In addition to the theater of war, there will be a lot of automation built into the game to reduce the micromanagement burden. While you've always been able to designate rally points for new units to converge on in other real-time strategy games, Supreme Commander goes even further. You can set it up so that ground units automatically load onto air transports, and then those transports automatically deliver those units to a distant point on the map before returning to pick up more ground units. Or if you issue an attack on an enemy base, your units will mow through the base like a lawnmower, rather than converge on a single point in the base, like armies tend to do in other real-time strategy games. Even the way you input commands will tell the game what to do. Clicking once on an enemy tells your units to attack it, but they'll also engage any other threats that come into range. If you encounter an incredibly high-value target, such as a nuclear missile silo (yup, nukes are in the game) and you need to destroy it before it can send up a missile, clicking frantically on the silo tells the game that you're alarmed about something. Your units will respond by focusing all their firepower on that target.

The combat in Supreme Commander looks great, and since everything in the game adheres to the laws of physics, you get what game designers call emergent behavior, or the idea that you can have complex, unexpected behaviors that occur as a result of a few simple rules. For example, battles can almost seem unpredictable, because everything in the game is simulated, right down to the trajectory of shells flying through the air. We saw hundreds of tanks rolling through a forest, knocking down trees left and right. Then, during a battle, the forest caught fire, sending choking plumes of black smoke into the air, obscuring some of the action. The action can look downright cinematic, especially when huge armies meet. Tanks and ground units maneuver wildly while jets and other aircraft scream overhead.