Supremacy (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
91Supremacy was published by Australian distributor Melbourne House in 1990. This is a real-time space strategy game, and one which earned regular high praise in the magazines on all of the formats. Let's play through the Easy and Medium levels and see if it is still fun.
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Production Notes:
Captured 4th and 11th November 2021
Narrated: 25th July 2022
Supremacy is an NTSC compatible game which has been on the list to cover almost from series 1, and one I remember from back in the day, although I seem to remember I had the C64 tape version. The graphics and audio is not really why the game is good, and it's all about the gameplay. Coming back to record this is November 2021, I had to have a quick look at the menu system to remember how to play it, as it helps to know what everything does. The easy level was fairly straight-forward, but I didn't record footage of me slowly building up the forces for the end game. A few days later I decided to play the Medium level, but didn't record any of it except for the 'end game'.
The narration contains a few factual mistakes. For some reason I say that the main bank is not on the Starbase, but then later I say that it is. There are lots of smaller mistakes too. I think I narrated this one fairly quietly, as I had a new noisy neighbour at that time who made it difficult to narrate things.
The audio balance is fairly loud for the game, as I wanted to keep as many sounds as I could from the game. That means the intro and horticultural stations are fairly loud. At least the narration is balanced all the way through and doesn't gradually get louder.
Cracked Copy Story
I think it might have been a crack, as the original disk would probably not have been copyable to begin with. I do remember him asking for me to buy him the real game afterwards, so perhaps it was the real disk after all? At the time, I had a very old Cumala Cax external drive, which could read disks ok but was struggling to write them. So I swapped over the drives in X-copy, so DF0 was the destination and DF1 was the source. But then I put the source disk in DF0 as usual, and the blank in DF1. The system asked me to remove the copy protection tab from the destination disk, so I ejected it, and did so, not noticing I had the disks in the drives the wrong way around. It wasn't the last time this happened, but at least it didn't happen very often after that.
Danscore:
On the surface, Supremacy looks like a very deep game, with lots of complicated info screens and lots of blank buttons to press. But dig a little deeper and what we find is a very basic economy builder, and only a small evolution away from old mainframe games like Hammurabi. Planet materials are mined, resources are turned into cash, with which you can build up an army. There are a few bells and whistles, but this is not as deep as Civ, The Settlers or even the lightest of RPGs. Instead it concentrates on being a fairly arcade-like experience, with as little as possible to slow the player down. In fact, it plays more like a board game, where players trade cash for ships and attack each other. A.I is fairly dumb on the Easy and Medium levels, and can get more aggressive on the harder settings. Most players will never get to see the true ending for the game, as even though the atmosphere and gameplay is great, there is not much to encourage players to take on the harder enemies once they beat the easier ones. I'd say this is a perfect game for a rainy Sunday, when you just want to beat some enemies in combat without too much controller waggling or mouse-clickery. It is fun to play, and deep enough to keep you hooked whilst playing into the small hours. I'd give this 7 out of 10.