Total Annihilation Players!

Hey Guys,
There are probably a lot of you out there. Just thought I'd get a post going that would bring us a bit together. I'm Shollos from zone and all sorts of other places, most notably from BTU back in the old days. (Someone stole my username on this site)
I just wanted to link this interview for Planet Annihilation over at PCGamer:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/15/plane ... interview/

This snippet I'm pasting below really launched my enthusiasm.

Quoted from the interview:
"What is your current thinking regarding factions?

Mavor: This is a tough one that we’ve been going back and forth on. There’s basically going to be a single pool of units that everybody can build from. Like, why is there a difference between what the Core have and the Arm have? The war has been going on so long, all the technology should be available to everyone. So differentiating based on faction, in a lot of RTS games, it comes down to the look of the unit. We all have archers, but they look a little different.

We’re taking the perspective that you are your own faction. You are your own commander, and you control your own faction. You are trying to win the galactic war. When it gets into the bigger battles, I’m really hoping to be able to fit people’s clans and stuff into this, so that people can form their own factions and battle against each other.

But I’ll also say that this decision is not 100 percent. In other words, if the fans say, no, we really want to split it up into a couple of factions, we will do that. I’m really curious about this, what the reaction will be to that. It’s one of those things that I think is going to be divisive."

As an online 1999+ TA player to the center of my heart, I fully endorse this kind of development. This is the kind of game I have been hoping and dreaming for as a TA2, ever since Boneyards was conceived, and I stepped into my first competitive Galactic War game.
Tell me what you guys think! Hope I see a lot of familiars out there!
-Shol

Looks like a great take on expanding the meta-game TA never quite had. Will be interesting to see how many of the TA old timers can be pulled into the 21st century with Planetary Annihilation

Lots I'm sure, I've already seen a few familiar names. I'm an TA old timer myself, though I won't go telling anyone who I was during boneyards.

I grew up on TA (it came out when i was 1 and my dad bought it) so i am not an old timer, but play ta often and will be in the beta for PA

TA was my first PC-Game and I can say it is one of my best games.

TA wasn't my first game, nor was it even my first computer game. My gaming history started with RISK on a high school outdoor cafeteria table with a few other weirdos; it quickly graduated to a full obsession with Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, and within a couple years I had discovered MetaGaming's Stellar Conquest... and thus fell in love with my first "4X" game. I used to frequent Strategicon and Orccon gaming conventions in southern California in the Eighties. I would run into Alan Emrich as one of the con organizers; many years later he was the head honcho behind Master of Orion III. My first love was and is and will always be turn-based games, but a well-made RTS game is... tolerable.

I have enough history with strategy, 4X, and RTS games in 34 years to have seen all the collective things done right and all the oversights and mistakes made. I have yet to find a game that avoids all the historic mistakes and does everything right; would anyone even have the courage to build and sell that game, if it was so perfect it would ruin the market for next year's game? The sad part is that so many young designers and developers now don't have that history, have never played the pioneering games, and wind up making the same mistakes again! It's depressing. RTS games in particular are almost always lacking some of the best usability features of turn-based games, and there's no reason they should lack them. RTS games can learn a lot from the best turn-based strategy games. Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, SC:FA, and SC2 were all good, but there was room for improvement in all of them... which is why I'm here!

I have some very specific ideas about how a game like Planetary Annihilation should play; since I'll have access to the alpha builds I hope I can persuade the Uber team that they're ideas worthy of this game. I want it to become that perfect game, such a game-ender that I can finally clear my shelves of all the other 4X and RTS games. Help me free up some shelf space, guys!

VulcanTourist, the (TAUniverse) artist formerly known as macraig/MAC




BTW, anyone interested in an unopened mint condition box of the late-70s MetaGaming release of Stellar Conquest? Might be time to pass even that along.

Somehow sounds like a brag post to me

By the way, I recently saw a mint condition of Stellar Conquest (not sure about the MetaGaming thing though) for sale, and it wasn't very expensive either. You wouldn't happen to be offering it for free, would you?

Naturally my concern is that they invest enough time into the AI. Not only that, but that they continue to update it after launch as player strategies evolve.

Or hire Sorian, that'd do fine too.

Call it a brag post if you like; I was just citing references. "I'm gud and noh stuff" without an explanation is kinda hollow. It was as much about lamenting the dearth of the finer points of strategy game design as it was about me.

The Avalon Hill reprint of the game probably ain't very collectible, if that's what you saw. If it was pre-boxed Metagaming, that ought to be seriously collectible. I wasn't even addicted to gaming yet when the original version debuted around 1974/5.

If your concern in particular was anything else, it would be unnatural.

I'm an old timer as well, played the game since the beginning.
Recently found the old original manual of the game

http://i.imgur.com/Pr0LF.jpg

I was about 8 years when the game came out and my dad bought it for me and my brother. Since then TA has a special place in my heart, I never even dared to think there would be a remake of some sorts.
I'm also a big fan of Supreme Commander 1, SupCom 2 was just horrible.

Cheers

Ride, of the Mighty Core Empire (MiCE). Someone always pilfers my handle so I'm using my faithful backup.

Rebuilt

I'm the opposite, the original was an over fiddly mess, while the second took all the cool stuff and streamlined it into something fun to play.

I've wrote a review on SupCom2 2 years ago on Gamespot. Here is the link;
http://www.gamespot.com/supreme-commander-2/user-reviews/712579/platform/pc/

And seriously, some of the experimentals are just outrageous.

Pulinsmash
Cybranosaurus Rex

The Fatboy is just plain horrible in SupCom2, and the list goes on and on.
But even if SupCom1 is better than 2, they don't come close to the masterpiece Total Annihilation.

So with all due respect, but...if you liked SupCom 2... which is a closer resemblance to a normal RTS like C&C than to TA, and SupCom1 has a lot in common with TA and you didn't like it at all, I don't think Planetary Annihilation is something for you.

Sorry, but calling people names is not a valid review of a game. Gamespot never should have published your review. I wouldn't be proud of yourself and I certainly wouldn't be advertising it. Let's talk about TA in the TA thread.

Ohyeah, Hi

I played TA the first time on a pentium one. It was not a great experience, because everything was too awesome for my computer. I kept trying to play TA on and off though and had some success, but had trouble getting the game to the level of fun and ease to get into of Star Craft. Then in college I started looking at all the mods and trying the super battle packs. That's where I saw the Peewee Cannon for the first time. Very funny. At some point I found Uber Hack. At this point I had a PC that could run 8 player maps and an awesome internet connect. I was really amazed how much fun could be had playing TA. It was so great. I played a lot with Anderson, Raven, Fadetogrey and many others. We had some seriously awesome players on that balance team and I had some epic games with Fash Tanks, Stumpes, Nukes, Anti-nukes, Goliaths, Annihilators, Cans, Sumos, Zeese, Mavericks and many other awesome sauce stuff. I always loved the navies. There was a lot of love for TA put into Uber Hack.

I am sorry, but what is wrong with my review? I am not insulting anyone with my review?
I've just read it again and I can't find anything insulting, perhaps you've clicked the wrong link?

Yes, you don't come out and say these guys are "superlative" "dumb people", but you might as well have.

The implications in your review are very clear. You question everything and give credit for low system requirements. Honestly, system requirements had nothing to do with the economic system.

Because?

Because?

I like the experimental units. Yes, the Fatboy 1 was better, but overall the experimentals in Supreme Commander 2 are superior and more interesting if only because many of them are viable in competitive play. Sorry you don't like the pull-n-smash if only because of the name but it's a great experimental. The game play elements of Noah and Space Temple are great. The AC1000 is truly a terror.

Look, I agree with your second points a little bit. I added heavy tanks in my SC2 mod Eternal Conflict. but your argument is terrible (you don't have one) and your implications are insulting. Most people here would agree that FA's 3 tier system has a lot of problems. If you look at any of the tech level threads you will see people saying that they don't want techs making tech 1 obsolete. What we need are good arguments for tech levels. Designers need to hear why we want things in a game.

If you had written a review with arguments made of insightful descriptions of what you actually wanted and why you wanted them and how they would be cool and add to your game experience you might have had something worth sharing with people.

What you wrote is that they don't have this this and this is dumb. I don't like it that much (your score).

What you have done is insulted the designers and pushed every publisher who read your review to look for Star Craft 2 style change not the sacred cow sequels.

Anyway, sorry about helping to continue to derail this thread. Can we talk about TA?

Boy, do you have an opportunity for a learning moment here. Listen up! There was no name calling in his review. I don't consider it especially literate, but there was no name calling. "Name calling" is simply a less accurate synonym for "argumentum ad hominem"; go Google that term right now.... Do you understand yet? He didn't directly belittle or insult specific persons at all. Instead he did exactly what any well-behaved debater does: he criticized and questioned specific aspects of the topic. You, however, tried to play mind-reader with his review and interpolate all this extra vitriol between the lines that simply wasn't there. Was he THINKING "Geez, those GPG people are idiots"? Perhaps he was, but he didn't SAY it at all, and it's not your place to rewrite his review to include what you suspect he was thinking.

The rest of us can, but you need to go sit in the corner for a while and think about why you reacted to his review and him like that. Your reaction reveals more about you than it does his review.

That part sort of... "Annoyed" me. The Core and the Arm are fundamentally different. They are constantly trying to one up each other tech-wise and they have radically different systems. Core can literally copy their best veterans thousands of times over. (Kinda odd since the A.K. should be a great unit after four millennia of combat experience.) but the Arm has to staff their stuff. Sure, sure, there are some of things like the solar plants that work identically but look totally different. Structure wise I can get them looking the same but unite-wise when they develop special units for different tactics and scenarios? Not quite.

Though PA solves this quite well. The "factions" left are robots. Remnants from a war that should have long since ended. They have assimilated each-other for millennia and condensed their technology down to the best of the best. The Core and the Arm where still sentient beings trying to one up each-other to win the war, as evident in The Core Contingency with the Alien Implosion Device.

well it was fun, but it was much more about tactics than strategy.