In Supreme Commander 2's skirmish and multiplayer maps, you'll find yourself starting off with a single ACU unit and two engineers, usually not that far off from some mass nodes. Your best bet is to build up some mass extractors as soon as possible, but beyond that, you're ready to make your first big strategic decision--which type of military installation to build. You can choose to build a land, air, or naval installation (though the Illuminate don't have a full naval track, since their units hover over the ground and can cross water) to produce only a few basic units that function on that particular terrain type.

On the PC, this takes place by way of a conventional mouse-and-keyboard interface that has been heavily streamlined to not dominate onscreen real estate. On the Xbox 360, the control scheme has been modified to work with the sticks and buttons, replacing the standard mouse cursor with a "stretch cursor" that will let you select any nearby unit with a quick button press, rather than having to hunt for that unit and precisely click on it. (The console version of the game also lets you paintbrush any units in the vicinity to group-select them.) Though the console version has simple, one-button shortcuts for move and attack orders, Supreme Commander 2 uses a radial menu system to issue more-complex orders, such as building structures in specific areas, or queuing up specific units to build at an installation. While it took us a bit of time to get used to the interface, we quickly figured out the radial menu system and button shortcuts and were able to pretty much the same things we had done on the PC version.