Supremacy: Four Paths To Power Review

Supremacy: Four Paths to Power is a turn-based strategy game of space conquest with both space fleet battles and planetary ground assaults. These types of games are few and far between for some reason, and fans of space exploration and combat face long waits between releases in this genre. In the case of Supremacy my advice is to keep waiting. The game is a lot simpler than the norm for games of this type, but it does not make up for this simplicity with good gameplay or strategic depth and so you have a game that won’t hold your interest for very long.

You begin a game of Supremacy by selecting from one of the four alien leaders. Your choice will determine the race of your starting planet and the bonuses applied to your side for the game. Next you must select a game type which sets the game’s objective and can range from racing to rescue a VIP to the tried and true conquer all space option. You can also set a turn limit on the game or leave it open-ended until one side meets the victory conditions. The game will actually let you zoom in to the point where a single square fills the screen, but this is total overkill since the ship models are not very detailed at all.

When play begins you’ll find yourself on a 2D map of a region of space overlaid with a square grid and with 3D planets scattered about the place. There’s no fog of war in the game, so you’ll be able to see the whole region at a glance or you can zoom in on the map to get a better look at local affairs.

Starting with a few ships and your homeworld you’ll need to build a star fleet and head out into space to conquer new worlds or rescue the hostage or what have you. Movement is entirely turn-based – you move one unit at a time by selecting it and then clicking on a new square to move to. Selecting a ship will cause the squares within its movement range to become highlighted making it easy to see where you can and can not move. After the ship reaches its new square a mini-menu pops-up which allows you to initiate an attack against a neighboring enemy or confirm that the ship’s movement is complete. Science ships and transports will have additional options on their mini-menu such as “Capture Station” and “Load troops”, respectively. The former option is used to capture the neutral research stations that float around space busily enjoying the pursuit of knowledge until an alien race comes along and makes them design weapons upgrades. The game seems a little touchy when it comes to registering your movement clicks and you can easily undo a move by forgetting to click on the “Done” option, so movement in the game is a bit of a slow affair and takes some getting used to.

Ship to ship combat is strictly a one on one encounter – move a ship next to an enemy and fire, move the next ship and fire, etc. Squares on the grid can only be occupied by one ship at a time, so there’s no way to mass your fire at an enemy. When combat occurs a little laser bolt is fired from the attacker, the defender fires back a similar bolt, hit points are reduced, and the battle is over. It’s a slow-paced and none too exciting affair.

Conquering a planet involves moving troops to the planet with a transport and dropping them onto the surface. When such a battle occurs, the game switches to a 3D map with the attacking and defending units squaring off in a turn-based battle. Or at least the game tries to switch to a 3D map – I encountered several crashes to the desktop when ground combat occurred. Despite the fact that there are a few different unit types available for each of the game’s four races, there’s not a lot of strategy to the ground battles. You just trade shots with the enemy until there is only one side left standing, so the side with the most units or more strong units than the other will invariably win. Before long you’ll be wishing that the game simply auto-resolved the planetary battles.

Capturing a world will allow you to begin using it to produce units and ships, with the available units dependent on the race living on the planet. If you own at least one planet of each race you’ll have access to a special battle cruiser unit and if you conquer all of the planets belonging to a race you’ll be able to build that race’s unique mothership. The production interface is rather unique – the planet’s industrial capacity is represented as a grid of squares. The more factories that you have on the planet, the more squares there are. You then drag and drop units onto the grid to manufacture them, but there’s a catch: stronger units such as tanks require multiple squares on the grid. There’s almost a puzzle element to production as you will need to move around the production units on the grid to maximize your output. It’s a lot like managing your inventory in an RPG game. In practice this production scheme is an interesting idea that is impractical to use. It is very time-consuming and tedious to move units one by one across the screen, drop them on a grid, and then shuffle them around to maximize the space. Boring sliders or queues work a lot better in practice and let you spend more time conquering space instead of fiddling with production. Unfortunately this same scheme is used to load troop transports, making that operation just as time-consuming as production.

Moving around space and attacking enemy fleets and worlds consumes the resources generated by your planets and space stations. However, it’s not that easy to keep track of your resource consumption during a turn which can lead to frustrating moments such as moving a ship into position only to find that there aren’t enough resources left for it to attack. This resource restriction also feels very artificial – why are ships deep in space stranded if there is not a pile of raw materials sitting back on the homeworld?

The game’s annoyances would perhaps be tolerable if the gameplay itself was challenging and interesting. Unfortunately this is not the case. The AI takes a straightforward, brute force approach to its play and it always seems to overreact to your actions. There’s no sense of an underlying strategy to the computer’s play and as a result it doesn’t present much of a challenge. Anyone who’s played strategy games before will have no trouble routinely beating the game and quite soundly.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 45%. Unless you need constant affirmation of your own supremacy, you’ll need to look for challenging strategic gameplay elsewhere.