I don't know about you guys, but I am looking forward to Supreme Commander.

For those of you not familiar with it, it's a RTS being made by Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games.  CT made the game Total Annihilation back in the late 90s which IMO is by far the best RTS that has ever been produced.

Rather than relying on a rock-paper-scissors type system, Total Annihilation introduced two pretty innovative concepts -- 1) Damage handled by the physics engine and 2) Pay as you go spending.

By damage handled by the physics engine that means shots can simply miss. Units have speeds and manuevability.  So you will literally see shots miss the target.  Having this extra dimension removes the need for things like "Unit A does 2X damage against Unit B".  It also eliminates the classic "I'll just build 50 of the same unit.." because some units move and fire drastically slower (which means they can get picked off by other means).

By pay as you go, this is my favorite part as it dramatically reduces the click-fest and micro management in RTSs.  In most RTS games, you can't build something until you have enough resources.  In TA, the building orders were decoupled from resources.  They still required X energy and Y metal to build, but different constructor units build at a rate of X energy and Y metal (which also meant that you could build things faster if you threw more units onto the structure). 

As a result, players could plan out their construction strategy at their leisure without even paying attention to how much energy and metal (the two resources in the game) that were stockpiled. The key was rate of resources coming in, not how much you had on-hand.

It also helped that it had terrific unit AI and an incredibly rich and intuitive user interface. 

I loaded up TA today and played with my son and it's amazing how well the game has aged.  This is a game that was probably developed around 1997.  Think back to that time, its competitor was Warcraft 2 and later Starcraft.  It was a 3D engine (software since back then no 3D hardware could support the kind of resolution people wanted) that could play at any resolution. The maps can be huge, there are tons of units, and tons of modding support and map making. Even today, it continues to thrive because players can make their own units and supply them to the game.  Even the AI was moddable (the game's AI was HORRIBLE, even for the time but modders improved that to the point that it's an excellent non-cheating AI).

Which brings us back to Supreme Commander.  How good it will be remains to be seen.  Total Annihilation was a niche game where as with SC, Gas Powered Games is hoping to make a more mainstream title. That worries me a tad. The website shows very few units per side (Total Annihilation had dozens of units per side to choose from which provided a high variety of strategies).  But the videos of it look impressive and with a hardware 3D engine, the zoom in and out looks great (and like TA, it has gigantic maps rather than the tiny maps we see in most RTS's such as Age of Empires 3, Rise of Legends, etc.).

So that's the game I'm looking forward to the most.  What about you?