Personally I like the missile weapons not being able to guide the terrain (and it's a bit logical: they can't aim at what they can't see). It adds some depth to the game.

On my PC I got rid of the flickering issues by running in windowed mode (you can't see the window border BTW). How you do it is explained in this forum post :http://www.gog.com/en/forum/total_anihilation/resolution_fix_windowed_res_fix_inverted_colors_fix_flickering_bars_fix .

The missile towers have no problem hitting aircraft which is their main purpose ;-) As for using them against ground units, you need to build them as high up as possible to avoid the line of fire being blocked by hills\elevation. Some terrain objects like trees can be destroyed. On the other hand, you want to be building things like fusion plants immediately behind hills and raised terrain to shield them from artillery and other ranged attacks.

As for the graphics glitches, I presume you're running Windows 7? There are numerous threads already discussing the issue and a fix has been posted in one of them.

Keep in mind this is a 1997 game, it's been surpassed by its spiritual successor Supreme Commander (in my opinion at least) although in a few respects it is better (more varied terrain and units). The Escalation mod aims to bring Supreme Commander features and units to Total Annihilation.

Doesn't help that the game crashes about 30 seconds into the Core campaign. Sigh...

Core i7, 12 GB RAM, ATi Radeon 6870, Win 7 ... even running compatibility mode ... splat.

Hard to talk highly of a game that won't even run.

Did you check the thread that Giesber linked? Or read any of the other technical discussions on this board regarding Windows 7?

Core campaign still crashes. Tried running in just about every compatibility mode Win 7 has. Not sure what I'm doing wrong that keeps it from running properly. The -d swtich only seems to make the menu in windowed mode; the game play window reverted back to whatever.

So very, very much unimpressed. For the amount of hype this game has gotten, it seems to deliver so little. Unstable, mediocre graphics, etc. Just not impressing me at all.

If you're playing at 1920x1080 you could face the same problem as I had. The core campaign has a map (the first one I think) which isn't 1920 pixels wide. I had issues on that map when scrolling left or right. I managed to beat the level without scrolling left or right, and never got problems afterwards. But I suppose lowering the resolution for that map only would also have helped (I was too lazy to try it).

Besides the above issue (which is caused by forcing a resolution that wasn't supported in the first place) the game never crashed on my PC. And I found the graphics pretty impressive back in 1997 (that's the era of Red Alert and Age of Empires).