Supreme Commander Demo, is out, looks hot, plays hot.

I've only tested the skirmish so far. Basically thats 1v1 u versus AI. The AI no easy is pretty much a pushover, but its good for learning how to manage the resource income/expense. The game isn't centered around accumulating resources nearly as much as efficiently exploiting the resource piles u have, while upgrading your structures as well as your resource capability.

The rate at which you income and expend resources is very much more important then total piles owned. I think this is super cool compared to most RTS where whoever has the most piles basically wins. Not only that but the constructor unit, has three levels. Level one, builds level one buildings, from level two constructors you can build level two buildings. Some of the buildings namely, the land, air, or sea factories respectively allow you to build these constructors and upgrade accordingly.

The graphics are pretty sweet, even on my older rig, but the gameplay is going to actually be strategic rather then tactical. That's a significant cut above the rest of the RTS world thus far.

There doesn't appear to be a unit limit, hehe, but slowdowns occur if you have too many in a concentrated area and have a machine with the settings turned up. I would imagine lag online might be an issue with some of the larger armies/battles, but that remains to be seen.

Another cool thing touted is the ability to zoom way out and then all the way into close tatical view, its very similar to the zoom feature in Dread Lords which is good. However the unit symbols are a bit small and not always easily viewable. As for intuitiveness of the controls, it's point click and shoot, the units only have one or two functions and all u have to do is right click like standard to get them do what u want. There really isn't any hot key or decision making the units just do the one thing when u select two that they can do. I.e. infantry boarding transport, or constructor healing warbot.

Some of the larger units look cool, still want to see that damn spider unit, it's not in the demo so far as I've played maybe in the campaign.

One thing that is cool is the ability to query units infinite number of times, or any real number, or set a bunch of different types in the query and just have it repeat. You can also have it go to mutiple waypoints upon leaving the base. Works great!

It almost reminds me of Earth 2150 only units seem to move much more freely and along 360 degrees rather then the clunky one of six directions they were limited to in 2150. The graphics in close are pretty good and maybe its my rig being about 4 years old but I was expecting something more. I still think they are excellent though. As for sound, you can turn it down but nothing show stopping, it gets a bit annoying at the odd moment.

I like the ability in the demo map to be able to play air or land or sea units. I think that there are going to be some really incredible matches played. I also hope that with the variety of units that this game wont boil down online to two or three strategies and rushes and just general exploitation of poor balancing but if the game is as effective as it appears at keeping the pace and options in check that might not ever happen. I can't wait for a 2v2 or 3v3 match hopefully without lag, and with good coordination.

A few things I don't like would include no mini map, and only about half the screen is actually map and tactical view, the rest is all the buttons and descriptions and console stuff that could have been scaled back for more viewing space for action. I would expect that a future mod or maybe patch could fix that. It feels like you are viewing through a smaller window then you should be able to and this might also be to conserve GPU cycles I don't know but it just looks like too much space is lost to the console. Well all for now I'm going back it to play on medium. See if that AI can die in under 20 min.