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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

I am still waiting for a strategy game which gets near to the Total Annihilation experience (the most satisfying strategy experience I had so far). I am waiting since 1997 (20 years)! What I would like to see is real use of terrain features, monumental maps and units which are well designed. Take a look at the Prophet from TA:Escalation: [0]. 2 naval cannons, 2 plasma batteries, 2 flak guns with built-in multitasking.

[0][https://images.discordapp.net/.eJwNxkEOgyAQAMC_cC-7wGYFP0MIE...]

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TA really has had a lot of community mod work done to extend and improve it. Playing vanilla TA and then a modern mod like Escalation [0] really demonstrate that.

It's even more impressive to consider that the TA engine was never open-sourced, Cavedog, the original developer, never gave out any information on how to mod the game, and that the community has managed to do things using limited unit scripting engine and some hex-editing that even some of the original developers are amazed at.

The Hyper Viper

[0]http://taesc.tauniverse.com/

I will never forget the Death Ray unit which is a flying unit which looks like a Ray and has a gatling plasma battey on top of it.

A few years ago SpringRTS, and in particular the BalancedAnnihilation mod [0] were active and playable. There is also Planetary Annihilation [1] (that I used to play competitively online, a few of the top players are ex-StarCraft II Grand Masters).

[0] https://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation [1] http://www.uberent.com/pa/

I own Planetary Annihilation. It is a horrible successor to TA. No use of terrain, boring units and terrible UX. I currenlty play Total Mayhem (TA mod) and TA:Escalation.

Eh, there is also, with the same Engine(https://springrts.com/) , and improved gfx and ux:

Zero-K (www.zero-k.info) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcqY4GfRpI

TheCursed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-cursed

BalancedAnnhilationReloaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK0u2OYLubo

Evolution RTS: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291150/

Spring:1944 http://spring1944.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76jFZvpvwoA

KernelPanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doF7owZ0blk&fmt=18

And various Original TA Derivatives. Try some, have fun.

I've played Warzone, Zero-K and SC2. I think Zero-K is the better of the three. Warzone's huge tech tree is overwhelming and I believe it doesn't really add to the game, because it's likely that only a few tech paths are actually viable if one talks competitive play. SC2 is pretty and all, but suffers from hard-to-solve balance problems. Zero-K has solid gameplay elements (like terrain deformation and good unit control) a great variety of units available to all players to master, and it handles nicely a dozen of players without population caps. The only problem is the small player base.

PS: The Spring-Engine Team is always welcoming experienced contributors. And yes, that's the engines repo- not the java hibernate framework ;)

https://github.com/spring/spring

My earliest RTS is TA and we played the heck out of it. I think the SpringRTS is a worthy successor.

I've found Forged Alliance (standalone Supreme Commander expansion) to be a worthy successor and it still has an active community in Forged Alliance Forever.

If you've played it, where did you feel it was lacking?

The main problem is the resource management. In TA there is a continuous transmission of resources so you will build (albeit slowly) even if there is an outage. SC:FA on the other hand works like Red Alert. You buy something (like if you were using money) and then it builds. Additionally the animations are supbar compared to TA. Just try out both games and you will see what I talk about.

Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance both have flow economies. Supreme Commander 2 works as you described, and indeed, is not worthy :)

Forged Alliance is great if you like TA!

Oh sorry! My memory tricked me.

Bit late I know, but PSA: If you own just SupCom, you can register the code on steam and you will get both SupCom and FA.

>I am still waiting for a strategy game which gets near to the Total Annihilation experience ...

TA2 should be coming soon:

http://www.pcgamer.com/chris-taylor-you-can-use-your-imagina...

That was 2013, so perhaps E3 this year we may see an announcement. Four years is usually standard for big projects.

In the mean time, SC:FA on FAForever is your best bet.

I thought Chris Taylor was involved in Planetary Annihilation, no? PA was an utter failure.

Nope, CT wasn't involved in PA, but a bunch of other Cavedog vets, including Jon Mavor, one of the main developers on TA, were.

I'm of the opinion that another CT RTS would be a project of 50/50 potential for TA fans. I love SupCom only a little less than I do TA, but I'm not a big fan of SupCom 2. On the other hand, some other old TA vets weren't big fans of SupCom, only to find themselves really liking SupCom 2. I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.

>I never played PA, but I'm pretty confident I would be meh on it.

People like to trash Planetary Annihilation but it's not really deserved. Yes, it doesn't scratch the TA itch as well as one might wish but it's a decent game in its own right.

Um, you did hear about the failed Human Resources campaign, right?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resourc...

GPG went under right after that campaign (October 2014). Technically they got bought out, but who knows if the new owner wants to make the same kinds (or quality) of games.

You're thinking of Wildman, not Human Resources. The latter was Uber Entertainment. Gas Powered Games went under in 2013.

Chris Taylor left Wargaming back in November, and while I'd expect Wargaming to be doing something with the TA franchise, based on their other games, I'm not sure that it is a game that TA fans are going to be too excited about.

Given that I played with WoT for a while I can say that I'm actually terrified about that monstrosity Wargaming will make out of TA...

>Chris Taylor left Wargaming back in November ...

I hadn't heard the news, that is terrible. It basically crushes any hope I had for TA2 being good.

Figured they'd have just given CT free reign and had TA2 use a traditional retail pricing model ala Master of Orion, a Wargaming Labs project. It's still possible that could happen, but doubtful.

Exactly my thoughts.

Have you tried Supreme Commander? It is the spiritual successor to TA with huge scale, terrain having an impact, and decent balance.

Also, it has things like the Fatboy, http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/18/17842/Upgrade4.jpg

Yes. See my comment to @andruc's comment.

Supreme Commander is the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. It is made by Chris Taylor and is very similar in style. If you don't like that you probably wouldn't really like a sequel to Total Annihilation.

I've already said the problems with SC. It was a very bland and plain successor. They recognized this and tried to bring it up to the level of TA with SC:FA but it is not as good as Total Mayhem or TA:Escalation. Try them out and you will see the difference.

Forged Alliance Forever is about as close to the TA experience as you will get - coming from another hardcore TA fan.

It's of course not quite the same, but the community work on SC:FA has really made the game quite polished.

I too am still waiting on another modern TA-like flow economy game, but supreme commander is still by far the closest and best there is. In some ways it's better.

Remember Supcom 2 is in no way affiliated with the TA franchise like supcom 1 (and expac) was. It's an entirely different (and bad) game imo.

https://www.faforever.com/

I will definitely try SC:FA. For some reason I skipped it after the SC fiasko and SC2's non-flow economy was a no-go for me. Thanks for the info!

Very little beats TA, not even C&C. I wish I was playing TA right now.

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