Supreme Commander came out in 2007, published by THQ, developed by Gas Powered Games. It was big in ways most RTS games still are not: maps measured in square kilometres, zoom ranges spanning from individual unit to theatre-wide overview without a cut, armies numbering in the hundreds across land, air, and sea simultaneously. The community that formed around it, and around Forged Alliance in particular, has been waiting for something to credibly follow it ever since. Gas Powered Games moved to Square Enix for the sequel in 2010, delivered Supreme Commander 2, and the fanbase largely considered it a retreat. GPG became Wargaming Seattle in 2013 and was shut down in 2018. The IP sits with Square Enix. Nobody is making Supreme Commander 3.
Enhearten Media, a small independent studio staffed by veteran RTS developers and modders, is making Sanctuary: Shattered Sun instead.
The setting is a Dyson Sphere, a megastructure built around the sun to harness its output, and combat takes place on its exterior surface rather than inside it. The scale is considerable. Maps span dozens of kilometres across the sphere’s artificial terrain, which includes frozen seas that ground units can cross, chasms bridged by structures that can be destroyed, and an environment that the game’s heavier weapons actively reshape. Three factions contest control: the Earth Defence Alliance, a conventional mass-production force built around volume and fast decisive strikes; the Chosen, post-human consciousnesses inhabiting machines, fewer in number and more technologically refined, with each unit housing an individual consciousness and therefore worth preserving; and the Guard, the sphere’s original architects, who fight with drone swarms, superior reconnaissance, and a doctrine built around sustained pressure and patience.
The faction designs are distinct enough to suggest different strategic approaches rather than cosmetic variations on the same unit roster. The EDA plays numbers. The Chosen plays precision. The Guard plays time.
Combat uses a real-time ballistics simulation layered on top of conventional hitpoint reduction. Projectiles travel visibly across the battlefield and can be evaded. Units absorb damage as they always have, but the simulation adds positional consequence. Terrain provides protection. Line of sight controls engagement range. Flanking and positioning affect how quickly hitpoints drop, because shots that miss do not contribute to attrition. The developers have prioritised intelligent unit AI specifically to reduce the need for micromanagement, letting positioning and formation decisions do the work that most RTS games leave to frantic individual unit commands.
The economic system is flow-based, drawn directly from the Supreme Commander model. Income and expenditure run in real time. Overbuilding creates financial exposure. Playing conservatively cedes production tempo. The system does not cap resources arbitrarily, which means the ceiling on army size is set by the player’s economic management rather than a hard limit. Ten thousand units across ground, air, and naval theatres is the stated maximum. For context, most RTS games consider two hundred units a large army.
The development team cites Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander as direct influences, which is not a surprise given the feature set, and Chris Taylor has publicly endorsed the project. Taylor designed both of those games. The endorsement says something about how the team is perceived within that specific community, though what Sanctuary ultimately needs to prove is that a small studio can solve the technical problems that come with simulating thousands of simultaneous unit engagements, ballistics calculations running across kilometres of terrain, and a flow economy responding to all of it in real time. Those are hard problems. Gas Powered Games had considerably more resources and still shipped a game with significant performance issues at scale.
The single-player campaign is planned for the initial release alongside multiplayer, with co-operative support built in. Post-launch roadmap includes ranked competitive play, seasons, tournaments, and mod and map support. The pitch is a long-term platform rather than a release-and-move-on product.
If the execution matches the design, Sanctuary is the game this corner of the strategy genre has been waiting for since 2007. That is a big if. Wishlist it on Steam.
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