Supreme Ruler 2020 Developer Diary #4 – Hotspots and Formation Movements

The scope of Supreme Ruler 2020 is unlike most any other strategy game available; we allow players to zoom in and work with individual facilities or units, or zoom out and deal with entire regions and battle fronts. A number of user-interface and feature additions were made to allow players to deal with this scope and manage their regions and armies – here we’d like to detail two of those new features, ‘Hotspots’ and ‘Formation Movements’.

Unlike many Real Time Strategy Games, Supreme Ruler 2020 does not have a cap on the number of units a region can field at a given time. Instead, this depends solely on whether you have the military manpower to bring units online, and whether you can afford to pay the salaries and maintenance for all of your units. (Note: In Supreme Ruler 2020 each land unit represents a Battalion; each Air unit represents a Squadron; but naval units and submarines each unit represents one ship.)

Even with economic and manpower limitations, many of the world’s larger countries can field a huge military. If playing as The United States for instance, a player begins the game with almost 2000 military units at their command. Organizing your units into a coordinated fighting machine can be an overwhelming task for beginners, unless of course they learn to use some of the new enhancements we’ve included…

HOTSPOTS
Rallying points have long been used in games to mass military forces in preparation for an attack or to fend off an invader. What if we could make these points independent of any one military base and simply provide criteria for your AI Generals to mass the type of force that you want. Using the example of the United States again, let’s assume that they want to invade Canada (Come on, admit it! We know you want our oil fields. ?). Right click on the map in Upstate New York and select “Create Hotspot”. In the lower panels you can then indicate what kind of force and purpose this hotspot will have. Since an invasion of Canada is intended, here would be a good setting for this hotspot:

Force Size: Heavy (will deploy a significant number of units)

Air Support: Moderate (will assign fighters and patrol aircraft to provide cover and reconnaissance)

Force Focus: Offensive (the type of units assigned will be mobile and intended for offensive operations)

Actions: Attack (once at the hot spot, units will look for targets to attack)

Priority: High (this will take priority over other possible uses of your military)

With little more than a few clicks and no need to search through your lists of available military units, you will notice your generals moving the appropriate units into place. Hotspots can also be used to build up Defensive Forces, prepare Naval Task Forces, signify areas where Air Superiority is a priority, and more.

FORMATION MOVEMENT

Battle tactics were very important in our first release, Supreme Ruler 2010, and this has not changed in the sequel. It is very important to front an attack or defense with your tanks and infantry and protect your artillery, anti-air, and supply forces from engaging in direct combat. In large campaigns it can be a constant challenge to keep your support vehicles behind the protective wall of tanks and infantry, but for Supreme Ruler 2020 we’ve added Formation Movement. You need to configure your front line once, and then as you rubber band it to move them forward, the units will travel independently but end up in the same relative position to each other.

Of course if desired you can still rubber band units and then move them to a single map point and not maintain formation. Formation movement is the default setting for the User Interface, but moving selected units to a single point instead simply requires holding down the Shift key when issuing the move order (this default setting can be reversed with a button on the orders panel).

USING THE TWO TOGETHER…

So as players are mapping out an offensive against another region, they can quickly use a Hotspot to rally the type of forces they want. Then they can then adjust their formation to ensure that support vehicles are behind combat vehicles. And finally once the formation is set behind their lines, they can then give the order to move forward and attack!

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Supreme Ruler 2020 is a strategic and tactical geo-political game where direct control of the military and the policies of a nation becomes the key to survival. The original Supreme Ruler was a text-based economic strategy game released in 1983. A new vision of a groundbreaking economic, political and military strategy game was realized with the release in May 2005 of Supreme Ruler 2010.

Will your leadership take you to new heights of power or will you be nothing more than a footnote in history?

Key features:

• Control any department within your government or delegate decisions to your Cabinet Ministers
• Sophisticated Military Strategic and Tactical Command System
• Select from hundreds of actual military vehicles to research, build, and deploy
• Choose conventional warfare or develop your nuclear weapons program
• Detailed Economic and Political Models
• Flexible Diplomatic Interface allowing sophisticated negotiations
• Play any one of over 250 Regions world-wide
• High Resolution Satellite imagery provided courtesy of NASA
• Single Player or Multi Player support
• Includes Map Editor and extensive modability
• Varied Game-play options include Regional Battles, Missions and Campaigns
• Next Generation AI
• Introducing BattleGoat's new Super Sandbox Mode for unlimited customization and replayability

The game is scheduled for release in North America on June 17th (39.99 USD), and Europe on June 20th (39.99 EUR).