My favorite computer game ever, still a good play today.

Total Annihilation is still my favorite computer game of all time for the PC. It had the perfect mix of gameplay, strategy, and on-line playing opportunities. The storyline was a little weak, but you quickly forget that when engaged in battle!

So just what is Total Annihilation?
Total Annihilation is what is now referred to as a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. This is a game where you make all your decisions in real time. In other words, players don’t take turns, everyone playing is making decisions, attacks, defenses, all at the same time. This makes for a very intense game.

The setting for the game is in the future of humanity, several thousand years from now. Basically humanity has been divided into two sides: The Arm and The Core. The Arm is what you would think of as humans now, fleshy weak people, just with very advanced technology surrounding them. The Core is the other side of humanity that chose to transfer their brains (and their souls?) into computers. No organic portions of them remain; everything about their “person” is contained in the machines that their minds now control through computers.

To make the game interesting, both sides think the other side is completely wrong for either remaining human (The Arm) or for giving up their human body (The Core). They think it is so wrong that they completely hate each other and are therefore at war. In the thousands of years since present day, humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and therefore you get to battle on many worlds with different environments.

Computer Requirements:
This game has very minimal requirements compared to more recent games. This game can be played on Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows 2000. I have not personally tried it, but it is reported to work fine on Windows XP.

Basically any Pentium III or higher based Windows PC running any of the above operating systems with a low end graphics card and 256MB of RAM should be able to run this game no problem.

Game Modes:
Basically you can play Total Annihilation (TA) in three modes:

1. Individual play following premade missions:
The original game included a series of missions that you could play, as either The Arm or The Core. The first few contained some help tips that explained how to play the game and got increasingly harder from there. As you played further into the story you got to use new units. The story was pretty weak with very little story, if any, between missions. Both The Arm (The Good Guys) and The Core (The Bad Guys) could achieve victory and that was cool. Once you got good at the game, it only took dozens of hours to complete the missions, although several of them too several tries.

There were three expansion packs to this game, but the best was by far the “Core Contingency”. The other two packs were buggy and a little unstable. I still played them all, but the core contingency included the best expansion to the storyline with many new missions.

2. Skirmish mode where you choose a map and opponents:
After you finished the pre-made missions, the next logical progression was to start playing in skirmish mode where you could choose the map, the number and difficulty of opponents, a variety of game conditions and victory conditions. This was the best way to figure out which side you liked playing more and what units were the most useful. This is where you could develop your style.

You could also play Skirmish mode in direct IP mode where you could connect directly to another player’s computer if you knew their IP address. This was sometimes preferred over on-line websites as you usually would play with well known friends or opponents and didn’t have to deal with a lot of unknowns or lag induced by servers in between your computers. Once the majority of my friends quit playing this game, I had to resort to option #3.

3. On-line websites
This is where I really enjoyed playing the game. Cavedog Entertainment (the maker of this game) ran a website called the Boneyards where you could take part in a tournament type game of The Arm vs The Core. I always played The Core side as it was more challenging. The tournament would be a huge map of planets with one side belonging to The Arm and one side to The Core. Each planet would be fought over numerous times by numerous Arm and Core players. The overall battle tally would determine who took control of the planet. This tournament went on until either The Core or The Arm was destroyed. The Arm typically won, but that was usually due to fact winning as Arm was easier, a few imbalances in the game or the dreaded problem of “lag”.

There were other places to play this game online, including MSN, but Boneyards was my favorite as it usually had the least amount of cheaters.

The Sides:

The Arm:
As mentioned earlier, The Arm is the human side and they are considered the good guys. I will get into descriptions of specific units later, but Arm units tend to be smaller, lighter and faster than their Core counterparts. This makes them slightly weaker in battle, but cheaper and faster to produce, so it is pretty much evenly balanced. This makes sense since humans are smaller and quicker than robots today and goes well with the storyline.

The Core:
The Core is the machine side and they are considered the bad guys. Core units tend to be larger, heavier and slower than their Arm counterparts. This makes them stronger in battle, but more expensive and slower to produce. While strategy plays a great deal into battle, typically a battle between an equal number of Core units and an equal number of Arm units will usually result in a Core victory. As an added bonus, while many units will be heavily damaged, you can repair your units and send them back into battle, while most Arm units will be simply destroyed.


AI intelligence:
The AI in Total Annihilation was good, but definitely is lacking. When I used to play in skirmish mode I played against 4 computer opponents, at the hardest level, allied against me to feel challenged. Even then I could win most of the times because the computer would typically take the most direct route to your base and try to beat its way into the base. If you could locate your computer opponents early, you could simply build a single wall between you and them and defend it. The computer AI would throw massive amounts of troops against your heavily defended wall, even if the wall was open on both sides and could easily be avoided.

Once you get good at the game, the only real challenge is on-line. Humans are just so much more difficult than the computer AI. Not that the AI is a pushover, but once you are good at game management, it gets boring playing the computer after a while.

Game Description/Strategy:
This is where Total Annihilation (TA) really shines. Sure there were other RTS games released around the same time as TA, such as Starcraft and the Warcraft series. These were fine games in their own right, but TA is the only game I still play over 6 YEARS later. Some people would argue that TA has too many things you need to maintain to win, but those people are just the weak players I used to crush on-line. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The game starts out very differently in each premade mission, so I won’t describe those here. I’ll be talking about the skirmish mode and on-line games as they are basically the same, just your opponents are either human or computer.

Game setting can be changed before the game starts, but the most common settings was starting off with 1000 metal and 1000 energy and your commander unit. As soon as the game starts you will start making buildings and units that will make up your base of operations. You will protect your base to ensure your survival and also use it to build your armies to destroy the other players.

First off I’ll talk about resource management. This was key to winning the game, whoever was the best resource manager would usually win the game, even if their war strategy was not as good. The two resources in the game are metal and energy. Metal is usually the limiting resource and it is critical to keep your usage lower than the production of metal or your production will suffer pauses where nothing is made until you’ve stockpiled enough metal to do some more production. For example, say your metal income is 40 units per unit of time. If you are using 40 or less units of metal per unit of time, then all your units and building in production will complete as soon as possible. However, if your usage is 60, then your production will stop until you have gathered up 60 units of metal to complete a unit of time building. So in this example it would take 1.5 units of time to create 60 units of metal and your production is stopped 33% of the time. Stopped production is BAD BAD BAD. It is much better to have fewer resources being used and always having a surplus of metal than to have more resources being used and your production being frequently on hold.

The exact same thing goes with energy, but it is much easier to gather energy than metal on most maps. My favorite strategy was to have a lot of excess energy production so that I could make “metal makers” that would rapidly convert energy into metal. I would turn the metal makers on/off to use up my extra energy and to create extra metal when needed.

While it strictly isn’t a “resource”, your time is very valuable in this game, so having as many things as automated as possible was critical. TA built in many features that helped out with this, such as map bookmarks, waypoint control (so newly created units would automatically go to where you wanted them) and production queues that would continue unless you stopped them. A player bogged down with controlling production or building new units or buildings would eventually be destroyed by someone who was good at automating these things and focusing on battle.

The strategy for each side is different, but some similarities exist. Strategies are different for playing computer opponents and people, so I’m going to focus on playing against other people. It is critical early on to locate your enemy and to start harassing them. The more you can do to disrupt your opponent, while having yourself not disrupted, puts the game in your favor. After your opponent has built sufficient defenses then this becomes a problem, but by then you have gathered larger armies and can begin destroying your opponent.

With Arm’s inherently quicker and faster units, the Arm must rely on harassing the Core players as soon as possible and slowly creating larger harassing forces over time. The Arm must basically constantly attack to have a good chance of winning. If an Arm player sits back and waits for a Core player to attack, the stronger Core units will eventually win. The first half of a game is where the Arm players will win or lose the game.

The Core player will want to do some scouting and harassing, but a Core player should focus on protecting their resources and building good defenses early and then once a decent army is built up, it is time to pummel the Arm base.

Line Of Sight (LOS) is critical in this game and one of the things Cavedog did very well in TA. If you build units or buildings on higher ground, they can see and shoot farther than units placed in gulleys or flat land. This makes taking and holding the high ground critical in some games. It wasn’t perfectly implemented, but it was much better than some other games. Having units placed on high ground around your base, and aircraft scouting around your base, will allow you to react sooner to enemy attacks. This is especially critical for The Core as their units take longer to get in good defensive positions and have shorter ranges.

There are entire websites dedicated to the strategy for this game, so I will end there, but for additional reading you can try these sites that are still up and running:

http://tazone.tauniverse.com/
http://www.tauniverse.com/

The Units:
This is where TA also really shined compared to other games. The number of units available out of the box is very good and the core contingency really adds some critical units. There is some talk of many units being redundant, and to some extent that is true, but it makes for interesting strategy if you know how to use a unit really well than most people.

The Commander:
The most important unit in the game is your commander. This is your on the field general and you must not lose him. The commander is much more important on smaller maps, but is useful in the early part of the game no matter how large the map. The commander is a relatively slow unit (especially Core’s commander who is slower than Arm’s), but is very powerful and can take quite a bit of punishment. It is also self healing, so it can repair itself while continuing to build. It is critical that your commander be building at all times, unless under direct attack. The commander is equipped with the dreaded “Dgun” that will destroy anything in its path. It takes a lot of energy to fire, but nothing survives in the direct path. Early in the game if your base is under attack, the “Dgun” might be your last and best defense.

The problem is that in most games if your commander dies, you lose the game. Even if that option is turned off, the commander dying causes a very large explosion that wipes out just about anything on the screen (good or bad). If you know your commander is going to get killed and that won’t end the game, get him as far away as possible from your base and as close as possible to enemy resources and units. Luckily your can cloak your commander unit to hide it from enemy eyes and you can keep it protected well doing that. NOTE: Once your commander has been targeted by enemy units, even if you cloak, the units will still know where to find you...nasty bug.

The Flash Tank (Arm):
Nothing is more controversial in this game than the Flash tank. It is a small tank that Arm can build out of their first vehicle factory. It has two EMG guns on the unit that fire very rapidly. While each EMG shot does minimal damage, a few Flash tanks can rapidly take out any weak or undefended target. Arm players quickly figure this out and early in the game charge the enemy base with 4-5 flashes constantly. It is very difficult to defend against this tactic as The Core doesn’t have an equivalent unit.

The debate will always continue about if this unit is fair or not, but I think it was unfair. I could usually counter this tactic and still win, but it makes the game very boring if you are always destroying flash tanks charging your base. What made it unfair on-line was when lag would slow down the game. This game was CPU and bandwidth intensive and if the game lagged, then weird things happened. Often Flash tanks could magically appear behind defensive walls because of lag or would not take damage. The combination of the unfair Flash tank and lag was deadly and many TA players would not play with someone who had a poor connection.

There are well over 50 units in the game for each side, so I won’t get into details, but you do need to know that you have units grouped into five basic categories and two levels regular(cheaper, faster) and advanced(stronger, longer to build):

K-bots
These units are your standard two legged variety, basically human shaped robots with a variety of weapons. Generally K-bots are your fastest ground units, although weaker than vehicles.

Vehicles
Vehicles are your standard tank type vehicles that use treads or multiple legs to move. They are generally slower and harder to maneuver, but pack a lot more power in their weapons.

Airpower
Airpower is pretty self explanatory: Airplanes. You can build transport planes, fighter planes (basic and advanced) and bombers (basic and advanced).

Buildings/Defenses
There are many different buildings in the game, but they are grouped into resource production(Metal extractors and solar panels), defensive(missile towers and mortars) and unit production (K-bot factory and vehicle factory). Probably the most effective defensive unit is the dragon’s tooth which can be built to form defensive perimeters or scattered to slow the advance of enemy armies while your missile towers and mortars destroy them.

Ocean Vessels
Pretty simple here too, these are you water bound units: Ships. You have small scout ships and larger and more powerful battleships and cruisers along with submarines. I was sad to see they never implemented an aircraft carrier in the game, but the game engine wasn’t really designed to handle one. One of my favorite units was the missile cruiser that could pound targets well inland and could not be seen by any land based units if positioned properly. You could also build a transport ship to move many land based units at once to enemy shores. They were problematic, but still helpful.

Game Problems:
While this was a well balanced game, there were a few problems never really solved.

1. Lag – this was a game killer many times on-line. One player would begin to lag due to a bad connection and eventually the game would need to be ended as the player would drop off. This also caused damage to not be recorded on some units during the lag. This was often near the end of the game when destroying the more powerful advanced units was critical to victory or annihilation and cost me many games.

2. Flash Tank – This wasn’t usually a game killer, but so many Arm players loved to use the Flash tank that the on-line games were often very boring. This is the main reason I played Core most of the time, to avoid using the Flash tank and inventing strategies to kill them.

3. Airpower – Airpower, especially the advanced fighters and bombers were very powerful and could easily destroy most building and defensive structures that take considerably more resources to build. This is pretty much how airpower is in real life, so that isn’t my complaint. My complaint is when airpower would not suffer damage due to lag and could easily decimate a base when they should have been destroyed much earlier.

4. Cheats and Cheaters – There were many cheat codes built into this game and at times it was difficult to avoid players from using them. The Boneyards was the best place to avoid this, but people found ways around this even there. It just isn’t fun to see your base wiped out in the first 2 minutes of the game by a fleet of advanced bombers that couldn’t possible have been built that fast.

5. Lost Time/girlfriends/meals - This was quite possibly the most devastating impact of the game. It was highly addictive and I know that I spent way too much time playing this game. I also experienced incidents of lost time when I would suddenly find 5, 6, even 10 hours completely gone in front of the computer. I’m guessing that I was probably abducted by Aliens at some point and didn’t even realize it.
Seriously though, I know guys who got so addicted to this game that they dropped out of college, lost girlfriends and friends from too much time with the game. Luckily I wasn’t one of those, but this game is not a good gift to give to college bound seniors.

6. Cavedog has been annihilated. The company that made this game is now bankrupt and while one sequel was made (Total Annihilation Kingdoms), it is probably what bankrupted the company with its poor launch. This makes getting this game difficult, but I still see it occasionally at places that buy back computer games and is usually available at amazon.com. There is also no longer support from the company to fix bugs. There are some hardcore gamers that have modified the game since then, but the modifications are typically unstable. The good news is that Chris Taylor, One of the original Cavedog crew, is now working for gas powered games and it looks like they are making a TA spin-off called Supreme Commander. I'm looking forward to it. More info can be found at www.gaspowered.com.

Summary:
Despite the problems, I played this game long past the usual life of a computer game. It was addictive and I lost a lot of sleep over it. I haven’t installed it on my new computer at home, but I still have the disks. Unfortunately life is just too busy for me to take a walk back down memory lane and play it again. My wife wouldn’t appreciate me spending more time in front of the computer anyway.

I thought this would be the perfect review to participate in chelledun’s 200th review write-off on nostalgia. Not only to help her first write-off be a success, because she was one of the first people to trust me on epinions and is a fellow Boilermaker (Go Purdue!), but also because I was thinking about this game recently and this is my 100th review on epinions. It is probably also my most complete review now at 7 pages on MS word.