It's the first and probably only RTS game where I don't even care about my individual units and just send them en mass to the front line automatically. I literally count on the wreckage of the dead units to clog up the spaces where I am defending. In some sense the game is not tactical at all but really more about strategy and economy planning. There is very little micromanagement on my part and I love it.
I've played that. Unfortunately I don't think the spherical planetoid map concept works... navigating from one place to another is a huge PITA, and even the largest planetoids are still too small
I can't quite put my finger on why I don't like PA, but something about it just feels off. Which is a shame, I really want to like it, and the planet-smashing aspect of it seems like it would be a lot of fun.
Games need to be short. Games need to be fast and have continuous action. Buildup phases need not apply. Rushes need to be viable. Unit counts need to be restricted. Attack uber alles--defense need not apply.
A game design article recently had a good word for it: homeostasis.
Twitch-friendly games are ferociously anti-homeostatic. They want balance to be metastable--easily knocked off and then the imbalance snowballs to defeat.
Supreme Commander, on the other hand, is practically the anti-Twitch. It is strongly homeostatic. If you rush an opponent on a large map, your L1 units are running into L2 defenses. If you don't knock your opponent out, there is now a LOT of quickly harvested scrap metal sitting really close to his base and really far from yours. Defenses are strong and problematic. Unit counts are large.
Yes, i agree.
But besides that, also the planetary maps where an awesome idea, but for me is just very bad in practice. Also performance was problematic from the first launch. Though improved a lot, still not where i'd like it to be. (though BAR also still has a road ahead, but we're close to updating to new GL rendering, which can improve unit-rendering multiple times over... :) )