A Land Mark for RTS Gaming
Ahead of it's time with it's 3D engine and (for the time) intelligent AI Total Annihilation was a land mark RTS game that took us out of the 2D age of economy management simulators that came before it. It's single player campaign was a simple good vs bad of two races seeking to completely eliminate each other from the galaxy but it's gameplay was where the uniqueness lay. Like other RTS games you advanced through tech trees but instead of a simple rock/paper/scissors system of balancing the CORE and the ARM differentiad each other through simple nuances in similar units. For instance the KBOT for the CORE would be the quick hitter first strike unit that had the speed to rush the enemy but the ARM counterpart had an edge in fire power to compensate for it's lack in speed. It's other key feature was that it didn't focus on the economical management of your base and infastructure like WarCraft or other RTS's of the time instead it was more about map control in the form of resources as the resouces you collected were brought passively into your war machine through extractors without the micromanagement of workers.
Overall this was a finely balanced game that brought the world of 3D to RTS games and did it damn well. It wasn't until 10 years later that we saw its true sucessor the pseudo-sequel Supreme Commander in 2007 which followed closely in it's predecessors footsteps.
