It'll be the AI that eats the most out of the CPU.
Eh, I don't think it will need to be that good either, it looks like everything is played out with clumps of units at once, so the AI just has to build a bunch of groups and send them out periodically. Builds base stuff when it needs it blah blah.
The AI will probably not be great, this looks way more like a multiplayer fun fun fun game.
No...AI in general. AI routines for base building and all that stuff is a piece of cake. ITs each of the units that have independant gun positions and so forth. Thats all AI...even your units. That eats into the CPU cycles because AI is just rediculous in how much it needs. AI really hasn't gotten any better despite CPU advancements...its just very hard.
Supreme Commander units have this? They move independantly? That's pretty cool. Would be great if you could customise units and switch around thier weapons to suit your needs, Mech Commander style.
Well most RTS games have independantly moved AI units. Even the good old Dune 2 had this...each AI unit operates with its own bit of AI that governs what the unit does. In recent years we've gotten pretty good at it. In C&C Generals each tank for instance determines its path, what enemy targets are in range, if its being threatened, has a turret that can independantly track the enemy units while moving, and can, to some extent, even determine which threat (if presented with two similtaneously) it can better deal with. Even in C&C Generals your units will respond when attacked and fan out to engage.
What Supreme Commander has takes things a few steps above from the looks of it but its really quite the same. The biggest thing being that units like the Battleship have two or three main guns and a compliment of smaller guns. So what I see is units that act more like they do in FreeSpace. They know how to operate in their 3D space, they know what guns they have, each independant weapon system runs its own AI routines to prioritize, range, and track appropriate targets. So when we saw the battleship go into combat we see the main guns engaging the enemy ships, while the AAA guns track, each independantly, the enemy fighters. With the air units we see them dogfighting in a pattern attempting to gain advantage and fire on the opposition.
Its still not all that sophisticated but its better than we've probably seen.