The Supreme Commander demo is available for download. You can get it off of the official site or you can get it straight from FileShack here.

My initial impressions (now that the demo works fine on my computer, the Beta didn’t) are thus:

Pro

1. Zoom out is awesome - I honestly feel like the feature has always been there (probably because of stuff like Google Maps), and I will be loathe to go back to a game that doesn’t have it
2. Right click is truly smart - Contextual smarts helps a lot of the boring micromanagement go away. Right click an engineer on another engineer: instant ‘assist’ chain that lasts until you break it. Same with unit building, resources, and many other things.
3. The lines and such that draw on the map for different information are amazing - Attack circles show ranges, all paths are smooth splines, movement vectors, attack vectors… it’s a little bit Illustrator and a little bit DEFCON. It’s hard to explain the visceral joy at seeing these lines, you just have to experience it.
4. Unit power levels feel incredibly balanced. There are less units I feel than in TA, but the units have more defined purpose - nothing wasted here.
5. The proximity lines I haven’t mastered yet, but they add to the feeling of clean connectedness which, even without game mechanics to help with, is worthwhile for the sensory warmth.

Con

1. Doesn’t run with my dual GPUs, and won’t run unless I set affinity to only one Core of the processor. I’m not getting my full computer worth in rendering power, but it doesn’t seem to suffer for it.
2. The interface is way too screen-consuming, especially at low res. It needs at the very least a WoW-style UIscale. It feels like you’re playing with someone covering up your peripheral vision.
3. Some hotkeys don’t appear to be built in or intuitive or there. Haven’t fully investigated, but haven’t found a good way to add/remove units from an existing group.
4. Scroll is WAY to fast, almost necessitating the Strategic Zoom. This needs to be a UI setting like it is for zoom speed. (maybe I haven’t found it?)
5. The ‘upgrade’ options feels a little bit ‘hidden away’. It could use being brought out somehow, or given contextual visibility.

All but the first one I expect could be fixed very shortly with mods.

EDIT: I found if you play at 1600×1200 (what it should be played at), the interface size and the scroll speed issues are gone. There is also a patch to the release of the game now that has a minimalist UI.

In total, I am duly impressed by everything it has to offer, and with the prospect of a highly modable system, I feel it will become the Nom de Plume for RTS for me for a while.

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