Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

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Does anyone here play SCFA? It has nowhere near as many players as something like StarCraft but it's a far superior game in my opinion. Real-time strategy games evolved in the mid to late nineties and then Total Annihilation came out - it had every refinement of every previous game and a massive load of other improvements, it was the absolute pinnacle of the genre. A few months later StarCraft came out and through a bizarre series of fluke events became a massive international e-sports phenomenon. RTS games other than StarCraft started to die out, there were no new innovations to be made and the userbase declined.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance came along in 2007/8 and it is the sequel to Total Annihilation in all but name. It has several further refinements (most notably the strategic zoom which lets you see the entire map, or at the flick of a mousewheel a single unit) and is entirely logically consistent, and epic on a scale that actually deserves the use of the word. It allows the easy direction of up to a thousand units and you aren't left wrestling a clunky interface like in some other games.

Here's a video that one of the players put together to showcase some of the game, this is all ingame footage, no cut scenes:

Youtube video, click to play

Anyway, if you're interested you can get the game for peanuts on Steam, and there is a brilliant free lobby system available from Forged Alliance Forever (click). I'd be happy to teach any new players the basics to help them get up to speed.

i love the game but i tend to prefer a leisurely pace where i turtle up and tackle the ai over hours, the slow down issues kinda killed this for me though.

i might be up for trying some mp action after my work load drops a little.

I gave away my copy because I was addicted to it... I could easily spend all night playing (which makes work the next day painful!)

There is an AI mod by a guy named Sorian that sorts a lot of the slowdown issues, you can find it on the Gaspowered forums (I'm on my phone otherwise I'd link it).

Multiplayer is pretty fast paced, turtling is looked down on by “serious” players, but having said that the various Thermopylae maps are very turtle-friendly and pretty popular. Go to Find Games in the FAForever client and if there's a Thermo game hosted you can just double-click and it will auto-download the map and get you into the game lobby.

EDIT: Here the Sorian AI mod. Note that you can't use it with FAForever. FAForever includes it as standard so it will cause problems if you don't remove it before using FAF.

Avoid Supreme Commander 2 it's complete pants compared to this.

A lot of strategy and tactics in this game. Though the key is to get your base economy going and then the slaughter begins.

Love it. Best RTS that's come out in the last few years

I love supreme commander it was the right way to go with the rts style of games and is simply the best out there right now but total annihilation will always be my favorite.

But for NTs there is supreme commander 2 a much simpler game.