I get it that TA is among one of the most praised strategy games of all time, but having played it (or rather attempted to play it) for a few hours with a friend the closest thing I could compare it to was the first Command and Conquer. It has nearly the same looks, so I get that, but it just doesn't feel right, or to quote a certain Australian game critic: "Like a dolphin on strike it just wasn't clicking for me."

I see comments all about epic encounters and massive armies, but where are they? It's like being lulled to sleep by a dancing formation of various colored boxes with guns glued to the front of them. Yes yes, some say it's fluent and others praise the combat but what am I supposed to be focusing on here?

I remember as a kid I was playing C&C and all the other kids were play Total Annihilation. To this day I don't quite understand what the fuss was about. Don't get me wrong, it is a great looking game and played very well. But it lacked the characters and style of C&C.

Peace Through Power!!!

Not every game is for everyone. Just because it's a golden classic praised by masses, it doesn't mean you have to like it ;-)

Just play Tzar, bro :D

Try Supreme Commander instead. From my experience, Supreme Commander + expansion is, at least in MP, basically Total Commander with a good and modern UI which does a great job of conveying what you're supposed to be doing.

As for TC itself, there are quite massive encounters, it's just rather bothersome to manage them - you can't zoom out, pathfinding is terrible, just as controlling production in multiple buildings. As for what you're supposed to be doing, you're supposed to get your income to solid levels, build a couple of production factories and produce dozens upon dozens of units that you then send in the general direction of the enemy. Once you learn what the individual units do, strategy will suddenly appear.

Following applies to both TC and SC:
These games take a fairly untraditional approach towards resource management. Most games give you a finite reserve which goes up and down depending on how many miners do you have at your disposal, and you make decisions based on how many resources do you have at the time, which leads to a lot of micromanagement.

TC and SC took a different route - you have income and outcome for energy and resource thingy, and the key to victory is to strive and keep these two balanced. As long as your income allows you, you should be topping your production whereever possible, and expand your possibilities by producing more mining facilities. This changes gameplay when compared to traditional RTS quite a bit, as instead of producing 10 units and leading them towards your enemy, you start production, leave a couple of factories producing and either send units on partrols right away (SC way) or go and find a bunch of produced units that are more or less constantly at your disposal when you need them.

You mean like sitting next to each other while one dude is playing or did you actually instantly try multiplayer without getting to know the game in SP first?

Well, we used to play 10 player, 2 team matches with friends on LAN - unit limit raised to 1000. Those matches last many many hours and had thousands of units on the map all the time. Ofcourse the usual map being metal map -> core industrial area kinda made it easier.

There are also still mods for the game.

Anyways, it is still the most epic RTS ive played and ive played quite few of them. Even in any of the supreme commanders i havent had so epic fights as in the first TA. ....so i would kinda suggest you to practice the game a bit - epic fights dont make themselves you know :)

Oh, the single player isnt much to talk about.

About mods, you could check out Escalation for example: http://taesc.tauniverse.com/

What's the problem with that? My friend had two PCs in his house connected via IPX and we played gazillions of hours online and many games I or him didn't know :P It's how kids back then rolled! :P What is Total Commander? ;P Isn't it a file manager app? :P

btw. when did you start gaming for reals? Because every time you pop in to the thread, you're all like "I don't like old games because they have bad UI and all" and you seem to be frustrated every time you have to click twice instead of just once :P

I'm not trying to be douchy, I'm just curious. It looks like you're dismissing every game that doesn't have optimized UI. I'm not an oldfag, but I don't have a tiniest problem to get used to "outdated" controls. Maybe with an exception of Dune 2, but I have Dune 2000, so I don't care :P

btw. Supreme Commander are brilliant games indeed. It's a shame they didn't sell that well and SupCom 2 is the final one in the franchise.

Nothing wrong with that per se, but I also remember instantly playing some strategy games in multiplayer without getting accustomed to them first and I remember how the matches would always turn out weird or boring. I think with RTS games like Total Annihilation you should always try singleplayer first since the AI puts you under pressure to play the game "properly", you get a feeling of how fast you should do what, how many and what units you need, how fast you have to expand etc.. Else it often results in a weird and boring snorefest that may just scare you away from a game altogether, especially when not a single participant in the match knows the game.

You've not played much StarCraft MP, have you ;) And while I've hardly played any C&C in multi, from what I've seen of it being played, it doesn't seem to lend itself too much to turtling. I guess it would be somewhat more map-dependent, though.

It seems to me that the main difference between these two major RTS branches, the C&C-likes and Warcraft-likes, is that the C&C-likes are optimised for massive production, mostly ignoring unit micromanagement. In contrast, the Warcraft-likes allow and even encourage individual unit management, with things like limited control groups and supply limits. Thus, while they can make for exciting skirmishes and manoeuvres, they can't really reach the scale of the C&C-likes and their corresponding epicness. The flipside of that is, once one is at a disadvantage in a C&C-like game, it can be almost impossible to overcome.

Oh... Well, I never play online with uberplayers, because I don't want to get frustrated :P So My AOE2 matches for instance looked very interesting unlike many online matches that are constant rushing and micromanaging.

And we had that advantage that if I didn't know how some game works, I was just shouting across the room asking what should I do ;P and after a while I got how to play it ;P

Oh, I just reminded LAN matches with first Call of duty with my friends :D It was superb, because we had internet connection via cable, but everyone in a cable was connected via LAN as well. So we were sending games to each other at 30megaBYTES/second to each other (via Gadu-Gadu, lol) :D You know, a friend got a... alternate copy of Cod, and sent it to us within few minutes (it was just as fast as copying something from drive to drive), and we had wonderful deathmatches...

Good times ;-)

It's a problem that many players have, no matter when they started gaming. My brother also isn't willing to play many "old" games, despite the fact that many of them are much more advanced and intuitive than the stuff he has actually grown up with. It's been pretty similar for me for several years, I also only found the willingness to get into weird old interfaces shortly before I joined GOG (despite the fact that I had also grown up with games like Populous, Power Monger and Dune 2).

It's strange for me, because many of the GOGs I bought here I never played before. Many of them are older than my oldest Pc (1999), and outdated graphics or controles never bothered me.

But I made a habit of opening a DOSBox game in a window and a reference card opened just next to it ;P It really helps a lot, and because of that, I don't need to miss out great games that are older than my first PC experience, which was...

AOE 1 and Colin McRae Rally.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for a good UI and polished controls.

As for when I have started gaming, it was 2000-ish when I got my first computer. It's not really about when as it is about what - my computer was barely able to run current games, so I've been playing stuff from about '97 or so. Just to give you an idea, it was struggling with Tiberian Sun, and couldn't run Heroes of Might and Magic 3 at all. I was stuck with that computer for about 3 or 4 years.

I don't really care about how old a game is tho, it's just new games tend to get a lot of things right in a way which actually lets me enjoy a game instead of battling against its controls/mechanics constantly. When an old game does, well, fantastic, there are many good examples of old games which are actually quite polished and allow you to do what you want without actively hindering you (betrayal at krondor would be a good example of that.) But for the most part, I'm trying to rate games based on a modern viewpoint as unfair as that is, and while many actually stood up the test of time quite nice, many just ... Kind of didn't.

At any rate, in case of Total Annihilation, I can definitely say that UI was actively getting into my way of enjoying it - it's a game that's inherently not focused on micro all that much, but limited viewport and bad AI forced me to micro all the time.

All the tools that Supreme Commander gives you, with incredibly extended queue system, 'unlimited' zoom providing crazy situational awareness etc. actually allowed me to focus on what I have enjoyed about the game - you know, strategizing. I still have good memories of Total Annihilation, but now, I'd never play it instead of SupCom.

I think I have a much lower standards for fun :P What I expect from RTS games is unit groups. If there is a CTRL + 1 and all that, I'm fine, I will manage :D But even if there isn't such option, I will still try...

What I also don't like, is when UI buttons are not labeled at all. But then, reference card usually is enough.

But I'm unemployed still, so I have plenty of time to learn :P