>slow combat, slow unit movements, slow battle development, long games >no moba like unit specific spells, less micro >less strategic variety and depth, broken quick win cheeze (but could be voluntarily avoided) >almost symmetric factions and units >mostly waiting and watching instead of racing your opponent in constant 200apm action >very basic multiplayer features, no server synchronization, few settings
also important >inferior controls (left mouse selects and moves), few hotkey commands - in SC every action has hotkeys, can queue actions and jump to map locations which allows for much better easier and faster control
>Starcraft accounts for firing at higher ground with an accuracy penalty
oh wow, starcraft does the bare minimum that's been the standard since AoE1, and in 2010 no less!
>huge map >build 10 big berthas >5 nuclear power plants >2-3 advanced radars with patrolling adv radar airplane >barrage the shit out of the enemy
Gods... those were the days.....
I would add "less interesting setting" - Starcraft's races are way more distinct and imaginative (yes, even the rugged space cowboy Terran, the alien locust horde Zerg, and the precursor psychic robot Protoss) than ones on TA.
>slow combat, slow unit movements, slow battle development, long games >no moba like unit specific spells, less micro >mostly waiting and watching instead of racing your opponent in constant 200apm action
Fricking sold!
True sight is an important feature, I agree. I never played Total Annihilation but I think thats something that made Company of Heroes 2 important where vision range and line of sight plays a big part.
it's shit
I recently have been trying to learn to play BAR against AI and it's been fun. Also been watching some of the youtube matches. I have mixed feelings, aesthetically it's not very pleasing and the robots feel pretty soulless. Tactically its pretty micro intensive despite having so much control over your units. The eco I find very tedious. Strategically with the map and unit control on a macro scale it's amazing. I don't like aircraft system of not having to rearm at an airfield. I love the simulation you have from more of your Command and Conquer style of having to RTB aircraft. The ICBM part with nukes and anti nukes is really fun though. I would love a BAR/total antihalation type game with more of a modern or cold war setting.
I think it's as big in terms of impact, but just not in terms of playerbase. It's up there with C&C and SC. Like that other anon pointed out though, it's not very conducive for big sweeping popularity and a large multiplayer scene. It's more the concepts that were passed on. I'm sure anyone making or playing strategy games at least knows about it.
It was a weird one. Simplistic but still complicated eco, abysmal pathfinding, weak balancing, the campaign had minimal storytelling, the units could shoot very far but had very short sight range, and though it had a custom scene, it probably came out too early to become as productive as Warcraft 3's. Also there were many other, more forgiving RTSes at the time.
However, the legacy of the game is very important, as it spawned various spiritual successors, though the success of these overshadows the original.
>UI was pretty bad compared to sc, theres a reason every rts now uses similar shame to it
I played TA first and it felt more intuitive to me. SC has you left clicking for some orders and right clicking for others and it just doesn't feel quite right.
even ignoring suboptimal UI position and minimap readability the fact most buttons have no hotkeys and you have to click on everything manually makes it vastly inferior.
I don't really remember how StarCraft was but I do remember getting half my army stuck every time I sent it somewhere in this. They'd just walk in a straight line.
You could use the shitty pathfinding against your enemy, though. Just blow up a few of his vanguard units, and watch his advance bog down in the wrecks.
>Everything is super slow which makes battles quite predictable and micro skills make little difference. >Resources can be unlimited thus stalemates occur easily. >Units leave wrecks on the battlefield making battlefields hard to navigate and slowing things down even more. >Extremely long range base defenses heavily encourage hurtling dragging out game and severely limiting most ground forces to the point where ground forces can become pointless. Turning the game into artillery whack-a-mole.
Mods made this even more ridiculous. I cant remember which modpack did it, but one of them added a massive gatling gauss cannon. Big Bertha on steroids. Massive energy consumption etc. Except that at some point you could stack enough fusion plants to make the gun fire indefinately. And then build another one. And another one. And those things had enough range to reach halfway across the largest maps. So you could basically create no-approach lanes through the map by just setting them on ground attack. Everything disappeared.
>but one of them added a massive gatling gauss cannon
that wasn't a mod, that was an expansion unit.
https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcan
https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/Buzzsaw
I remember I think either a Red Alert mod or a WW1+2 mod where you get real units with attempts at proportional stats to make accurate outcomes. It was kind of surreal in hindsight that the AI needed to get nerfed multiple times in order for people to wind.
BAR is free and makes the speed of the game better and unit pathing is miles better, with devs that play the game a lot they keep adding more controls for players. TA is not dead but lives on because some people are awesome.
Beyond All Reason. Good stuff. A quick search should have it come up pretty quick.
I'll note the engine BAR uses is SpringRTS, which itself may be worth looking into, in part thanks to having other games built on it like Zero-K if you want to explore a few more (free) options.
I like that they added that Heavy Arty and Nukes deform terrain. To the point that you can make new water ways if the elevation is in your favor.
For having up to 25 vs 25 it is a great time to throw big stompy robots at your friends.
>it's shit
Sounds like a sad boy with no friends.
Seriously it's worse than SC2. Look at this fricking scene. Does this look like something you'd see from an airplane or drone? It's a fricking bedroom floor with plastic toys right next to each other with "flying toys" 3cm above the ground and "bases" 30cm apart.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Looks like Total Annihilation to me
6 months ago
Anonymous
TA's old pixelated graphics and isometric view look a million times better and the lack of details leaves room for imagination which helps with immersion, the new crap does not. It presents you a literal turd in full detail.
6 months ago
Anonymous
TA always looked like toy robots. If BAR does something wrong, it's being too faithful to that aesthetic.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Wrong and you're dumb.
6 months ago
Anonymous
TA wasn't even isometric. You're a subhuman shitwipe and Starcraft is God.
6 months ago
Anonymous
t. subhuman
6 months ago
Anonymous
>It's a fricking bedroom floor with plastic toys right next to each other with "flying toys" 3cm above the ground and "bases" 30cm apart.
It's ugly. I get it. But some of us here don't care about graphics. How is the gameplay?
6 months ago
Anonymous
As boring as TA and all similar games, but the control scheme is something other RTS devs should look at and steal
6 months ago
Anonymous
Don't take too much bait man, it's not good for you 🙂 Game looks fine, I especially like the disigns of some units. Maps all look much cooler after they are littered with craters and wrecks
>start 4v4 with ally and enemy AI >play core >build up >get a krogoth >go to town
Every time like the first time.
>core
wait, I'm too young to know TA, but there is Cortex aka "Core" faction in BAR. Focused on brute stats and impractically large shit. Is it literally the same as TA then? Cool.
6 months ago
Anonymous
yes, BAR is practically a remaster of TA
6 months ago
Anonymous
Nice, good to see this subgenre of RTS survived. For me BAR was the "supcom successor", but I suppose the lineage goes all the way back to TA. Have this picture of a grunt
6 months ago
Anonymous
TA lineage includes TA kingdoms, SupCom, and Planetary Annihilation, as well as that new Factorio like one coming out: Industrial Annihilation. The Spring engine is a basically remake of TA that has many games made on it, among them Zero-k and BAR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Engine
Honestly TA is as influential at least as CnC and AoE, although the only game I can think of using a similar system and not tangentially related to it is Sins of a Solar Empire (income being positive and negatives instead of a fixed amount of resource and ships and structures being made via blueprint and seeming assembled by nanolathes.)
6 months ago
Anonymous
There's also Ashes of the Singularity which features the least micro of any RTS I know of.
6 months ago
Anonymous
TA's old pixelated graphics and isometric view look a million times better and the lack of details leaves room for imagination which helps with immersion, the new crap does not. It presents you a literal turd in full detail.
lol
lmao even
What a shitty opinion and terrible taste. And calling it shit just because of that.
6 months ago
Anonymous
There's probably a whole lot of shit underneath the brown surface of shit too. But if it looks like shit and smells like shit you don't wanna find out.
6 months ago
Anonymous
He's right though. The textures look too plastic. Even the environment textures look too detailed to the point where they look off.
I see this picture and realize how games could do away with all this resource gathering clusterfrick and focus more on combat. Dawn of War 2 and Retribution had the right idea.
Eh, sometimes basebuilding and how resource gathering are big and important parts of the game. I wonder how Industrial Annihilation will handle it.
But yeah, DoW2 is pretty great and did the right thing, because basebuilding in DoW1 was seriously such jackshit.
5 months ago
Anonymous
building in 1 was stylish at least, they needed to replace building with something because one HQ is lame
>get 50 Hawks >fly over any group of units >everything annihilated
This worked way too often in the campaign and was only stopped by heavy concentration of flak defenses. I only played the campaign but unmodded TA in multiplayer must've been unbalanced as shit.
Every single unit in pic related looks a million times better than anything in TA, SupCom, PA or BAR.
What kind of unfortunate birth defect were Chris Taylor and his subhuman Black personturk fans born with that prevented them from creating a similar level of RTS kino?
>Total Annihilation
for some reason every time this name comes up I'm reminded of some obscure strategy game but all I remember is that it had this big immobile cannon in it in one mission
the screen was very busy making it look more like a city builder game instead of RTS
I can't be the only one that played it
>slow combat, slow unit movements, slow battle development, long games
>no moba like unit specific spells, less micro
>less strategic variety and depth, broken quick win cheeze (but could be voluntarily avoided)
>almost symmetric factions and units
>mostly waiting and watching instead of racing your opponent in constant 200apm action
>very basic multiplayer features, no server synchronization, few settings
also important
>inferior controls (left mouse selects and moves), few hotkey commands - in SC every action has hotkeys, can queue actions and jump to map locations which allows for much better easier and faster control
it doesn't have attack move but has more advanced stuff like patrol, lot of good RTS around that time got overshadowed by SC
>less strategic variety and depth
Firing long range artillery at blips on the minimap and seeing them turn into harvestable wrecks was such a goddamn mood
>was such a goddamn mood
this. also it was mood-coded
Starcraft accounts for firing at higher ground with an accuracy penalty, and there are no implausible scenarios as implied by that picture
not in starcraft 2, which is what the picture is referencing.
oh true, my mind saw the siege tank and just thought SC1
>Starcraft accounts for firing at higher ground with an accuracy penalty
oh wow, starcraft does the bare minimum that's been the standard since AoE1, and in 2010 no less!
keep moving those goalposts misinfo tard
>huge map
>build 10 big berthas
>5 nuclear power plants
>2-3 advanced radars with patrolling adv radar airplane
>barrage the shit out of the enemy
Gods... those were the days.....
bring back our homie Jeremy Soul(e)!
TA even has anti-nuke defense systems and tons of more units and buildings compared to SC. Heck even more varied map tilesets too.
"moba like" is a rather anachronistic term to apply to a pre-moba game
I would add "less interesting setting" - Starcraft's races are way more distinct and imaginative (yes, even the rugged space cowboy Terran, the alien locust horde Zerg, and the precursor psychic robot Protoss) than ones on TA.
>slow combat, slow unit movements, slow battle development, long games
>no moba like unit specific spells, less micro
>mostly waiting and watching instead of racing your opponent in constant 200apm action
Fricking sold!
Sounds perfect.
True sight is an important feature, I agree. I never played Total Annihilation but I think thats something that made Company of Heroes 2 important where vision range and line of sight plays a big part.
I recently have been trying to learn to play BAR against AI and it's been fun. Also been watching some of the youtube matches. I have mixed feelings, aesthetically it's not very pleasing and the robots feel pretty soulless. Tactically its pretty micro intensive despite having so much control over your units. The eco I find very tedious. Strategically with the map and unit control on a macro scale it's amazing. I don't like aircraft system of not having to rearm at an airfield. I love the simulation you have from more of your Command and Conquer style of having to RTB aircraft. The ICBM part with nukes and anti nukes is really fun though. I would love a BAR/total antihalation type game with more of a modern or cold war setting.
>no moba like unit specific spells, less micro
The commander unit has an arm mounted plasma cannon "spell" though.
I think it's as big in terms of impact, but just not in terms of playerbase. It's up there with C&C and SC. Like that other anon pointed out though, it's not very conducive for big sweeping popularity and a large multiplayer scene. It's more the concepts that were passed on. I'm sure anyone making or playing strategy games at least knows about it.
The net code was utter garbage and as a result multi-player games were painful and cheating was rampant
very nostalgic, almost a perfect 1:1 recreation of the terrible Ganker threads from years and years ago.
it's literally the same autists
It was a weird one. Simplistic but still complicated eco, abysmal pathfinding, weak balancing, the campaign had minimal storytelling, the units could shoot very far but had very short sight range, and though it had a custom scene, it probably came out too early to become as productive as Warcraft 3's. Also there were many other, more forgiving RTSes at the time.
However, the legacy of the game is very important, as it spawned various spiritual successors, though the success of these overshadows the original.
UI was pretty bad compared to sc, theres a reason every rts now uses similar shame to it
>UI was pretty bad compared to sc, theres a reason every rts now uses similar shame to it
I played TA first and it felt more intuitive to me. SC has you left clicking for some orders and right clicking for others and it just doesn't feel quite right.
even ignoring suboptimal UI position and minimap readability the fact most buttons have no hotkeys and you have to click on everything manually makes it vastly inferior.
sorry but any RTS without functioning attack move is outdated junk at this point.
At the time, Starcraft was for casuals and TA was for gamers
For me what killed it was the braindead pathfinding. You needed to babysit every unit
As opposed to the excellent pathfinding of Starcraft?
I don't really remember how StarCraft was but I do remember getting half my army stuck every time I sent it somewhere in this. They'd just walk in a straight line.
the best part was when your a couple of tanks in your frontline got killed and the rest completely failed to move around them
at least dragoons stop blocking shit when they die
You could use the shitty pathfinding against your enemy, though. Just blow up a few of his vanguard units, and watch his advance bog down in the wrecks.
yeah that sucked too, where's the challenge? you could hold a chokepoint with frick-all against practically anything
it's a low bar and TA didn't clear it
>Everything is super slow which makes battles quite predictable and micro skills make little difference.
>Resources can be unlimited thus stalemates occur easily.
>Units leave wrecks on the battlefield making battlefields hard to navigate and slowing things down even more.
>Extremely long range base defenses heavily encourage hurtling dragging out game and severely limiting most ground forces to the point where ground forces can become pointless. Turning the game into artillery whack-a-mole.
Mods made this even more ridiculous. I cant remember which modpack did it, but one of them added a massive gatling gauss cannon. Big Bertha on steroids. Massive energy consumption etc. Except that at some point you could stack enough fusion plants to make the gun fire indefinately. And then build another one. And another one. And those things had enough range to reach halfway across the largest maps. So you could basically create no-approach lanes through the map by just setting them on ground attack. Everything disappeared.
God I loved this stupid fricking game.
>but one of them added a massive gatling gauss cannon
that wasn't a mod, that was an expansion unit.
https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcan
https://totalannihilation.fandom.com/wiki/Buzzsaw
>that was an expansion unit.
That somehow makes it even funnier. OP mod units are somewhat understandable.
I remember I think either a Red Alert mod or a WW1+2 mod where you get real units with attempts at proportional stats to make accurate outcomes. It was kind of surreal in hindsight that the AI needed to get nerfed multiple times in order for people to wind.
BAR is free and makes the speed of the game better and unit pathing is miles better, with devs that play the game a lot they keep adding more controls for players. TA is not dead but lives on because some people are awesome.
BAR?
Beyond All Reason. Good stuff. A quick search should have it come up pretty quick.
I'll note the engine BAR uses is SpringRTS, which itself may be worth looking into, in part thanks to having other games built on it like Zero-K if you want to explore a few more (free) options.
Beyond All Reason, which is essentially a TA remaster
it's shit
can you elaborate? what is shit about it? use your words
Seriously it's worse than SC2. Look at this fricking scene. Does this look like something you'd see from an airplane or drone? It's a fricking bedroom floor with plastic toys right next to each other with "flying toys" 3cm above the ground and "bases" 30cm apart.
Looks like Total Annihilation to me
TA's old pixelated graphics and isometric view look a million times better and the lack of details leaves room for imagination which helps with immersion, the new crap does not. It presents you a literal turd in full detail.
TA always looked like toy robots. If BAR does something wrong, it's being too faithful to that aesthetic.
Wrong and you're dumb.
TA wasn't even isometric. You're a subhuman shitwipe and Starcraft is God.
t. subhuman
>It's a fricking bedroom floor with plastic toys right next to each other with "flying toys" 3cm above the ground and "bases" 30cm apart.
It's ugly. I get it. But some of us here don't care about graphics. How is the gameplay?
As boring as TA and all similar games, but the control scheme is something other RTS devs should look at and steal
Don't take too much bait man, it's not good for you 🙂 Game looks fine, I especially like the disigns of some units. Maps all look much cooler after they are littered with craters and wrecks
>core
wait, I'm too young to know TA, but there is Cortex aka "Core" faction in BAR. Focused on brute stats and impractically large shit. Is it literally the same as TA then? Cool.
yes, BAR is practically a remaster of TA
Nice, good to see this subgenre of RTS survived. For me BAR was the "supcom successor", but I suppose the lineage goes all the way back to TA. Have this picture of a grunt
TA lineage includes TA kingdoms, SupCom, and Planetary Annihilation, as well as that new Factorio like one coming out: Industrial Annihilation. The Spring engine is a basically remake of TA that has many games made on it, among them Zero-k and BAR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Engine
Honestly TA is as influential at least as CnC and AoE, although the only game I can think of using a similar system and not tangentially related to it is Sins of a Solar Empire (income being positive and negatives instead of a fixed amount of resource and ships and structures being made via blueprint and seeming assembled by nanolathes.)
There's also Ashes of the Singularity which features the least micro of any RTS I know of.
lol
lmao even
What a shitty opinion and terrible taste. And calling it shit just because of that.
There's probably a whole lot of shit underneath the brown surface of shit too. But if it looks like shit and smells like shit you don't wanna find out.
He's right though. The textures look too plastic. Even the environment textures look too detailed to the point where they look off.
I like that they added that Heavy Arty and Nukes deform terrain. To the point that you can make new water ways if the elevation is in your favor.
For having up to 25 vs 25 it is a great time to throw big stompy robots at your friends.
>it's shit
Sounds like a sad boy with no friends.
I see this picture and realize how games could do away with all this resource gathering clusterfrick and focus more on combat. Dawn of War 2 and Retribution had the right idea.
Eh, sometimes basebuilding and how resource gathering are big and important parts of the game. I wonder how Industrial Annihilation will handle it.
But yeah, DoW2 is pretty great and did the right thing, because basebuilding in DoW1 was seriously such jackshit.
building in 1 was stylish at least, they needed to replace building with something because one HQ is lame
Look, if you don't like basebuilding and resource gathering, that's fine, but don't pretend there isn't an audience for it.
It has zero appeal for anyone besides people who want to turtle vs ai for hours. Utter trash game. Starcraft is God.
t. never played the actual game
>get 50 Hawks
>fly over any group of units
>everything annihilated
This worked way too often in the campaign and was only stopped by heavy concentration of flak defenses. I only played the campaign but unmodded TA in multiplayer must've been unbalanced as shit.
TA was first video game with professional opera soundtrack
You could put the second cd from the game into your car and skip the first track(data) and listen to the songs with great speakers.
Every single unit in pic related looks a million times better than anything in TA, SupCom, PA or BAR.
What kind of unfortunate birth defect were Chris Taylor and his subhuman Black personturk fans born with that prevented them from creating a similar level of RTS kino?
>Total Annihilation
for some reason every time this name comes up I'm reminded of some obscure strategy game but all I remember is that it had this big immobile cannon in it in one mission
the screen was very busy making it look more like a city builder game instead of RTS
I can't be the only one that played it
>start 4v4 with ally and enemy AI
>play core
>build up
>get a krogoth
>go to town
Every time like the first time.
krogs are a meme unit, the game is long over before the first one rolls off the assembly
Because TA is actually crap that has small cult following that yell at other RTSes why they aren't like TA?!
It has less character, I suppose.