Supreme Ruler 2010 Preview

The southwest coast of Australia is ripe for industry, for making decisions that will expand your empire beyond the limits of a coastal region. The only questions that are to be determined are do you have the right stuff to grow beyond your borders, to unify a territory, a continent, or even the world?

Supreme Ruler 2010, a PC title from BattlegoatStudios and Strategy First, is an economic and military simulation that opens the doors to a wealth of possibilities.

The game takes place in the near future, where the world powers have disintegrated into regions built around economic and military power. Instead of the United Nations, there is the World Market. There is no overseeing power that will punish you for ruining or conquering a neighbor. How exactly you do that is up to you.

In many ways, Supreme Ruler 2010 is the game of Risk fleshed out and actualized as a deeper, more involved world-conquering scenario. Replace military pieces with factories. Consider tax bases instead of number of military units, but don’t forget the military units.

Graphically, this game is a little simplistic, but click on any structure in the game and you will be treated to a player interface that is detailed and option-rich.

Supreme Ruler 2010, upon release, will feature more than 40 game scenarios and more that 200 possible starting regions. The game features 11 commodities, and gives players the ability to control the manufacturing, consumption and export of those commodities. The game has an economic and military model that revolves around cabinet ministers. The nice thing here is that the cabinet ministers have personality traits which influence the way they run the areas entrusted to them.

There are advisors to deal with micro-managing, a technology tree, and the ability to play this game in either real time or turn-based modes.

While the preview version received was limited in many regards, this title will support multiplayer gaming with up to 16 players over LAN or Internet.

While the actual industry graphical elements are not overwhelming, great care was taken in creating the world view and the game actually uses satellite imagery courtesy of NASA.

When one jumps into a game such as this, walking through the mechanics of the tutorial is always a sound idea. However, in this version, the tutorial was not available. That meant jumping in and giving the game a whirl, stumbling through the controls and mechanics and learning as the journey went on. With some games that may have been a daunting task, but not with Supreme Ruler. The interface is rather huge, but once the basics were understood – through the click-and-look style of gaming – this was a game that was very easy to jump into and play.

The game will also have a map and scenario editor upon release in May.

Supreme Ruler 2010 is a game that has numerous options. Players can make this as deep or superficial an experience as they wish in line with their style of gaming. Take Risk, make it a much more involved game, with layers of economic and military issues brushed liberally with diplomatic and political models. Supreme Ruler will not appeal to everyone, but for those who want world building to be a more cerebral exercise, this title may well fit that bill.