Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

by mcbuilder • 5 years ago

230 101 5 years ago

For those of us who are not into RTS games, which of the features listed on this front page are ones that Total Annihilation was known for (and which other RTS games presumably failed to follow up on), and which ones are further innovations this game is making atop TA’s take on the genre?

majormajor2• 5 years ago

Unit count and "planning" were the two things that separated TA from others for me.

You could build more units and you could command larger groups of them compared to something like SC where you couldn't group more than 12 per hotkey. The sheer number of units you could crank out also had interesting strategic effects if, say, your opponent had a balanced defense but not quite enough flak cannons, say, to hold up to a giant swarm of air units. I remember having to worry more about the specifics of what they were building than in games where there was a unit cap that increased the relative value of fortifications and defensive structures.

Sequencing was great too. Tell your commander to build a factory, then another factory, then a solar plant, etc, with seemingly no queue size limit. Queue up dozens of things in each of those factories too. Etc.

It always felt less "clicks per minute" dominated because of these things for me - though I was not a high level player or anything, just playing for fun - while the industry went the opposite, way into the Micro side and turned into things like Warcraft 3 and then LoL.

(I forget the name of Cavedog's TA sequel set in a fantasy world, but even that, IIRC, backed away from the giant armies thing.)

tomc19859• 5 years ago

In its successor, Supreme Commander, you could completely automate your base construction using those assist features and looping build queues

vosper• 5 years ago

They don't seem to mention the thing I most remember TA for: the soundtrack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljDyp__ejco

blunte2• 5 years ago

Same. Although I do remember the graphics and number of simultanously visible independent units as being impressive...

But the music was magnificent orchestral work. It was also so depressing [ https://youtu.be/ljDyp__ejco?t=995 ] that I decided to play the game without music after a while. It's gorgeous, but too emotive.

blunte2• 5 years ago

Another great game with a soundtrack that was a delight: Re-Volt. https://youtu.be/_83cPS87tYM

mcbuilder2• 5 years ago

The BAR music is really good, in the same theme done by a professional composer. It's not a full orchestra on the level of the TA soundtrack, which is simply one of the best of all time, but it excellent on its own and captures much of the essence.

robertlagrant• 5 years ago

Well that brings back memories! Beautiful. First game I played where the music dynamically changed with the action.

GrumpyYoungMan2• 5 years ago

Along with the soundtrack, John Patrick Lowrie's amazing voice work also form some of my most vivid memories of the game. I still get goosebumps when I hear his narration of the opening cinematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6mZZiI4ShQ

astine• 5 years ago

In addition to what majormajor said, there TA had a bigger sense of scale than Starcraft or Command and Conquer. There was a greater discrepancy between the size of large and small units and the size of the units had a bigger impact on the movement speed and how much room on the map the unit took up. This went a long towards making the game feel bigger in scope whereas SC and C&C always felt more tight and controlled.

Karunamon• 5 years ago

One thing TA and all of its successors kept was the ability to have units assist in construction. For instance, you have your commander plunk down a factory, then order the commander to assist with anything the factory is doing. Early on, this will be creating engineers (builders) and your first defensive units. Then you have your commander and engineers build/upgrade your level 2 factory.. rinse and repeat. It turns into a virtuous cycle.

The upshot of this is that it creates opportunities for prioritization (and opportunities for blowing past your income if you're not careful).

majormajor2• 5 years ago

Oh, yeah, THIS was a huge one. As well as just how construction/payment worked in general. This thing costs you X metal, and this factory can deliver metal at a rate of x/sec... but if you throw in all these helper units, you can up that. Very interesting and unique twist.

You also didn't have to pay up front when queuing things, like you say with the opportunity to blow past your income, so your cash flow was the counter-balancing production speed limiter, but not in a way where you had to be constantly watching that bank account dollar amount before clicking "build."

GrumpyYoungMan2• 5 years ago

Total Annihilation was the first to have projectile physics for artillery and other weapons. One could actually have, for example, an artillery projectile in mid-flight accidentally collide with an aircraft.

[EDIT] Not mentioned on the BAR front page but also pioneered in TA was wreckage. Destroyed units left wreckage behind that had to be navigated around or fired upon to clear a path. Wreckage could also be scavenged to recover the material used to construct them, allowing the construction of more units. In the race to build enough infrastructure to overwhelm the enemy, this could be the difference between life and death.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

One could actually have, for example, an artillery projectile in mid-flight accidentally collide with an aircraft.

Or, anti-air units used as ground defense and ground assault units :). In my TA days, I had plenty of cases where I saved my base by ordering AA bots to fire on the ground, counting on weaker but much further-flying missiles to accidentally collide with the attacking force.

Also, Commander's D-gun. That one was an exercise in aiming, but early-to-mid-game, one well-placed shot could cut the attacking force in half.

I also appreciated the little things - like the solar generators automatically closing down when hit, to protect themselves.

Or, dropship bombing - IIRC when a dropship gets shot down, it crashes with all its load, which can sometimes be pretty explosive.

Maybe I'll just stop now. I have a lot of good TA memories.

icexuick9• 5 years ago

Correct. We recently even saw that a tactical nuke dropped from a bomber, created a blast-wave that pushed 19 flash-tanks so much their got a temporary 300% movement speed (if they weren't flying/crashing/exploding). https://www.twitch.tv/tarnishedknight/clip/AssiduousAttracti...

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

One favourite of mine is the recent Zero-K/Spring example of an Athena (cloaked gunship constructor) sneaking on the top of a silo launching its nuke, with just the right timing so that the missile hits it and explodes still partially inside the silo, before the Athena is shot down by AA (because decloaked due to proximity to the silo) :

http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/1784?postID=189519#189519

Or maybe also this (BA?)/Spring one, dating back to the time when shields were invulnerable to plasma shots and deflecting them, featuring a shot being randomly diverted to hit a commander that was hiding in a bunch of buildings, wiping out half the base in the resulting death explosion !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5eBkn45Jo4&list=PLkuJSFWAxE...

GasPoweredMaker• 5 years ago

Two key characteristics of TA/SupCom that set it apart were economic.

First, map resources (metal patches) were not depletable. So, the game would see massive economic growth as every metal patch would give resource indefinitely. Big econ ramp up, and a marked ability to come back due to non-exhausting resource patches.

The second characteristic is the flow-based economy that worked with build queuing. A player could queue up as many units or structures to be built as desired, as opposed to "buy and build" where you must currently have the resources necessary to build something.

"Queue" may be an imprecise word here, as the player could, for example, have ten factories all attempting to produce a series of units simultaneously (and similarly, have a swam of engineer units all attempting to build a number of structures simultaneously). That is, it was simultaneous building that would consume resources on the fly as they came in that was the core of this model.

The flow economy model meant that a player tracked resource income and resource usage: kept positive, all the queued up units or structures could be built. Go into the negative, however, and the resource buffer would be eaten into and the player would see all currently-building units/structures slow down in their rate of build progress, awaiting resources to come in.

The last bit was disabled in SupCom 2, out of concern that newer players often bottomed out their economy and had a bad time. However, after fan outcry, the flow-model and infinite queuing was re-enabled as an option.

Svperstar• 5 years ago

For a time after its launch in I think 1997 people were calling Total Annihilation the greatest RTS and maybe the greatest game of all time. I wish the RTS community wouldn't shit so hard on any game that isn't StarCraft.

EamonnMR• 5 years ago

It's very much a taste thing. TA-likes are a whole different kind of RTS and demand a different type of skill. SCs reward quick thinking whereas TAs seem to much more reward overwhelming scale. I can usually counter my way out of a problem in SC, but in Planetary Annihilation if I've committed in the wrong direction or just not made as many mines as my opponent, I'm sunk.

Also there is the number of units. Over three hundred in this game! TAs tend to have lots and lots of units whereas the other shall we say branch of RTS design tends to have far fewer.

torhorway• 5 years ago

If you're into this style of RTS, I've found Zero-K to be a very good free similar game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/334920/ZeroK/

dTal• 5 years ago

Both this and Zero-K use the same engine (SpringRTS).

tomc19859• 5 years ago

The scale on Zero-K is much smaller, sadly. My favorite aspect of TA was thousands of units on thousand-square kilometer maps

hangonhn4• 5 years ago

100%!

It's the first and probably only RTS game where I don't even care about my individual units and just send them en mass to the front line automatically. I literally count on the wreckage of the dead units to clog up the spaces where I am defending. In some sense the game is not tactical at all but really more about strategy and economy planning. There is very little micromanagement on my part and I love it.

willis936• 5 years ago

Then perhaps look at Planetary Annihilation, if you haven't already. It has a very high skill cap.

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

I'm surprised that you're not mentioning Supreme Commander (1) : ((Forged Alliance) Forever ) then ??

garmaine2• 5 years ago

I played Total Annihilation back in the day. One thing that I remember standing out about it was the ability to automate production and tactics to a significant degree. I had factories pumping out drone ships with preprogrammed flight paths, which would engage any hostiles they encounter then resume flights. Then so long as I kept factories supplied with metals, I ensured air superiority and was able to focus on moving land forces, or other things.

Whereas most RTS devolve into micromanagement matches, TA seemed to be more about high-level strategy since automation really let you focus on theatre management.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

These mechanics are very much present in BAR. Micro can certainly play a role but it's typically in the context of the macro.

dane-pgp2• 5 years ago

pumping out drone ships with preprogrammed flight paths, which would engage any hostiles they encounter then resume flights.

I love the idea of being able to program a collection of routines which you can change the parameters of, or swap in and out, depending on how the battle is progressing.

There's probably a danger, though, that by making the programming language/runtime too capable, the game ends up being "solved" or at least ends up only leaving boring work for the human to do.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

There's probably a danger, though, that by making the programming language/runtime too capable, the game ends up being "solved" or at least ends up only leaving boring work for the human to do.

This would imply that war and generalship in reality are already "solved" problems. It's not a real concern.

garmaine2• 5 years ago

The capability was very limited. Basically you could program a looping series of commands for newly manufactured units. "Go to this waypoint #1, then waypoint #2, then this final waypoint, then go back to the beginning and start again." And IIRC you toggle a switch to select whether the units should strictly obey the commands or stop to engage in battle along the way.

Typically this is used to set a destination for new units, so they assemble automatically. But because you could set the commands to loop, and because you could authorize them to auto-engage (using the built-in AI to track and follow targets they run into), you could hack it to have the new units do routine patrols without further player action.

This definitely doesn't "solve" gameplay. It just gives the player access to the game's built-in AI for their own purposes. Of course it's much more useful playing against the computer than other players.

smnscu• 5 years ago

I was curious to see it in action, here's a random Twitch video https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1118988304

icexuick9• 5 years ago

also nice piece of history + some explaination why someone playing FAF likes BAR so much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WdYAV-11Fs

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

eh, it's a bit too inaccurate to be "nice"...

ra33o2• 5 years ago

I've tried BAR and my experience was: - 150 fps when starting. - Under 50 fps when quitting (after 1 hour or so). I hope they can manage to improve the performance. - Air-units was only able to attack ground or air. Not both. With so "many" air units, that felt a bit too old school for me. - The AI needs some work. - BAF is still miles away from SUPCOM 1/2.

But I love the RTS genre and I am always excited when I find new titles.

I do hope they will develop this game further. Mods can hopefully fix the rest.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

With the 50fps issue, was that in the lobby or during a large battle? Secondly, how long ago was this. There have been some improvements which may have resolved this issue.

As for the AI, depending on how long ago it was we've either made lots of improvements or a few small ones. Unfortunately it's one of the areas we have fewer devs.

rhn_mk12• 5 years ago

For me, this was after ~2 hours on a medium-sized map, this January. The game started out with about 20-30 fps, and ended as an unplayable slideshow, <10fps.

For comparison, I have never experienced such low frame rates on Zero-K regardless of unit count or map size, and the other player didn't complain either.

ra33o2• 5 years ago

During a large battle. A few months ago. I'll give it a try later today to see if there have been any improvements.

icexuick9• 5 years ago

We're working on new GL rendering for units, which is a huge part of slowdowns in FPS mid-late game. In testing environments we can see over 3-10x better performance on rendering.

We rarely see simulation slowdowns (<1.0x speed) so this is already pretty good - though also here we're on a mission to multithread as much as humanly possible.

skytreader• 5 years ago

First of all, interesting how there's a lot of (seemingly) massive and feature-rich open source games, very specifically today on HN's homepage (two by my count, which is a lot!). Open source games have come a long way since the last decade.

Second of all, nostalgia time! I didn't play TA, rather TA: Kingdoms, the medieval-fantasy version. I think today it might qualify as a re-skin but don't quote me on that (edit: I just checked Wikipedia, and no, it isn't a "re-skin" by any means). I started for the story mode but eventually I found myself drawn to the RTS mode. It's my very first RTS and, without aid of the internet, I independently developed tactics and strategy, identifying map choke points and which "kingdom" is best suited for which terrain.

With the traditional human faction, the best result I managed was this stalemate of a scenario in a labyrinthine map. I only ever managed to win with the dark/evil faction. I didn't like how they looked or their back story but their stats and abilities suited my style.

Good times! I didn't really keep up with the RTS genre but maybe I'll give these games a spin when I have the time.

dogma1138• 5 years ago

The original TA had a thriving modding community with 100’s of custom units for download, scenarios and many other modes.

midasuni• 5 years ago

Annihilated.com was one of the first sites I frequented on a regular basis

smegger001• 5 years ago

yeah i always did best playing as Zhone the monster nation, the ability to send cheap harpies out to convert builders units of the enemy to your side was broken. Why yes I would like all of the available units in the game in my faction. also your units spawners being mobile and able to take offensive action while the rest had permanently placed buildings for spawning units made it far more powerful.

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

interesting how there's a lot of (seemingly) massive and feature-rich open source games, very specifically today on HN's homepage (two by my count, which is a lot!)

2nd one being this one ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28204948

How did so many Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup players miss such an obvious bug?

----

Also, (BA/)Spring is totally from last decade (especially diversity-game-wise !), IIRC top activity there was circa 2008 ?

https://springrts.com/

amcoastal• 5 years ago

There was another post about an open source RTS game, you're commenting on an 18 hour post.

PAPPPmAc• 5 years ago

It looks like it's a clever double-bacronym, since BAR is also "Balanced Annihilation Reloaded" which is what this project started as. Balanced Annihilation being the most influential and TA-like of the several games built on top of the Spring ( https://springrts.com/ ) engine... which was originally made for TAlikes though there are several other projects on the engine now. Zero-K is also a popular Balanced Annihilation-derived Spring engine game, but is less TA-like.

I think the original Balanced Annihilation had the feature/problem that it used a bunch of a original Cavedog models and Reloaded is carefully avoiding that in addition to visual and gameplay improvements.

I played a ton of Balanced Annihilation like a decade ago and it was already a "better TA" than TA or SupCom in many ways.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

That's accurate. BAR's roots are indeed with BA but split in part due to this copyright concern. We've since implemented a number of improvements and a huge amount of remodelling.

icexuick9• 5 years ago

Roughly 8.000 commits from 39 contributors since the end of 2018 when development of BAR really (re)started.

Mac675• 5 years ago

There is an active BA community. Check discord https://discord.gg/GkvfDMZA or BA site https://balancedannihilation.com.

tomc19859• 5 years ago

This is really cool! I found Zero-K very good in some areas and very disappointing in others, particularly the scale (or lack thereof).

SupCom is great, but it has its own issues....

4111111111111112• 5 years ago

Uh, why is scale an issue with ZK? Some Maps are way larger then the biggest in TA ever were. The 1vs1 maps are generally pretty small, but that's just because players generally prefer shorter games.

tomc19859• 5 years ago

All the maps I played and saw in the map selector were really small. The couple of single player campaign missions I played through seemed to be a couple of large hills and nothing more.

And scale is an issue because I hate the tacticality of small-scale RTS games. I find tactical-scale gameplay incredibly boring. That is my biggest complaint/disappointment with Starcraft, Dawn of War, C&C, etc, and why TA and SupCom are #1 in my book.

Besides, micromanagement turns these games into actions-per-second showdowns, and that misses the point of RTS games entirely. I much prefer a more relaxed pace and being able to focus on strategy.

Can you recommend a couple of large scale maps that support multiple factions duking it out with hundreds or thousands of units per side?

icexuick9• 5 years ago

I love the fact that Zero-K has such a large group of people really enjoying it. It's both proof that a spring-engine game nowadays still can work/be played very well, and also that gameplay is what matters most.

For me personally, it's the taste that's different. ZK has a kinda chaotic/weird setup/design-style. And even though gameplay > graphics, i do really love it when they match/meet/work together. For BAR it is one of our missions to make looking at the game to already be very enjoyable. (and since the basic gameplay mechanics derived from TA were already so good).

glial• 5 years ago

Does anyone know of a way to interact with BAR or another of the TA clones via an API or in some other way? I'd love to have a go at building a game AI.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

I'd try the BAR Discord, AI channel - https://discord.gg/uNDxk5MX

GoogleFrog2• 5 years ago

https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/BARbarIAn is an AI for BAR if you want to have a poke around, it's a descendant of https://github.com/rlcevg/CircuitAI for Zero-K.

If scripting is more your style then AIs can be written in lua.

senjin2• 5 years ago

It's not open source but Planetary Annihilation is a lot of fun and developed by some of the original TA team.

skyfaller• 5 years ago

I backed PA on Kickstarter and enjoyed it for a while. Here's a random game I played while it was still in beta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPzIodz2VM

One feature I liked was the ability to completely share control, so in this game I took responsibility for the economy / building, and my partner was responsible for controlling our mobile units.

Playing on a spherical map was fun and flavorful, and the potential to do things like plant rockets on a moon map to smash it into the planetary map (or send opposing forces to interfere) was awesome.

When I was active, it didn't seem to develop a large/active enough community to reliably support (evenly-matched) multiplayer games. I don't know if this ever improved because I quit.

As I recall, the company infuriated the community by crowdfunding a new game while there were still nasty bugs / missing features in the original game. Players left in disgust, and that's when I gave up on the multiplayer improving.

This frustrating experience was part of my journey towards refusing to play multiplayer games that weren't free to play (so community would be as large as possible), then quitting computer games entirely.

senjin2• 5 years ago

I was a kickstarter backer too! I didn't play much multiplayer outside of my friend group but it was a lot of fun.

I didn't know about the other kickstarter game, do you mean the titans expansion?

zbrozek• 5 years ago

I'd love to see an RTS explore single sovereignty multiplayer. One player might be the industrial minister and another the military minister. You could imagine letting the tree deepen to allow more players. Bob runs the navy, Alice does resource acquisition, etc. Would lend itself to team games that solves the problem of defeated player boredom.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

You are able to play with multiple players controlling one team (Archon mode in SC2 I think). I've used it once or twice for coaching and it works pretty well.

In a team game you can gift units to allies so if one ally gets knocked out but the game isn't over then you'll often find them being given units to rebuild with.

robbmorganf• 5 years ago

Alternatively, maybe the navy minister could beat the army minister if there are more sailors than soldiers. It would be interesting to simulate/play the dysfunction of bureaucratic militaries...

icexuick9• 5 years ago

This is already a default option in the game. And also, this is what we'd like to expand upon, f.e. in the coop-campaign.

Each player working together as one is quite the experience and different from each building their own base/having their own eco.

So do expect a lot more on this in BAR.

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

Zero-K/Spring has this built-in in the lobby (for instance a big "Invite Friends" button for the Campaign missions), and since BAR/Spring uses the same lobby, I'd guess it has this feature too ?

hangonhn4• 5 years ago

I was just playing Total Annihilation last night! It's kind of amazing coming back to this game after so many years. A lot of the aspect of the game actually aged really well. I was able to bump up the resolution to fit a modern wide screen monitor using a few registry changes. The game still looks great and on a modern CPU it absolutely flies even with 1,500 units per player.

The scale of the game has never been replicated by any other game/series as far as I know. There is so little micromanagement. It's almost half economy planning and half strategy. Once you have enough energy production and MOHO metal makers, the economy can basically scale infinitely. I basically just queue up my factories with the different unit types and automate their orders to patrol certain areas and watch the mini-map to see how the front line is shifting.

cheese_van• 5 years ago

What system were you using? I've been waiting AGES for this to come to Steam but for linux.

I think I might be willing to buy a Windows box just for this as I've waited long enough. I haven't had a Windows box in 20 years but for TA, yeah. Any recommendations?

TA was a marvel when it first appeared. The gameplay was very much, for me, a revolution.

hangonhn4• 5 years ago

I'm on a Windows box. I'm in a similar boat as you and basically caved when it came to gaming and built a Windows box. I don't love Windows but I mostly just use Steam anyways.

At one point I used the version sold by gog.com

That version worked on OSX for a while but it doesn't look like that's the case anymore: https://www.gog.com/game/total_anihilation_commander_pack

BTW: I've run TA on a VM before. I think I used VMware Fusion. You'll still need a Windows license but at least you won't need extra hardware.

Teifion8• 5 years ago

BAR supports Linux natively, I'm running it on Mint right now. We're hoping for a steam release "some time in the future".

HoppyHaus• 5 years ago

From my experience, TA ran great over Wine. I might be misremembering though.

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

The scale of the game has never been replicated by any other game/series as far as I know.

Hmm, maybe some 4X ? Even excluding the non-RTS ones, you have the likes of AI War (1&2), Distant Worlds (2 to be released soon) and Star Ruler (1&2) ?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/70900/Star_Ruler/

hangonhn4• 5 years ago

Those games look awesome! Thanks for the suggestion! This is very exciting.

beprogrammed• 5 years ago

A contender appears for FAF(Forged alliance forever), looks very good.

Gremlin123• 5 years ago

If you want to play something similar to Total annihilation with better graphics and balance check https://balancedannihilation.com

remram2• 5 years ago

BA is still in development, separately from BAR?

The existence of 3 different games (counting Zero-K) really doesn't help them take off.

BlueTemplar13• 5 years ago

This wasn't a problem during Spring's height (circa 2007-2010 ?), when there were a lot more than 3 games regularly played, and they all shared the same lobbies (yes, you could pick the lobby you preferred too), so going from one game to another to a mod of a game (like a popular one a while FPS version) was very easy.

Zero-K splitting away certainly didn't help things...

valiant-comma• 5 years ago

Haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but Total Annihilation: Escalation is a pretty good add-on to the original TA:

https://taesc.tauniverse.com/

no_time• 5 years ago

Does this have a version of the Escalation mod? Ever since I got into that I don't think I can go back to the regular thing. Breaking a 2 hour long stalemate with a Victory and massive support fleet will never get old.

That being said it does look really nice.

dusted• 5 years ago

I just played an hour of this, definitely a keeper, well made, fun old-skool RTS like our mom used to cook it.

icexuick9• 5 years ago

Awesome to hear and something you will see improve, practically every day. Enjoy!

Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation

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