Total Annihilation IS A PERFECTLY BALANCED GAME WITH NO EXPLOITS - Everything Is Broken In This RTS 

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The moment Spiff said airport I smiled because my memory recalled how many friend commanders I've stolen and taken hostage on 1v1. ;D

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.

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...

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!

Me: *has played this game regularly since its release* Spiff: *releases a TA video* "PLEASE BABY DON'T HURT ME"

Idea: spiff and other exploiters get in a civ six game and see who can win via exploits

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.

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 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 used to play Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and I can't believe It is actually vintage stuff now.

Total annihilation needs a remake damn it!

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.

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 always loved the cheesy OP custom units you could add. Like the custom big bertha that launched nuclear warheads, the alien reactor that basically gives unlimited power, cloaking, and OP air defense.

Total Annihilation was the 3rd RTS game I played back in 97, following C&C/Red Alert and was my defacto go to game for RTS cheese. Most of my cousins played this game back then and not one of them could beat me in it, and I'm still quite a formidable opponent in RTS games as few of my friends are willing to battle me after a Starcraft Broodwar 1v7 match that ended with me teasing them leaving only the bare minimum units/resources to attempt a comeback

Still playing it to this day with Absolute Annihilation mod.

Dark Reign: The Future War. Not very well known but a gem

Long-time TA player, still going to this day. Some things you may find interesting. The ability for transports to pick up enemy units is very intentional, as it makes a some of the campaign missions _much_ more bearable. These are the missions where you start with just your commander in enemy territory and have to capture units to proceed. Yes, you can pick up an enemy unit, fly it over to your commander, and then capture it with complete impunity. Maybe being able to pick up commanders was not the greatest idea though. (Or maybe it was?) Tbh, there should have been a flag to disable picking up enemies in multiplayer. Even if you can't get hold of the enemy commander you can build crawling bombs, and use ctrl-D to set them off. Requires a good judge for timing though. (Just shooting them down doesn't set them off iirc.) This also works with the transport ship & hover which can carry several units, which if explosive in nature generates a somewhat amusing event with lots of "confetti". Aircraft are slightly unbalanced in another way: They can stack infinitely. It's not so much of a big deal for fighters and such, as almost all RTSes stack air units. But where it falls to pieces is the construction aircraft. You can build so many of them that you can either repair a beefy unit so fast it almost (but not quite) becomes immortal. Or you can build units much faster by having them all assist the same factory (or other construction unit). And you can have as many of them as you like, as they take up effectively no space while they're flying. When the game first came out the internet was cups and string, and made funny noises at you when you connected to it. As a result the network connectivity for this game's multiplayer was not stellar, and it was trivially easy to lag it so hard it would induce the effect mentioned in this video. And you didn't even need to do anything other than play the game as intended, just pick a specific team. You picked ARM. And then you built as many Flash tanks or Peewee bots as you could. What so special about these? Well, they're fairly cheap which is nice. But the real reason is that they're armed with the Energy Machine Gun, or EMG, which fires lots of little blobs really quickly. And your sub-potato computer _HATED_ it as it struggled to keep up with rendering hundreds upon hundreds of blob bullets being slowly drip fed through your slowly smouldering modem. "Flash Rushing" didn't make you any friends on most of the multiplayer hosts until broadband took off. And then it became just another "strat". You can also make submarines shoot torpedoes out of the water like fishy mortars using the same range exploit as shown with the Bertha in this. And I'm fairly sure there's a way to make bombers drop a _lot_ more bombs than they're supposed to, but I don't recall exactly. Hiding your commander in some tiny puddle somewhere was always amusing. Especially when the patch came out and you could build decoys.

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 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!

This game was one of my childhood game and the first RTS I had. That's the game I started learning engish for since everything from the game was in english even the manual... At the time we couldn't load the skirmish map where it's a full city (we called it chocolate bar) because we didn't have enough memory on our blue colored apple computer. I remember sneaking on my brothers when they were playing to hit "ctrl + D" while they were controlling their commander (they did the same) the stress you had when you failed to notice it in the first 3 sec of the countdown. Also remember that you could the install CD into your radio and it would play the games music. And when I discovered that you could pick up the enemy commander I was blown away. And I remember discovering that you could shoot farther with the big bertha, remember to hit "t" when using it to see where the shots land and adjust it ;) I probably have a ton more memory about it that I could share...

Hay spif I was only playing this yesterday lol I've been out of reach of your content for a wile but love the fact you haven't changed I'm gonna go and look back and see what I've missed out on 😊👍 keep it up and may queen countrie and tea ever be on your side

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).

I replay this or its successor Supreme Commander once in a while ... I never knew for these exploits, but I utterly loved the main campaign. Seeing your hundreds of units descend upon the enemy base is one of greater joys in gaming :)

Spiff have you ever considered a vid on "Gothic"? Arguably the most broken rpg game with a cult following?

You're one of the few youtubers who actually manage to insert an ad without being obnoxious!

Ten Billion Trillion Infinities of Thumbs up for you. You Finally found my favorite RTS of all time.

Spiff: "...and consequently looks about as appetizing as deep-fried butter." Americans: That screen doesn't look like a Paula Deen dish...

I used to play this a lot. It was one of my favorite games along with Age of Empires 2. I don't know man, that whole picking up a commander thing never struck me as an exploit, more like a skill check. Are you good enough to not have your commander just "yoinked" right at the start. haha anyways good vid man.

I used to simply make piles of the Brawler aircraft. They circle strafe their enemy firing continuously. 95% of the units in the game could not reliably hit anything circle strafing them.

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!

"Let's make this intro screen more palatable" *uses Comic Sans* DAMN YOU SPIFF

Bought total annihilation yesterday to relive my childhood days and man didn't even think of the transport exploit lol thank you for doing this video

Thanks for reminding me of my own mortality by drudging up a game from my childhood's childhood. Good looking out Spiff.

This game was a lot of fun back in the day. It is the grandaddy of Supreme Commander, had one of the best music of any strategy game ever made, by Jeremy Soule (who would later make the music for Skyrim) and like the Spiffing Brit already said, it is available on both STEAM and Good Old Games, where you can buy it for cheap. DO SO NOW!

19:55 “told them to commit sudoku” I think you meant to say seppuku 😂

I played the hell out of this game when I was a kid. My favorite thing to do is to kidnap enemy units (workers ideally) with transport aircraft and bring them to the commander to hack. Build enemy buildings. Win.

I would LOVE to see Metal Fatigue at some point

Yes, it's broke, but *_is this so broken, Spiff doesn't even need the power of Tea to exploit it?_*

I did like how you put in a bunch about the history of RTSs

Still one of the best games ever. Still playing it 20 years later.

Me: Sees that the A.I.'s colors make a Hungarian flag. Also me:*happy Hungarian noises*

Total Annihilation was the most fun RTS I ever played, as a non-RTS fan that is, it was just so bonkers to see all the units and the amazing weapons like the Big Bertha or Vulcan.

T.A, wow it's been a while since I saw that game. It was fun, but when I remember me back as the game come out, it was completely broken. The enemy does crazy things at all: From chasing weak units, so you could kite a whole army and you minions scrap them to dust. Or the enemy commander walks right into your base and got shred. The base was lost, but "victory" was yours. It was wacky / funny as hell.

Game from my childhood! That was a memorable game.

I remember back in the late 90s, some kids putting this game side by side with Starcraft and Red Alert. And then only remembering every couple of years that this existed but I never hear of it.

I found this game at a Dollar Tree store in 2005 and it was bonkers. For the most part I didn't even build things and used the commander to do all the heavy lifting in combat.

Fun fact Jeremy Soule did the music for this game. Looks like no matter what The Spiffing Brit does, Todd Howard is just around the corner.

I liked this video before I even started watching it. TA is one of my all time favourite games and my introduction to RTS.

I often captured an arm builder (plays core) and build a massive army of both factions. Core with expansion was way to OP

It's nothing too crazy of an exploit and has since been patched out, but I remember in one of the Astroneer patches early on in the Early Access stages you could have your character sit in a chair designed for one of the moon buggies, then click to pick the chair up with your character still sitting in it, and you could move the chair anywhere you wanted, including lifting it off the surface of the planet and into space, or even all the way to other planets. Since the chairs were the part of vehicles that provided life support to your character it would even provide you oxygen while you were sitting in it, meaning that with the power of chairs attached to nothing you could explore the entire galaxy without ever needing anything else to survive provided you get back in the chair periodically to refill your air and energy.

FYI in emperor battle for dune, you can use transports to pick up enemy units as well, not just in total annihilation

As someone who plays Planetary Annihilation, it's really cool to see where it came from. And how entirely broken the original game was.

19:55 I do love it when people commit Sudoku XD

For a modernized experience with vastly improved UI, graphics, balance and unit limit... And easily 150-200 players online at any time in any timezone (Not counting passworded servers) - at the moment theres 10 filled up 8v8 servers and several smaller ones... Try Beyond all Reason, BAR. Its the successor to a spring-engine based TA mod called Balanced Annhilation.

Yeah, I still play this game. Got my first copy for free with a pre-built Pentium 2 PC in 97 and it’s still great fun. Don’t even need exploits, just play the Core faction and build a few “Krogoth” Kbots - they’re basically invincible giant mechs that can vaporise any Arm unit or structure with one shot. No kidding, this was just in the game, no exploits they just though that sort of thing was fine. I miss the 90s...

If you want a free and open-source version of this game, play Zero-K, it's the same but in 3D with tons of unit branches and minus the exploits of course (or is it?). Really it's an awesome game, and it's fun to see its inspiration comes all the way back to 1997

Grew up with this game, easily the game that got me into RTS. I loved the mods you could get for this game, i wonder if they still exist. Like the Belezeebub mega mech that was like the size of 50 commanders and its auto attack fired nukes.....good times

Don't forget the Core Contingency expansion that introduced the Krogoth and the Vulcan Canon, both of which were rude gestures to balance.

TA nukes were awesome! The whole screen shook! Compare that to Red Alerts nukes that barely scratched the paint on buildings and killed maybe two trash units. I remember playing this at a friends house the first time as a kid, without knowing any english. We saw a robot with a huge barrel ontop of it and reasoned that must be the best robot, it clearly throws huge bombs. So we build a ton of those best robots and attack the enemy. But the robots dont do anything and just get destroyed. Many years later I learned it was the radar jammer robot... Good times. But even with its flaws TA was lightyears ahead of many RTS's made even today. Shift click linking orders was awesome, the ammount of units you could have (upto thousands if your hardware could take it), the mods were insane, the immense range of artillery and destruction of the nukes all made the TA superior to pretty much all other RTS's of the time.

In the original Red Alert you could edit the ini files with a hex editor and make a spy run around with a Tesla coil, C4 and more. Also you could increase unit range etc. :P

Alright Spiff, would love an exploit video on Medieval Total War 2. It's far too majestic to have not had a video on it.

I've had this on Steam for a couple years, it's... really old, but I've managed to enjoy it, even though it's almost as old as I am. There's also the free game on Steam ZeroK, which is basically a remake of this one, complete with some of the exploits you've shown, but with a lot more features and units.

And while spif is still talking, i ordered 320 bags of yorkshire tea.

I loved TA never thought the kidnapping of enemy commanders was cheesy tho... they could do the same lol

I used to play this game multiplayer with a few friends. What I always found hilarious was to put SAM sites in my allies base, claiming I would help with the air defence. However the SAM missiles had a low firing arch but long range, which meant when ever an enemy plane came near the SAM site would fire off a constant stream of missiles. However these missiles would collide with the allied buildings and do vast amounts of damage! Lmao. Most of the time they didn’t realise it was the friendly SAM doing the damage. Lollop lol. But boy were they mad when they figured it out! Had my Dutch friend raging at me for a while!!! (SAMs were part of one of the expansion packs. And I used to load up TA every now and again for a game against some OP cheating AI until just a few years ago. It was one of the games that I never uninstalled from my system. Unfortunately I got a new PC a couple of years ago and haven’t bothered to install it again) I have many amazing memories of playing TA, all of which come flooding back when I listen to the amazing soundtrack. Quite possibly the best game music ever imo. I’m happy to of spend my teenage years playing TA.

Ah a throwback to my childhood, Im surprised I picked up on it as a kid and abused the hell out of using their nuke against them

Story wise, it's not AI versus humans. It's people who downloaded their brains onto computers versus regular humans.

"If you want a free bombing run without worrying about enemy attack, you can fly him off the map and loop around" yeah, that still happens even in FAF

that deep frie butter analogy falls flat on american ears, where thats basically our diet.

Build a dragon teeth wall. Almost indestructible base defence. Such a great game back in the day :)

I love this game. I bought it back when it originally released; me and my best friend played it solo and over LAN. I actually reinstalled it about a month ago; the single player campaigns are pretty well balanced, but the multiplayer can get insanely over balanced even without exploits. I remember building a naval force that, thanks to the shape of the map, could kill anyone on land from the water, it was utterly ridiculous, but since I aggressively destroyed any building in the water, I was effectively immortal. It's really easy to get that kind of a strangle hold on the game with land, sea or air units so long as you spawn in a good place and can get metal and energy production up and running ASAP.

TA was and is still one of my favorite games of all time.

Can you add Supreme Commander to your list for future? Would love to see you cover that as a sequel to this one 😊

I made the biggest offence possible. I drank coffee, the umpty mug I filled with Yorkshire tea (without rinsing out the left over coffee) and added oaths milk instead of milk. I needed to confess

I loved this game. I still have it on cd rom somewhere in the house in a box. Remember getting it for free in a cereal box.

I grew up playing the Supreme Commander series, so I would love to see some SC or SC Forged Alliance exploits :)

this was and still is one of my favorite games ever

well....this was my first game on PC in my life...just a little more than 20 years ago, and i spent days on it....i've never noticed this kind of exploits.....except the spamming bombers and fighters to fly-attack the enemy base

I have been playng this game my entire childhood and this is the first time I heard it had exploits

I still have my original copy of this game. Loved the game back in the day.

Best game design. Modern games are like: "hey we give you this nice unit that can do X.. oh no, you cannot do the X thing on Y.. and nope, you cannot do the X thing on Z either... or Y"

This game was a big portion of my childhood and what got me into RTS games. It's jankiness is what made it fun. The total escalation mod that alot of people use on gameranger adds alot of content and some of the bug fixes. The community may not be as big as others but damn is it dedicated and resilient.

Thanks for the shoutout for AoE2 and myself in this PERFECTLY BALANCED VIDEO with NO EXPLOITS

"4 different AIs" apparently includes Spiff himself. Now everything makes sense.

Spiff: “Build a trebuchet” Also Spiff: *shows catapult* Me: “hello is that the Inquisition?”

_"one of them we told quite simply to commit _*_soduku_*_ "_ - The Spiffing Brit 2020

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?!”

Me - "Spiff can we get a trebuchet?" Spiff - "We have a trebuchet at home!" The Trebuchet at home - That catapult.

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"

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.

"Enemy transport spotted! Shoot it down!" "Wait, is that our commander on board the enemy transport?" *"I SAID SHOOT IT DOWN!"*

"Looks about as appealing as deep-fried butter." Me, an American: Ah, finally something I can relate to!

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