That trick is Supreme Commander's essential claim to inspiration. Where conventional RTS games split tactical and strategic layers into a "zoomed-in" tactical window and a strategic "zoomed-out" minimap, Supreme Commander integrates both into a single, uninterrupted view. Want to see the entire map at once? Roll the mousewheel back a few times. Close-up? Roll it forward. Need to shift positions quickly? Zoom out, point to where you want to go, then zoom back in. As the zoom range increases, your planes, ships and infantry transform into tiny 2-D symbols, each distinct and selectable, like figures on a half-time whiteboard.

Employing this "omnipotent" vantage, battles are waged with one of three factions, the United Earth Federation (your standard military-industrial humans), the Cybran Nation (a cybernetic offshoot) or the Aeon Illuminate (an "alien-touched" group of reluctantly fighting pacifists). Only two resources are available, "mass" and "energy," but as in Total Annihilation, the challenge lies in balancing your consumption rates as you place new buildings or upgrade old ones. Let things redline and you'll instantly cripple your construction rates and need to shut down buildings (or build orders) to bring things back to life. Think of it as constantly adding power capacity to a generator which then fuels buildings, upgrades, defensive fortifications, radar, shields and so on. The more things plugged into the generator, the less capacity it has.

Research, which occurs in the guise of upgrading land, sea and air facilities, comes in three tech flavors, with a fourth available when you build third-level engineers (the game's build or "fixer-upper" units). Each faction also has an upgradeable Armored Command Unit (ACU), which begins as the primary base builder but can eventually grow powerful enough to employ special abilities or house WMDs like tactical nukes. If a player's ACU is destroyed, it goes nuclear, effectively eliminating the player from the game.

Online play supports up to eight players working individually or in teams to dominate each map. An alternate solo-skimish mode lets you play AI opponents that can be tailored to focus on rushing early, building advanced units before attacking, or a combination of both.

Overrated—but impressive anyway

Sometimes you just want to impress the heck out of your audience, and you have to give Chris Taylor credit for knowing precisely which buttons to push when it comes to making us exhale like Keanu Reeves. That the guy seems to be stuck in neutral when it comes to pushing other aspects of the envelope is a criticism only if you want it to be, and plenty of gamers are happy just doing more of what they know. Supreme Commander should make the latter crowd smile, especially when it comes to visual spectacle, because this game looks absolutely amazing, especially once you've started filling its vast tracts of blank desolation with thousands of whirring, roaring robots that can instantly light up the skies with swirling contrails and gazillions of crisscrossing laser bolts.

After you've played a few campaign games, tried a few skirmishes and watched a replay or two, however, it becomes apparent that this is a game with as many irrelevant distinctions as "unique" units. Each side starts the same, builds the same and, until the upper tech echelons, pretty much fights the same, whether you're trying to be subtle about your tactics or not. Minor and often functionally trivial distinctions are available, like the UEF's slow turrets (rendering them more susceptible to flank attacks) and the Aeon's longer-range weapons. But when these are just as easily steamrolled by building as vast an army as possible and rushing your opponent for the win, and it's tough to hold much sympathy with apologists who'd as readily point out pixel differences in a facsimile and its original.

One thing that's changed is the scale and speed at which damage occurs, so rather than a few hundred units whittling each other down to smoking rubbish in seconds, Supreme Commander stages thousands upon thousands of units against one another in battles that can take minutes—upwards of a dozen in the largest battles. Synchronizing attacks and organizing building plans is also simplified by allowing you to quickly queue up orders holding the shift key; if you want to see who's doing what, just hold down the key and a series of faintly visible yellow lines connect units with their projected orders. Next to the combined strategic-tactical view, it's the most indispensable part of planning effective assaults (or "coordinated rushes," if you will, since in the end they're still about piling on, and once battles get going, "indiscriminate" is the name of the game).

Fourth-tier "experimental" technology is where Supreme Commander best distinguishes its otherwise homogenous factions. The UEF get things like a weapons-bristling mobile war platform that can crawl across the ocean floor, and a massive artillery gun that can fire the length of the entire map. The Cybran have a spiderlike "Monkeylord" robot that can go anywhere and take on anything with its cannons, torpedo launchers and devastating laser. The Aeon have a flying fortress that's like the UFO in Independence Day, complete with its "goodbye White House" beam weapon. Once you hit level four with a few other players online, games get seriously interesting, or at least catastrophically entertaining, as absolutely colossal battles play out between these towering toys and nuclear missiles start flying overhead haphazardly.

If you thought Total Annihilation was a truly great game, no one's going to convince you Supreme Commander isn't, because it's just Total Annihilation with a few new (and, I'll admit, cool) tricks. If you didn't care much for Total Annihilation, you're only in for more of the same disappointing peas-in-a-pod unit design here. And if you've never played Total Annihilation, then you're certifiably guaranteed to have at least one of those experiences for the first time.