeon units outrange their contemporaries,hit MUCH harder,and can strafe and hover.
Yeah,it's this sort of combo that makes me giddy for an RTS. Faction identity,scale,and a game determined by an actual strategy that can change on the fly,that doesn't need to be formulated like chess.