Supreme Commander was based on Total Annihilation, but Chris Taylor's vision of the future isn't entirely unique or without influences. After all, any science fiction universe draws upon the influences that came before it. While both of Chris Taylor's settings are quite similar to one another, and dissimilar to outside stories, there's common themes that run through each that extend beyond the border of the games themselves. These are not the only stories to describe millennia-long wars!

The first theme of Chris Taylor's epic real-time strategy series is that of a technological singularity. A technological singularity is when technology (normally artificial intelligence, through the principle of recursive self-improvement) has advanced to such a point that it is fundamentally different and unpredictable compared to the present. This is most apparent in Total Annihilation, but it is also relevant in Supreme Commander. In both games, clones and robots have taken over most of warfare, leaving the only actual humans to pilot the war machines known as commanders. In Total Annihilation, this conflict between cloning and digitization of consciousness is what started the war between the Arm and Core. The Arm subsequently began cloning their best soldiers to fight over and over forever, while the Core merely digitized them and mass-produced chipsets with their knowledge and skill. In Supreme Commander, this schism, and subsequently the concept of the technological singularity, is toned down. Minor conflicts (relatively, anyway) between the Cybrans and UEF are a prelude to the massive war between all three factions, rather than being the main focus of the story. If anything, the religious fervor of the Aeon is the focus of the plot.

The concept of humans worshiping an alien culture is not unheard of. The concept of religion is a fairly simple one: give people some magical, develop a set of rules based around it, and let them go. Assuming that the aliens are advanced enough to invoke Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotation ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."), then there will be people who worship them. Even if the technology isn't all that advanced, people will still form a religion around the alien's culture. A good example of this is the fervor around the Na'vi spiritualism that has sprung up amongst fans of the movie Avatar. It's gained significant traction over a short period of time, considering its origins.

The gameplay thread of the Total Annihilation series (including Supreme Commander, as it is a spiritual sequel) is that of massive battles. There is not a single game in the series that doesn't emphasize how truly huge battles should be. Total Annihilation kicked this off, and Supreme Commander took it to a whole new level with the advent of strategic zoom. In fact, it's a surprise that strategic zoom hasn't become more popular amongst RTS developers. We've found ourselves unconsciously trying to use strategic zoom in games like Red Alert 3 or Company of Heroes, thanks to how useful it really is. Seeing the whole battlefield at once, coordinating battles of massive scope, and engaging in huge strategic movements are all elements we wish more strategy games had. Other elements that we wish saw more traction amongst the community are simulation of projectiles rather than simple to-hit formulas (which a few developers have adopted) and a flexible economy based around balancing infinte potential rather than working with limited piles.

Supreme Commander 2, much like every other sequel covered on All You Need To Know (we've covered a lot of sequels), continues the story of the first game. Here's a quick recap for those that never bothered with the storyline or didn't pay enough attention to why they were blowing apart gigantic robots. The UEF, Cybran, and Aeon forces fought in a conflict that lasted a millenia. The turning point of the war happened to be the Black Sun device, built by the UEF on Earth to essentially "scare" the other factoins into submission. Hijacked by the Cybran's Quantum AI, the Black Sun device was used to create a quantum tunnel that allowed the aliens the Aeon worshipped, the Seraphim, to enter our dimension. Unfortunately, the aliens were hardly peaceful, and subsequently began to eradicate humanity wherever they could find it. The UEF, Cybrans, and a splinter faction of the Aeon collaborated to successfully defeat the Seraphim, ending the threat to humankind. After the war, the three factions joined together into a single federation, which stayed at peace for about 25 years. After the newly-elected president is assassinated by a sniper's bullet, all the old grudges burst through the surface (much like World War I) and the war resumes.