Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation is the 1997 real-time strategy game from Cavedog Entertainment, designed under Chris Taylor, and the first RTS to put fully articulated 3D units and 3D terrain on screen. The lore is built around a four-thousand-year war between the Core — a humanity that has merged with machines via consciousness patterning — and the Arm, the rebel colonies who refused to leave their biological bodies behind. Both sides have effectively destroyed the galaxy fighting each other; what's left is now ruined battlefields and irreconcilable hatred.

The base game shipped with more than 150 units per side — aircraft, amphibious tanks, kbots, vehicles, hovercraft, ships, submarines, factories, stationary defences, long-range weapons — and 25 missions per faction across grasslands, forests, deserts, archipelagos, lava, ice, metal, crystal, acid and moons. The Core Contingency expansion added 75 more units (including the notorious Krogoth), 50 maps, 25 missions and six new world types; Battle Tactics added another four units, six maps and a hundred more missions; a final 3.1c patch added six more units, including a resurrection kbot, and is bundled with this Steam release.

Mechanically the game built around variables that genre contemporaries didn't bother with — gravity, tides, wind, radar and sonar coverage, cloaking and stealth, and the option to revive destroyed units from their wreckage. The community kept the engine alive long after Cavedog folded, producing thousands of unit mods, hundreds of maps, total conversions, complex scripted features like mass unit transports, instant teleportation and true shields, and a competitive online and skirmish scene that some players have never left.