Score
Gameplay:	9
Graphics:	6
Sound:	7
FunFactor:	9
PlasmaFactor:	8
Overall:	7.8

Supreme Ruler 2020 Review
June 24, 2008 by Eric Franck

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if New Zealand had nuclear weapons? Or if Switzerland was run by a military dictator? Have you ever wanted to rule your own state or province as an independent country and invade your neighbors? Of course you have! And thanks to Battlegoat's geopolitical strategy sequel Supreme Ruler 2020, you can fulfill all of your political daydreams without actually ruining the world.

Gameplay

Supreme Ruler 2020 charges the player with running an entire country in a hypothetical near future fraught with political instability. There's a lot to worry about—after all, industry and trade won't just take care of themselves, and the nation's technological advancement, infrastructure, and international standing won't come without planning and funding. Oh, and if, for whatever reason, you wind up in another nation's bad books, you'd better have a standing army ready to defend your borders. On top of all this, you need to keep your citizens and army happy or else you might up getting booted out of office in the next election. An especially disgruntled army won't hesitate to end your career using less democratic means.

In practice, all of this means you have to build facilities for industry, research, military, and societal development, produce and command military units as necessary, mind the financial numbers and adjust the budget and taxation if needed, and also ink deals with foreign rulers to solidify your nation's standing as a world power. Needless to say, Supreme Ruler 2020 gives players plenty to think about. Fortunately, the game's nearly overwhelming complexity is offset by its inclusion of cabinet ministers.The ministers each specialize in one of six areas of government: production, research, finance, state, operations, and defense. You can, if you like, give your ministers priorities to suit your goals and they will competently handle the micro-managing themselves. If you'd rather get involved however, you can manage all kinds of minutia, and you can even deny your ministers certain authorities, like the use of nukes or adjustment of the social spending budget, if there are things you don't want them to meddle with.

Even with the help of the cabinet, though, Supreme Ruler 2020 subjects new players to a nasty learning curve. The game does offer a set of tutorials which summarize the basics of the game's interface and the government departments, but these brief overviews provide very little in the way of actual gameplay training. Players who are want to get a firm handle on all the game has to offer will either have to learn by trial and error or dive into the 80 page manual. If you've played Supreme Commander 2010, however, you can expect to feel right at home and enjoy some of the newer game's interface improvements. Veterans of the Civilization franchise will also have a head start, as Supreme Ruler 2020's mechanics of land and city development, international combat, and cutting deals with foreign powers bear strong resemblances to elements of Sid Meier’s series of games.

Players who get past the learning curve will also have to deal with the game's deliberate pace. While Supreme Ruler 2020, unlike Civilization, runs in real time, it doesn't mean that the gameplay is faster. In fact, this game is likely to be one of the slowest strategy games you have ever experienced. While the gameplay speed has seven possible settings from “pause” to “very fast” which the player can jump between at any time, the fastest of these equates a single gameplay day with about seventeen real-time seconds. This may not sound so bad at first, but many of the game's research projects and buildings take upwards of ninety game days to complete, which translates to twenty five real-time minutes waiting for the progress bar to fill before being able to use the new technology or facility. This is further aggravated by the fact that there are literally hundreds of technologies and unit designs to research and dozens of facilities to build. Players leading wealthy countries can climb the tech tree faster by trading for technologies that have been researched by other nations, but it's ultimately inevitable that large stretches of gameplay will find you waiting for various projects to be completed. The overall time frame of each scenario is also necessarily drawn out as a result of the game's slow pace. The shortest skirmish scenario takes about half an hour to play, while the campaigns are essentially infinite sandboxes, so players should be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

These complaints aside though, if you're up for a serious strategy game with loads of units, technologies, and diplomatic deals, and a veritable ocean of stats and possible tweaks, Supreme Ruler 2020 might be the one for you. Its complexity gives it an unrivaled potential for strategic depth and offers players a horizon of decision-making freedom that similar games only dream of. The military elements alone strategically eclipse most combat focused RTS games by taking into account eight inherent attribute stats and four other continuous variables for every unit in a battle. In addition to these, the game factors in the effects of land elevation and defensibility and provides the option of more than a dozen orders for each unit. While it will undoubtedly intimidate newcomers, Supreme Ruler 2020 is a feast for the hardcore strategist.

Graphics

Supreme Ruler 2020's graphics are functional but by no means pretty. The game's scale is represented impressively enough, allowing the player to zoom smoothly from a world map view all the way down to the level of individual units and buildings, Supreme Commander-style. The maps themselves are actually NASA satellite images and look pretty sharp unless you zoom all the way in. The buildings and units, however, are simple models with drab colors, and look out of place on top of the flat map. The units don't animate at all except for sliding around the map, which means that infantry end up looking like mannequins on roller skates as they glide toward the front lines. Battle is represented by blurry flashing sprites that resemble explosions. While the game's visuals aren't much to look at, they get the job done.

Sound

The audio in Supreme Ruler 2020 is hardly more remarkable than the graphics. The sound effects mainly serve a practical function, alerting the player to incoming e-mails from cabinet ministers and foreign ambassadors as well as drawing attention to military attacks with generic battle noise. The music is quite good, providing ambiance appropriately themed to your nation's location. Because each game is so long, however, you will likely want to turn the music off or listen to your own rather than hear the in-game music loop for hours.

PlasmaFactor

One of Supreme Ruler 2020's coolest aspects is its setting in the real world. It's nearly impossible not to enjoy virtually leading your own home country, or just choosing an obscure nation that you happen to like, and then waging war on rival nations and watching familiar borders shift. The map also includes most major real world cities, so you might even be able to develop your own hometown into a major industrial center or military base.

The real world map is just one part of the game's overall sense of realism. As a backstory, the manual posits a shockingly plausible series of events that could easily cause the real world to be in the state that the game presents. Battlegoat also went through the trouble of enhancing the game's realism by ensuring that all of the units and technologies either exist in the real world already or are currently being developed. Whether or not this kind of realism really adds to the gameplay, Battlegoat at least deserves recognition for attempting something so ambitious.

It's also worth mentioning that, while the game isn't quite fully featured now, it appears that Battlegoat will continue to update and improve it. One sizable update has already been released, adding new scenarios, improving old ones, and fixing bugs. The game's multiplayer has great potential for strategy enthusiasts, but unfortunately the internet matchmaking system is either extremely picky about ports and firewalls or just doesn't fully function yet. Hopefully this will be resolved and the game will garner enough interest to be played regularly on public servers.

Conclusion

Supreme Ruler 2020 definitely isn't for everyone, least of all casual gamers and those with short attention spans. It doesn't really innovate either, its gameplay borrowing heavily from the Civilization series and shamelessly adhering to many conventions of the strategy genre. The things it does, however, it does well, and on a grand scale. If you're looking for a complex, realistic, epic strategy game, here it is.