Supreme Commander 2

Supreme Commander 2 is a real-time strategy video game developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Square Enix. It is a sequel to Supreme Commander. A PC only demo was initially released via Steam on February 24, 2010, with the full game released on March 2, 2010.

A Mac OS X version of Supreme Commander 2 was announced by Virtual Programming in May, 2010. A release date was not established at the time.

Plot
The story starts with the newly-elected president's assassination. A trailer for the game released at the Entertainment Software Association's 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo indicates that the story takes place twenty-five years after the conclusion of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and centers on the breakdown of peaceful relations between the United Earth Federation, the Illuminate, and the Cybran Nation, implying that war has been instigated through a single bullet. Supreme Commander 2 has 18 missions; 6 for the UEF, Cybrans and Aeon Illuminate, collectively. The UEF campaign follows Dominic Maddox, a UEF commander who fights off Cybrans, withdraws from the UEF to defend his family and later secures a portal that leads to Seraphim VII. The Illuminate campaign follows Commander Thalia Kael as she fights to restore the Illuminate to its former glory before realizing her mistake and turning against her former comrades. The Cybran campaign follows Ivan Brackman, an experimental genetic composite of Dr. Brackman and Elite Commander Dostya, who fights under the direction of his "father" while attempting to help his friends. The end goal is to acquire a planet killer superweapon. Throughout the campaign the player will run into one Commander Gauge, an earlier version of the Proto-Cybrans who is also a bit mad and likes to use a mix of Cybran and Illuminate tech.

Demo
On February 24, 2010, a demo of Supreme Commander 2 was released on the Steam digital distribution service. The demo includes two tutorial levels and two campaign levels all played as the UEF faction, but does not include skirmish or multiplayer modes. The single player includes two missions, which were picked these missions to show the more advanced portion of the game.

Gameplay
In skirmish and multiplayer play, you start out with an ACU (Armored Command Unit) which is a large, powerful, construction capable unit and your avatar on the battlefield. You build mass extractors and power generators which produce mass and energy, along with the research facility, which produces research points. Research points can be spent on multiple faction specific tech trees to add bonuses, abilities, upgrades, and unlock more advanced units and buildings, culminating in experimental units. Experimental units are massive, research unlocked units or buildings that are far more powerful than average units or buildings and are produced from the experimental gantries (buildings with the sole purpose of building experimental units) or built by engineers. You also build land, air, and sea factories which produce land, air and sea units respectively. The player may also build add-on structures, expanding the capabilities of existing factories. There are more advanced buildings and units, and as the player's base and research level expands, so does the quality of the units. The ultimate aim of the game is to destroy your opponents' ACU. In the heavily scripted campaign, the player is given a base, a heavily entrenched enemy, and certain objectives such as "destroy the enemy's experimental unit". As the campaign progresses, the player is allowed to use more units, the missions become harder, and the enemy grows stronger.

Changes from Supreme Commander

 * The key difference from its predecessor is that research is a cumulative resource gathered by building labs. Build more labs and you research points at a faster rate. This means you can spend research points on any tech you wish at any time. This produces an entirely different game to Supreme Commander 1 because it often results in a multiplayer game where one side will suddenly acquire an invincible tech advantage: for example, the ability to use a loyalty gun which converts masses of enemy units to your side, or the ability to fire a nuke. It is often this sudden game changing acquisition of tech which marks the end of a multiplayer game.
 * There are fewer units and buildings in total; three or four units in Supreme Commander have been condensed into one unit in Supreme Commander 2 and many buildings have been removed. There are 8 experimentals per faction divided into major and minor, and are now built by special experimental construction buildings (except for sea based units, which are still constructed by engineers).
 * Experimental units in Supreme Commander 2 are generally less expensive, faster to build, but pack less of a punch than the ones in its predecessor. But like the original, these units are still what generally leads to victory between multiple players (or AI).
 * Mass fabricators, which automatically changed energy into mass at a fixed rate, have been replaced with mass converters, which must be manually triggered from energy generators.
 * Construction is now based on presently available resources; queueing up more units than there are resources is rejected, and trying to place advance building orders does not work. Saved build orders have been removed.
 * The adjacency system has been removed, perhaps in part because the new navigational AI has trouble with tightly packed bases. Some buildings no longer deal area explosion damage when destroyed, power generators and mass converters still explode on death.
 * There is a research tree instead of three tiers of tech levels, although buildings are split between 'basic' and 'advanced' (everything in 'advanced' is unlocked by research, except for the radar/sonar station).
 * The graphics are less detailed and the texturing is not as thorough.
 * Formation based movement has been removed in favor of an automatic self organization system, however many players have complained that this feature organizes mixed groups badly.
 * The Aeon Illuminate has been renamed the Illuminate, and has been stripped of all naval vessels in favor of almost all units using hover technology. Illuminate unit names are now primarily based on puns, with a few holdovers from the original. For example: a fighter/bomber air unit named "Weedoboth" (We do both), an anti-air experimental named "Airnomo" (Air no mo').
 * Supreme Commander 2 campaign is more focused on conflicting characters rather than ideologies; there is not a state of total war on as in the original.
 * Resource storage buildings for mass and energy have been removed. There are no longer any player-affected resource caps.
 * Maps are generally smaller. There is also less "playable" battle space on maps due to an increase in decorative terrain.
 * The tech tiers of Supreme Commander 1 have been replaced by 5 technology trees for: Air Units, Land Units, Naval Units (Absent while playing Illuminate), Structures, and ACUs.
 * Except for the mission briefings, cutscenes cannot be skipped, this includes the end credits.

Reception
, Supreme Commander 2 has scored a Metacritic rating of 77, receiving generally favorable reviews from critics and mixed reviews from fans with an average of 6.1/10. Some praising the new game play and others criticizing the game for not being the same or nearly as complex as the original Supreme Commander, along with its use of Steam and large update (approximately 2.5 GB) necessary to play.

GameZone's Dakota Grabowski gave the game a 7/10, saying "When push comes to shove, Supreme Commander 2 is worthwhile RTS to a certain demographic, which ends up being the casual audience who only toy around with the genre at their own leisure. Hardcore fans will instantly be turned off by the changes and removal of particular elements, so they may want to try the demo out first before hunkering down to pay their hard-earned cash on Supreme Commander 2."