It''s hard to believe that the excellent Supreme Commander is destined to be a footnote in history as the 'other Real-Time Strategy (RTS) title of 2007' behind the awesome juggernaut that is Company of Heroes. Disbelief comes not from the quality of the games - both are deserving of attention - but rather the fact that Supreme Commander is a wonderful game deserving of accolades, but it will get none because Company of Heroes is better in pretty much every way. The good news is that it got enough critical, and more importantly commercial, attention that an expansion has been released. The other good news is that Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is every bit as good as the original. However, it just so happens that Company of Heroes received an expansion at the same time ... and that one is better, meaning that Forged Alliance will do nothing to change Supreme Commander's position as the 'other' RTS this year.

So, now that we are past where this game and its expansion pack fall in the greater hierarchy of the RTS genre, let's dig into this wonderful title and examine it in some detail. Before I do so, let me issue a caveat: while I believe that any serious RTS fan should have played both Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander because they are excellent games, there is another reason to play Supreme Commander before touching this standalone expansion: it is a brutally difficult game that starts you off at higher levels and dumps you unceremoniously into the fray of tense battles. If you have played the original then your mouth should now be watering!

Supreme Commander is a huge and complex game that rewards getting intimately associated with all of the details of the interface and using strategy to manage your units or developments in order to accomplish objectives. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance comes with a large stack of refinements and interface improvements, thereby streamlining all its elements. This could suddenly have you thinking that the game now comes with an 'easy button' to automate everything, but don't let that fool you - this is still a behemoth of a game to play and control. There has certainly been some streamlining of the interface to hog less screen space and be more efficient, but all of the functionality and depth is still present - along with the complexity! Forged Alliance is massive in scale and scope, even compared to other recent games in the genre. Playing it is like playing chess against a grand master; you will need to take a long term view of the game and plan many steps ahead or you'll quickly be wiped out. This is because not only is the core combat challenging, but the tech tree is massive, the resource management is daunting and the economics make you feel like the Finance Minister of a large economy.

From a technical perspective, the game is also a monster; the original looked pretty good and this looks better - for a price. To get even reasonable performance with mid-level settings you will need a very powerful computer. As real-time strategy games have added more destructible areas, more units and a generally vast scale, they have done so at the cost of massive computing power. With a reasonable PC you can still enjoy the game, but make no mistake - this game is power-hungry and uncompromising and if you try to ask for more eye candy than your PC can support, you are likely to get lag and stutter during critical phases of a battle. As is typically true for RTS games, you have the best view of the battlefield when zoomed far out, but then you can't see all of the gorgeous units and skirmishes. You will constantly be zooming in and out to control your factions and then witness them destroying your enemies. The sounds and music are every bit as good as the original - the dialogue is different for the various factions, there is a stirring soundtrack and somehow you can hear all of the different effects amongst the chaos of the units onscreen.

One thing that disappointed me was that while the various factions look and sound different, they play the same scenarios with the same objectives and for some you need to look pretty deep into the tech trees to see a difference. In other words, your fundamental strategy will not vary much as you play the different factions. This was true in the original, so many fans hoped that among the tweaks and differences with the new Seraphim race there would be more varied factional gameplay. At first glance this seems to be true, but while there are tech tree differences, they pale before the fact that managing resources and economics for the new race is pretty much identical to any of the other. Therefore, just as before, focusing on the micro-management of resources and economy is the best path to success.

The core of the gameplay comes down to 'build the best units and weapons as fast as you can'. As I mentioned, there is a world of resource management behind that strategy and that is where battles (and ultimately the war) are won and lost. You will need to constantly monitor your statistics to keep everything positive so that you have the ability to continue building. Then you need to figure out what units or weapons are needed and where to place them to complete your objectives. Finally, you actually need to fight the battles. That is the struggle - juggling all of the things you need to succeed can make it feel that you are playing a city builder-style game rather than a war game. This is exactly where the separation between casual RTS fans and true grognards happens - learning the details of what factors impact each other will make you one of the people who win wars online rather than the folks who are under the feet of the giant mechs.

The single player component of Forged Alliance adds a new story and several massive missions. One of the cool things in the original game was that you would start with a large map and when you completed an objective a new large section of map opened up, usually with enemy forces ready to take you out. This is still the case in the expansion and it is simply staggering how massive some of the maps become, plus how many actual units come into play during the missions. It is little wonder that the game requires so much computing power. One complaint I have is that too many times there are enemies that appear unreasonably close, sending you quickly to your death - it is a classic example of the game using the 'die and retry' gambit, something that is an artifact of first person shooters and adventure games that should have died long ago.

As with the original, multiplayer is where the fun really takes hold and when I say "takes hold", I mean that it grabs you by the jugular and throttles you if you aren't prepared! The chances are that if you are new to Supreme Commander then you will enter multiplayer after doing pretty well at single player, confident that you understand the game mechanics and how to properly conduct a campaign. Then you will learn that you haven't even scratched the surface of understanding. This is a game that rewards patient study over time; if you do your homework then you'll be treated to massive and lengthy battles against other clever wargamers. It is worth every minute you dedicate, because once you figure it out you will feel like you are simultaneously playing three games - a traditional RTS, a nation-building resource management game and a city-building economic simulator, all connected and interrelated!

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance takes everything that was great about the original and makes it better; it also takes all of the issues with the original game and does some amount of work on them. Thankfully though, it never betrays the core experience that the original game offered; an experience that is very difficult, complex and not for everyone. There were many complaints about the complexity and interface, and while it could have been an easy choice to drastically change the structure of the game to address these issues, I am glad this didn't happen. There are enough games that meet this need and Supreme Commander remains a unique experience that is challenging for even the most seasoned RTS player. So while it isn't perfect I still highly recommend it - it is the second best RTS expansion pack of the year, adding to the second best RTS in recent history. So sit back and prepare for a gaming experience that is truly as awesome in scale as it is in quality.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).