Supreme Commander: Difference between revisions

[[File:Epic-sm_2238.jpg|frame|Yes, that's two entire '' fleets'' [[More Dakka|duking it out]].]]

 

 

The first nail in the coffin of this golden age is the Cybrans, humans enhanced with cybernetic implants-the chief one being having their brain merged with an advanced AI computer in a process patented by [[Absent-Minded Professor|Dr. Gustav Brackman]]. Unfortunately, the Earth Empire treats the Cybrans more like slaves then real people which is something the Cybrans and their father figure Brackman don't particularly like. So Brackman and a group of followers rebel, set up their own country - the Cybran Nation - and start waging a guerrilla war to liberate their fellow Cybrans.

 

 

Then, the Earth Empire collapses and is reformed into the United Earth Federation. And then you have a thousand year long three sided war being waged by these factions. These are the events leading up to the first game. Then the expansion pack, ''Forged Alliance,'' comes out and we find out the Seraphim are actually [[Not Quite Dead]]. The colony that was destroyed was only a very small fraction of the entire Seraphim race. Naturally, they are pissed at what happened to their colony and proceed to attack humanity. This causes the Aeon Illuminate to break in two with one faction siding with the Seraphim and the other forming an alliance with the other two human factions to stop the Seraphim in their tracks.

It was followed in 2010 by ''[[Supreme Commander 2]]''.

 

* [[Airborne Aircraft Carrier]]: The Czar, an Aeon experimental unit based off the alien ships from ''[[Independence Day]]'' (core laser included), is one of these, being able to not only carry aircraft but also produce them. The factory feature is shared by all aircraft carriers in the game, including the UEF submersible aircraft carrier experimental, but only the Aeon version is airborne.

* [[Aliens Speaking English]]: Averted. The Seraphim units have their names in the Seraphim language, and their commanders even taunt you in their language. It even appears to be a well thought-out language - several Seraphim names have reccuring fragments, such as the use of "Ya" for economy facilities. On top of that, even not knowing what they're saying, you can just ''tell'' that they're taunting you through tone of voice.

** The aversion continues even after Brackman is able to devise some [[Translator Microbes]] for the player, as you can hear their native language in the background as you listen to their translated words.

* [[Artificial Stupidity]]: Direct-fire units sometimes ignore little things like mountains between them and their target, and will sit plinking away at it forever.

** On island-based skirmish maps, the AI will usually build huge numbers of low level ground units that do nothing except die in the inevitable naval bombardment. Weird, since the game features a very user-friendly method of setting up complex ferry operations with air transports. But the AI never uses it outside of scripted missions, where the air transports spawn loaded.

* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: The "game ender" experimental units, usually oversized superweapons which take ENORMOUS amounts of resources to build and have paper-thin armor. In the time it takes you to build them, conventional weapons could have wiped out your enemy twice over. And if you do build them, expect your (human) enemy to come down on you hard in desperation.

* [[Awesome Yet Practical]]: A lot of the more reasonably-priced experimental units, especially the Cybran Monkeylord and the Seraphim Ythotha.

* [[BFG]]: Numerous examples, of which the most impressive are probably the beam weapons on the experimental bots (nonchalantly sweep beam across line of enemy units, whole line dies), the super-long-range artillery cannons (capable of slaughtering advancing armies to a bot well before they are in sight of your base), and of course [[You Nuke'Em|the nukes]] - game-enders capable of turning entire bases into clouds of scrap.

** Worth special mention is the Serraphim experimental nuke launcher, whose nukes destroy about a quarter of a medium map, including experimentals with the most ludicrous amount of health, and to top it all off, takes 2 anti-nuke missiles to destroy while building nukes about 5 times faster than anti-nuke missiles can be made.

* [[Bigger Is Better]]: Leaves a larger explosion too.

* [[Black and White Morality]]: The expansion casts all three of the human factions as heroic defenders of the human race against genocidal [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]] and their [[Ancient Conspiracy|cultist lackeys]].

* [[Brick Joke]]: The Aeon T1 Anti-air unit is called the Thistle. The Seraphim T1 Anti-air unit is called the Ia-istle. Hmm...

* [[Church Militant]]: The Aeon Illuminate.

* [[Enemy Civil War]]: The Aeon. expect to find yourself smack-dab in the middle by campaign 3.

* [[The Eternal Churchill]]: The expansion is about the united factions' last stand against extinction.

* [[Everything Fades]]: Averted in the same way as ''[[Total Annihilation]]'', although there was one considerable step back in that destroyed ships don't leave reclaimable sunken wrecks any more. Considering that ships cost much more mass per unit than land or air units, this was a pretty big omission.

* [[Expansion Pack]]: ''Forged Alliance'', a stand-alone expansion, in fact.

** Averted in the sequel, with the player characters actually having backstories.

* [[Faction Calculus]]:

** The UEF are the Powerhouse. [[Mighty Glacier|Their units tend to hit hard and have lots of HP, but are slow.]]

** The Cybrans are Balanced, although maybe their units lean into [[Glass Cannon]] territory.

* [[Fashionable Asymmetry]]: The Seraphim ''love'' this trope.

** The Cybrans are morally a light shade of grey. They have a [[The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised|darker side]], but they have a good set of ideals, and they're ultimately just an [[Ragtag Bunch of Misfits|oppressed people]] fighting for their freedom.

** The Aeons are a fairly dark shade of gray. On one hand, they're a [[Church Militant|militant human religious movement who want to eliminate all who refuse to join them]], and this is reflected in a [[Knight Templar|few of their commanders]], ''[[Omnicidal Maniac|especially Avatar Marxon]]''. However, they [[Well-Intentioned Extremist|fight for peace and harmony among all living things]], [[Utopia|something they actually achieve in their ending]], and there are good people in Aeon, like [[The Messiah|Princess Rhianna]].

* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: {{spoiler|General Clarke}} in the expansion opening and {{spoiler|Princess Rhianna}} in the expansion ending.

* [[Humongous Mecha]]: Chris Taylor likes this one. About half the ground units fall into this category, though they aren't really humongous (relatively speaking). The really large, and most iconic ones are the Cybran Nation's Monkeylord spider-bot walker and the Aeon Illuminate's Galactic Colossus sacred assault bot.

* [[I Love Nuclear Power]]: The UEF. Their Tier 2 and 3 generators are fusion plants, and their commander mech can be fitted with a backpack missile silo, which can hold one nuke and one counter-missile. They also have a T-4 superheavy artillery that shoots nuke bullets.

* [[Instant Win Condition]]: The default game mode is assassination - the player who loses their ACU is out. {{spoiler|The end of the Forged Alliance campaign is a fairly straightforward example of this trope.}}

** The Aeon commander [[Knight Templar|Avatar Marxon]] believes that all non-Aeon humans are irredeemable abominations that [[Utopia Justifies the Means|must be cleansed for humanity to reach utopia]].

** The Seraphim believe that all humans, {{spoiler|including the ones that side with them}}, must be cleansed. Seraphim commanders even go so far as to permanently cut themselves off from The Way, since otherwise they would be [[Good Is Impotent|incapable of violence]]. That probably means they have to kill themselves too once they're done killing everyone else.

* [[Kill Sat]]: One of the UEF's experimental weapon systems.

* [[Knight Templar]]: Avatar Marxon

** {{spoiler|You do however get to kick his ass on the last mission in the expansion campaign. There is much rejoicing.}}

* [[Master Computer]]: QAI, complete with [[Creepy Monotone]] {{spoiler|and [[Turned Against Their Masters]]}}.

* [[Military Mashup Machine]]: Again, Chris Taylor seems to like this one. This is the concept behind most experimental units, which are built to fill several niches at once. The ultimate example is the UEF Fatboy: an amphibious land battleship with an area-covering shield that is capable of constructing its own support force.

* [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]]: Ranks somewhere in the middle.

* [[More Dakka]]: Experimental Units can have up to ten weapons firing at once.

* [[Obvious Beta]]: ''Supreme Commander'' was heavily promoted as a DirectX 10 showcase, with unit creation and mapmaking tools both promised. In the end, the game featured none of these things out of the box, with promises of a major patch -- as time went on, it became clear this too wouldn't happen. The game also included faction balance issues that had been identified in the Beta, dodgy pathfinding, poor optimisation and a raft of bugs.

* [[Obvious Rule Patch]]: ''Forged Alliance'' addressed issues with artillery hitting aircraft by making aircraft tougher than tanks. This meant that a tank column could have serious problems destroying a single parked plane.

* [[Path of Inspiration]]: The Way.

* [[Photoprotoneutron Torpedo]]: The Aeon Illuminate has strategic bombers which drop 'quark bombs'.

* [[Poor Communication Kills]]: Princess, if you would like to prove to that UEF commander that you want to save those civilians, you should point to the fact that your champion is ''right now'' defending them from all attacks, instead of trying to use your soothing voice to try to convince him you mean no harm.

** He was quite obviously insane, as he started shelling those civilians ''just because you were protecting them''.

** Made even better by the gun in question, mistakenly called Big Bertha by the French, receiving a [[Shout-Out]] in the previous game.

** The Mavor, however, is the most precise artillery piece in the game, and barely misses its targets. Granted, after 1000 years of war they should be able to do better, but it's still quite a feat compared to the T3 artillery which usually hit everything around your target instead of the target itself.

** And among the most epic, thanks to the implementation of the strategic zoom: You can zoom far enough in to see your little [[Cannon Fodder|Mech Marine]] pick its nose, then zoom out to see the entire battlefield and the several [[Nuke'Em|radioactive trefoils bearing down on your army]].

* [[Ridiculously-Fast Construction]]

** And the occasional Support Commander you can call in once you build a Quantum Gate.

* [[Saintly Church]]: The Way, depending on who the preacher is. Reaches [[Religion of Evil]] levels in some hands, and the two sides fight civil wars in both games.

* [[Spider Tank]]: The Cybran Monkeylord and Megalith. The latter can even ''lay eggs'' as a bizarre unit construction method.

** They even have land-capable Spider ''destroyers''.

* [[Stupidity Is the Only Option]]: A few of the campaign missions conclude as a failure if you kill the enemy commander by flanking them instead of punching through their units in an open attack (the very first expansion mission is like this, exploiting a hole in the enemy commander's defenses to assassinate him is a loss if you bypass his experimentals). Made worse in that advisor characters will encourage you to use that kind of tactic at other times.

* [[Stupid Sacrifice]]: {{spoiler|Samantha Clarke}} in the opening cutscene of ''Forged Alliance''. {{spoiler|She refuses to recall, despite it only taking ''a few seconds'' for her ally Dostya to do so, to try and buy more time for the evac ship to get away. Even after the ship is shot down, she can only stare at the enemy ACU as it levels its gun at her and destroys her with one shot.}}

* [[The Federation]]: The Cybran Nation is the only faction whose long-term goal is not to completely conquer the other two factions, but that doesn't mean they don't do some pretty nasty stuff.

** This actually is in keeping with the standard disunity that characterizes [[The Federation]] in most settings. The core of the Cybrans are the least malicious of the groups in the setting, but because they stress individual freedom far more than the other two sides (they are separated into individual "nodes" that operate semi-autonomously and [[We ARE Struggling Together!|occasionally come into conflict with one another]]) they have trouble exercising any real control over their more radical elements, {{spoiler|which eventually comes back to bite them in the [[Expansion Pack]] in the form of the traitorous Seven Hand Node}}. Understandable, considering that they are not so much a "nation" like the others as a loose coalition of people who the others seek to enslave (in the case of the UEF) or outright exterminate (the Aeon and the Seraphim) with little in common in terms of ideals.

* [[Trailers Always Lie]]: Averted to the point of lampshading. Not only can you play the map from the main trailer (it's Seton's Clutch), ''the wreckage from the battle in the trailer is present''.

** Though it still lies, featuring UEF bots firing homing missiles from a launcher that was removed in the final game, an Atlantis with the similarly canned retracting SAM launchers, and a Monkeylord dealing crush damage to friendly units.

[[Category:Science Fiction Video Games]]

[[Category:Real Time Strategy]]

[[Category:Video Game]]