Iv'e played the demo, I can't see what's so unique and revolotionery about this game. It's not bad for sure, but I can't see why so many people love it so much.

Anyone ?

It's not revolutionary today. It was, however, revolutionary when it launched.

The gameplay is nothing special compared to today's games - in part because TA paved the way in several respects and those features are now standard fare within the genre - but I think the game still holds up fairly well.

But... if you cut your teeth on newer RTS games then TA may seem underwhelming.

At the time,it was revolutionary because of the scale. The maps are positively enormous at times. Back in the day,this was unheard of. Furthermore,to my memory,it's the only RTS game of the time to have a fully realized navy. Finally,the game chose to handle economy differently than any other game out there by streaming it. If something needed 1,000,000 metal,and all you had was 1,000,you can still build it,where in any other game of the time,you'd be forced to wait until you could pay it off up front.

That,and reclaiming the terrain,and unit wrecks were also very big things. Essentially,it's the genepool for Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation.

The really revolutionary aspects of Total Annihilation mostly come out in advanced multiplayer, especially using the patches that allowed 1000+ units per side. TA simulates an economics of scale that still hasn't been matched by any other game as far as I know. I can spend quite a while ranting about the glories of TA, so I'll spare you the details and just describe the economics of scale and how they affect gameplay.

In my TA heyday a friend and I would finish 6-8 hour TA games with the winning and losing sides each having produced >15k units. That's more than 1 unit per second for the whole game! As each side's resource production begins to really ramp (and it has no upper limit) they end up producing armies that are continuously streaming toward each other's bases. There are so many units on the board that battle becomes "unending combat at the front line" instead of every preceding game where you'd produce a special set of units and send them off to do direct combat under your direction.

Instead of defeating your opponent in tactical strategy, in Total Annihilation you defeat your opponent by having a bigger economy. TA has a richness of complexity that makes it much more than simply, "Build a group or groups of units and use them to attack your opponent."

I don't know about revolutionary but the bits that struck me from back when I played it were the scale, the varied types of units (air, sea and land), the "physics" of the weaponry and some of the details around the way the interface worked (I don't recall the specifics offhand but I remember being impressed by little details here and there).

I got it for $2, that's what was special about it. :D

Very true. It's difficult to defend against even a number of standard AI players if you're doing a hedgehog defense while the AI of course goes for its swarming and making the rest of the map its base. But there's always the buzzsaw and the silencer.

I like the way you can precisely limit units and buildings. Instead of banning say nukes or long range artillery completely you could limit it to one or however much you preferred. You could do this for every unit or building in the game.