Brian The Dog on 19/8/2010 at 09:06

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Seems that (http://www.atari.com/games/total_annihilation/pc-download) Atari are selling TA on their website as a download - but when I click on "buy" it gives an error message. Regional purchasing maybe?

Vernon on 21/8/2010 at 09:02

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Maybe you're right, but on the other hand I've seen more games where there's little but scouting and expansion skirmishing until they both have econ for Bricks and Titans or whatever (In retrospect, I am going to backpedal completely on my experimentals comment, but not on T3).

SupCom T1 doesn't have the pace or HP/DPS balance of OTA, let alone Uberhack. In high-level TA, squeezing out a couple of T2 units could be a game-ender. Of course, there was no T4 in TA so it had to have a heavier bottom rung.



Of course, which is just fucking absurd. Sure, everyone who isn't retarded enough to enjoy DotA/Demigod (another Chris Taylor failure) wants to control a massive fucking army but with that many units and factories you're just macroing like a motherfucker. TA was complex, but not exactly micro-heavy in comparison with something like Starcraft. However SupCom's micro was so lacking as to be almost negligible. I think this was part of the reason it wasn't the spiritual successor that the diehard TA fanbase would have wanted. If you look at SupCom 2, that has been taken to the next level - it is pretty much an RTS that plays itself :troll:



Yeah really. Shame, because FA was a Very Good Game. And SupCom 2 is just a laughing stock that killed much of the SupCom 2 fanbase awesome

Anyway, TA's magic lies in that it is the best soft-counter RTS ever made and had a massive diversity of strategic potential. Also D-guns. D-guns and the boi nuke are probably the best device I have ever come across in any video game. You get the best weapon at the beginning of the game, counter-balanced by the fact that it is wielded by a comparatively weak unit

Shadowcat on 24/9/2010 at 12:55

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So I've been playing Total Annihilation recently for the first time in a great many years. I never played more than a handful of missions into it back in the day, and I am currently up to level 14 of the ARM campaign.

I'm certainly not hating it, but I was really hoping to be enjoying it more than I am, and I don't know how many of the problems are just generally applicable to the genre (I rarely ever play RTS games), and how many are just me sucking at the game.

One issue is that you start out with next to no information about the landscape and the enemy, which makes it really hard to know how to begin to approach a level; and because each level can take such a long time to play out, it can wind up being trial and error gameplay, but with a really long time between an error and your next trial. It takes ages to even develop scouting craft capable of giving you some real insight into the map.

People criticise the likes of Another World for its trial and error nature, but that game wasn't nearly as annoying as finding that your last hour of effort was all a mistake, and doomed from the beginning to be eventually crushed, without you ever really knowing where you went wrong.

Is that just the nature of the game? Should I just treat each map as a puzzle to be solved, and accept that it's going to take a lot of time? (Do people replay levels trying to get the most efficient solution?) Should I do a dummy run on high speed to get some scout planes and some (relatively) quick insight before reloading and playing properly?

Or is there a general approved approach to setting up any base that should always be followed, regardless of the map?

Frankly it seems like a bit of a grind at times, and my successful missions just tend to involve me managing to survive while building the biggest army I can, then invading en masse, and hoping for the best, which isn't all that satisfying (but I'm guessing at this point that I'm Doing It Wrong). I guess I should probably be thinking about cutting off the enemy resources first, and things like that.

Sometimes I try to be more tactical with my assaults, only to have the game thwart me (like asking my long-range artillery to attack a target, and then watching them continue to approach after getting close enough to fire, until the enemy also has them in range, and obliterates them. WTF?)

Also, the path-finding is really appalling at times, with units getting confused by one another way too easily... sometimes I have to tell a group to "go there" a half-dozen times or more before they are all moving in the right direction!

I don't feel that I have a good handle on all the different unit capabilities yet, which is undoubtedly a significant problem, and so I feel that I'm flailing around a bit at present. There are rather a lot of them, though (and the expansions add so many more -- I elected just to install the original game at this point, to try to keep things as simple as possible!)

I think I'm mostly lacking patience for all the resource gathering and base building (especially if I get it wrong and have to start over). I want to persist with TA, but perhaps I'd be better off with the likes of Myth and Ground Control, which take resource gathering out of the picture altogether.

Vernon on 24/9/2010 at 17:55

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Play some Balanced Annihilation with me in like a couple of months, after exams. It's the dog's bollocks. Exponential economy is something most RTS players aren't familiar with, but when you have learned how it works and what you can do with it, hoo boy the world is your oyster (the finite BA world anyway)

LETS MAKE IT TAKE PLACE



Also this

Malleus on 25/9/2010 at 00:26

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You mean the fifth or so mission in the Arm campaign? Because that one's a huge difficulty spike. In fact, every mission on Thalassean is. Get past that planet and it will be better.