A few people here say that Supreme Commander fell short in several areas compared to Total Annihilation. Care to elaborate on why TA remains superior?

1) TA can play at low-end computer, SupCom still get lag at High-end computer
2)TA has better resource system
2a)TA has sea resource & better sea battle
3)TA has much more unit to choose
4)huge number of mods
5)...
Although it sound SupCom has nothing better than TA, it still much better than SupCom2...

1) Kinda expected, maps and unit count can be way bigger than on TA and SC has realtime physics. With similar scale you wont need more than a moderate dualcore, the games that lag are massive ones.
2) Whut? the system is the same
2a) Did you even play SC? it has naval battles - albeit no underwater mexes on the standard maps. there are a couple custom maps with underwater mexes so its not a restriction of the game
3) Thats true, but then a ton of them are just the same with a couple tweaked values - means redundant.
4) SC has a fair amount of mods.
I`d pick Forged Alliance over TA any day, the improved userinterface alone is worth it.

Supreme Commander felt like it went a little too far in the direction of "grand scope." It's best played zoomed further away from the action, but at that point there's no real attachment to it. Also, while there are always early units that lose importance, it seemed like this was more true for SC than TA. I also found TA's campaign more enjoyable than SC's.

I liked Supreme Commander, but I think Total Annhilation to this day is still a superior game. Supreme Commander did a good job of capturing the scale of warfare that Total Annihilation had, but it just lacked the remarkable moments I found in TA.
Unfortunately I think a lot of it is due to the zoom feature in Supreme Commander. I think it's great to get a view of the entire battlefield for a tactical overview, but unfortunately this seems to always lead to a very impersonal perspective - as most seasoned players will spend 90% of the time playing the game completely zoomed out because it's just easier to manage everything that way. I remember playing a game of TA in Greenhaven, minding my own business building up an army with one ally versus two enemies. After finally exploring just to the left of my base I found an entire battlefield of destroyed enemy and ally units. This graveyard made me realize just how close my puny army was to being annihilated and gave me a ton of respect for my ally who sacrificed an entire army to save my a**. It was always great to build an army of cans and see how many kills each could rack up before being taken down or to reach the peak of a mountain to build an annihilator to give your team defensive leverage on the enemy. I never experienced anything like that in SC.
The physics and gameplay in both games are similar and both are great fun. TA just seems much more personal to me. On top of that, it came out 10 years earlier! Even those who consider SC to be a marginal improvement over TA have to respect the fact that 10 years of technology and development should at least result in a better game than its predecessor.
I play both games today. I have one friend who never played Total Annhilation that likes to play me in Supreme Commander, but the majority of my friends who have tried both still prefer to do fire up a game of TA instead.

Performance is an issue. I have a pretty bad ass computer, and Forged Alliance still causes some slowdown with max settings.
Either way, I prefer Supreme Commander, but that's probably because I haven't played TA in years. In fact, the reason that I got SC is because I heard it was the spiritual successor.
edit: Also, I'm sorry to say that when I had TA, the only way I knew of to get the expansions was to have someone copy the discs for me. It will be nice to have them legitimately.

Well I would pick SC because:
-Grand Battles (Seriously, what can be the problem with that? Big ships, and whatever ar cool.)
-Really nice graphics, which actually adds a lot to te battles.
-Shields. A proper Sci-fi needs shields and SC has them. They also look cool by the way.
-More or less everything TA has and a few tweaks I happened to find very useful.
-The tactical wiev is very useful, and helps even if the game slows down terribly.
I would pick TA because:
-It works. I always test new PCs with Forged Alliance, but good old TA runs fine on everything. And it still looks okay.
-Better, far better music then anything I have ever played. I sometimes called away my engineer from a half finished building jut to hear the battle music. The original CD also played fine in a CD player.
-It's the original, every self respecting gamer should play a few days with it at the very least.
All in all I would go with SC, if I had to choose...

Supcom origional comparied it was a Turtle friendly RTS.

Than they made it into a map control/rush game. Like ever other RTS ever created ever.... blizzard owns the rush/map control RTS market you do not compete with star craft, they did they game failed and became unfun because if I want a rush game I play SC.

TA is sooo popular because it is a Turtle friendly RTS there are not many of those around. Until a gaming company realises their is a huge demande for Turtle friendly RTS's TA will stay around. It was/is the best RTS ever created IMO. All weapons actually acted like real weapons too.. you could attack while moving and be less accurate you could move out of the way of arty if skilled, etc.

BEST RTS ever.

What are you talking about? Supreme Commander is far from a rush game, with all the big berthas and chaingun towers, it is incredibly possible to turtle in that game. In fact it is how i always play it.

Personally, when I tried out SC for the first time it seemed to be very complicated, which was off putting. TA is beautifully simple to play, yet hard to master.

It's like comparing a 60's corvette to a new one. The old car is going to be fun to drive and very classic. The new corvette will handle better and will have cutting edge performance. SC does require a computer that can handle it, not really a drawback, unless your computer is 10 years old. I like them both, but Forged Alliance is my personal favorite. If you play against the AI and do not like being rushed you can set a no rush timer in the settings and also play against the turtle AI. The turtle AI will lull you into thinking you are winning the game until he starts lobbing nukes or artillery barrages at ya. You better have a good base that can handle it by then or you will be exterminated. TA is better played against human players as the AI is weak. Anyways, the problem with TA was always the human players rushing and winning the game early, not really fun in my world.

TA is my favourite real time strategy game. I can even beat 10 enemies on hard, on a metal map! The only flaw, and its a big one - it is pretty much just an air war game, since you cannot move large numbers of ground forces due to the limited path finding.

I played SC for about 10 minutes until i realised it was not as similar to TA as i had hoped, i then lost interest in the game and have never played it since.

The community patch on tauniverse improves the pathfinding alot but yeah i guess with 10 AI opponents its still pretty bad.

There are only 2 ways to beat 10 fully established AI opponents. One way, the easy way is with air units (fighters), wave after wave, and you cannot keep any repair pads, if you do, this strategy will never work. The other harder way is with krogoths, but even Krogoths cannot take down 10 AI opponents on a metal map without cover - only fighters can do it.

As for gunships, well, their tendency for congregating together makes them disappear too quick.
And bombers require too much hand holding to be useful - you simply cannot issue orders quickly enough to keep up with AI production, and using pause is just painful.

The only thing ground units are useful for at this stage of the game is to distract AI big guns if they manage to out big gun you - which they usually do, but even when they don't, sometimes your 20 big guns are no match for 1 AI big gun + amazing luck - and amazing luck seems to be fairly routine.