Supreme Commander 2

In single-player it sort of does and it sort of doesn't. There's probably 170 total, about 60 per side. In the first mission you might get to build five, in the second you get 10, but we might fill in the first five for you. The third there might be 20 but we fill in 12. It's the lower-end ones that you had to research a couple of times, we just give you those for the future because we want you to concentrate on the new ones and learn all the toys in the sandbox. So by the time you've finished playing all three chapters, you'll be comfortable and familiar with every faction's units and upgrades. You will have done it all. Which I think is better than the old way. I think it was Blizzard who pioneered doing this; the RTS community feeds on each other's ideas quite a bit.

We're definitely focusing heavily on our story and our single-player game, we want to make a really rich experience for somebody who doesn't want to go online and fight other people. Should we be moving away from base-building like in some other games? I actually think base-building is really fun, and an important part of the game. Innovation doesn't mean we move away from that. Innovation means we do things like add strategic zoom, we have really cool Experimental units and half-baked systems and systems that really make the game more lively, but not at the expense of the core RTS experience that we've learned.

Yeah. I think we're doing a good job of revitalising RTS but keeping it moving forward in a way that doesn't forget itself. If you love Dune 2 and Command & Conquer and Total Annihilation and Starcraft... I mean, certainly Blizzard is staying on that track, they're not throwing away the old formula.

It's no secret that they have a double-edged sword there, because you need innovation, but if the Koreans up and stop playing the game... What they should do is they should take Warcraft IV and innovate on that, because they don't have the same risk and they do need a free hand.

But I definitely think there's been some desperate moves in the industry to find a new place for RTS. There was a game that had you fighting on the surface and below the surface - Armies of Exigo - and there was one where you could be fighting on a ground map and also in space. All these kinds of variations, but it's like saying let's add a fifth wheel to a car, or let's take a wheel off. But maybe we can actually make the car more comfortable, maybe we can make the drive less noisy or more fuel-efficient.

There's other places to go than just pure breaking something off or sticking something on to innovate. I actually wrote an internal essay about this - when games run out of places to go and apply a gimmick instead, it's a turn-off, and not having had the resources or the dare to do it, they would have sold more copies.

For years we've been beating the drum "innovation, innovation, innovation", but innovation for innovation's sake actually takes you backwards. You've got to have the right idea - like what we're doing right now with Experimental units. We know Experimentals are great, but we've got a nice balance between offensive and defensive, land, air and sea, so we can spread them around that way, and it's not nine different versions of the Universal Colossus. You only need one!