It's no use putting all your efforts into building nuclear capabilities if it makes the rest of your production line crawl to a halt. Moving up through the tech tree produces more efficient and effective units, topped out with experimental units that are truly a sight to behold, but comes at a significant cost. Balancing the economy of energy and mass accumulation with your efforts at producing units and structures and climbing the tech tree presents a great deal of strategy.
The Supreme Commander design takes delicate resource management and mass scale to the extreme. This exacerbates the problem which is trouble indeed on a game that requires you to often select individual units from a mass of small icons. Controllers have enough trouble mimicking the precision of a mouse and keyboard as it is. Try making a precision unit selection or command while the game is dropping frames and bouncing around. It might be worth it to struggle through the skips and stammers, but this is a case where the technical problems hamper the gameplay itself. I thought it might be the 360 I was playing on, but several different retail units all showed the same serious issues.
Sometimes the game even pauses for a second or two after you give a command, freezing the cursor in place. Of course, if it did get much worse it would hardly run at all. In fact, the issues don't get much worse when the game is running full tilt with hundreds of units on screen. The main game is no different than the tutorial. Zoom in and out on the screen and you'll find that the game just can't keep up. Boot up the tutorial and you'll find a small test bed to learn the basics of the game - a test bed that contains only a few units and still can't run without stuttering. Even with the graphics scaled back from what a good PC can do, Supreme Commander never approaches anything close to a smooth experience. The game has such serious performance issues that they force everything else to take a back seat. Unfortunately, debating the pros and cons of Supreme Commander's strategy is rather superfluous in the case of the Xbox 360 port. It's not that the game itself is bad in fact I quite enjoyed it when it came out on PC early last year.
Bringing Supreme Commander to the console was probably a bad choice.
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