Each faction has a different Armoured Commander - a huge, intimidating, unit capable of building, defending, and destroying - think of it as a typical hero unit, but bigger, stronger, and scarier. The commander unit can build most basic, tech level 1 structures - these are used to build more units, and higher tech level structures. Resources are found in the form of mass, and energy. Mass is gathered from mass extractors, and you can convert mass to energy in converters.

Base building has an extra tactical element in the form of bonuses to productivity of certain buildings depending on their proximity to other supporting buildings. There are many area of effect weapons in the game, so you, as commander, have to chose between increased productivity, and protection from rapid destruction of bulidings too close together.

The campaign appears short at first, but each mission can take several hours to complete. Supreme Commander takes a more tactical stance than other RTS games - build times are longer, and units are much more specialised than you may be used to. The commander units can also take a fair bit of punishment, so the typical early game rushing in multi player should be less of an issue.

The battles in Supreme Commander can be huge - the unit cap is around 500 units per side. Thankfully, the UI makes commanding such huge forces easy, with a very flexible camera that allows for everything from zoomed in views to a very abstracted, zoomed out military overview.

Commanding large groups of units is made easy with the strategic overview, and at later stages of each mission you may find yourself spending more time in the zoomed out 'war table' view than you do in typical RTS view.

The AI plays a decent game, with varying levels of agression depending on the difficulty setting. On normal you will usually have plenty of time to prepare yourself, but you will still find the AI defending, and attacking sensibly. The AI seems to put basic defences in as a matter of course, and will look at your forces and identify weak areas, so there is less chance of monotony and caused by one-trick AI - as your strategies vary, the computer will respond.

We tested Supreme Commander on two machines - one was a 64Bit AMD 4000 with a single NVidia 6800 graphics card and 2GB RAM, the other was a Dual Core AMD 4000, also with 2GB RAM, but with 2 PCI-e 7800 graphics cards. Both machines are well above the minimum specification, and both were capable of running the game, but the first machine needed some of the detail turned down to get an acceptable framerate. The second machine was able to run the game with everything on full detail, and we did not see any drop in performance during large scale battles. Its worth checking the specifications before you buy, as Supreme Commander is a huge install - taking up 8.5Gb of drive space, and while the minimum requirements for graphics aren't that high, if you want it to look its best, you will need a decent card.