The Rise and Fall of Command and Conquer

I enjoyed Renegade, even though it was half finished.

 

I don't remember which. But the C&C series was one of many RTS games where you could effectively turtle meaning that successfully attacking the base either required a stupid number of units or effective use of artillery. But even artillery could be countered if you were active in defending your base by destroying said artillery with your own units. Of course, then the attacker has to counter that by protecting his artillery. Etc.

TA was another one where you could very effectively turtle, and stationary artillery had extremely long ranges. The downside for using them for defense, however, was that artillery shells had long flight times, so unless your opponent was lazy or bad, they'd keep their units on the move as much as possible. The only thing in C&C that I can recall with similarly long range were the capital ships in some of the older C&C games. Newer ones like those in Red Alert 3 didn't have nearly as much range.

Regards,
SB

 

Given the fact that Total Annihilation doesn't start for me using the GoG standard version I went to Total Annihilation Universe to download the TA Unofficial patch. I didn't know I was in for a surprise and it is the fact that a 3D version of Total Annihilation exists and it look pretty good! Even in 2D this was one of the games that better represented heights and obstacles!! The long artillery shots were an example of that.

TA Unofficial patch and the new TA 3d can be found here:
http://www.tauniverse.com/ta3d/

When you say opponent I guess you mean human opponents, right? I don't remember the AI moving very much in those situations, although it was daring and kinda smart.

I haven't played TA online in ages, although it made me realise that I was an average player. I mean, I played TA so much, completed very complex maps in the campaign mode, in fact the entire campaign mode, I played well I thought. But then when I went online in the early 2000 people had such an incredible skill and level that I felt like a noob, it was an eye-opener.

Age of Empires 1, and 2 -especially- where the RTS games I played the best, I couldn't compare to Arch_Koven and heroes like him, but I was good enough in most cases.

 

Finally got Total Annihilation working!! The fix was pretty easy in Windows 10. Control Panel>Programs>Turn windows features on or off>put a check under Legacy Components/DirectPlay. The unofficial patch did nothing to get it working, it was that feature alone.

On a different note, Total Annihilation 2 seemed to be a reality because Wargaming bought the Total Annihilation brand from an Atari auction, along with Master of Orion, but Chris Taylor left the studio some time ago and the famous composer Jeremy Soule is working on other projects.

The true sequel of one of the best RTSs ever made would be great news, but we shall see. The thing is that there is also Supreme Commander, a good game, just not as good as TA. I have the Xbox 360 version and couldn't get Supreme Commander 2 because my PC couldn't run it then, but I played quite a few hours of Supreme Commander and managed to get far and got me hooked, although it lacks that certain something Total Annihilation had.

 

Wow missed that news, damn.
WG did put out a Steam version of TA (free with nuMoO but pretty cheap on its own) which runs fine on Win10 etc.

Another thing that was downfall of C&C for me was the advent of Shogun: Total War.

 

I played a lot of Rome: Total War. That was one crashy game though.

 

http://www.tauniverse.com/

These guys have some impressive projects in the works.

 

does the webpage to get Total Annihilation 3D works for you? It doesn't work for me, the browser tries to open it but the waiting icon is there forever and nothing appears. I very much would want to play the same experience but in 3D with the zoom in, zoom out feature of Supreme Commander.

Been playing the ARM campaign as of late, got to the Spider Technology stage. Not difficult even in Hard -my default difficulty mode- but lost like 10 times before completing it because I didn't know where to hide the spiders.

 

Yeah the TA 3D site loads here. I haven't tried to play that though. I feel that is somehow related to TA Spring...

I think the main things to watch are TA Enhanced and TA Escalation.

 

Theres a hell of a lot of stuff available for TA

 

Got TA3D -the least interesting of the 3 mods I got for now, it's just on the disk and that's it-, TA Escalation and TA Enhanced. I wonder if I can play the campaigns with Escalation or Enhanced, gotta install both and try.

 

Finally got a chance to watch the video, man what a mess. Watching the vid I think Red Alert 2 was the last in the series that I played.

 

The fall happened in 1999 with the long awaited C&C3 Tiberian Dawn being somewhat mediocre. Thats when Blizzard pulled away with their benchmark setting Starcraft (released a year earlier in 1998) from Westwood Studios in terms of King of RTS. Before then Westwood and Blizzard were neck & neck with C&C, Warcraft, C&C2, Warcraft2, and RedAlert.

 

Quite the irony here Actually, the game from 1999 is Tiberian Sun. Tiberian Twilight is C&C4.

I remember that at the time I found TS okay, but the gameplay of StarCraft was much more appealing to me. It was much more dynamic and streamlined, with three completely different races both in terms of visuals and mechanics. Also IIRC, I found the animation in C&C quite funky. Like the units were gliding on the terrain or something. Not to mention that some of them were quite small.

In any way, I think that Blizzard really caught a lightning in a bottle with that one. The music, the visuals, the gameplay, it all just clicked. I haven't played it in ten years and I can still whistle some of the tracks there, not to mention the unit responses when you click on them.

 

I loved TS, it was the one based on the voxel engine, and you could engineer rush in subterrainian APC's and sell your opponents base lol. Also had the Cyborg Commander, "Your command". I only played skirmish and 4 player LAN though, so no idea if the campaign was any good.

The C&C game that ended the appeal for me was C&C3, it just felt so old fashioned and restricted after playing Supreme Commander.

 

Yeah I just scrambled all of them together. Sorry I was going off memory, its been 18years. You know. I probably should have double checked everything. I mean't to say C&C2 Tiberian Sun.