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Supreme Ruler 2010

Supreme Ruler 2010 is a massively detailed strategy game from Battlegoat Studios, to be published by Strategy First, who can't be blamed for not taking chances. This is the sort of complex strategy game that would have most publishers clucking their tongue because it's too complicated and too 2D.

The game itself has the potential to be either the next Master of Orion 3 or what Master of Orion 3 should have been. It is a game with a stupendous amount of detail running under a map crowded with city icons and base icons and tank icons and artillery icons and jet icons. It's the sort of game that will unabashedly use phrases like 'gross national product' or 'domestic budget deficit' on a crowded graph or above a long list of six and seven digit numbers. There's so much detail in here that you can turn it over to your ministers, letting them run things while you give them broad mandates and maybe tweak a slider bar or two.

Zoomed out view of Texas.

Hexagonal layout

Units galore!

The subject matter is a progression of conquests in which one state, say California in the US or Queensland in Australia, fights at increasingly epic scales to take over a country and then the entire world. The cast of characters is a serious list of modern military units with a dozen or so stats, eleven different resources, hungry consumers, diplomacy, build queues that have to retool, fuel and ammo, and supply lines. The game runs in the sort of pausable real time that shouldn't scare off people averse to turn-based games. But then again, anyone averse to turn-based games probably isn't going to touch something this detailed with a ten-foot slide rule.

At worst, Supreme Ruler will be like a less streamlined version of Dreamcatcher's strategic monstrosity, Superpower. At best, it will be like...well, there hasn't really been anything like this that's worked very well. So at best, it will be proof that a really complex game crammed with thinly veiled numbers can work after all.

(By the way, in case you're wondering, Battlegoat Studios' name is derived from a stuffed toy ram with a camo helmet that they developers got as a promotional item for Worms; the little ram was perched atop the monitor while the developers demoed their game.)