Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation, known internally as Really Cool Wargame during production, is a futuristic real-time strategy (RTS) videogame, created in 1997 by Chris Taylor and Cavedog Entertainment. It was the first RTS to feature 3D units and terrain, a significant achievement in the days before graphics cards with hardware 3D acceleration became commonplace. Total Annihilation was unparalleled for its time, and even today it is widely considered one of the finest games in the RTS genre.

Story

A long time ago, the galaxy was ruled by a wise and benevolent central body known as the Core (named after their location, at the core of the galaxy, although some believe it is an abbreviation for "Consciousness Repository"). This organization pushed scientific progress and planetary colonization forward until the human race covered almost the entire galaxy. Ironically, it was, however, the Core's final triumph against mortality that would prove to be its undoing, for when the Core mandated uploading all peoples' brain patterns into machines in a method known as "patterning," there was a massive rebellion from the Arm (named after their location, an arm of the spiral galaxy), an organization which banded together from the edges of the galaxy and demanded to keep their physical bodies. A war like no other began, which has since raged on for four thousand years.

Intro narrative

Description

Total Annihilation is distinguished from its contemporaries such as StarCraft by its three-dimensional rendering technology, true Newtonian physics, rapid battles, high-powered weapons, a staggering array of different (and customizable) units, and rapid and versatile unit construction. Screen resolution as well as the limit of maximum units per player are customizable, depending only on the quality of computer hardware.

Strategic comparison

Much of Total Annihilation's strategic uniqueness comes from the immense speed and power of the units. Unlike many other games such as StarCraft and Command & Conquer where powerful weapons are slow moving and fast weapons are limited in power in effect to create a balance, Total Annihilation's balance relies on the fact that bases can be rebuilt quickly. This is to compensate for the devastating power that the heavily armed and highly maneuverable strike aircraft and extremely long-ranged artillery can apply towards structures. Nuclear weapons are also very affordable, powerful and quick to construct with multiple weapons being able to be stockpiled for devastating strikes, a dynamic rarely seen in most other games where only one missile may be built at once, limiting their impact. This leads to bases in Total Annihilation having a distinctive, mildly un-aesthetic spread-out pattern to limit the damage of a nuclear attack, an air-strike or an artillery barrage.

The other major strategic difference has to do with the way resources are implemented (see Resources). In most other RTS games, resources are available in finite quantities, so every construction choice must at some level be weighed against the fact that once expended, those resources will never be available to be used for anything else, and thus there will eventually come a time when no more units may be built. This makes attrition an entirely viable strategy, as killing enough enemy units will always - eventually - lead to victory. With Total Annihilation, this is never true, because resource quantities are unlimited. The only limiting factor on unit production is how fast the player can produce units, not how many may be produced. This resource model makes massive offensive strikes a necessity for successful play, as a purely defensive strategy will never curtail the enemy's capacity to produce more units. Late in a StarCraft game, for example, it is possible to damage an enemy's base in such a way that he will be unable to afford to rebuild, but in Total Annhilation, such attacks must be immediately capitalized upon, or any advantage is lost.

AI and physics

The artificial intelligence of computer-controlled players in Total Annihilation is often considered one of its weakest aspects. 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. 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 unerringly to produce more units. The computer will also only use the constructor units' reclamation ability to supply itself with resources, and does not know how to clear paths. This gives players a marked advantage on maps strewn with reclaimable doodads, like urban areas. The physical environment units operate in is also very rich with true trajectories, inertia, momentum, thrust, and explosive force interacting to create a very "real" environment with all damages based on the physical environment in contrast to many games that rely on random hit or miss formulae. This allows artillery to be simulated accurately with immense ranges, an element to warfare that hadn't been simulated effectively in RTSs until that time. Furthermore, due possibly to balance considerations and possibly lack of imagination, almost all RTSs do not have range as an important consideration; For example, in Warcraft III, arguably one of the most popular modern RTSs, the range of the units in unmodified games is at most about one screen, whereas in Total Annihilation artillery units could fire 15 screens away and nuclear missiles could travel anywhere on the map. In Total Annihilation, if terrain is steep and jagged, units actually tilt and turn to meet the face of the ground, which is easily perceptible by players. The game's terrain, though only a two-dimensional rendering, is assigned a matrix of height values, and all objects in the game interact with it as though it were fully three dimensional; hills obstruct artillery fire, and height enhances units' visual and firing ranges. As such, the location of bases is critical to protect from artillery and create choke points to defend against enemy assaults.

Multiplayer

Total Annihilation was developed to include multiplayer play; up to 10 players can play simultaneously in a single match. Unfortunately, all of the original TA servers have disbanded or no longer host TA (such as Boneyards, MPlayer, etc).

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

TA has a nice distinction of being able IP into games straight from your computer to a friends' or another players', but setting TA up for this can be a daunting task, made much easier by TCBW's TA Page which has a wealth of configuration information for TA.

Interface

One of the unique features that sets Total Annihilation apart from many other real-time strategy games on the market is its powerful interface. The game interface allows the player to add unlimited numbers of units to multiple groups. Queuing of actions is simple and virtually unlimited as well; holding the shift key and clicking on the map allows the player to queue any action or command that a unit can possibly be given. This allows such things as patrol routes automatically being assigned to units as they emerge from factories, or for construction bots to autonomously repair groups of buildings. This unlimited queueing of actions, along with many key commands for selecting categories of units, gives the player the ability to minimize micromanagement by automating many of the routine tasks that most other games force the player to perform manually.

Units

The number of unique units also makes the game distinctive. 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 a possible 5,000 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 game was often criticised for the fact that units lacked uniqueness, were similar in appearance, and were parallel in usage for both sides. The Core Contingency expansion attempted to remedy this problem by providing both sides units which sported features units from the other side lacked, although some still say that variation could have differed more greatly.

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. Over six thousand 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.

Resources

In the context of an RTS game, resources are one of the player's main concerns, as secure control of resources means an increased production or repair rate of offensive and/or defensive units.

Total Annihilation has two resources for the player to consider:

Energy, accumulated with many different types of power plants (including all the renewable energy sources of solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and fusion), which may be built anywhere making energy supply only limited by the player's foresight to build more plants before production is slowed by energy shortages. Geothermal power plants are an exception in that they can only be constructed upon thermal vents, where the structures can yield a very large amount of energy. Tidal Generators can replace solar power on water maps for low cost, low yield energy production. The player's mechanical units are required to run on the resource of energy.
Metal, which can also be extracted anywhere, but only in large amounts from metal patches. This makes controlling the largest amount of territory an important strategic consideration. Energy can be transformed directly into metal later in the game using special conversion facilities, though the process requires huge amounts of energy for a small amount of metal. Metal extractors require a modest amount of energy to run as well, so if energy production is not able to meet the metal extraction energy use, metal-extracting structures will temporarily shut down until more energy can be gathered.

Neither resource can be exhausted or even lessened by their exploitation meaning that battles do not slow down over time. Resources are a buffered flow: if the player collects resources at a faster rate than he uses them, his buffer fills up until it is at the maximum level - 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" unit spontaneously produces a small amount of energy and metal so a player is rarely ever completely bereft, and wreckage can be salvaged for a little extra in a pinch.

Certain worlds of the Core, including the homeworld of the Consciousness Repository, are an exception to the scarce metal factor. The Core has covered the entire surface of these planets with a metal shell. Thus, metal-extracting structures can be constructed anywhere and will always yield the highest amount of metal possible, provided that they are supplied energy to function.

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 he 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.

Total Annihilation also provides certain features, such as rocks and trees, that may be reclaimed for metal and energy. Reclaiming a feature removes it from the map, but metal patches are not reclaimable so the metal provided by these is never depleted. The energy provided by energy producing units never runs out either - solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear energy production, as well as the small amount of energy produced by virtually all units automatically, never runs out. Only the reclaimable resources such as trees may be depleted.

Wreckage may also be reclaimed on the battlefield, but wreckage also blocks low-trajectory shots (lasers, rockets and direct-fire artillery shells, as opposed to high-arc artillery and missiles) and hampers unit movement, so important considerations must be made in so far as deciding to reclaim wreckage for valuable resources, or to leave it in order to block unit movement. It also needs to be considered that sufficient firepower will reduce wreckage to rubble (which contains much less metal), and eventually destroy it.

Such resource construction allowed in the game virtually unprecedented tactical and strategic versatility, truly matched by the sheer number of units each player was able to produce. The player could mass-produce as many cheap units as he wanted, or save up resources to manufacture an impressive battery of intimidating superweaponry. One interesting factor, introduced within the expansion packs was the Krogoth - a massive, mobile weapons platform and the ultimate unit available to the Core. The Krogoth only became available after significant development. It required its own separate structure to manufacture it, the "Krogoth Gantry". It required the most resources and build time of any buildable creation in the game, thus counterbalancing its frankly staggering strength with it's primary, nearly totally debilitating weakness - to build a single Krogoth invariably exhausted all available resources and prevented the construction of nearly any other large scale military presence. It took such a long time to produce, that once discovered by enemy players, it often became a race for them to destroy it before completion, and a race for the building player to defend it on a negligible budget. Once constructed, however, a single Krogoth could easily destroy an entire, well-defended base unaided, being armed with three or four distinct and immensely powerful weapons: two heavy bolters for destroying weak to medium strength units in one hit, a single D-Gun for annihilating any ground unit in a single hit, and two portable ballistic missile launchers mounted on it's back for destroying air units and taking out distant enemies. In multiplayer co-operative games, a single 'side' would often consist of two or more players who would do the majority of the fighting, but would also gather resources on a massive scale (farming them) with immense numbers of resource structures, and a single player whose job would be to manufacture a Krogoth at speed while the other two players financed, loading him down with all the material they could not possibly expend.

Extensibility

Total Annihilation was unique amongst most strategy games in that data files containing game information can be simply 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. This led to huge community support with thousands of third-party add-ons and utilities created by many hundreds of loyal players. This is on top of the many additional official enhancements released by Cavedog for free (including its own add-on units as well as a patch), and bundled with expansion packs. It was this capability of expansion and constant renewal that doubtless gave Total Annihilation its cult status. A major example of this was 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 soundtrack of the game is unique, and perhaps one of the most distinctive in the strategy genre; instead of the standard synthesized rock music incorporated into many strategy games, Total Annihilation had an epic feeling orchestral soundtrack. In addition, the music changes according to the action on the battlefield. During a battle, for instance, fast pumping orchestral music plays whereas during a lull in the action a more tranquil new-age style music is broadcast. The soundtrack is in CD-audio format and listenable with ordinary CD players. Music written by Jeremy Soule is performed by a 96-piece symphonic orchestra (the Northwest Sinfonia). The soundtrack system is also compatible with ordinary music CDs, which can be inserted once the game is under way and event-configured in the options menu track by track like the original game music.

Criticism

The main cause of criticism towards the game was the weak in-game storyline and plot, consisting of a few brief lines describing the player's reason for fighting each particular battle. The short (though fairly original) opening storyline was utterly devoid of any characters, except for the two Commanders. Even these two "characters" are left wholly undescribed, excluding a tiny reference to the Arm Commander as a "shrewd tactician". Cavedog attempted to remedy this in Kingdoms, though it yielded mixed results. Players also 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. Despite these problems, Total Annihilation's AI was seen as much superior to its 1997 contemporaries, such as Red Alert and Dark Reign.

Also noted is that even though the official unit limit is 250, the pathfinding AI of all units break down noticeably upon approaching this number. While third-party AI have largely solved this problem, it lingers due to an engine deficiency.

Platforms

Microsoft Windows
Macintosh (PowerPC)
Works well on recent versions of Wine (details).
Works almost perfectly in Cedega.

External links

The official Total Annihilation web site has been taken down, and now forwards to the Atari website. (Mirror of the original site)
Spring is an open-source 3D RTS inspired by Total Annihilation which can make use of TA data files.
TA Wiki
TA wiki guide at StrategyWiki (previously hosted by Wikibooks)
TA at RTSC: An introduction to Total Annihilation.
Galactic War Briefings Galactic War Battle Reports, as cached by WebArchive.
Unit Universe, an archive of over 5,000 downloadable first- and third-party units.
Switeck's Junkdrawer has some of the most useful TA files like TA Bugfix and the AI Guide.

Large fansites

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