Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance

Chris Taylor left Cavedog Entertainment in 1998, founded Gas Powered Games in Seattle, and spent the next several years making Dungeon Siege before returning to the genre he was known for. Total Annihilation came out in 1997 and was widely regarded as one of the best RTS games ever made. Supreme Commander, released in February 2007 and published by THQ, was his attempt to do the same thing at a larger scale, with a bigger map, more units, a two-monitor display mode, and an economy designed to keep growing rather than plateauing. The reviews were positive. The sales were not. Despite a good critical reception and a genuinely ambitious design, the game’s steep hardware requirements and complexity kept it from finding the audience it deserved. Nine months later, on November 6 2007, Forged Alliance arrived.

It was sold as a standalone expansion, meaning you didn’t need the original to play it, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of expansion the industry was still capable of producing in 2007 before DLC and season passes replaced the model entirely. Not additional maps or cosmetic content, but a substantial second game that fixed what the first got wrong and added enough new material to make going back to the base game feel unnecessary. The original had performance problems, a late-game economy that could spiral into absurdity as mass fabricators and assisting engineers created exponential resource loops, and balance issues across its three factions. Forged Alliance addressed all of it. Mass fabricator energy efficiency was reduced. Assisting was reined in to prevent the late-game snowball. The engine was optimised enough that large battles ran noticeably faster than they had in the original release. It was the version most players actually wanted to own, and within a short time it was the version most players actually played.

The new content was built around a fourth faction, the Seraphim, an alien species arriving without warning to exterminate humanity. The three existing factions – the United Earth Federation, the Cybran Nation, and the Aeon Illuminate – form an uneasy alliance against them, which provided a narrative reason to put all four factions on the same maps without the campaign feeling contrived. The Seraphim units were designed to be visually and mechanically distinct, with high damage output and the kind of aggressive forward momentum that made them threatening to play against and interesting to play as. The UEF got orbital weaponry in the form of controllable satellites, destroyable only by attacking their ground-based control structures rather than the satellites themselves. Each faction got additional units across all technology tiers, giving experienced players new tools and giving newer players more variation to learn from.

The economy ran on two resources throughout, mass and energy, with mass extracted from deposits on the map and energy generated by dedicated power structures. Spending either resource created a deficit that had to be covered from stored reserves or by expanding production, and the interplay between the two created most of the mid-game decision-making. Research wasn’t a separate tech tree but a tiered production chain – building higher-tier factories required the prerequisite infrastructure, and the choice of when to advance tiers rather than saturate the current one was one of the game’s more interesting questions. Experimental units sat outside the tier system entirely. They were enormously expensive, took significant time to build, and were not automatically decisive. A Fatboy mobile factory could produce units in the field but was vulnerable to swarms of cheaper counters. The Monkeylord could devastate a base but had to get there. The experiments were tools with specific applications, not win buttons, and knowing when to invest in one versus continuing conventional production was a skill that separated competent players from good ones.

GameSpot reviewed Forged Alliance at 8.5 out of 10 on release. The strategic zoom feature, which allowed players to pull out to a near-satellite view of the entire map without switching to a different interface, was consistently praised across reviews as one of the better design ideas in the genre. Jeremy Soule composed the soundtrack, as he had for Total Annihilation a decade earlier, and the dynamic score that adjusted to the intensity of ongoing battles was mentioned in nearly every review that bothered to discuss audio.

What followed was instructive. THQ filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2012, which shut down GPGNet, the official multiplayer service. The community had already anticipated this. Forged Alliance Forever launched in 2011 as an open-source client built specifically around the expansion, replacing GPGNet’s functionality, adding cross-platform support, improving matchmaking, and continuing to patch the game for balance long after Gas Powered Games had moved on. It has been running ever since. THQ’s assets were liquidated in 2013 and the Supreme Commander IP was acquired by Nordic Games, now part of Embracer Group. Square Enix retained rights to Supreme Commander 2, which they had published in March 2010. SC2 was developed explicitly for a broader audience – the dual-resource economy was simplified, unit counts were scaled back, and the game received an Xbox 360 release alongside PC. It scored 77 on Metacritic, was praised as a competent standalone RTS, and was received by the Forged Alliance community largely as confirmation that the series had moved in a direction they weren’t interested in following. Most of them went back to FAF.

Forged Alliance is still being actively played through that client. The expansion outlasted the studio that made it, the publisher that funded it, and the sequel that was supposed to replace it.