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Whatever direction you expand in, you’re always expanding. You expand organically, deciding between the safety of expanding away or the daring of expanding towards their location. In Planetary Annihilation, you frantically pan the board in 5 seconds, make a couple guesses to where they might be spawning, and send some scouts in as soon as you can. In other games, you know exactly where to send scouts and you know where to expand. While expansion and scouting are vitally important in any RTS, there’s a distinctly different tone in Planetary Annihilation. Take into account the three dimensional aspect of each planet, and every round begins with a paranoid expansion in all directions and scouts.

Spawning adjacent to an enemy commander is not Supreme Commander, it’s claustrophobic. Yes, there’s a whole solar system, but you’re not fighting in the solar system. While the boards are… spacious, let’s say, the actual playing field is miniscule. It retains barely anything from Supreme Commander. Well, maybe you go too big. There’s an odd tension in Planetary Annihilation. Forget the Galactic Colossus, the Fatboy, or any of that other crap. Where can you go after you’ve already had some of the biggest boards in the genre? You go even bigger. Not so closely as to invest in the Kickstarter, but enough to watch it and buy the early access. So when Planetary Annihilation was announced, I naturally followed it quite closely. It also shares some important members of the Gas Powered Games team, specifically Jon Mavor and Steve Thompson, who also worked on Total Annihilation, the root of all these games. The name of the game in the Supreme Commander series is massive units and even more massive boards. For the unaware, Planetary Annihilation is the spiritual successor to Gas Powered Game’s Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.

I’ve been playing Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation for the past two months.

Supreme commander forged alliance controls