Spiff: “For a while this was of the best games you could buy but now it’s just completely and utterly broken.” Todd Howard: “DID SOMEBODY MENTION SKYRIM?!”
Great video Spif but you can merely.... NOT build with your commander and he's safe from pickup. Or watch the minimap like a hawk and press S for Stop when somebody tries it....which pretty much everyone does already in competitive play. No, the bigger concerns in MP competitive were things like cancel-strafe bombing. Instead of a full route, you could just bomb, cancel order, re-target while over their base to re-bomb and nothing could hit you because the movements were so erratic
So, a few things to correct here: 1) "You can pick up anything with your transports" Not entirely true, there are certain units that are considered too big to move like the Krogoth, you also cannot pick up any navy vessels or units submerged under water. 2) "Construction airships can collect metal from metal deposits" This is not true, there is no mobile unit that can gather from metal deposits, only miners can collect from there. What you're referring to is the mass reclaim glitch on a rock or a tree, not a metal patch. This glitch makes it so if you have all the air construction units reclaim a map object at the same time, done through clicking it a few times to start reclaiming at the same time, then the resulting resource is multiplied by the number of craft that are collecting it. 3) "Trading units has an off chance of duplicating them" There is no unit trading between players, only capture. This happens when two players try to capture a unit at the exact same time from a third team. 4) "By placing down an expensive item and immediately hit reclaim on them, you get all the cost of the item" This is also not true, you only get what you spent on the item back minus a bit of bleed off since buildings under construction will decay resources if there is no active construction unit constructing it. There is a minor glitch where buildings that have an on/off state will switch between the two states during construction if attacked, like solar panels or radar. There is no resource glitch when it comes to buildings under construction. 5) While the multiplayer/competitive side isn't as active as most, the game still does have an active player base. Most of which is on the modding side of things adding all sorts of stuff like entire branches of units like hover units or an entire branch of spider units, experimental units, shield generators, etc. Also yes, there are tons of ways to cheese the AI, it's not a very hard AI to cheese. However playing with other people you wont get to use most of the exploits with them.
I’m pretty sure there was a trade unit option as when I used to play multiplayer and were teamed up with my friends if we were about to get our bases wiped out we would ask for a construction unit in their base so we could shelter and slowly rebuild. I’m guessing it was a command line function like +setsharemetal but I can’t remember what it is. I think we also gave construction units to our allies so they could build the other factions units. I always played core and they usually played arm.
@@Riotlight That's not trading in the traditional sense, you are providing shelter and you don't have control of your teammates unit. What Spiff is saying is you yourself can relinquish control of any of your own units to another team basically without input of the other team. The two players would repeatedly do this to the same unit for an off chance of performing some supposed unit duplication glitch. This is not a thing you can do in TA in any capacity. In order for you to gain control of another team's unit, ally or otherwise, you are required to capture the unit using your commander, or if you have a special unit that does capture. That's also the only way to use units for both Arm and Core. There is a command that lets you share metal and energy with another player so you can pool your resources between the two bases but that's it.
@@Skellitor301_VA yes we did get complete control of the unit. We sheltered with that 1 unit in our contol taking care not to get killed while we rebuilt our base in any spare space in their base. It definitely was possible to give units to allies. I just cant remember how.
@@Riotlight Actually you are correct, this is a function I wasn't aware of and had to look up. You select the units, press tab, and select the player you want to send the units to. This transfers that unit to your team. I'm still not finding any mention of a unit dupe glitch outside of this video.
The story of this game is actually pretty awesome. Basically, there are two factions at war with each other, the Arm and the Core. The Core was an AI that ran the central government and, after a technological breakthrough allowing people to transfer their minds into machines and obtain immortality, began to require everyone to do so. The Arm was a rebel group who opposed this and eventually began mass producing clones to fight the Core, who simply copied peoples' consciousnesses to make more soldiers. The game takes place after thousands of years of war, with most of the entirety of the galaxy's resources having been depleted in each faction's quest to wipe out the other.
i remember the tactic of telling the artillery to force attack under their attack range to hit outside their potential range. this was an amazing feature of TA that added extra dimensions to the gameplay. best game ever
In TA Kingdoms they always keep their Lord in the same area, and 1v1 a Lord is the easiest thing to do because the AI is bad at Lord duels. So you could effectively start a game and immediately hunt down a single Lord before they get anything up. My favourite, though, is the game managed to make (almost) invincible walls. To destroy them, you need a trebuchet or catapult to destroy them, but the AI doesn't. So the best way to win is to just box in your nearest enemy AI and deal with the rest while your pet AI sits in its little box. It's a wonderful game
silly thing is all you need to do is tell your commander to move away. as he moves away and the transport attempts to chase to pick it up, your commander can easily laser it out of the sky. it's not an "exploit" it's a legit part of gameplay. If you weren't paying attention to your commander AND hadn't built any AA near it, you deserve what you get...
The "air transport kidnapping" strategy was definitely something everyone who played TA back in the late 1990's was at least somewhat aware off. The other cheeses/glitches were less known though.
Back in the day when this game first came out, Cavedog (the developer) released free downloadable unit and map packs. The game ended up with literally hundreds of different units to choose from for each side. You had mech units, vehicle units, air units, ship units, submarine units, and hovercraft units and each unit category has it's own builder unit that can build enhanced factories for their unit type. Both teams have totally different units, and the red team (in the expansion?) can build a giant super-mech that can just blow the hell out of anything, but takes FOREVER to build. One of the best things about this game is you can queue up almost unlimited actions with the shift key. Like you can tell a builder plane to go build a bunch of metal extractors (they will even build them automatically if set to patrol an area), then queue up a patrol of your base, and they will seamlessly go build all the extractors, then return to your base to patrol and automatically fix anything they see. You can even build aircraft repair pads which damaged aircraft will automatically use then continue their patrol routes. If total annihilation wasn't so dated, it would easily be one of the greatest macro RTS games even to this day. It's also worth noting: Even though the map is a 2D image, the ground has actual 3D height maps, and plasma weapons actually fire in a parabolic trajectory. You can build nuclear missiles, but you can also build anti-nuclear missile systems. Turrets were insanely powerful in this game. Some turrets were like calling down the hand of god on your enemy, giving you incentive to try to turtle. In this video he uses a Big Bertha heavy plasma cannon to lob a single projectile at the enemy base, but for significantly more time and resources you can build a six-barreled Gatling gun version that fires like twice a second and can drain your entire economy of energy if mishandled. I first played in '97 or '98, when I was at my friend's house. They had an engineer dad, with more than one computer to play games on, so my friend was going to fight me through the LAN from the other room. Unfortunately, I was only 7 or 8 and had no idea what was going on or what to do. His brother was supposed to help me, but only showed me how to build solar plants and then left. So I was walking around exploring and building solar panels with my commander like I'm playing Space Engineers, when all of a sudden there are aircraft everywhere, shooting me. I try to fight back, but I am overwhelmed... I fall... AND BLOW UP IN A GIANT EXPLOSION! I remember thinking about how I didn't even care that I lost because of how cool the game looked. That moment of that day has been ingrained in my mind for 22 years. Pure nostalgia. Planetary Annihilation could be a good spiritual successor to this game. It has very similar gameplay to this, except you are literally fighting on giant spherical planets orbiting the map. I wouldn't recommend paying full price for it since its development has been wrought with conflict and the game is a little glitchy, but it probably has one of the most similar feelings to the original game with some major improvements sprinkled in, and a really good gimmick.
God i remember that. It was insane. Never got around to all the units but loved using the seaplane builder. Since planes dont take up any ground space, id build like 100 seaplanes and build anything almost instantly, like 20 vulcans or big berthas 😂
For anyone curious the epic soundtrack to this game was done by Jeremy Soule, same guy who did the Elder Scrolls soundtracks, definitely my favourite game music composer.
The computer plays two moods of music, depending on the action on the screen; similar to the combat music popping up in later games, especially MMOs. The "building and exploration" tracks are near 100% great, where the "combat" tracks are a little south of 50% good, imo. I even see a similar trend in his later work, but not as pronounced.
a trebuchet is a type of catapult. what you mean is spiff showed some kind of onager (or something, history of siege engines and what name applies to what is pretty jank) - being a different kind of catapult. but all are types of catapult.
Literally the first video game I ever played after my dad introduced me to it and single handedly got me into gaming FOR LIFE. I was literally obsessed with this game and still miss it so much
I just joined ta forever. It is awesome. The game is really ballanced with the pro ta mod and the community is small but pretty active. Having a blast and I havent rts since 1999.
Best cheat in this game: +sing This causes your units to start scatting whenever selected or given orders. Of course, you never do this with your own units, you wait until your friend uses the restroom and when they come back everything is singing at them.
@@thespiffingbrit No, no. It's a real thing, Spiff. Wait until I tell you about deep fried twinkies. Or bacon wrapped, deep fried, snickers candy bars....
TA! My favourite. Played that so much in the day. The modding scene was so big for the era. It is still going. Also, there is absolutely nothing imbalanced about the nuclear weapons. They're nuclear weapons. They're supposed to do that. The ABM you can build will swat them effectively. Build more. I think it very accurately models real world game theory.
You've got just something wrong about TA; it's creator clearly told: "I created it just for myself and my friends; i didn't expected that much audience about it".This game falls under the "Fonzie Complex"
More than just that: 1. It was peer-to-peer, so there weren't servers in between the players. 2. It had a unit cap of 200 (and then later increased to 250) 3. Though the switching cheats on was a thing. I don't remember +iwin working in Multiplayer. and that's just stuff I remember off the top of my head. /shrug
@@PermanentlyTemporary there was the unlimited units mod but then the AI started to s0000ck. The cheats didn't work in MP becausenyou could turn them off at the lobby.
I feel like it was also never advertised. I only found out it existed after a "completely legal and legitimate backup copy" *ahem* fell into my lap (cause yeah CD burners were becoming popular right as this game was coming out). XD
@@BrainSlugs83 I've seen demos of it in magazines but never found it to buy it or I totally would have bought it. In Italy computers and games at those times arrived years after they were published.
The premise of this video is untrue. Most "exploits" mentioned were considered valid tactics that were hard to implement and/or easy to counter. There was a very competitive multiplayer community, in fact there still is now albeit not so active these days. Check out "Total Annihilation Replays" youtube channel for some very high level games from back in the day with excellent and entertaining commentary.
I have been having trouble sleeping lately but listening to spiff videos allows me to get some rest, but I have been noticing that upon waking up I have a great urge to buy crates of Yorkshire gold and pledge my loyalty to the queen, I also appear to have stitches where my kidney is. Well, I do thank Spiff for allowing me to get some rest at night. May the second British Empire prosper under our Queen and her loyal Spiff.
Mr. Spiff! Current day TA player here. Still a fun game. People can join us at the TA Universe Discord or at the TA Universe Discord Some things: 9:00 Not true. There are a few units you can't pick up, Krogoth and Sumo in particular. 10:00 - Com-napping was used in online play, but difficult to pull off. Most people don't let themselves get napped. But if you had an ally that wasn't useful... 15:20 Off-screening was widely used in competitive play. Considered as completely fair play. 18:40 Overshooting was also used, but not as commonly. Primarily because it decreases the accuracy of the weapon. The exception is on low gravity maps such as Darkside, where everything became infinite range artilery. Some fun bugs you missed: Multi-Reclaim, Sparking, Bomber Stacking, and overwhelming anti-nukes. Enjoyed the vid! ( PS: PG Tips 4 life.)
I mean yeah if you're dumb enough to let your main guy get abducted, you kinda deserve to lose. It's just the AIs were so dimwitted you could catch them with their pants down in all kinds of situations.
Total Annihilation was an amazing and genre defining RTS. Love the channel Spiff, but have to respectfully disagree with this take on Commander theft. It was a rare insight of gameplay that if you loose your leader you’ve lost the fight, as a strategy it was equivalent to attempting a 4 move checkmate as an opening gambit in a game of chess. Tremendously entertaining for the uninitiated opponent but easily foiled once seen. Any multiplayer game ensured you gave a small entourage to your commander at the beginning or threw up a few laser towers to destroy any cheeky Atlases trying this on. One of my most enjoyable games I still remember after some 23 years was surprise evacuating an allied player commander to a secret base I’d built just as his was overrun and he thought we’d lost the map with the immortal words over gamespy teamspeak “airlift inbound, stand by for evac” :) halcyon days. Time for a tea.
"4 move checkmate" is a great analogy for commander napping. It's funny you know, I was playing recently and a very good player (much better than me) attempted this exact thing with me with not just 2 but 3 air transports when I foolishly left my commander exposed it was hilarious. I shift-clicked my commander in a zigzag line and the air transports turn far too slow to line up and grab my commander, they ended up getting shot down by the commander's little laser :D I still lost the game lol but there's no way even a fairly crap experienced player would get caught out by this unless they were both foolish to leave commander exposed without anti-air AND not paying attention to their commander. That same game he could have won with crawling bombs carried by those 3 air transports if he had them handy, but he was trying the noob trick to see if I was paying attention ;)
Agree. Commander-napping was never a serious tactic. Computers then were not fast enough to dupe units, but de-sync did happen. Force firing to increase range is a feature of the true ballistics of the game, but accuracy suffered. This is just a cheap pot shot at an award winning RTS from 1997. Its only serious opposition at the time was Dark Reign.
I played this game quite a lot with my friends back in the day, and the "Pick up Commander" would not fly that well in our group; You only fall for this once. Maybe twice... and maybe 2-3-4-5 more times. But eventualy you know; Anti-Air early game combined with reconnaissance aircraft on Patrol is the single most important thing in order to not die in the first 15 minutes. ...later on everybody eventualy died in Nuclear Holocaust when we tried to oversaturate the Anti-Nuke-Launchers of each other with tripple diggits of Nukes. ...Good old times...
That was my late game build one game against a roommate. I launched a nuke at him, and he shouts back from across the living room, “I built anti-nukes, Matt.” I calmly asked him, “yes, but how many?” Then I launch another nuke. And another. And another. I had built a row of six nuke silos with multiple nukes each. Turns out he had one anti-nuke launched and had shift-clicked on it once, so he had five anti-nukes. Good times.
Or you could, you know, build a radar and pay attention to the minimap. Picking up your enemy's commander was a perfectly fair strategy because everyone knew it could be done and it was their own fault if they allowed it to happen.
Hey Spiff, Fall 2023 now and I still love this game. Epic soundtrack to boot! Thanks for all the great content you provide. Looking forward to the next one!
it's always amazing how you can stretch 3 minutes of content into 30 minutes of rambling. "hey guys, in total annihilation you can use transports to pick up enemy commanders. how about that, eh?" => spaghetti machine => video bonus points for mentioning over and over there are a 100 different bugs and exploits and only actually demonstrating 2 (well, 1.5 really) in all of the video's runtime.
I mean, he missed the other feature of LR artillery - which is aiming at one of your own aircraft to also get extra gloriously inaccurate range Even better with the expansions rapid fire artillery
I remember the one where you selected a construction unit, paused the game selected the the commander, unpause and your commander would have the new upgraded construction building. So many holes. Great game.
I've played Total Annihilation off and on for dozens of years! BOOYAH! Also, I'd love to see more exploits in Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, or the follow on game Planetary Annihilation!
Fun fact, both factions the "arm" and the "core" have slightly different units. Some of which are op and an exploit in themselves. But! You can use a transport to kid nap a enemy construction bot/vehicle and then use your commander to "capture" it. This allows you to build both types of units from both factions and gain access to the best of both sides.
Literally the best rts of all times. Funny how I was playing this game both vanilla and moded for decades, and haven't seen even a single exploit, okay maybe a couple, I definitively remember the artillery's range exploit and aircraft going out of screen.
Oh god my nightmares of "Commander Bombs" will come back and haunt me! I suppressed those with my psychiatrist long ago, now I'll have to go and see him again!
@@Iregretthispost Ah, but it wasn't just any old Pentium. It was a Pentium with MMX! With a 2 GB hard drive, and running Win98. Not sure why GOG is overinflating the minimum specs there.
I'm still playing this on my Steam account, with the expansion pack. The best thing I love about this game is adding custom units and structures, giving some bad ass resource gathering, and some very very very OP units, that once one is built, it can take on everything on the map, and there is no stopping it, short of another one fighting back. I start my game by hiding behind a wall of dragons teeth, so the AI can stack up and have absolutely no idea how to fight me. Then I just place some rocket towers down to protect against occasional air attacks, and work on building my resources before building a Karganath, a custom bigger brother to the Krogoth. Once built, it's game over for the enemy.
Hey Spiff, "Total Annihilation: Kingdoms" was literally my entire childhood. Could you... take a closer look, and maybe... just maybe... destroy my childhood? xD (I doubt you'll ever see that comment tho... x.x)
Bartok oh cool thank you. I will look into it! I’ve been playing a lot of TA again recently and was excited to see this video pop up! The only other person I know that played this game is my father 😂
I have found memories of me getting home from elementary school for lunch, quickly shoving my meal in the microwave then rush to the computer to launch the game, get back down stair to get my food, then spend the 20 minutes I had playing this wonderful game while eating my warm meal. Good times 👍
Yeah and in real life snipping officers and abducting leaders shouldnt be possible. Sure illegal but it is still possible especially for those who dont follow the rules.
I'm still kinda okay with that level of freedom... With maybe the addition that the commander just falls and lands with minor damage after you free it from the transport. Call it durability.
I remember as a child, I played "Emperor: Battle for Dune" and loved it. But I also got absolutely wrecked by the AI in any of the campaigns. Tried for ages to either learn strategies or find exploits, but I was little more than a precocious sprog at the time. It has been ages since I played it, so I might have better luck now. If the mood strikes you, I'd like to see what sorts of exploits you are able to discover. Cheers!
Most well known BALANCED thing about Emperor is certainly the ixian holo projector tank, which can create free, infinite, 1 hitpoint copies of anything that still can deal damage.
I am actually part of the very small Total Annihilation community that is still alive. I'm not all too active but I did see your video. The game itself actually has a community made "Beta" patch which attempts to fix many of the issues with the game. Increasing AI stability, removing as many exploits as possible, attempting to optimize it for newer computer, and other fun stuff like a Mega Map like you see in Command and Conquer or Supreme Commander. There are many many community made units that you can download as well as community made maps. Additionally there are mods with the biggest and most active mode being Total Annihilation Escalation and luckily for you you CANNOT pick up enemy commanders with a transport as the mod fixes that issue right off the bat and it's the highest quality mod. Sadly there are limits to what the community was able to fix with the Beta Patch as we don't have TA's source code (Note I'm not a modder but I did make some custom units) which is owned by Wargaming. Regardless you should try the game out again with the Beta Patch + Total Annihilation Escalation. It's basically TA 2.0 at that point. Also the AI are brutally hard on the highest difficulty.
I used to play this game so much as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was to quickly grab all the NPC commanders and then build up my own forces and base to the highest degree, and then release the commanders, effectively giving myself an hour long head start.
"Total Annihilation: Kingdoms" version (the "reskin"!) is my favourite RTS for the single-player story campaign, it takes you through loads of stuff, from all the different factions, seeing things from each angle as you go along, and tieing it all together, with a huge variety. Also the graphics (in-game, not menu!) still hold out really well at high-def today, without any mods or anything!
Even without exploiting, the 'balance' and mechanics in kingdoms were utterly busted though. In Original TA if you played everything straight the two factions were pretty even, kingdoms was a complete joke in that regard. The story was kind of nice but I personally don't like the switching perspectives, it's one of the main things I dislike about Disciples, for example.
I really liked the "sequel", while not as popular as the original game, I had a lot of fun with Kingdoms as they took risks with very asymmetrical factions, and the unit veterancy feature which made me micromanage my veteran units simply because they had a visual difference to green units.
You sir are my hero, this game was a huge part of my gaming childhood. I am a proud pioneer of the atlas stealing their units , you can actually steal the giant Core super weapon for the Arm by grabbing it with an atlas, and converting it with a construction bot
Hey, Spiffy! Me and my girlfrind, brother and father still play this game to this day and have only last year started to play it with the Escalation mod, which is really fun! Glad to see someone play this in 2020!
I used to love this game. A friend had a telephone-directory-sized strategy guide for it and all. Though if memory serves, I think there's actually an option in the game menus to turn on two-button mouse commands, which makes right-clicking the context orders and left-clicking on empty space clear selection. It's just toggled off by default since one-button interfaces were the norm at the time.
@@coeusdarksoul2855 one of the very many basic things Spiffing Brit failed to do in this video. It's nice to see coverage of Total Annihilation, a game I still play all these years later. It would be even better to see an ACCURATE video about Total Annihilation.
I remember that you could download new units from their site back in the day. CORE had a Necro bot which was a great way to steal ARM tech. Kill a construction unit, then repair the wreckage to make it your own. It even came with a stealth bubble! I had so much fun with this game over the years, thanks for the trip down memory lane. :)
I'm three years late to this party but I still remember when we figured out that you could pick up other people's commanders with a transport plane at a LAN party. We all learned very quickly to build at least one rocket turret very early in our build queues!
I asked before and you responded, but I still need to see it My Lord: break DoW Dark Crusade. Because it is amazingly well balanced. And the NoLimit mod actually maintains balance... mostly. Id be fascinated to see you do it! Last time I posted this request, got a couple thousand likes. So, please 🥰 ruin my happy highschool memories!
It's funny you should mention this - When in got the first DoW it had a seal on the front quoting 'the best RTS since Total Annihilation' and that's what sold it to me :)
Yeah, I remember websites that would look like a microtransaction store, but you'd just download the custom unit if you liked the way it looked. There was stats and everything.
There are still 3 or 4 mods still actively being developed for Total Annihilation, and an active community (somehow spiff missed this, along with a bunch of other things)
I was just playing this game in May! I bought it for all my close friends on Steam and we played against each other! :) I used to play this game when I was little, I'm so happy you did a video on this game!
I used to play this multiplayer back when it came out. The air transport didn't really work well vs real players as it was easy to counter. The biggest cheese I remember was doing a flash rush. The flash was a fast little super cheap tank with a minigun. You could micro to dodge a lot of enemy projectiles and do huge damage as the minigun was hard to miss with. 20 Min no rush anyone? :D
Forget Flash rush, it's all about the Flea rush. When I introduced my brother to multiplayer in this game I took his Commander out with a single Flea running circles faster than the Commander's gun could track. I then told him we could turn off the "game ends" option if the commander dies and he agreed. Then I introduced him to Atlas bombs :)
@@thrdeye7304 ?! Fleas do a tiny amount of damage. With the commander's self-repair it would take forever to do this. Plenty enough time to build a single samson or missile tower or laser tower...
@@JamesFaction Or to build another unit to come over and help. He didn't though, and the Flea's laser does outdamage the Commander's self repair. He was also trying to D-Gun it so between that and whatever he was building (if anything) he may have been bottoming out on energy thus slowing the self repair. I honestly don't think he thought the Flea could possibly win the matchup (to be fair I didn't either) so he just kept trying to hit it until I eventually wore him down. Fun times.
I've never commented here Brit, but I seriously love your channel and tho I'm not sure for how long I've been subscribed, I watch you got some years already, now about TotalA, I used to play it with my father when I was younger, we used to go 2v2 with AIs via LAN years ago, when GOG gave the game for free, we HAD to play it again, and so we're doing it! It's been a nostalgic blast, also didn't know most of the exploits you mentioned here xD AIs are sometimes confused indeed but they do play well both on Normal and Hard, I would guess that even on Easy they grow infinitely, that which makes them op (besides being able to see the entire map), I still love this game, wish they made a sequel, but there's things like Planetary Annihilation out there, anyways, keep up the good work Brit! Love your content ;)
"I think my units are all drunk." "..slow unit response is a key part of formulating strategy, so you can't just steam roll an enemy with one click." "Oh, so it's a part of the actual game?" "......yes." "Cool!" "Yessss..."
TA had a vibrant competitive multiplayer community for a solid 15 years and is still played today, which is a strong testament to how balanced the gameplay actually ended up being in practice (tho in many ways the devs didn't originally intend).
As someone who's played this in 2020, this game is pure nostalgia at this point for me. Used to play LAN with some buddies back in the day. I remember we used some wicked mods for the game where the AI would learn how to play better based on what you did. We used to play with Commander Death not ending the game so my one bud would do this thing where he'd build 10+ nuke silos and have them all primed with a missle. Then when ready, he'd launch them all almost at once to different points of the enemy base effectively carpet nuking the AI. Well the next game, his AI did the exact same thing to us! I didn't know about a bunch of these exploits but I almost never played the base game (always had CC and some other bug-fixing mods downloaded). Planetary Annihilation is a pretty good modern remake of TA if anyone is looking.
Total Annihilation Kingdoms was one of my first ever RTS and holds a special place in my memories... I'd love to see Spiffing show the world how PERFECTLY BALANCED it is!
nice vid hope you see this cause i think you do a great job at everything you do so keep at it even with discouraging comments keep going you'll do even better
Hey Spiff, take a look at Zero-K, its based on Total Annihilation fan made alternative engine called springs, ist now a standalone game, and its on steam!
Absolutely! While I think Zero-K is actually pretty well balanced, there are so many whacky and interesting units that Spiff will certainly find something overpowered :D And the game is just great.
@@re11wind Oh yeah... I remember "TASpring". It used to be a way to play TA on modern machines, I think. The good old Win 95 and 98 - era games had a really hard time running on XP. They never seemed to work well
"What's the name of the game?" "Total Annihilation" "So how do you win?" "You kill the other teams' Commander." "...so what's the name of the game again?"
I did love playing "Total Annihilation Kingdoms" back in the day. Forget trebuchets. Best exploit was with Stone Giants. They had limitless range of throwing rocks. Zhon storyline with Thirsha the Huntress was the best. Yet creating every single unit by select and drop to create, was a nightmare.
great game! Zhon was the coolest faction but my favorite strategy was using Taros' Mind Mage and capturing builders from every other faction in order to create the ultimate army!
It is fine to take the enemy commander, it's a proper strategy. No reason we should have arbitrary rules about what you can or can't load. As for the game success, Star Craft came around a few month later and it took all players away, not really because of bugs or AI problem (we had mods for that already)
The modded version of the game Total Annihilation Escalation has an active community and a discord. Still being updated and developed today. The mod fixes many of the issues mentioned here (including planes flying offscreen and still attacking).
"Cemented a nice stable future for the Command & Conquer series." Command & Conquer is from 1995, Total Annihilation is from 1997. The precursor of C&C is Dune 2 from 1992.
To be honest, compared to other strategy games, Total Annihilation is *designed* to have an absolute metric shit-ton of units to sling against the enemy, to the point map-wide artillery just shoots at each other until one land the lethal Commander shot. Still one of the best strategy games in my opinion. Planetary Annihilation wished it would be this game lol
I remember doing a wall of artillery pieces ( the simple tier 2 defense one) followed by a wall of rocket towers plus 1/2 nuke defenses, then I grabbed myself a drink and watched the AI slam a metric shit ton of units onto a immovable wall. Some games I had a 5000 to 3 unit loss.
Total Annihilation is such a pure RTS, so far ahead of its time, and one of my all time favorites. I love how I can command a construction unit to patrol-reclaim the husks of the dead for metal, or entire forests for energy. I love how the polygon based units explode into bits of shrapnel which then bounce off the terrain. The game engine really is amazing, it had 3d terrain and true line of sight in 1997, you can hide your units in craters for protection or build turrets on top of mountains for additional range. You can track units and their projectile's trajectory by pressing T. There's tons of downloadable units, endless maps and total conversions. There's a mod to zoom out similar to Supreme Commander, only not as terrible. If you're into voodoo and black magic, I've even seen hex edits for totala.exe to add useful features.
dz187 and this is the reason I’ve never gotten into another RTS. They all seemed so basic in terms of controls in comparison. Like C&c you had to click the buildings every time you wanted a unit, but in TA you could queue up vast amounts of various units which were built in the correct order, then they would do all the commands you had given to the building such as, move, patrol, or attack. And you could again queue up a huge list of commands. It was also a head of its time using directX which meant as long as DX supported the resolution so did TA. My original copy had the option, and worked fine using resolutions that had not even been dreamt of when the game was coded. Something that most old games don’t do. Amazing game.
@@Riotlight Yeah, Total Annihilation was a game so ahead of it's time that RTS games basically played catch up until... roughly Supreme Commander coming out? So, 1997 to 2007 or so at the very least, a literal decade ahead of it's time.
It's probably worth mentioning that there's a pinned topic in the Steam forums for Total Annihilation, that gives a guide on how to get the game updated, play online, and links to a very nice re-balance mod called Total Annihilation: Escalation, which makes tons of changes and adds lots of new stuff besides. I loved playing this game a ton growing up, and it's always great to see someone do a video on it, especially one That's Perfectly Balanced With No Exploits!
I sometimes still boot up this game to play just for nostalgia sake. The narrator in the opening and during the mission briefing was GODLIKE for my child self and I loved every bit of it. Plus this game effectively turned me into a robot enthusiast(along with Warcraft 2 narrator and gameplay turning me into a medieval and fantasy history aficionado). The sound effects and how things moved were marvelous and fascinating. A big shout out to everyone else who also played this game and fell in love with the RTS genre.
At this point it wouldn't surprise if Spiff started unearthing games that have been considered "lost media" since the dawn of time just because he remembered there was a game he didn't exploit yet.
If commander kills aren't the end of the game, then the cheese strategy changes to "drop your own commander into the enemy base as fast as possible". If you see the enemy commander within the enemy base, you can have your commander run up and fire his D-Gun to obliterate the enemy commander in one hit as long as your energy isn't too low. The primary source of balance for Total Annihilation is the similarity between Core and Arm forces, but really if you want to prevent unfair cheese, just make both players use the same units.
I remember buying this game new and playing it since 1997. The units that were made as downloads from Cavedog and others were insane. Thanks for the nostalgia!
Spiff: “For a while this was of the best games you could buy but now it’s just completely and utterly broken.” Todd Howard: “DID SOMEBODY MENTION SKYRIM?!”
The even better part is jeremy soule made the music for both.
I was seriously thinking this when they mentioned how it won so many awards.
Look at you thinking Skyrim was good.
@@GundamGokuTV TESV had good and bad parts, tbf
Did you mention "Ants Empire"? So broken it doesn't even start.
Thanks for the shoutout for AoE2 and myself in this PERFECTLY BALANCED VIDEO with NO EXPLOITS
Hiiiiii
The Spiffing Brit pretty sure the ai run on a potato
I would be intrigued to know whether Spiff himself plays AOEII ? (btw T90 been watching entire HC3 now (up to Quarterfinal #2 now- tis excellent!!!)
He should do the exploit where you put three archery ranges on a neutral island
Great video Spif but you can merely.... NOT build with your commander and he's safe from pickup. Or watch the minimap like a hawk and press S for Stop when somebody tries it....which pretty much everyone does already in competitive play. No, the bigger concerns in MP competitive were things like cancel-strafe bombing. Instead of a full route, you could just bomb, cancel order, re-target while over their base to re-bomb and nothing could hit you because the movements were so erratic
"4 different AIs" apparently includes Spiff himself. Now everything makes sense.
So Spiff is from the same family as Bot001
@@thespiffingbrit an AI made by Yorkshire tea... That's why you aren't getting sponsored! D:
@@thespiffingbrit Your secret is sa... I mean; NOTHING TO SEE HERE. DRINK SOME TEA AND BE ON YOUR WAY FOLKS.
👏, 👏, 👏
The Spiffing Brit *THEY KNOW TOO MUCH ACTIVATE THE TEA NUKE*
So, a few things to correct here:
1) "You can pick up anything with your transports" Not entirely true, there are certain units that are considered too big to move like the Krogoth, you also cannot pick up any navy vessels or units submerged under water.
2) "Construction airships can collect metal from metal deposits" This is not true, there is no mobile unit that can gather from metal deposits, only miners can collect from there. What you're referring to is the mass reclaim glitch on a rock or a tree, not a metal patch. This glitch makes it so if you have all the air construction units reclaim a map object at the same time, done through clicking it a few times to start reclaiming at the same time, then the resulting resource is multiplied by the number of craft that are collecting it.
3) "Trading units has an off chance of duplicating them" There is no unit trading between players, only capture. This happens when two players try to capture a unit at the exact same time from a third team.
4) "By placing down an expensive item and immediately hit reclaim on them, you get all the cost of the item" This is also not true, you only get what you spent on the item back minus a bit of bleed off since buildings under construction will decay resources if there is no active construction unit constructing it. There is a minor glitch where buildings that have an on/off state will switch between the two states during construction if attacked, like solar panels or radar. There is no resource glitch when it comes to buildings under construction.
5) While the multiplayer/competitive side isn't as active as most, the game still does have an active player base. Most of which is on the modding side of things adding all sorts of stuff like entire branches of units like hover units or an entire branch of spider units, experimental units, shield generators, etc. Also yes, there are tons of ways to cheese the AI, it's not a very hard AI to cheese. However playing with other people you wont get to use most of the exploits with them.
All of this. Seriously, every single thing here.
I’m pretty sure there was a trade unit option as when I used to play multiplayer and were teamed up with my friends if we were about to get our bases wiped out we would ask for a construction unit in their base so we could shelter and slowly rebuild. I’m guessing it was a command line function like +setsharemetal but I can’t remember what it is.
I think we also gave construction units to our allies so they could build the other factions units. I always played core and they usually played arm.
@@Riotlight That's not trading in the traditional sense, you are providing shelter and you don't have control of your teammates unit. What Spiff is saying is you yourself can relinquish control of any of your own units to another team basically without input of the other team. The two players would repeatedly do this to the same unit for an off chance of performing some supposed unit duplication glitch. This is not a thing you can do in TA in any capacity.
In order for you to gain control of another team's unit, ally or otherwise, you are required to capture the unit using your commander, or if you have a special unit that does capture. That's also the only way to use units for both Arm and Core.
There is a command that lets you share metal and energy with another player so you can pool your resources between the two bases but that's it.
@@Skellitor301_VA yes we did get complete control of the unit. We sheltered with that 1 unit in our contol taking care not to get killed while we rebuilt our base in any spare space in their base. It definitely was possible to give units to allies. I just cant remember how.
@@Riotlight Actually you are correct, this is a function I wasn't aware of and had to look up. You select the units, press tab, and select the player you want to send the units to. This transfers that unit to your team. I'm still not finding any mention of a unit dupe glitch outside of this video.
The story of this game is actually pretty awesome. Basically, there are two factions at war with each other, the Arm and the Core. The Core was an AI that ran the central government and, after a technological breakthrough allowing people to transfer their minds into machines and obtain immortality, began to require everyone to do so. The Arm was a rebel group who opposed this and eventually began mass producing clones to fight the Core, who simply copied peoples' consciousnesses to make more soldiers. The game takes place after thousands of years of war, with most of the entirety of the galaxy's resources having been depleted in each faction's quest to wipe out the other.
@@brooceleroy79 check out "beyond all reason". It's "armada" and "coretex" and it's all 3D.
Mostly interesting: in both campaings you play with the remenants of the armies.
For the transport exploit there is a simple counter : build a point defense first
The only acceptable outcome for either side being the total annihilation of the other.
@@helmetfire5973 *cue trumpets*
Me - "Spiff can we get a trebuchet?"
Spiff - "We have a trebuchet at home!"
The Trebuchet at home - That catapult.
i remember the tactic of telling the artillery to force attack under their attack range to hit outside their potential range. this was an amazing feature of TA that added extra dimensions to the gameplay. best game ever
its called big bertha and yeah aiming down forces it to do that elevation thing
yeah are we playing $#@#$@ing Conan here or talking bout TA bring on the Big Bertha
@@alconeuskhan4747 yeah, and you can actually choose a distance (the closer to the gun center, the farther) and shoot more precisely
"Enemy transport spotted! Shoot it down!"
"Wait, is that our commander on board the enemy transport?"
*"I SAID SHOOT IT DOWN!"*
That's been one of my favorite strategies in skirmishes. Doesn't work on attentive players though
In TA Kingdoms they always keep their Lord in the same area, and 1v1 a Lord is the easiest thing to do because the AI is bad at Lord duels. So you could effectively start a game and immediately hunt down a single Lord before they get anything up.
My favourite, though, is the game managed to make (almost) invincible walls. To destroy them, you need a trebuchet or catapult to destroy them, but the AI doesn't. So the best way to win is to just box in your nearest enemy AI and deal with the rest while your pet AI sits in its little box. It's a wonderful game
When I was much younger I accidentally found out you can pick up enemy commanders, so yeah... I also had fun watching the enemy destroy themselves
silly thing is all you need to do is tell your commander to move away. as he moves away and the transport attempts to chase to pick it up, your commander can easily laser it out of the sky. it's not an "exploit" it's a legit part of gameplay. If you weren't paying attention to your commander AND hadn't built any AA near it, you deserve what you get...
Putting AA up early is a priority to prevent this.
Also prevent plane rushes.
_"one of them we told quite simply to commit _*_soduku_*_ "_ - The Spiffing Brit 2020
That's sudoku. The most painful way to end your existence.. math games.
Was looking for this
@@itayraz8530 same. Lol
Almost as humilating as committing minesweeper.
The gravest of crimes require sudoku to be commited!
Oh my god, I thought I'd never see the day when a popular youtuber would play one of the best classic games I've ever played. Thank you Spiff.
I played until no hardware supported. But I still playe it now in my windows 7 Laptop, I hope it can stand longer than I live.😁
@@jenssabai9885 i highly recommend the escalation mod. runs on modern Os and is massively improved over the original game.
The "air transport kidnapping" strategy was definitely something everyone who played TA back in the late 1990's was at least somewhat aware off.
The other cheeses/glitches were less known though.
Back in the day when this game first came out, Cavedog (the developer) released free downloadable unit and map packs. The game ended up with literally hundreds of different units to choose from for each side. You had mech units, vehicle units, air units, ship units, submarine units, and hovercraft units and each unit category has it's own builder unit that can build enhanced factories for their unit type. Both teams have totally different units, and the red team (in the expansion?) can build a giant super-mech that can just blow the hell out of anything, but takes FOREVER to build.
One of the best things about this game is you can queue up almost unlimited actions with the shift key. Like you can tell a builder plane to go build a bunch of metal extractors (they will even build them automatically if set to patrol an area), then queue up a patrol of your base, and they will seamlessly go build all the extractors, then return to your base to patrol and automatically fix anything they see. You can even build aircraft repair pads which damaged aircraft will automatically use then continue their patrol routes. If total annihilation wasn't so dated, it would easily be one of the greatest macro RTS games even to this day.
It's also worth noting: Even though the map is a 2D image, the ground has actual 3D height maps, and plasma weapons actually fire in a parabolic trajectory.
You can build nuclear missiles, but you can also build anti-nuclear missile systems.
Turrets were insanely powerful in this game. Some turrets were like calling down the hand of god on your enemy, giving you incentive to try to turtle.
In this video he uses a Big Bertha heavy plasma cannon to lob a single projectile at the enemy base, but for significantly more time and resources you can build a six-barreled Gatling gun version that fires like twice a second and can drain your entire economy of energy if mishandled.
I first played in '97 or '98, when I was at my friend's house. They had an engineer dad, with more than one computer to play games on, so my friend was going to fight me through the LAN from the other room. Unfortunately, I was only 7 or 8 and had no idea what was going on or what to do. His brother was supposed to help me, but only showed me how to build solar plants and then left.
So I was walking around exploring and building solar panels with my commander like I'm playing Space Engineers, when all of a sudden there are aircraft everywhere, shooting me. I try to fight back, but I am overwhelmed... I fall... AND BLOW UP IN A GIANT EXPLOSION!
I remember thinking about how I didn't even care that I lost because of how cool the game looked. That moment of that day has been ingrained in my mind for 22 years. Pure nostalgia.
Planetary Annihilation could be a good spiritual successor to this game. It has very similar gameplay to this, except you are literally fighting on giant spherical planets orbiting the map. I wouldn't recommend paying full price for it since its development has been wrought with conflict and the game is a little glitchy, but it probably has one of the most similar feelings to the original game with some major improvements sprinkled in, and a really good gimmick.
I vividly remember Planet Annihilation and its massive collection of additional units.
Me (or possibly Jeff Goldblum): Ah, yes, ah, that would be the Core Krogoth unit.
Literally Everyone, Everywhere, Ever: NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD!
God i remember that. It was insane. Never got around to all the units but loved using the seaplane builder. Since planes dont take up any ground space, id build like 100 seaplanes and build anything almost instantly, like 20 vulcans or big berthas 😂
@@60sSam I'm glad I wasn't the only one who knew it was the Core Krogoth. I hated that encounter.
never played total annihilation, but the macro you described look like a lot what's available in supreme commander
For anyone curious the epic soundtrack to this game was done by Jeremy Soule, same guy who did the Elder Scrolls soundtracks, definitely my favourite game music composer.
YAS the sound track for this game was SO fucking good
The computer plays two moods of music, depending on the action on the screen; similar to the combat music popping up in later games, especially MMOs. The "building and exploration" tracks are near 100% great, where the "combat" tracks are a little south of 50% good, imo. I even see a similar trend in his later work, but not as pronounced.
This is hands down one of the best games ever made.
The moment Spiff said airport I smiled because my memory recalled how many friend commanders I've stolen and taken hostage on 1v1. ;D
Spiff: “Build a trebuchet”
Also Spiff: *shows catapult*
Me: “hello is that the Inquisition?”
Not if you're batman
No one expected them.
a trebuchet is a type of catapult.
what you mean is spiff showed some kind of onager (or something, history of siege engines and what name applies to what is pretty jank) - being a different kind of catapult. but all are types of catapult.
@@JNCressey just wanted to say this too:P
Literally the first video game I ever played after my dad introduced me to it and single handedly got me into gaming FOR LIFE. I was literally obsessed with this game and still miss it so much
Come back, the community is still alive, just look for "Total Annihilation Forever".
@@MyriadColorsCM Tauniverse is still up.
I just joined ta forever. It is awesome. The game is really ballanced with the pro ta mod and the community is small but pretty active. Having a blast and I havent rts since 1999.
Check out beyond all reason, if you havent already.
"This is the most broken game of all time"
*Todd's eyes glow red as he snaps his head to look at you*
(You feel like your going to have a bad time)
@@gigabeep1150 todd howard looking at me like that with megalovania playing is a very discomforting image
Best cheat in this game: +sing
This causes your units to start scatting whenever selected or given orders. Of course, you never do this with your own units, you wait until your friend uses the restroom and when they come back everything is singing at them.
HONK
This even works when cheats are set to off. You can always +sing along.
Scatting lol. I know its a jazz thing, but it is also something far worse. Thank GOD they don't do the other one.
If you added "when targeted" before the scatter command, you could have perfect micro ...
*Insert Scatman John meme here*
"Looks about as appealing as deep-fried butter."
Me, an American: Ah, finally something I can relate to!
Wait till he hears about deep fried beer.
@@thespiffingbrit No, no. It's a real thing, Spiff. Wait until I tell you about deep fried twinkies. Or bacon wrapped, deep fried, snickers candy bars....
@@thespiffingbrit it's a carnival food i think . . . i'm sorry.
America does in fact deep fry everything. Our buildings, clothes the very air we breathe is deep fries.
Deep fried Lard is a thing in the south
TA! My favourite. Played that so much in the day. The modding scene was so big for the era. It is still going. Also, there is absolutely nothing imbalanced about the nuclear weapons. They're nuclear weapons. They're supposed to do that. The ABM you can build will swat them effectively. Build more. I think it very accurately models real world game theory.
You've got just something wrong about TA; it's creator clearly told: "I created it just for myself and my friends; i didn't expected that much audience about it".This game falls under the "Fonzie Complex"
More than just that:
1. It was peer-to-peer, so there weren't servers in between the players.
2. It had a unit cap of 200 (and then later increased to 250)
3. Though the switching cheats on was a thing. I don't remember +iwin working in Multiplayer.
and that's just stuff I remember off the top of my head. /shrug
@@PermanentlyTemporary there was the unlimited units mod but then the AI started to s0000ck. The cheats didn't work in MP becausenyou could turn them off at the lobby.
I feel like it was also never advertised. I only found out it existed after a "completely legal and legitimate backup copy" *ahem* fell into my lap (cause yeah CD burners were becoming popular right as this game was coming out). XD
@@BrainSlugs83 I've seen demos of it in magazines but never found it to buy it or I totally would have bought it. In Italy computers and games at those times arrived years after they were published.
The premise of this video is untrue. Most "exploits" mentioned were considered valid tactics that were hard to implement and/or easy to counter. There was a very competitive multiplayer community, in fact there still is now albeit not so active these days. Check out "Total Annihilation Replays" youtube channel for some very high level games from back in the day with excellent and entertaining commentary.
I have been having trouble sleeping lately but listening to spiff videos allows me to get some rest, but I have been noticing that upon waking up I have a great urge to buy crates of Yorkshire gold and pledge my loyalty to the queen, I also appear to have stitches where my kidney is. Well, I do thank Spiff for allowing me to get some rest at night. May the second British Empire prosper under our Queen and her loyal Spiff.
The Spiffing Brit Thanks Spiff, take care and keep exploiting our fragile universe
Mr. Spiff! Current day TA player here. Still a fun game. People can join us at the TA Universe Discord or at the TA Universe Discord
Some things:
9:00 Not true. There are a few units you can't pick up, Krogoth and Sumo in particular.
10:00 - Com-napping was used in online play, but difficult to pull off. Most people don't let themselves get napped. But if you had an ally that wasn't useful...
15:20 Off-screening was widely used in competitive play. Considered as completely fair play.
18:40 Overshooting was also used, but not as commonly. Primarily because it decreases the accuracy of the weapon. The exception is on low gravity maps such as Darkside, where everything became infinite range artilery.
Some fun bugs you missed: Multi-Reclaim, Sparking, Bomber Stacking, and overwhelming anti-nukes.
Enjoyed the vid!
( PS: PG Tips 4 life.)
Game: 23 years old
Spiff: I think I should find some exploits
@@thespiffingbrit THANKS FOR THE HEART LOVE YOUR VIDS
@@thespiffingbrit One of my favorite games ever. I really didn't expect to see it here, no one ever talks about it anymore :(
Games are like wines. But with one difference. Older the game more balanced it is
The Spiffing Brit then when is the “pong is a perfectly balanced game with no exploits” coming out
Next: Dune II
This is one of the greatest RTS games ever made. It's still a blast!
Abducting enemy commander: the most effective tactics even in real world
I mean yeah if you're dumb enough to let your main guy get abducted, you kinda deserve to lose. It's just the AIs were so dimwitted you could catch them with their pants down in all kinds of situations.
Me: *has played this game regularly since its release*
Spiff: *releases a TA video*
"PLEASE BABY DON'T HURT ME"
Total Annihilation was an amazing and genre defining RTS. Love the channel Spiff, but have to respectfully disagree with this take on Commander theft. It was a rare insight of gameplay that if you loose your leader you’ve lost the fight, as a strategy it was equivalent to attempting a 4 move checkmate as an opening gambit in a game of chess. Tremendously entertaining for the uninitiated opponent but easily foiled once seen. Any multiplayer game ensured you gave a small entourage to your commander at the beginning or threw up a few laser towers to destroy any cheeky Atlases trying this on. One of my most enjoyable games I still remember after some 23 years was surprise evacuating an allied player commander to a secret base I’d built just as his was overrun and he thought we’d lost the map with the immortal words over gamespy teamspeak “airlift inbound, stand by for evac” :) halcyon days. Time for a tea.
"4 move checkmate" is a great analogy for commander napping. It's funny you know, I was playing recently and a very good player (much better than me) attempted this exact thing with me with not just 2 but 3 air transports when I foolishly left my commander exposed it was hilarious. I shift-clicked my commander in a zigzag line and the air transports turn far too slow to line up and grab my commander, they ended up getting shot down by the commander's little laser :D I still lost the game lol but there's no way even a fairly crap experienced player would get caught out by this unless they were both foolish to leave commander exposed without anti-air AND not paying attention to their commander.
That same game he could have won with crawling bombs carried by those 3 air transports if he had them handy, but he was trying the noob trick to see if I was paying attention ;)
Agree. Commander-napping was never a serious tactic. Computers then were not fast enough to dupe units, but de-sync did happen. Force firing to increase range is a feature of the true ballistics of the game, but accuracy suffered. This is just a cheap pot shot at an award winning RTS from 1997. Its only serious opposition at the time was Dark Reign.
Com Napping/Bombing was generally a blacklisted tactic. You could try, and have a hard time getting any multiplayer games after that.
@@coeusdarksoul2855 lol, completely untrue. Not a banned tactic at all. Only works on inexperienced players who don't know how to counter it.
I played this game quite a lot with my friends back in the day, and the "Pick up Commander" would not fly that well in our group; You only fall for this once. Maybe twice... and maybe 2-3-4-5 more times. But eventualy you know; Anti-Air early game combined with reconnaissance aircraft on Patrol is the single most important thing in order to not die in the first 15 minutes.
...later on everybody eventualy died in Nuclear Holocaust when we tried to oversaturate the Anti-Nuke-Launchers of each other with tripple diggits of Nukes.
...Good old times...
OH my God... You gave us the best resume of TA ever. Thank you my good sir.
That was my late game build one game against a roommate. I launched a nuke at him, and he shouts back from across the living room, “I built anti-nukes, Matt.”
I calmly asked him, “yes, but how many?”
Then I launch another nuke. And another. And another. I had built a row of six nuke silos with multiple nukes each. Turns out he had one anti-nuke launched and had shift-clicked on it once, so he had five anti-nukes.
Good times.
@@korivakvehiclesims3341 Good times... Good times.
Or you could, you know, build a radar and pay attention to the minimap. Picking up your enemy's commander was a perfectly fair strategy because everyone knew it could be done and it was their own fault if they allowed it to happen.
ComBombing usually got you blackballed from the communities back in the day. MSN Gaming Zone & MPlayer especially.
This was one of the top 3 strategy games of my childhood. loved it
Hey Spiff, Fall 2023 now and I still love this game. Epic soundtrack to boot! Thanks for all the great content you provide. Looking forward to the next one!
im playing it right now
immagine playing videos game and your goal is find way to exploit the game :D back in the day we had no such thing as idiot doin that@@thegun7701
December 23rd 2024 here in Adelaide and I still play it.
"One of the most broken games ever created". Yes, and that's why we love it.
In the world of gaming there's a concept called 'Perfect Imbalance' - Extra Credits did a video about it.
Right? Not every game has to be perfectly balanced
it's always amazing how you can stretch 3 minutes of content into 30 minutes of rambling.
"hey guys, in total annihilation you can use transports to pick up enemy commanders. how about that, eh?" => spaghetti machine => video
bonus points for mentioning over and over there are a 100 different bugs and exploits and only actually demonstrating 2 (well, 1.5 really) in all of the video's runtime.
Took him like 5mins to actually get into the game play...
I mean, he missed the other feature of LR artillery - which is aiming at one of your own aircraft to also get extra gloriously inaccurate range
Even better with the expansions rapid fire artillery
Truee. Though welcome to spiffs content.
1.3333333 maybe?
Still amazing music to this day! SpringRTS is the open source engine that has a bit of a community there.
I remember having LAN and playing this game with my friends all night long, those were the days
This game is and has always been a treasure.
*Takes a sip of water while browsing through subscription feed*
*Sees Total Annihilation*
*Laptop now shooting sparks and covered in water*
Sees Spiffing Brit
water has suddenly turned into tea, and the laptop is enjoying it.
0:35
"more palatable"
*USES COMIC SANS*
Chaotic evil
“... looks about as appetizing as deep-fried butter.”
*stomach growls loudly in American*
Fr. Gonna go get some now. Ahhh. Us butter sluts here in the states.
John Townsend is flipping through his recipes from the 1700s. (And checking to see if he has enough nutmeg for it!)
Seriously, deep fried butter just looks like a pastry. You probably wouldn't even know what's in it.
Five straight minutes talking about how it's broken before we get to see anything. We get it. Love you Spiff!
I remember the one where you selected a construction unit, paused the game selected the the commander, unpause and your commander would have the new upgraded construction building. So many holes. Great game.
I've played Total Annihilation off and on for dozens of years! BOOYAH!
Also, I'd love to see more exploits in Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, or the follow on game Planetary Annihilation!
Supreme Commander!
Supreme commander 2 on xbox is full of bugs
Fun fact, both factions the "arm" and the "core" have slightly different units. Some of which are op and an exploit in themselves. But! You can use a transport to kid nap a enemy construction bot/vehicle and then use your commander to "capture" it. This allows you to build both types of units from both factions and gain access to the best of both sides.
reminds me of what used to do with protoss in brood war. It wasnt efficient, but holy crap was it fun since it had a different unit cap for EACH race
@@SeraphRyan Which in itself made it kind of efficient if the game took long enough.
@@SeraphRyan "When do I push with siege tanks in a PvT?"
Thanks to this I managed to get Krogoths as an Arm player.
Also, barring a few exceptions, one of them is significantly better than the other.
Idea: spiff and other exploiters get in a civ six game and see who can win via exploits
Survival of the cheatest.
I am no gamer but I was a kid in the 90s obsessed with this game.
Literally the best rts of all times. Funny how I was playing this game both vanilla and moded for decades, and haven't seen even a single exploit, okay maybe a couple, I definitively remember the artillery's range exploit and aircraft going out of screen.
Oh god my nightmares of "Commander Bombs" will come back and haunt me! I suppressed those with my psychiatrist long ago, now I'll have to go and see him again!
Or getting peewee rushed on my pentium 200 w/ 32 megs of ram, it would sometimes crash my game
@@Iregretthispost Ah, but it wasn't just any old Pentium. It was a Pentium with MMX! With a 2 GB hard drive, and running Win98. Not sure why GOG is overinflating the minimum specs there.
I'm still playing this on my Steam account, with the expansion pack. The best thing I love about this game is adding custom units and structures, giving some bad ass resource gathering, and some very very very OP units, that once one is built, it can take on everything on the map, and there is no stopping it, short of another one fighting back.
I start my game by hiding behind a wall of dragons teeth, so the AI can stack up and have absolutely no idea how to fight me. Then I just place some rocket towers down to protect against occasional air attacks, and work on building my resources before building a Karganath, a custom bigger brother to the Krogoth. Once built, it's game over for the enemy.
Hey Spiff, "Total Annihilation: Kingdoms" was literally my entire childhood. Could you... take a closer look, and maybe... just maybe... destroy my childhood? xD (I doubt you'll ever see that comment tho... x.x)
Yes please do this. The game is amazing and nobody likes it for some reason
This is still one of my favourite games ever. Going to check out kingdoms. Only played TA.
Yes please, I wanna see the "stealing every enemy unit" exploit covered
@@mzleviathan4626 I recommend trying out Aramon. Trebuchets are pretty OP
Bartok oh cool thank you. I will look into it! I’ve been playing a lot of TA again recently and was excited to see this video pop up! The only other person I know that played this game is my father 😂
So how many cheats/bugs are there in Total Annihilation.
Us Old Farts "YES!!!"
I have found memories of me getting home from elementary school for lunch, quickly shoving my meal in the microwave then rush to the computer to launch the game, get back down stair to get my food, then spend the 20 minutes I had playing this wonderful game while eating my warm meal. Good times 👍
"Transports shouldn't be allowed to pick up enemy units"
Why not? It worked wonders, didn't it?
Yeah and in real life snipping officers and abducting leaders shouldnt be possible. Sure illegal but it is still possible especially for those who dont follow the rules.
Used to do this with multiple enemy units and construction units so I could capture them for the lolz
Its a similar scheme to the germans sending a few commandos and a storch to grab musollini from allied captivity isnt it?
Free units!
I'm still kinda okay with that level of freedom... With maybe the addition that the commander just falls and lands with minor damage after you free it from the transport. Call it durability.
When everything is broken and unbalanced, nothing is
-Yoda from Star Trek and the philosophical stone
I remember as a child, I played "Emperor: Battle for Dune" and loved it. But I also got absolutely wrecked by the AI in any of the campaigns.
Tried for ages to either learn strategies or find exploits, but I was little more than a precocious sprog at the time. It has been ages since I played it, so I might have better luck now.
If the mood strikes you, I'd like to see what sorts of exploits you are able to discover. Cheers!
So... the LAST dune game... i played Dune 2... The father of modern RTS... Lol I hope the new dune movie allows for new Dune games
Loved the 1992 Dune, a weird strategy game
Most well known BALANCED thing about Emperor is certainly the ixian holo projector tank, which can create free, infinite, 1 hitpoint copies of anything that still can deal damage.
@@akondar Weird combo of RTS and RPG... I miss it actually... wanna play according to the books... see if it turns out the same
For house ordos and the executrix!
I am actually part of the very small Total Annihilation community that is still alive. I'm not all too active but I did see your video.
The game itself actually has a community made "Beta" patch which attempts to fix many of the issues with the game. Increasing AI stability, removing as many exploits as possible, attempting to optimize it for newer computer, and other fun stuff like a Mega Map like you see in Command and Conquer or Supreme Commander.
There are many many community made units that you can download as well as community made maps. Additionally there are mods with the biggest and most active mode being Total Annihilation Escalation and luckily for you you CANNOT pick up enemy commanders with a transport as the mod fixes that issue right off the bat and it's the highest quality mod.
Sadly there are limits to what the community was able to fix with the Beta Patch as we don't have TA's source code (Note I'm not a modder but I did make some custom units) which is owned by Wargaming. Regardless you should try the game out again with the Beta Patch + Total Annihilation Escalation. It's basically TA 2.0 at that point. Also the AI are brutally hard on the highest difficulty.
You can talk smack all you want TA is still the greatest war strategy PC that ever came out
I used to play this game so much as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was to quickly grab all the NPC commanders and then build up my own forces and base to the highest degree, and then release the commanders, effectively giving myself an hour long head start.
When nothing is balanced... everything will be.
"Total Annihilation: Kingdoms" version (the "reskin"!) is my favourite RTS for the single-player story campaign, it takes you through loads of stuff, from all the different factions, seeing things from each angle as you go along, and tieing it all together, with a huge variety. Also the graphics (in-game, not menu!) still hold out really well at high-def today, without any mods or anything!
Even without exploiting, the 'balance' and mechanics in kingdoms were utterly busted though. In Original TA if you played everything straight the two factions were pretty even, kingdoms was a complete joke in that regard. The story was kind of nice but I personally don't like the switching perspectives, it's one of the main things I dislike about Disciples, for example.
Bro that was my childhood
I really liked the "sequel", while not as popular as the original game, I had a lot of fun with Kingdoms as they took risks with very asymmetrical factions, and the unit veterancy feature which made me micromanage my veteran units simply because they had a visual difference to green units.
You sir are my hero, this game was a huge part of my gaming childhood.
I am a proud pioneer of the atlas stealing their units , you can actually steal the giant Core super weapon for the Arm by grabbing it with an atlas, and converting it with a construction bot
Sseth managed to single handedly bring games into the trending charts, its criminal he has less than 1 million subscribers
Hey, Spiffy! Me and my girlfrind, brother and father still play this game to this day and have only last year started to play it with the Escalation mod, which is really fun! Glad to see someone play this in 2020!
I used to love this game. A friend had a telephone-directory-sized strategy guide for it and all. Though if memory serves, I think there's actually an option in the game menus to turn on two-button mouse commands, which makes right-clicking the context orders and left-clicking on empty space clear selection. It's just toggled off by default since one-button interfaces were the norm at the time.
this is true
Yarp - basic gaming 101: check the options before playing.
@@coeusdarksoul2855 one of the very many basic things Spiffing Brit failed to do in this video. It's nice to see coverage of Total Annihilation, a game I still play all these years later. It would be even better to see an ACCURATE video about Total Annihilation.
I used to play Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and I can't believe It is actually vintage stuff now.
its been so long since i played it i can barely remember it
I remember that you could download new units from their site back in the day. CORE had a Necro bot which was a great way to steal ARM tech. Kill a construction unit, then repair the wreckage to make it your own. It even came with a stealth bubble!
I had so much fun with this game over the years, thanks for the trip down memory lane. :)
I'm three years late to this party but I still remember when we figured out that you could pick up other people's commanders with a transport plane at a LAN party. We all learned very quickly to build at least one rocket turret very early in our build queues!
this was one of my absolute faves as a kid. so many cheesy strategies
I asked before and you responded, but I still need to see it My Lord: break DoW Dark Crusade. Because it is amazingly well balanced. And the NoLimit mod actually maintains balance... mostly.
Id be fascinated to see you do it! Last time I posted this request, got a couple thousand likes. So, please 🥰 ruin my happy highschool memories!
It's funny you should mention this - When in got the first DoW it had a seal on the front quoting 'the best RTS since Total Annihilation' and that's what sold it to me :)
And that doesn't even touch on all the mods that this game had. Thousands of custom units. This game soaked a lot of hours from my childhood!
Indeed. Remember Spring? LoL ^_^
The Krogath I think was a really cool robot mega unit.
Yeah, I remember websites that would look like a microtransaction store, but you'd just download the custom unit if you liked the way it looked. There was stats and everything.
There are still 3 or 4 mods still actively being developed for Total Annihilation, and an active community (somehow spiff missed this, along with a bunch of other things)
Total Annihilation, the Best RTS ever created. I have much more than 3000h on this game, and I play it since 1997.
I was just playing this game in May! I bought it for all my close friends on Steam and we played against each other! :) I used to play this game when I was little, I'm so happy you did a video on this game!
I used to play the shit out of this game growing up.
Ikr? Absolutely loved it then, still do now actually
@@pyrenviii3053 TA forever.
Same
Ah man I thought I was the only one in that time
Fist game that I ever had mods for. It was probably the first game that had mods.
I used to play this multiplayer back when it came out. The air transport didn't really work well vs real players as it was easy to counter. The biggest cheese I remember was doing a flash rush. The flash was a fast little super cheap tank with a minigun. You could micro to dodge a lot of enemy projectiles and do huge damage as the minigun was hard to miss with.
20 Min no rush anyone? :D
Forget Flash rush, it's all about the Flea rush. When I introduced my brother to multiplayer in this game I took his Commander out with a single Flea running circles faster than the Commander's gun could track. I then told him we could turn off the "game ends" option if the commander dies and he agreed. Then I introduced him to Atlas bombs :)
@@thrdeye7304 ?! Fleas do a tiny amount of damage. With the commander's self-repair it would take forever to do this. Plenty enough time to build a single samson or missile tower or laser tower...
@@JamesFaction Or to build another unit to come over and help. He didn't though, and the Flea's laser does outdamage the Commander's self repair. He was also trying to D-Gun it so between that and whatever he was building (if anything) he may have been bottoming out on energy thus slowing the self repair. I honestly don't think he thought the Flea could possibly win the matchup (to be fair I didn't either) so he just kept trying to hit it until I eventually wore him down. Fun times.
i always just spammed like 10 bombers and had them repeatedly carpet bomb the enemy commander right from the start. pretty much always worked
pee wee rush for me , but same thing
Ah yes. That classic Japanese history of *SUDOKU*.
You Sir are the best, funniest master troll I have come across in a decade. Hats off to You!
I've never commented here Brit, but I seriously love your channel and tho I'm not sure for how long I've been subscribed, I watch you got some years already, now about TotalA, I used to play it with my father when I was younger, we used to go 2v2 with AIs via LAN years ago, when GOG gave the game for free, we HAD to play it again, and so we're doing it! It's been a nostalgic blast, also didn't know most of the exploits you mentioned here xD
AIs are sometimes confused indeed but they do play well both on Normal and Hard, I would guess that even on Easy they grow infinitely, that which makes them op (besides being able to see the entire map), I still love this game, wish they made a sequel, but there's things like Planetary Annihilation out there, anyways, keep up the good work Brit! Love your content ;)
TA is a perfect example of that age-old adage; "it's a feature, not a bug."
"I think my units are all drunk."
"..slow unit response is a key part of formulating strategy, so you can't just steam roll an enemy with one click."
"Oh, so it's a part of the actual game?"
"......yes."
"Cool!"
"Yessss..."
One of the best musical scores I've ever heard in a game.
TA had a vibrant competitive multiplayer community for a solid 15 years and is still played today, which is a strong testament to how balanced the gameplay actually ended up being in practice (tho in many ways the devs didn't originally intend).
As someone who's played this in 2020, this game is pure nostalgia at this point for me. Used to play LAN with some buddies back in the day. I remember we used some wicked mods for the game where the AI would learn how to play better based on what you did. We used to play with Commander Death not ending the game so my one bud would do this thing where he'd build 10+ nuke silos and have them all primed with a missle. Then when ready, he'd launch them all almost at once to different points of the enemy base effectively carpet nuking the AI. Well the next game, his AI did the exact same thing to us! I didn't know about a bunch of these exploits but I almost never played the base game (always had CC and some other bug-fixing mods downloaded). Planetary Annihilation is a pretty good modern remake of TA if anyone is looking.
I kind of want to try that AI script.
Total Annihilation Kingdoms was one of my first ever RTS and holds a special place in my memories... I'd love to see Spiffing show the world how PERFECTLY BALANCED it is!
nice vid hope you see this cause i think you do a great job at everything you do so keep at it even with discouraging comments keep going you'll do even better
Spiff: "...and consequently looks about as appetizing as deep-fried butter."
Americans: That screen doesn't look like a Paula Deen dish...
Fried butter on a stick is actually a real thing in 'Murricah' 😂
@@c0278x as an american i apologize for the bastardization of cuisine that is deep fried butter on a stick.
@@duhitzkyr63 hey, it just proves you can deepfry anything 😂👍🏻
Hey Spiff, take a look at Zero-K, its based on Total Annihilation fan made alternative engine called springs, ist now a standalone game, and its on steam!
Damn, spring, i vaguely remember that when it was some kind of TA-inspired mod/game/thing. Damn i feel old. :(
Absolutely! While I think Zero-K is actually pretty well balanced, there are so many whacky and interesting units that Spiff will certainly find something overpowered :D
And the game is just great.
@@re11wind Oh yeah... I remember "TASpring". It used to be a way to play TA on modern machines, I think.
The good old Win 95 and 98 - era games had a really hard time running on XP. They never seemed to work well
"What's the name of the game?"
"Total Annihilation"
"So how do you win?"
"You kill the other teams' Commander."
"...so what's the name of the game again?"
I did love playing "Total Annihilation Kingdoms" back in the day.
Forget trebuchets. Best exploit was with Stone Giants. They had limitless range of throwing rocks.
Zhon storyline with Thirsha the Huntress was the best. Yet creating every single unit by select and drop to create, was a nightmare.
great game! Zhon was the coolest faction but my favorite strategy was using Taros' Mind Mage and capturing builders from every other faction in order to create the ultimate army!
Guys, just find this video on UA-cam: "Total Annihilation Kingdoms Review | Shared Suffering™" ;-)
It is fine to take the enemy commander, it's a proper strategy. No reason we should have arbitrary rules about what you can or can't load. As for the game success, Star Craft came around a few month later and it took all players away, not really because of bugs or AI problem (we had mods for that already)
Hard to argue with that. It's not "Limited Political Annihilation", it's "TOTAL ANNIHILATION".
I would love watching you searching for an exploit in Planetary Annihilation : Titans, a really cool RTS.
0:29 looks about as appetizing as deep fried butter
Someone's clearly never been to the Iowa State Fair. Deep Fried Butter is actually delicious
Found the obese american
@@Ganara426 say what you will. It's good.
The modded version of the game Total Annihilation Escalation has an active community and a discord. Still being updated and developed today. The mod fixes many of the issues mentioned here (including planes flying offscreen and still attacking).
"Cemented a nice stable future for the Command & Conquer series."
Command & Conquer is from 1995, Total Annihilation is from 1997.
The precursor of C&C is Dune 2 from 1992.
To be honest, compared to other strategy games, Total Annihilation is *designed* to have an absolute metric shit-ton of units to sling against the enemy, to the point map-wide artillery just shoots at each other until one land the lethal Commander shot. Still one of the best strategy games in my opinion. Planetary Annihilation wished it would be this game lol
I remember doing a wall of artillery pieces ( the simple tier 2 defense one) followed by a wall of rocket towers plus 1/2 nuke defenses, then I grabbed myself a drink and watched the AI slam a metric shit ton of units onto a immovable wall. Some games I had a 5000 to 3 unit loss.
Total Annihilation is such a pure RTS, so far ahead of its time, and one of my all time favorites. I love how I can command a construction unit to patrol-reclaim the husks of the dead for metal, or entire forests for energy. I love how the polygon based units explode into bits of shrapnel which then bounce off the terrain. The game engine really is amazing, it had 3d terrain and true line of sight in 1997, you can hide your units in craters for protection or build turrets on top of mountains for additional range. You can track units and their projectile's trajectory by pressing T. There's tons of downloadable units, endless maps and total conversions. There's a mod to zoom out similar to Supreme Commander, only not as terrible. If you're into voodoo and black magic, I've even seen hex edits for totala.exe to add useful features.
dz187 and this is the reason I’ve never gotten into another RTS. They all seemed so basic in terms of controls in comparison. Like C&c you had to click the buildings every time you wanted a unit, but in TA you could queue up vast amounts of various units which were built in the correct order, then they would do all the commands you had given to the building such as, move, patrol, or attack. And you could again queue up a huge list of commands.
It was also a head of its time using directX which meant as long as DX supported the resolution so did TA. My original copy had the option, and worked fine using resolutions that had not even been dreamt of when the game was coded. Something that most old games don’t do.
Amazing game.
@@Riotlight Yeah, Total Annihilation was a game so ahead of it's time that RTS games basically played catch up until... roughly Supreme Commander coming out? So, 1997 to 2007 or so at the very least, a literal decade ahead of it's time.
“So many exploits that I don’t know all of them”
GASP! *clutches pearls!*
It's probably worth mentioning that there's a pinned topic in the Steam forums for Total Annihilation, that gives a guide on how to get the game updated, play online, and links to a very nice re-balance mod called Total Annihilation: Escalation, which makes tons of changes and adds lots of new stuff besides.
I loved playing this game a ton growing up, and it's always great to see someone do a video on it, especially one That's Perfectly Balanced With No Exploits!
I sometimes still boot up this game to play just for nostalgia sake. The narrator in the opening and during the mission briefing was GODLIKE for my child self and I loved every bit of it. Plus this game effectively turned me into a robot enthusiast(along with Warcraft 2 narrator and gameplay turning me into a medieval and fantasy history aficionado). The sound effects and how things moved were marvelous and fascinating. A big shout out to everyone else who also played this game and fell in love with the RTS genre.
At this point it wouldn't surprise if Spiff started unearthing games that have been considered "lost media" since the dawn of time just because he remembered there was a game he didn't exploit yet.
TA was huge when i was a kid. Every couple of years i revisit it, always brings back the nostolgia
Total annihilation needs a remake damn it!
PA is effectively a remake of TA.
It's a terrible one, but it's basically the same game.
@@bblvrable no, it isn't. It's not even close
Ah yes, the game when they had put victory conditions so Commanders aren't 5 minute nukes.
TA>Starcraft. Change my mind.
I would, and luckily I have this Giant Mech suit that is nuclear powered to put it in. Just watch out for the troop transports.
If commander kills aren't the end of the game, then the cheese strategy changes to "drop your own commander into the enemy base as fast as possible". If you see the enemy commander within the enemy base, you can have your commander run up and fire his D-Gun to obliterate the enemy commander in one hit as long as your energy isn't too low.
The primary source of balance for Total Annihilation is the similarity between Core and Arm forces, but really if you want to prevent unfair cheese, just make both players use the same units.
Why would we ever want to change your mind? :)
I remember buying this game new and playing it since 1997. The units that were made as downloads from Cavedog and others were insane. Thanks for the nostalgia!