Tactical Annihilation

I haven’t played the original Total Annihilation but I’ve played a lot of Beyond All Reason and a bit of Supreme Commander, and I’ve played a decent amount of Advanced Wars and recent indie inspired versions. So when I saw an indie game on my Steam Calendar:tm: I was excited to try a mashup between the two genres.

Unfortunately, when you take two things and combine them, sometimes you end up with the worst of both worlds. I think it’s very hard to combine these two gameplay styles, they are sort of diametrically opposed. Turn based games are more inherently tactical, which means precise unit placement and unit choice is emphasized, while large scale RTS are more strategic, emphasizing more the long term decision making and economy build out. Props to the devs for trying but here’s where I think things went wrong:

• Clunky economy: TacAnn clearly took inspiration from SC and earlier games where the economy is heavily focused on microing builders. This is even more clunky than those old games because builders have to be directly next to the thing they’re building, so oftentimes a builder spends more turns moving around to get to the right spot to build than building. This problem also becomes annoying when you’re trying to have 10 builders collab on one super unit - the unit blueprint is so large that it takes a few turns for builders to position themselves. This clunkyness may be intended as a way to prevent snowballing, but snowballing your economy is why those RTS games are fun and there are alternative ways to prevent snowballing.
• Box select movement is not that good when most units don’t have many move points: Box select in a turn based game seems like a great idea, but in practice it doesn’t work very well when some units can’t move the maximum number of moves because of traffic jams and it just doesn’t feel good to use. As a result, you end up moving every unit individually anyways and it gets tiring to move so many.
• Built in rock paper scissors mechanics (armor vs anti armor vs no armor): I personally feel like this goes against what those large scale RTS games stand for. RPS mechanics are a good match for games where you have few units but not when it’s a game where you are spamming units.

I guess I was expecting the game to cater to me - someone who plays a lot of RTS and some turn based games on the side. Instead it’s probably better for someone who plays a lot of turn based and a little RTS.