Simply put: this was the best real-time strategy game when it was released, and it still is the king, despite being so old by the time I'm writing this.
The graphics are no longer the best in the market, but they're still gurgeous, with fully animated polygonal units, and incredibly rendered terrains. The soundtrack is orchestral - literally. The basic game has nothing less than 150 units, there's more in the expansion pack Core Contingency, and yet a dozens more free for download, all of them made by the developer, and in the Internet you'll find thousands of third party not only of units, but also of maps, AIs and lots of other goodies.
And the gameply... oh, the gameplay... Hundreds of robots, planes, ships and tanks involved in huge battles at the same time, with amazing explosion effects for incredible different weapons, including inter-continental plasma cannons and nuclear missiles. Command squadrons with as many units as you like to storm an enemy outpost, or build plenty of defense buildings to not get hammered. Since there's land, water and air units, you'll have to plan very well your advance through the map till total annihilation of your foes.
That's not to mention, this game was the very first to introduce nice concepts, now present in every strategy game, such as wind that has influence on the shots' fly, higher ground grants plenty of advantage, specific air-to-ground and ground-to-air weapons, detailed unit behavior control, and the list of advances goes on and on...
To finish: I urge you to play this game. You may love it, you may just like it a little, but there's no way you will hate it. It's not for no reason that it's one of the only games ever that has a very active community even after the developer company exits business. In some last worlds before they would go away, they shared some words with Total Annihilation's fans, both players and third party developers: 'You guys are the Cavedog now'.
About Total Annihilation
[[quote:but there's no way you will hate it]]
I beg to differ. Same goes for Core Contingency and the recent clone, Supreme Commander.
I must admit TA and its kin has its own appeal, but it grows extremely tedious after a short while. Requires extremely little of thinking after you've familiarized yourself with it and the only thing you really are doing is optimizing your resource output while churning out masses and even greater masses of units to throw at your opponent. Beyond that there's nothing. You really just throw them at your opponent, there's nothing else needed since you're constantly building more to replace any and all that perish, and infinite resources do little to hamper this.
I beg to differ. Same goes for Core Contingency and the recent clone, Supreme Commander.
I must admit TA and its kin has its own appeal, but it grows extremely tedious after a short while. Requires extremely little of thinking after you've familiarized yourself with it and the only thing you really are doing is optimizing your resource output while churning out masses and even greater masses of units to throw at your opponent. Beyond that there's nothing. You really just throw them at your opponent, there's nothing else needed since you're constantly building more to replace any and all that perish, and infinite resources do little to hamper this.
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