Video Games, Day 9: TA
2020-05-04 17:14:24.381336+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Influential Video Games, Day 9 (a day late): Total Annihilation
Open worlds. Real-time Strategy (better if multi-player, because the AI for the single-player wasn't that smart and... I forget how the balancing happened, but it was really about multi-player).
You start with a "commander" unit, who is irreplaceable and has a lot of capabilities, but mostly you use the commander for building things, like resource extractors and energy generators, a few different sorts of factories, and turrets and missile systems.
The tech tree means that, of course, different sorts of factories can build various different types of vehicles, and some of those vehicles can create build level 2 units, and so forth.
Commands can be queued, so you can easily set up patrol routes for units, or build a whole field of solar collectors, or set up a sacrificial unit that you just tell to build mines with some protective turrets around on every single visible piece of exposed ore on the map, and if it gets destroyed, well, it was something you didn't have to pay attention to until later.
It both had "expose the whole map", and "only show things within some range of your units" modes, which meant a bunch of recon drones flying around, and a strategy to both shooting them down, and flight patterns which avoided the other fixed emplacements.
And aggressive units could be set to a couple of different modes of reaction (fire at anything, fire only if fired upon, don 't fire, I think one of the more aggressive modes was even if fired upon, chase down).
I've played a few other games of this type, but for me TA struck just the right balance between speed of play, tech tree complexity, enough graphics to portray what was happening but not so much that it lagged on the machines I was trying to play it on.
And I didn't get much into them, but there were mods.
There's an attempt at building an open-source recreation, called Spring RTS. I've installed it on an Android tablet. It was kinda cool. I'm not in that space any more, but I've got fond memories, and it brought some of them back.