Welcome to Thunderdome

Where to start? I agree, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance was way better than Supreme Commander 2. Me and my buddies still have 8 player LAN parties all the time playing that game, none of us play Supreme Commander 2 anymore. The biggest difference between Supreme Commander 1 and 2 is the economy and the scale.

In Supreme Commander everything was expressed in rates of how fast energy and mass were coming in, and when you built things it built at a rate instead of paying the bulk of the resources up front. Unfortunately this would stall a lot of players because they would start building tons of things and their rate of resources needed would far exceed the amount of resources that were coming in and nothing would get built and they wouldn't know how to recover. Maps were huge and you could have up to 1000 units. There was no tech tree like the one in Supreme Commander 2, you didn't upgrade your units on the fly, you had to build more advanced factories to build more complex units. Units often had firing ranges beyond their line of sight which meant using radar was critical. Scout units and intelligence were also crucial. Above all Supreme Commander 1 was a game about economics. Players had to intellegently use their resources to claim more resources until they could overcome their enemy, or if you had a weaker economy, identify a critical weakness through intelligence and use certain units to exploit that weakness and destroy the enemy's commander.

Maps were huge, I mean HUGE. 81x81km, playing Supreme Commander 2 feels like playing in a kids sandbox compared to the vast world of Supreme Commander 1. In Supreme Commander 2 they dumbed down everything. You have to buy everything with the resources up front, if you find a weakness in your strategy you can quickly use the tech tree to adapt, you can adapt any unit to any role with enough points on the tech tree. You can't buy anything on credit meaning you have to micromanage even more. Maps were scaled down to tiny sizes, the unit count is lower. Games play out fast favoring tactics over strategy. The game pace is fast often finishing in under half an hour when in Supreme Commander 1 games could for several hours.

Supreme Commander 2 is an odd game. People who loved Supreme Commander 1 hate Supreme Commander 2. Those who hated Supreme Commander 1 probably didn't try Supreme Commander 2. Supreme Commander 2, to fans of Forged Alliance, is a stupid, dumbed down real-time tactics game. Matches play out as matches of cheap tactics to accumulate research points, your commander acts like a character from DOTA and if you can get more research points and get to your build the fastest you can annihilate your enemy within minutes.

Supreme Commander was a game of gathering intelligence, economic control, flexing muscle, speculation, ruse, careful planning, guerilla tactics, fierce resource management, heavy analysis of unit strengths and weaknesses. Supreme Commander 2 destroyed everything that was good about Supreme Commander 1 and changed the game completely.

Worst $50 I've ever spent. The fact me and my friends still play FA to this day speaks volumes. Sometimes we just sit down and watch replays of games past, even though they can be hours long because they are that entertaining. No other game has had me sweat bullets quite like a lan match of FA. Building plans to defend your commander and infilitrate the weaknesses of your enemy, it was real time STRATEGY at its finest at a huge scale. Sorry, I'm ranting. Supreme Commander 2 is not a terrible game, it's a decent real time strategy game by every other standard, but it doesn't hold a candle to FA.