LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Total Annihilation
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Cavedog's Total Annihilation release was one of the first to truly embrace the fansite paradigm. Cavedog provided graphics and a full license to use trademark materials for the benefit of the game's community. The first known fansite can be found, archived, at Archive.org.
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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. New units, new weapons, new AI building strategies, new missions and maps may be loaded into the game. 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, and bundled with expansion packs. It was this capability of expansion and constant renewal that doubtlessly gave it 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.
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Where Total Annihilation had largely parallel technology trees between two similar sides, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms tried a more diversified approach. The sides were made to greatly vary from one another. The side of Aramon, had many "traditional" ground units such as knights, but ... had a large number of heavily fortified buildings and defensive structures. Aramon weakness was that they had hardly any sea or air units. Veruna, on the other hand, had many sea units and several mobile siege engines. The side of Zhon (represented by animal-like beasts) has no structures at all (other than resource generation and one defensive structure), as all units were built by others, leading to huge armies that were constantly moving.
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What all of these features of Total Annihilation taken into account, you have a real-time strategy game that really shook up the generic constraints that the RTS junkies at the time would have otherwise expected. The typical pace of the real-time strategy game at the time was (well, much like it is today) not especially fast-paced, with units that are typically as inversely fast as they are strong. Units... typically didn’t have an attack range that was really anything to write home about — the convention being that most units could not attack anything that they could not see or, more commonly, could not be seen within the range of the screen around the unit. In TA, there were an abundance of units of all power, speed, and range that you pumped out as fast as your factories and resources permitted until the point you reached the unit cap or, more likely, the enemy comes and absolutely crushes your puny forces.
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Ok, Total Annihilation is a game like Starcraft for those of you who have played it. It's a real time stratagey. It has robots and upgrades. You can go to http://ta.covclan.com/ to get it!! The best thing is you can upgrade it. Say someone makes a new bot or plane you can download it and use it on the game. Get pack 1 2 and 3 for the multiplayer and skimrish on one player. Patch 1 and 2 gets you new vechicles and other stuff.
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Cavedog's tenth free unit for Total Annihilation helps Core take control of the high seas by means of a powerful laser battery. You'll need to install the v1.2 patch in order to use it. Download »
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Total Annihilation