Total Annihilation: Commander Pack

My first experience with RTS games was with Warcraft 2. Soon after that, I found Command and Conquer. Both were great games that I played for countless hours each. I blindly purchased Total Annihilation on a whim after checking out its box shortly after it was released. It was released at the same time as Age of Empires, another RTS I enjoyed. Suffice it to say,Total Annhilation blew them all away and is still somehow more enjoyable to play than modern RTS games. First of all, let me outline some of the elements within Total Annihilation that set it apart from other games when it was released and then discuss why it is still the best of its kind today. Total Annihilation was the first game of its type to successfully utilize 3D environments. The terrain is filled with destructable objects such as trees that you can use to gather energy from or just let become part of the devastation of battle. The environment plays a big role in Total Annihilation. Gaining the high ground in a skirmish game and building a powerful defensive weapon can completely make the difference. The 3D world affects how missiles are projected and the graphics hold up, even by today's standards. The scale of Total Annihilation is huge. The battles are constant, massive, and utterly epic. Every battle will leave behind scars in the form of a graveyard of wreckage, which can in turn be harvested to gather metal resources or destroyed by the next battle wave. The variety of weapons is also astounding. Even in the original, stand-alone game there was a plethora of options. I was always fond of the Cans and/or Lugers on land, and Brawlers in the air. My favorite defensive weapon is the Annihilator, which, as I mentioned before, is incredibly effective when placed upon a large hill with some defenders to protect it from air attacks. Some of the maps are incredibly huge, especially considering the time it was released. You basically have the flexibility to create as epic of a matchup as you want. Amazingly, being able to select as many units as you wanted to wasn't a standard element of RTS games at this time, Warcraft and Starcraft being major culprits of this. Total Annihilation finally spared us of that ridiculous little roadblock, allowing you to select as many units as you could see. This is another little element that helps you realize the massive scale of the game. Despite it's size and scale, Total Annihilation somehow manages to stay personal. Every unit under your control keeps a tally of how many kills it has. If it single-handedly gets over five, it gains veteran status. This small and seemingly irrelevant feature makes the game just a little more personal and it was something just not seen in RTS games at this time. You'll care for your veterans and probably want to see just how far their skills can be taken by keeping them alive longer than the average cannon fodder. The resource system was quite different than most games at the time and gives the game a uniqueness unmatched until the release of Supreme Commander. In Total Annihilation, there are only two resources, metal and energy. Rather than gathering them and building up a stockhold to use later, you are expected to balance the constant amount you are using with the amount you are gathering (for example, you'd want to be gathering more metal, +20, than the amount you are currently using, -15). You can build storage buildings to store a greater amount and provide greater flexibility or padding for times of need, but it's not necessary for building a strong army and defense. However, if you don't keep a balance, you can run in to some serious problems. Running out of energy will severely inhibit your ability to build things, especially since your metal extractors require energy to work. More commonly, you'll run into issues of running out of metal, which is gathered at a slower rate. Keeping a balance between resources is absolutely key to winning the game, especially if you're playing another human opponent (who likely won't make the same mistake as you and won't hesitate to punish you). Total Annihilation is very customizable and still has a huge, active community. If, despite my insistence that the graphics hold up well today, you're unconvinced and think it needs an upgrade, you can download graphical enhancements that will allow you to zoom in and out and change views while providing higher resolution and texturing. There is also an incredible amount of maps and new units that can be downloaded or created (for the adventurous type). I would also be willing to bet that you'll always be able to find a multiplayer counterpart, though I mostly stick to playing over LAN with friends. Large and active communities, especially for older games, are always a testament to a game that has transcended time. For all the great things that Total Annihilation offers, I have two things to warn people about. One, I would recommend starting with vanilla Total Annihilation. There is so much content added with the expansions and especially with the downloadable units that you may be overwhelmed. As a seasoned Total Annihilation player, I was completely out of my league playing with a downloadable unit pack simply because I didn't know what units were effective and what buildings did what. Second, Total Annihilation is not about building a society (no Sim City elements). In other games, such as Age of Empires and games similar to it, your "civilization" really just serves as a way to advance, gather resources, and build a stronger army, making it not much different than Total Annihilation. However, those games do like to put an emphasis on building up a society even if it's nothing more than a red herring. In Total Annihilation, the focus is simply smiting your enemies with as much force as possible. All of my friends that played Total Annihilation ten years ago still prefer to play it than firing up a game of its unofficial sequel Supreme Commander, which feels somehow less personal to them. Though it's hard to explain this phenomena completely, I tend to blame this on the tactical zooming feature - something is lost when you're not in the firefights up close and personal. Being a seasoned RTS fan having played everything from the Warcrafts, Rise of Nations, Starcrafts, Age of Empires, Command and Conquers, Supreme Commanders, Company of Heroes, and Empire Earths of the genre, I must say that Total Annilation stands head and shoulders above the rest.

I spend ages playing this when it came out - it may lack the cut-scenes and plot from its C&C and Starcraft contemporaries, but it more than made up for it in innovative features - queuing commands, radar warfare with scanners and jammers, workable defences including artillery worthy of the name, the wonderfully animated hordes of unit types done in full 3d.... Awesome. And it still scales brilliantly on modern computers - more units, bigger maps, more annihilation!

This game really was a suprise to me. I still remember the day I bought it. Is was during a school excursion, and I had absolutely no Idea WHY the heck I chose this game. No advertising, no Hype created by the press... in fact, the gaming magazines I read at this time wrote more of a slating review, giving this title only half a page,whith 6 out of 10 Points, if any. But I did not remember I had read them, so different was the image of how this game could be I got while staring at the screenshots and reading the game´s specs. I just had a feeling, an hunch, so to say that there was something special inside this box. So I bought it... It promised: 1) Fully scalable graphics!! While Starcraft or C&C still worked with 640x480 (or worse) resolution, TA could be maxed out to 1600x1200 or even beyond. It was unbelievable for us little boys! How could one game be so advanced?? 2) Large maps. Even larger maps for those whith 64megs of RAM !!! How awesome was that?? A RTS that used all of your aviable RAM? And let you play even bigger maps if you upgrade your pc?! (Needless to say, this was the sole reason me and my friends were standing at the local pc-dealers shop demanding MORE RAM shortly thereafter! ) 3) Hundreds of units. AT ONCE! On one map. How could that be playable? SC was almost unplayable for me if more than 30 units were on screen. Not to mention c&c, where a pack of 9 bigger units often won the game. I was intrigued. 4) Orchestral Soundtrack. By Jeremy WHO??? Why would a game need an Orchestra ? If I remember correctly, they went to Prague to record it whith the Chech´s National Orchestra. Wow! That was something. But Classic? Not heavy metal? That´s not good! (I did not know HOW WRONG I was back then..) So to shorten things a bit: All, and I repeat ALL the things promised on the back of the package were (playable) reality! You could max out your monitor, and for the first time, a game matched the desktop resulition !!! WOW !!! It was plain awesome to get 8 (or UP TO 10!! when everyone fullfilled the RAM-prerequisites) in a LAN-game fighting each other in a war which really felt like it was heaving to and fro. You were leading a "tide of iron" towards your enemy´s base, only to get pushed back by his well organized counterattack. But never was there a time when you ran out of units and had to wait for your new "3 mighty units " to be produced, like in SC or C&C. How nice it was to tell your factorys to produce countless units one after another. Yes, no "unit production cue" like in all the other RTSs. Ordering 500 units? No problem. Wait for the first 20 to become produced, take them to battle and when you return to your base, 40 new ones will be waiting for your command. Sweet! This game IS the best RTS, if you are into large scale battles. If you like small skirmishes, go for SC or C&C. Even the newer SupremeCommander, which is made by the same team who made TA back then, does not quite offer the same dynamic battle experience TA did. (I use mods for SupCom to make it "feel" more like TA - that should say all, does it not??) ´Nuff said ! BUY it, if you have´nt already !

TA is a tremendously fun game that still looks great and and plays very well. It was also the biggest innovator in RTS's and well ahead of its time for many years. For one thing, it was 3D when games were still using sprites, including Starcraft. Vehicles ran over obstacles and you could see their undersides when they had to negotiate an odd bit of turf. Jet fighters did not just change their heading in a way that looked like a jerky version of an umbrella spining from above, but turned over in flight to make sharp turns. These units looked like units, not cartoon pictures of units. Projectiles shot further depending on the height of the placement of guns, and trajectories were calculated in a 3D world. Projectiles varied the time they took to hit, rather than hitting instantly because, unlike the code in games of its time, the code did not tell them that a shot fired is a shot that hits and hits immediately. Best of all -- and this was what made Starcraft the biggest retreat to the past after a game like TA had come along -- was that the realistic physics model meant that there are are no hard counters. There is no table that tells you that certain projectiles or units can't hit you because the game simply decides to disallow it. If the trajectory and speed work, you get hit! So you can't hover over someone and expect not to be hit by any bullets or missiles just because they don't have the one hard counter the designers have allowed you to use. You still have a chance of getting hit, as long as the physics work out. It is possible to counter any unit with (enough of) any other one. This makes fights more than a race to the uberunit or hard counter. So you can fight in a way that makes sense rather than follows some lame rule book or wins with one and only one unit. And that lets you pursue very unconventional strategies, and make very unlikely comebacks. One of the best things about TA is that coming from behind to win is extremely possible and indeed happens all the time. That makes TA a game to continue to play to the bitter but still at least faintly hopeful end, with some real gut-busting tenacity, instead of quitting out from when your enemy gets his superunit before you get the only unit that will counter it. One of the things you will not read talked about now, but was also huge when TA came out, is the incredibly usefulness and fluidity of the user interface. All others were VERY cumbersome and limited in comparison. TA's was lean in all the right ways, but you could still do quite complex things very rapidly. TA let you queue up factories to build units in orders as complex as you liked, and to cancel or partially cancel them with equal finesse. It let you manage units in small or large groups, and even assign single units to more than one group without losing the previous group assignment. You could set precise paths for all your units, whether on patrol or as part of the process of their being made in the factory, . You could set their responses on those patrols, from repairing and building to fighting and chasing, fighting without chasing, etc. There were key assignments for every kind of the many different sorts of vehicles, so moving and fighting orders of (and generally still unmatched) complexity were possible. FInally, interesting things were done by the mod community, from units to great maps to my favorite, the recorder. The recorder was a plug-in that let you record games and play them back later for fun and study. It made a fantastic way to study your own weaknesses and learn from others' strategies. There are still hundreds if not thousands of games out there to watch that reveal all sorts of strategic ideas and map-specific strategies, or are just like an incredible action movie with all the boring parts taken out. I can't mention everything good about the game in this already long review, but I must mention the sound and soundtrack. I still remembered clearly some of the jarring thuds and crushing recoil sounds of the game's guns. Absolutely incredible and it made battles very exciting! And composer Jeremy Soule's soundtrack was fantastic. Never omnipresent or overbearing, the full orchestral sound was rousing and beautiful; it seemed, frankly, far too good for a video game! Finally, check these out for great help with the game: Forums: http://tauniverse.com/forum/ Maps: http://www.ratpacker.com/Maps/Maps.html Commands: http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38037&highlight=metal+heck Great 3rd party site: http://www.tauniverse.com/ wiki campaign strat guide: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Total_Annihilation wind and tides chart (for energy): http://it-is-law.com/dump/TA/TA%20Map%20Wind%20&%20Tides.htm Game replayer: http://www.clan-sy.com/frame.html Recorded games: http://tadrs.tauniverse.com/