Neat setting. Great soundtrack. Gameplay was good for its time, has aged badly, but that goes for basically every older RTS since SupCom demonstrated how to do the genre properly.
RTS has been my favorite genre in my teens and I still like it, but despite all the RTS fans claiming Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are the BEST EVER!!! I never really got the appeal of them.
Comparing supcom to SC is like comparing Street Fighter to Tekken, Doom to Stalker; yeah it's the same "genre" but bottom line they are very different beasts.
Eh, still feel roughly the same in how the economy works and how you basically just toss massive armies at each other.
No, not at all. There are 3 major "strains" of games in RTS genre.
First one is Command&Conquer style, started by Dune 2, where you usually have
a base you need to manage, but the game is mostly about microing your units after you've found a right combination of them, necessary to win the mission.
Second one is Starcraft style, originating from Warcraft, which is more about expansion and map control, mainly due to resources being very finite. It's about being efficient and finding right balance between army and economy, expanding and defending.
SupCom is the third one, evolving from Total Annihilation, which is more of a tug-of-war kind of strategy. Microing is rarely worth player's time, because you have infinite and relatively easily available resources to build massive armies in order to push-back->gain momentum->overwhelm your opponent.
So SupCom is more about managing front lines where opposing armies slowly grind each other down, while Starcraft is more like conducting or defending against series of raids. It might look similar, but it has completely different feel to it.