When comparing Supreme Commander vs Europa Universalis IV, the Slant community recommends Supreme Commander for most people. In the question“What are the best RTS games for PC?” Supreme Commander is ranked 1st while Europa Universalis IV is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Supreme Commander is:
If there is a large building in between the line of sight of the player and the target, your units might hit the building instead. To compensate you can use artillery or missiles. However this type of full scale simulation is at the expense of CPU power.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Simulation of every shot
If there is a large building in between the line of sight of the player and the target, your units might hit the building instead. To compensate you can use artillery or missiles. However this type of full scale simulation is at the expense of CPU power.
Pro Massive battles with plenty of outcomes
Battles can involve hundreds of units. This allows for even experimental units that can single-handedly take out entire armies due to their sheer size. This way there is room for experimentation in what can works, or just to see what outcomes they have.
Pro Unlimited zoom increases visibility
You don't need a mini map to get an overview of the Battlefield: simply zoom out using the scroll wheel. If you want to "jump" somewhere else just zoom in to that exact spot.
Pro Authentic real time economy
When you spend resources on a building, they are not spent instantly but rather over the course of building. The same goes for collecting. Your buffer is small so try to match your spending rate with that of gathering.
Pro Rewarding, high skill cap
This game can satisfy you for hours. It offers a high level of play that not only takes a long time to attain but is also very rewarding when mastered.
Pro Advanced command system
By holding the shift key, you can see the commands you gave as an overlay on the map. Drag and drop commands to adapt them whenever you have to.
Pro Fundamentally different factions that are well balanced
Each faction in the game will have different abilities, units, transporters or stations that are unique to that faction. While one faction will have an advantage of a hovering engineer, another will have the advantage of a driving engineer, each being prone and un-prone to particular kinds of attacks. Somewhat like a rock paper scissors scenario where it will all balance out in the end. This way it keeps each faction feeling unique, but at the same time disallowing any to have too much of an advantage over the others.
Pro Asynchronous tech system
Upgrading one factory doesn't magically upgrade all the others. Decide wisely how much you spend on advancing in tech. Low tech spam can sometimes still be an option.
Pro You can set your own goals
While there are a lot of achievements for doing certain things in Iron Man mode, which runs can be tailored towards, and there is a points system allowing you to focus on becoming the "best" in the world, there is no definitive win condition and therefore a lot of players decide their own target for the campaign and focus on that, whether direct conquest or a trade empire or "playing tall" - highly developing a small nation without expanding geographically.
Pro Game features pausing and adjustable speeds
Europa Universalis IV allows you to play straight through in real-time, or pause the game for as much micro-management as needed. With this system in place, everyone can play at their own pace without need for rapid play styles or quick rushing attacks to achieve victory, thus giving players freedom to tackle missions at their own, preferred speed.
Pro Lots of depth
EUIV is a simulation of global politics and war. There is a relatively limited set of choices you can make under normal circumstances: hiring advisors to improve your capabilities, hiring troops, about two dozen diplomatic actions in peace, and a number of different peace deal options when terminating a war. However, these interact to produce a large number of interesting decisions that affect your outcomes.
If you want to annex a neighbor, do you declare a holy war on them, or do you fabricate claims on their territory and demand that they "return" this land to you? Do you ally a much larger nation that might try to force you to be their vassal? Conversely, do you try to improve relations with a much smaller neighbor in order to become their suzerain overlord, or do you attempt to conquer them directly and risk pulling their larger allies into a war?
On top of that, there are hundreds of events that can occur once certain preconditions are met. Some of them are specific to which country you're playing as. Some require you to hire the right set of advisors.
And if you don't keep your country's internal affairs in order, you may find yourself on the wrong end of a peasant's war or facing other national disasters.
Pro You get to chose how to play
You can either expand with colonies, martial might or be peaceful and attempt to ally neighbouring nations.
Cons
Con Stand-alone add-on Forged Alliance needed for stability
Vanilla game has balance issues, which is why it is recommended that the user installs the add-on, Forged Alliance.
Con Steep learning curve and need for planning involved
Supreme Commander takes a while to pick up and learn how to play well. Since everything in the game happens slowly, you need to plan.
Con Developers abandoned the game
However there is great community support in which they have released patches in order to fix outstanding bugs as well as support hosting a map vault where players can download community made maps to use in the game. There is also a matchmaking lobby tool available here, which makes finding online matches to play pretty easy.
Con Large battles with a poor CPU is not recommended in 4v4
The game can slow down significantly in large battles and on huge maps when there are a lot of players. This is especially the case for those using lower-end PCs.
Con Games can take a very long time
Due to the in depth, meticulous gameplay mechanics, the games can take weeks to finish which some people may not have the patience for.
Con Steep learning curve
When you start out, it can be overwhelming. You have a country and three thousand infantrymen -- what can you do? You decide to attack your neighbor -- and they cut you down like reeds. You start over as a bigger country and attack a smaller neighbor -- and suddenly you're in a war against several large countries at once. You start again and this time you find a weak neighbor with no allies. You crush them and bring them under your control -- and suddenly you find revolutions popping up everywhere.
Even after you've learned the basics, you'll still find yourself wondering: if I declare a holy war, will it cost me diplomatic power to annex territory or not? And it's often hard -- certainly in ironman mode -- to undo decisions, so small mistakes and misclicks can end up costing you a lot.
The game does give you guidance in the form of alert bubbles in the upper left of the screen, informing you of the things it thinks are most relevant, and paying attention to those can at least show you what you might want to think about. In the later patches, the user interface has been improving to help reduce surprises -- and the game mechanics as well. For instance, rebel uprising progress can be tracked easily -- you won't be surprised by a sudden uprising of Najdi nationalists, and when you're in for a long-term peasant revolt, the game will tell you why it's happening, how to prevent it, and how to get out of it once it happens.
But simply finding all these parts of the user interface takes time playing. Determining what's important takes experience. You can pause the game at any time and find all the data you can handle, but if you're not just extracting the important parts, the deluge won't help.
Your best bet is to find videos of people playing the game with a bit more skill than you. Streaming is best -- you can ask questions, and most streamers will answer.
Con Math
This game is pure math, like every game. But in this game, you can actually calculate the outcome of an action, which makes the computer (AI) feel dumb.
For example, when you grow, you easily form an alliance with the second largest army on the map, which will accept and let you grow, grow, grow without the slightest clue that he will be next. This is weird.