Galway Computer Club

10 years and this is still my favorite strategy game.

Fast and furious.

It was one of the first games to really embrace user modding fan sites. The community is still active at TAuniverse.com

Features

The game features three-dimensional rendering technology, true Newtonian physics and customizable units. Screen resolution as well as the limit of maximum units per player are customizable, depending only on the quality of computer hardware. Originally the default unit limit was 200, this was changed to 250 in Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency, and by modifying the totala.ini file in the game folder users can increase this limit up to 500. With a binary modification of the program file and sufficient hardware the unit limit can be increased to 6400 per team. ^{[citation needed]}

Interface

The interface is designed to minimize micromanagement by automating many of the routine tasks.

The player can queue unit actions by holding down the shift key. This allows, among other things, patrol routes to be automatically assigned to units as they emerge from factories, or construction bots to repair autonomously groups of buildings.

Players can also assign units to multiple groups.

Units

An in-game screenshot of a Core base.

Although the game originally shipped with 150 discrete units, the expansion packs The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics allow players to choose from 230 units, and over 6,000 units are available after 3rd-party installations from Total Annihilation's many different fansites (although only 511 units can be installed at any one time due to engine limitations). The two factions were balanced by giving both sides similar, well-rounded selections of units which filled all possible roles. These include aircraft, tanks, ships and infantry known as KBOTs (Kinetic Bio In-Organic Technology). All aircraft are VTOL and have unlimited fuel, so they can hover and land on uneven terrain. Except for large missile launchers, which have to build their missiles, all units also have unlimited ammunition.

The Core Contingency expansion further diversified both sides' arsenals by providing both sides units which sported features that units from the other side lacked. A Major component of the expansion pack was the inclusion of hovercraft type tanks that were able to travel over water and relatively flat land. Underwater base building as well as better support for amphibious units were also greatly improved in the expansion.

After The Core Contingency, Cavedog released several units online free for download that further diversified the Arm and Core - the Flea scout KBot, the Necro KBot capable of resurrecting dead units, the FARK "Fast Assist and Repair KBot", the Immolator plasma tower, and the Hedgehog and Scarab mobile anti-nuke vehicles. These units, like any other units placed in the Total Annihilation game folders, will only be available in a multiplayer game if all the players possess the relevant file.

Utilities were also produced by the fan community with some support by the game's authors for creating freely-downloadable third-party units. Many thousands of such units have been produced, in some cases being packaged as total conversions for complete replacement of the original units. Fans have even created their own races to join the game's two original races.

All-told, there are 236 official Cavedog units, with well over 6,000 third-party units available online.

AI and physics

The default computer player artificial intelligence is fairly simplistic^{[citation needed]}. The computer player, for instance, cannot detect what types of units are feasible for a given map and will produce as many land and sea units as can be fit into available space, which often results in humorous scenarios such as desert islands packed tight with tanks and infantry and small ponds full of battleships. This can be overcome by carefully rewriting the AI and adjusting weights{probability that a certain units will be built} & limits {max numer of units of a specific type allowed calculated as a percentage of the max unit count}. Normally adjusting the difficulty will only increase the rate at which enemy units are built and the frequency of attack attempts, and has no effect on the computer's strategy, which is only to produce more units. However manually rewriting the AI will allow multiple AI profiles on a single maps albeit at only a single difficulty level. The computer default AI will only use the constructor units' reclamation ability (see Resources) to supply itself with resources, and does not know how to clear paths. This can give players an advantage on maps strewn with reclaimable items, like houses, urban areas, trees or stones. This can also be upgraded manually by modifying the AI It should be noted that individual unit pathfinding and combat AI is considered good with respect to contemporary titles.

The physics engine supports true trajectories, inertia, momentum, thrust, and collateral damage. The game's terrain is a two-dimensional rendering with a matrix of height values mapped over it. All objects in the game interact with it as though it were fully three dimensional; hills obstruct artillery fire and, if line of sight is set to "true", height enhances units' visual and firing ranges. If terrain is steep and jagged, units tilt and turn to meet the face of the ground. Bases can be built on steep terrain to protect them from artillery fire and create choke points. Artillery shells are affected by gravity, which is variable on different planets in the Total Annihilation universe. Some artillery units can hit targets 15 screens away and nuclear missiles can be dropped anywhere on the map.

Multiplayer

Total Annihilation allows total control and customisation of unit numbers within multiplayer games. Using the in-game interface, it is possible to stipulate the exact number of any given unit that a player may build.

This can be useful, for example, if a game was wished to be played whereby the heavy use of fighter planes was to be avoided. Or perhaps, planes could be 'turned off' entirely, forcing a ground war instead.

Up to 10 players can play simultaneously in a multiplayer match. All of the original TA servers have disbanded or no longer host TA such as Boneyards and MPlayer, which were shut down in 2000.

The Macintosh game server "Gameranger" still allows for games of Total Annihilation, although there are very few players.

TA players still meet at WarZone, a server set up by the Axis & Allies community, the Phoenix Worx Server, at Gamespy, and on Internet Relay Chat [IRC] at irc.gnug.org on channels #tauniverse and #gnug. There are still active clans and ladders for TA at these sources. The TAUniverse IRC Help Page is available for help with joining IRC.

Help for setting up TA for internet play via TCP/IP can be found on TCBW's TA Page.

Extensibility

Data files containing game information can be placed within the game directory and their contents would be incorporated into the game. Units, weapons, AI tweaks, missions, races, and new map tilesets can be added, as well as a wide range of modifications and total conversions.

Apart from official enhancements released by Cavedog for free including units and patches, there is large community support with thousands of third-party add-ons and utilities. An example is the Uberhack modification, which modified all of the existing units and added several additional ones, in the attempt to balance the game and create unique roles for each of the wide variety of units.

Soundtrack

The game has an original orchestral soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule and performed by the 96-piece Northwest Sinfonia orchestra. The music changes according to the action on the battlefield. During a battle, loud music plays. During a lull in the action, a more tranquil track is played. The soundtrack is in CD-audio format and can be listened to with ordinary CD players. Ordinary music CDs can be inserted once the game is under way and played as game music. It is even possible to program CD tracks to the various battlefield situations (Battle, Building, Victory etc).

General strategy

An in-game screenshot using custom units.

Structures build relatively quickly in the game to compensate for nimble, heavily-armed aircraft and long-ranged artillery. Nuclear weapons are relatively cheap, powerful and quick to build. Several warheads can be stockpiled for devastating bombardments. This can lead to large, sprawling bases to limit the damage of a nuclear attack, air-strike or artillery barrage.

Total Annihilation uses two resources to regulate production: energy and metal. Each of these resources is unlimited, but the rate at which a player accumulates or restores resources depends on the amount of resource-collecting structures/units. Unit production is otherwise only limited by micromanagement speed and the number of production units/factories. There is a limit on the maximum number of units that can be produced, but this can easily be raised to a higher amount through the editing of a game file (see above). This makes offensive strikes a necessity, as a purely defensive strategy will never curtail the enemy's capacity to produce more units (but note that playing against AI the units produced will be a random mix, hence as offensive units are destroyed the AI player is left with a weak mix of low offensive value static units).

This can often lead to very long, drawn out games that last anywhere from an hour to 4-5 hours and sometimes a stalemate develops which is very hard to break. The only other discerning factor from other RTS games is the existence of the Commander: the most powerful unit in the game. He is the fastest solo builder and has the most powerful weapon, the D-gun, a manually targeted one-shot-kill weapon. He is also armed with a moderately powerful autofire laser that may engage ground or air targets and a cloaking device. Additionally, the commander is one of the few amphibious units and may build both land and naval structures. If the commander is destroyed at an early stage the resource capacity of that player becomes severely limited. The game options may be set so that victory is achieved by killing the enemy commander. It must be noted, though, that the spirit of the game assumed the end of the match after the death of a commander.

Resource management

One of the defining aspects of Total Annihilation is that both resources, energy and metal, are in unlimited supply. Structures which generate these resources collect them on a per-second basis (at the default game speed). A buffer is used to allow for variations in the speed at which these resources are consumed. Excess resources are placed in this buffer until it is full, at which point further supply is wasted. Storage structures can be built to increase the maximum amount the buffer can hold of either resource. If the player's production is exceeded by his usage (mainly due to construction and/or heavy weapons fire), his construction is slowed to the ratio between income and expenditure. The Commander and other construction units (as opposed to buildings) continuously produce a small amount of energy and metal, so a player is never bereft unless all construction units have been destroyed.

Both resources are vital to all aspects of construction. In addition, energy is continuously required to maintain functionality in many structures, including metal production structures, and intermittently required to operate weaponry. Structures which generate energy can be built anywhere, except for the geothermal power plants, however the metal generation structures can only be built efficiently on metal deposits. Secure control of these deposits vastly increases maximum production and provides greater efficiency than creating metal using energy. Certain maps, like those of the Core worlds are made entirely of metal. On these maps, metal extractors will always yield the highest amount of metal possible no matter where they are placed. Resource production structures vastly increase in effectiveness as the technological advancement of the player progresses. The most advanced energy and metal production structures are significantly more effective than the most basic, with a 50x and 10x increase in output respectively.

Energy production structures can be built anywhere providing there are no obstacles in the way and providing that it is in the correct type of area (i.e. water or land). Energy supply is only limited by the player's foresight to build more plants before production is slowed by energy shortages. Metal extraction structures can only be built on a metal deposit, however metal generation structures can be built anywhere (though they are very much less efficient than the extractors). It is hence possible to construct a base anywhere on the map, as no resource locations are absolutely necessary. The fastest method of gaining resources early in the game is by 'reclaiming' existing structures and objects such as vegetation and wreckages. These resources are, however, inherently finite and are infrequently used to gather resources later on in the game as the micromanagement of reclaiming them takes too much time.

Such a resource system allows for many strategies in production. The player can choose to only build items at a rate that matches production, so storage reserves are not touched. The player can also store enough resources prior to the construction of a unit so that they will still have a surplus after the unit is finished building. In either case, many construction units can help assist in building a unit or structure to complete it in the shortest time possible.

Criticism

Players found the pathfinder AI for naval units problematic - assembling a battle group of warships and giving them collective orders to move to new location often resulted in the ships colliding with and grinding against each other most of the way to their destination.^{[citation needed]}

The AI for computer-controlled armies was found to be quite weak and easy to defeat even on the Hard difficulty setting. This led to the development of a variety of mods to make the AI more aggressive. ^{[citation needed]}

The most critical point of the computer AI is with the anti nuclear defense. Computer AI will construct the important anti missile shield silos that could be used to stop an opponents incoming missiles but it does not actually build the missile. The computer AI would construct empty anti missile silos leaving the computer players completely open to nuclear missile attack. This was hard coded into the game itself and can not be changed with any 3rd party AI pack.

Another criticism sometimes voiced was that the game encouraged "spamming" or "rushing" large masses of a particular unit that was generally effective (such as the Flash tank) in order to win.^{[citation needed]} This was perceived to cut down on the number of actually viable strategies in favour of simply massing one's units, although some argue that skilled players can defeat one-unit spammers easily, pointing to how Total Annihilation was unique for a Real Time Strategy game in its variety of cheap fixed defenses.^{[citation needed]}

Fan support

Cavedog's Total Annihilation release was one of the first to embrace, truly, the fansite paradigm. Cavedog provided graphics and a full license to use trademark materials for the benefit of the game's community. The first known fansite can be found archived at Archive.org.

Platforms

• Microsoft Windows: 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, XP x64, Server 2003, Vista (may not work correctly)
• Macintosh (PowerPC)
• Works very well on recent versions of Wine (details).
• Works almost perfectly in Cedega.

See also

• Gas Powered Games
• List of awards received by Total Annihilation
• Supreme Commander (the "spiritual successor" to Total Annihilation, developed by Chris Taylor through Gas Powered Games)
• Spring, an open source game similar to TA and running on multiple platforms.
• Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency
• Total Annihilation: Kingdoms

References

1. ^ ^{a b} GameSpot Total Annihilation page
2. ^ GameSpot Core Contingency page
3. ^ GameSpot Battle Tactics page
4. ^ Total Annihilation Reviews at metacritic.com
5. ^ Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time at gamespy.com (2004)
6. ^ History of Real-time Strategy Games: 1989-1998 - the Second Generation at gamespot.com (2000)
7. ^ [http://www.rakrent.com/rtsc/rtsc_totala.htm RTSC Total Annihilation Page] at rakrent.com (2006)
8. ^ The Top 10 Strategy Games of All Time at gamefaqs.com
9. ^ Supreme Commander Q&A at gamespot.com (2005)

External links

• A mirror of Cavedog Entertainment's official Total Annihilation website.
• Total Annihilation Intro in YouTube
• TA3D is an open-source 3D remake of Total Annihilation's engine which uses TA data files (maps, units, weapons, ...)
• Spring is an open-source 3D RTS inspired by Total Annihilation which can make use of TA data files.
• FileUniverse contains over 3000 mods, races, maps, utilities and tutorials for TA, TA:Kingdoms and TA:Spring.
• UnitUniverse An archive of over 5,000 downloadable first- and third-party units.
• TA-Zone The Ultimate TA Resource site. TA 1v1 Ladder, TA Replays and Forums.
• D-Gun provides links to information and files for playing Total Annihilation online.
• Total Annihilation at MobyGames
• TA Wiki by TA Universe.
• Total Annihilation guide at StrategyWiki
• RTSC TA Pages An introduction to Total Annihilation.
• Switeck's Junkdrawer has some of the most useful TA files like TA Bugfix and the AI Guide.
• Galactic War Briefings Galactic War Battle Reports, as cached by WebArchive.
• Epic Class Productions has a large collection of gigantic 63 by 63 screen "Epic Maps" by James Beatty.