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Total Annihilation pages!

When it was first released, Total Annihilation raised real time strategy to the next level. It introduced genuine 3D terrain and textured, polygonal units made of separate moving parts. It weathered criticism for being dry and lacking the colour and personality of story driven titles like StarCraft; its units all looked the same, there wasn't much differentiation between its two opposing forces of robots and there were no personalities or heroes of any kind. This is all true. However, TA works best as a straight generic war game stripped to its fundamentals. Its quite abstract and very neutral. LEGO meets RTS. It needs a plot and deep characterization about as much as a game of Aussie Rules. If you really want to read the back story, try here. But Total Annihilation's impact on the genre has been profound: it managed to score first place in Gamespy's Top 10 Best RTS's of All Time in 2004.

There are two sides: Arm (rebellious heroes) and Core (incumbent villains). Arm units are generally lighter and faster, while Core's are heavier and more implacable. There are as many defensive units as there are offensive ones; almost as many different kinds of turret, silo and factory as there are types of mobile unit. It's eminently possible to build the (almost) impenetrable defence, which, when coupled with infinite resources, can allow a player to play completely defensively. Unfortunately, this can also deadlock games, with two sides unable to blast their way through the other ... unless they resort to nukes!

An army of Arm custom K-Bots runs smack bang into an army of (mostly) ordinary Core units in the UTASP mod. Swarming's a common tactic in Total Annihilation. Many TA custom mods usually add extensively to the game, but many try not to alienate the original units - rather they attempt to extend the strategy and variety of the game.

Cavedog maintained interest in the game by releasing a new custom unit every week after TA's initial release, which itself had about 150 units and structures to pick from. The Core Contingency expansion added 75 more. When the first third party units appeared, an arms race between Arm and Core fans broke out. A few years later, practically every niche you could possibly think of in the game's arsenal has been filled and there are custom unit packs, mods and total conversions all over the place. Even better, most of these custom mods are actually playable - if not a damn sight better than the original. These aren't just the odd graphic or sound hack here and there - TA's modular structure has let people build entire working races from scratch. Its one of the perks of a largely abstract robot wargame that doesn't depend on a story: you can mod it any way you like without compromising the game. Even the most colourful story can pall after a while (e.g. you can mod StarCraft any way you like - provided you don't mind the result still looking, sounding and feeling exactly like StarCraft) and the rigidities of history can make a custom mod in Age of Empires difficult to implement without it looking just plain silly. Also, with 2D games, there's the additional burden of trying to match the original's high caliber artwork - while in Total Annihilation even a boring old box with legs doesn't look too out of place.

One of the main reasons why Total Annihilation still has an active presence on the Web is due in no small part to the vigour of its gaming community and the extraordinary amount of custom maps, units, AI's and utilities that they've produced. Despite Cavedog's demise and the concentration of the fan base, what is left over seems to have become more focused and determined to persist than before. If you're going to get into TA, you should play the original game and its CC expansion just to learn it, and then browse through the maps and custom unit packs for the real thing.

As for customisation, there truly are some mind boggling extensions to the game. For a start, there's the TA:Mutation switching utility that allows to you mix and match maps, custom mods, custom units, AI's and "mutators" all in the one game install. One of the TA's renowned mappers and tilesetters, C_A_P, put together a patch that animates all the (previously static) trees in the game. Networked games can be recorded with the TA Demo Recorder, an amazing program written by the Swedish Yank Spankers. Those Scandinavian scallywags also cobbled together an extraordinary 3D game engine that lets you play Total Annihilation within an immersive 3D environment called the TA Spring Project.