Supreme Commander

[Husar]

Downloaded it yesterday and had two skirmish games vs the AI.
It beat me on normal by building three heavy artillery guns and aiming them at my commander, I should have been more offensive. But skirmish features only a small map and one faction in the demo.
Seems a bit more polished than the beta though.

[ElectricEel]

On the lowest settings, the game is pretty much unplayable on my computer. I could lower the resolution, but then the gigantic interface panel would take up half the screen (what's up with those? Europa Universalis III has the same problem, but fortunately is much less demanding on the system, so I can run it in a higher resolution). My system exceeds the minimium specs by a fair margin. I guess I'll have to pass on this game.

[Husar]

That's weird, I use highest settings (2x FSAA) and it runs somewhere between 20 and 30 FPs which is very playable, though judging by the graphics, I had expected even more fps, they're nice but not really jaw dropping.

[Meneldil]

Well, being a long time TA fan, I've been quite disapointed by SC demo. I still haven't tried the skirmish mod, but the little I saw while doing the first campaign map was not that great gameplay wise.

First, there are way to much things on the interface. While TA used to only have a few buttons here and there, SC is fullfilled with "toggle this-toggle that" buttons. The thing is, from what I remember, there's no "On / Off" indication, meaning that you basically don't know what is actually toggle-ed and what is not, and that you'll likely end up with a crapload of stuff on the screen (units' range, radar range, etc.)
Some unit have 2 kind of attacks (ie. against vehicle or against planes). You can toggle from one attack to another by clicking a button, but once again, either I'm blind, either there's no indication as to what kind of attack is selected.

Overall, what I found the most disturbing is the scale :
first, the units and buildings are supposed to be huge. Basically, it means that the map looks quite empty and blank. The first campaign map is really boring. Trees and civil buildings are not even half the size of the crappiest-smallest unit available. If you don't zoom in, forests will look like some green vomite on the screen. Only one or two mountains there and there, a few vomite-like forests, a few destroyed buildings, and that's about it. But then, the first mission apparently takes place in a desert. Let's hope other maps are not as blank.
Secondly, the fact you always have to side loads and loads of (often huge) units, added to the fact there's no minimap means that you constantly have to zoom out to as far as possible to only have a glimpse of what is happening currently.

I'm sure I'll get used to this new gameplay, but I'd have hoped for something as simple as good ol' TA.

[ElectricEel]

Secondly, the fact you always have to side loads and loads of (often huge) units, added to the fact there's no minimap means that you constantly have to zoom out to as far as possible to only have a glimpse of what is happening currently.

There is a minimap. There's a button to enable it on the left side of the interface panel.

On the lowest settings, the maps certainly look very bland and ugly. On higher settings, the map looks better, but I can't comment in detail, since then I get something like 3-7 FPS just looking at my supreme commander, a couple of burning wrecks, and an otherwise mostly empty landscape (on the lowest settings, the game only starts skipping horribly when there's fighting going on).

[Husar]

I noticed that, while they advocate Dual-Monitor support the demo uses only one of my two cores of the CPU which is a bit sad because it may affect performance with many units on big maps etc. Though so far, on a small map vs one AI, there is no lag on highest detail, with VSync it's usually between 20 and 30 fps.