History Videogame / TotalAnnihilation

* EnemyExchangeProgram

%%* MightyGlacier: Core Cans and Sumos.

* PlanetLooters

* RealTimeStrategy

* RobotWar

* StarfishAliens

* UnstableEquilibrium
* UselessUsefulStealth

** The Krogoth is the Core's ultimate weapon, a giant K-bot armed with AA, an Annihilator laser, weaker green laser, and cannons, with more health than anything in the game. Just one will tear through almost any defense. Two or three are basically unstoppable. The trade-off is that Krogoths need a special gantry to build them, take forever to build, and cost a massive amount of resources.

* AwesomeButImpractical: Krogoth, Vulcan, Buzzsaw; explained better on that page.

* GatlingGood: The Vulcan and Buzzsaw weapons are Gatling versions of the Big Bertha and Intimidator superguns, whose shells are powerful enough to destroy entire buildings! However this is also a case of AwesomeButImpractical, as the Gatling versions have a slightly shorter range and consume insane amounts of power when they fire.

* ExpansionPack: Two: ''The Core Contingency'' and ''Battle Tactics''. The first was a full expansion complete with campaign and dozens of new units, the second a map and mission pack.

** The planet Rougpelt is periodically bombarded by meteor showers which are devastating enough to destroy everything caught in them. This leads to much frustration when they destroy the base you worked so hard to build, or when they destroy a mission critical capture target that the computer isn't smart enough to repair. The trope plays out another way on the same planet in missions which involve vast numbers of "asleep" groups of enemy units scattered throughout a map which "wake" and become aggressive upon taking damage. This device is used throughout the campaign to allow the player time to prepare before attacking and to encourage players to explore the whole map (most missions require you to destroy all enemy units, so you have to find them; they won't attack you). It's a problem in the Rougpelt campaign because ''meteor showers'' activate these enemies too by causing damage. On the last Rougpelt mission in the Core Campaign, an early meteor shower on Hard can see your commander and anything you'd tried to build be wiped in 40 seconds.
** On planets with lots of plant life, what would be a simple task to set up a base is made obnoxiously difficult by the fact you have to go on deforesting binges to clear enough space to build.

* {{Invisibility}}: In the original game only the Commanders were capable of cloaking, and this is usually only feasible if they are standing still--the cloaking device absorbs exponentially more power if they start moving, and you need the late-game energy production buildings to supply that power.
** The expansion pack adds cloakable spy kbots and a cloakable version of the Fusion Reactor (although activating the cloak uses up most of its own power, so it can't be left cloaked all the time).

* FakeDifficulty: The planet Rougpelt is periodically bombarded by meteor showers which are devastating enough to destroy everything caught in them. This leads to much frustration when they destroy the base you worked so hard to build, or when they destroy a mission critical capture target that the computer isn't smart enough to repair.
** That affects the AI's game too. It's to a lesser extent, as an AI typically spreads their base out much more than a human player might (unlike also the tightly-packed bases which VideoGame/SupremeCommander incentives with the synergy system), but timing your own attack with the end of a shower at ''their'' base is a fair and useful tactic. The trope plays out another way on the same planet in missions which involve vast numbers of "asleep" groups of enemy units scattered throughout a map which "wake" and become aggressive upon taking damage. This device is used throughout the campaign to allow the player time to prepare before attacking and to encourage players to explore the whole map (most missions require you to destroy all enemy units, so you have to find them; they won't attack you). It's a problem in the Rougpelt campaign because ''meteor showers'' activate these enemies too by causing damage. On the last Rougpelt mission in the Core Campaign, an early meteor shower on Hard can see your commander and anything you'd tried to build be wiped in 40 seconds.

* OpeningNarration

->''What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fuelled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other.''
-->--'''[[http://youtube.com/watch?v=k6mZZiI4ShQ Intro]]'''

* CripplingOverspecialisation: "Rock versus rock". Any gun can hit anything. An insanely lucky shot from a mortar, for instance, can destroy a stealth fighter flying at top speed.
** Construction units can reclaim anything that's not the ground itself or flying, which can act as an improvised weapon.
*** Commanders can also capture enemy units, allowing them to instead rally an improvised army of turncoats, assuming they survive long enough to complete the capture.
* DamageDiscrimination
** More to the point, if you order your units to fire at one of your own, then many of these shots will fly through it (rockets and missiles, sometimes also artillery fire, in case of smaller units) instead of hitting them. In case of gravity-affected weaponry (and everything else as well, if the terrain is rough and you are unlucky) it will hit the ground just behind them, however, and you can hurt your own units with splash damage.
* DoNotRunWithAGun: Everything can move and fire, though often with reduced accuracy.
** Almost everything. A few units cannot.
* EverythingFades: Units leave wreckage, depending on how much base health the unit had and how powerful the weapon that finished it was. A medium tank destroyed by a rapid-fire light laser will leave a wreck resembling it with a similar metal content to the original unit; if it was killed by larger, heavier weapons, or the wreck then takes more hits, it'll turn to unrecognizable metal trash, and a unit insta-killed by a truly lethal weapon, such as the D-Gun or [=BLoD=] (Blue Laser of Death) generally leaves no remains.
** The wreckage can also be reclaimed by construction units and, with later patch units, ''resurrected''.

* SlapOnTheWristNuke: In the late game, nuclear missiles are cheap, plentiful and extremely powerful.
** However, due to the scale, it can still be a drop in an ocean. Some community made nukes are/were several times as powerful as the original nukes, making the small ones look weak. Against lategame CPU with 10000 unit limit, you need several nuke facilities constantly making and firing nukes to see any effect.

* AbsentAliens: [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], since the war had virtually destroyed the galaxy.
** ''The Core Contingency'' expansion further justifies this: non-sapient alien life-forms appear in the form of Sea Serpents (indigenous creatures to planet Hydross) and Scorpions (cybernetic constructs created by the same [[{{Precursors}} long-vanished aliens]] who built the [[MacGuffin beacon at the galaxy's edge]]). The first thing both the Arm and the Core do when encountering these aliens is to target them for destruction. Though the Arm consider the extermination of the Sea Serpents "regrettable", and their reason for destroying the Scorpions is because they may carry alien contaminants that could damage the galaxy ([[FridgeLogic never mind the fact that they have been on Lusch for several million years with no ill effects]]). The Core destroy both creatures because they are [[ForTheEvulz in the way.]]

* ArbitraryHeadcountLimit: Mods have expanded this limit to numbers where it no longer really matters.
** Interestingly, the game in it's original state had an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit of 250, while it supported 256 different units. The game could be brought to a point where even if you made only one of every kind, you still couldnt make them all.

* AdaptationDistillation: Some rebalancing [[GameMod mods]] and custom [=AIs=] are considered superior to the original by a number of fans.

* MightyGlacier: Core Cans and Sumos.

* SeparateButIdentical: There are small differences when playing each side, even though the overall unit selection is largely identical. Arm focuses more on FragileSpeedster, so their units are faster with less armor, and they outright have better level 1 units (for zerging). Their level 3 superweapons are also better. The Core is MightyGlacier, so better armored but slower units, and their level 2 ones are stronger than Arm. They also have better range on their artillery.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/e046ae51881ec0b908918ecbc2f665d2.JPG
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* FragileSpeedster: Arm's Zipper K-Bot, and other units such as the Jeffy/Weasel recons, the PeeWee/A.K. scout K-Bots and the Flash/Instigator light tanks (Arm version/Core version).

->''What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fuelled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other.''

It is also one of the most ''moddable'' games of all time. It was designed from the beginning to have additional units available for download after release, so adding new units or altering existing ones is relatively easy. ''Total Annihilation'' fandom and player-made mods still cling to life more than a decade after the game's release, though most have migrated to its SpiritualSuccessor, ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'' and the unofficial freeware game ''{{Spring}}'' (which can use ''TotalAnnihilation'' content - though the engine has since progressed so far that you need a lot of tweaking to get it working perfectly, and it'll be graphically sub-par compared to all the other games/mods on the engine - some of whom rival retail games in quality).

Before ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander'', there was the ill-fated follow-up ''TotalAnnihilationKingdoms'', which used the same game engine in a magic-fantasy setting with four (then five) sides rather than two. Never as popular as the original, and the producer Cavedog went belly-up not long after the release of its ExpansionPack, ''The Iron Plague''. However, ''Kingdoms'' enjoyed the same modding community as ''TotalAnnihilation'', indeed to ludicrous levels at times.

* PaletteSwap: In the sense of the different planets. RTS games of the time such as ''VideoGame/WarcraftII'' and ''CommandAndConquer'' tended to have different terrain styles such as forest or winter, but this made no difference to the gameplay. By contrast, TA introduced planets with lava oceans (or mist chasms between continents) where ships cannot be built (Barathrum and Temblor), planets with acid oceans that eat away at everything except hovercraft (Kral), planets made of metal so the normally limiting resource of metal is easily obtained (Core Prime) and so forth, changing the style of gameplay required for them. Also, each planet has a different level of metal deposits, metal in the regular ground, geothermal vents, wind velocity for wind turbines and life forms that can be reclaimed for energy.

* ArbitraryMinimumRange: Bertha/Intimidator are super long-range guns that can be used both defensively or offensively. The catch is that they have no negative field of gun depression, resulting in a large blind spot.

* ArtificialStupidity: The pathfinding leads a lot to be desired at times, and the "stock" AI is not very competent in sea or air arenas.
** The stock AI is almost comically inept at dealing with Tier 1 rushes, as a small number of light units can easily assassinate its Commander(s) in the opening minutes of a Skirmish (where all players only start with their Commanders).
** The stock AI is comically inept at '''everything'''. It'll build random units without keeping note of what it's making, send constructors to make resource gatherers in the middle of your base, build few defenses placed in a completely nonsensical way, and even do dumb things like construct buildings so close together that the factories can't get their units out. And when it's done all that, it'll display a complete lack of tactics by simply sending its units against your closest position - even if it happens to be on the other side of a river, and most of its units aren't amphibious. No wonder mods came out that attempted to fix the AI.
** A stupid AI is still a dangerous AI. If you fiddle around for TOO long and don't attack, the enemy will eventually build up to a point that it can keep sending units upon units at you non-stop, making the current mission almost impossible to win.

* PaletteSwap: In the sense of the different planets. RTS games of the time such as ''WarcraftII'' and ''CommandAndConquer'' tended to have different terrain styles such as forest or winter, but this made no difference to the gameplay. By contrast, TA introduced planets with lava oceans (or mist chasms between continents) where ships cannot be built (Barathrum and Temblor), planets with acid oceans that eat away at everything except hovercraft (Kral), planets made of metal so the normally limiting resource of metal is easily obtained (Core Prime) and so forth, changing the style of gameplay required for them. Also, each planet has a different level of metal deposits, metal in the regular ground, geothermal vents, wind velocity for wind turbines and life forms that can be reclaimed for energy.

** This trope is subverted by the game's basic units. As mentioned, Arm likes energy machineguns and Core likes light lasers, but the lasers are very precise and fairly slow to fire, while the machineguns are scattershot-type weapons. This results in Arm Peewees pelting their target with as many shots as they can not caring about precise aiming, while Core [=AKs=] waste time trying to line up aimed shots with their lasers. Result: Arm basic units [[CurbStompBattle curb-stomp]] Core ones with frightening ease.

* CutscenePowerToTheMax: Strongly averted. The (few) cutscenes unusually depict units looking and acting exactly as they do in game. The only exception is that Kbots and tanks are scaled like real infantry and tanks in the cutscenes, but like large mecha and tanks (similar in size) in the gameplay.

* OmnicidalManiac: Subverted in ''The Core Contingency'', where the Core remnant plans to destroy the entire galaxy, but in a way that would leave their Commander free to begin again with the resulting new, empty galaxy.

* SeparateButIdentical: Subverted. There are small differences when playing each side, even though the overall unit selection is largely identical. Arm focuses more on FragileSpeedster, so their units are faster with less armor, and they outright have better level 1 units (for zerging). Their level 3 superweapons are also better. The Core is MightyGlacier, so better armored but slower units, and their level 2 ones are stronger than Arm. They also have better range on their artillery.

* FleshVersusSteel

* ApocalypseHow: Seriously. Look at the name. The war is essentially an apocalypse of Galactic scope and severity ranging from Societal Collapse to Total Extinction with some planets suffering even Physical Annihilation; The ''Core Contingency'' ExpansionPack one-ups this with the Core plan to cause a ''Galactic Physical Annihilation'' with the only survivor being a single Core Commander, who would then [[ResetButton rebuild the entire Core civilisation]]. ''Hell'' of a contingency plan.

* HopelessWar: When an entire civilisation can be built from nothing as fast as you can tear it down...

->''What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fuelled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other.''

* BottomlessMagazines (Justified, as transmutation and mass-replicating is commonplace. The more powerful units and structures require seriously high amounts of energy to fire their weapons. In some of these cases, merely ''moving'' a heavy unit will drain energy, though this is usually offset by the fact that the unit in question also produces enough energy to balance out the drain.)
* CripplingOverspecialisation ("Rock versus rock". Any gun can hit anything. An insanely lucky shot from a mortar, for instance, can destroy a stealth fighter flying at top speed.)

* DoNotRunWithAGun (Everything can move and fire, though often with reduced accuracy.)

* EverythingFades (Units leave wreckage, depending on how much base health the unit had and how powerful the weapon that finished it was. A medium tank destroyed by a rapid-fire light laser will leave a wreck resembling it with a similar metal content to the original unit; if it was killed by larger, heavier weapons, or the wreck then takes more hits, it'll turn to unrecognizable metal trash, and a unit insta-killed by a truly lethal weapon, such as the D-Gun or [=BLoD=] (Blue Laser of Death) generally leaves no remains.)

* SlapOnTheWristNuke (In the late game, nuclear missiles are cheap, plentiful and extremely powerful.)

* ShortRangeLongRangeWeapon (One of very, very few games then or since to feature artillery that could fire across an entire map and nukes with near-unlimited range.)
* UnitsNotToScale (Scout boats are as long as the largest tanks, and battleships are larger than any ground unit.)

* AdaptationDistillation (Some rebalancing [[GameMod mods]] and custom [=AIs=] are considered superior to the original by a number of fans.)
* AllThereInTheManual (The glossary in the manual goes into much greater detail on the science behind many of the weapons and technologies used in the game. See ShownTheirWork below.)
* AMechByAnyOtherName ("Kbots")
* ApocalypseHow (Seriously. Look at the name. The war is essentially an apocalypse of Galactic scope and severity ranging from Societal Collapse to Total Extinction with some planets suffering even Physical Annihilation; The ''Core Contingency'' ExpansionPack one-ups this with the Core plan to cause a ''Galactic Physical Annihilation'' with the only survivor being a single Core Commander, who would then [[ResetButton rebuild the entire Core civilisation]]. ''Hell'' of a contingency plan.)
* ArbitraryHeadcountLimit (Mods have expanded this limit to numbers where it no longer really matters.)

* AuthorityEqualsAsskicking (The entire point of the Commander unit.)
* AwesomeButImpractical (Krogoth, Vulcan, Buzzsaw; explained better on that page.)

** The city maps are absolutely gorgeous, but good luck trying to get a proper metal economy running without hordes of construction units reclaiming stuff left and right, at least until advanced Metal Makers can be set up.

* BlackAndGreyMorality (Depending on your viewpoint, the war began as LaResistance vs TheEmpire, or a band of psychotic terrorists destroying great works out of futile bigoted spite. Regardless, both sides were nothing more than endless hordes of identical mindless hate-filled machines, towards the end.)

* BrainUploading (The whole war started over the Core government instituting mandatory "patterning" and the Arm faction refusing to do so.)

* ColourCodedArmies (In the campaigns, your side is always blue and the enemy is always red, instead of each side having its own colour.)
* ColourCodedForYourConvenience: The relative power of the different types of lasers are colour coded- the very weak 'popgun' type on scout units and A.K.s are orange, light lasers are red, heavy lasers are green, and the 'energy weapon' most powerful laser is blue.
* ConstructAdditionalPylons (Justified.)

* CuteMachines (Surprisingly, being near-mindless death robots in a game about a CrapsackWorld of endless war doesn't make the infantry units any less adorable. Some of them look very boxy, specially the Core ones, but they look so merchandise-exploitable that some players don't care.)
* CutscenePowerToTheMax (Strongly averted. The (few) cutscenes unusually depict units looking and acting exactly as they do in game. The only exception is that Kbots and tanks are scaled like real infantry and tanks in the cutscenes, but like large mecha and tanks (similar in size) in the gameplay).

* DerelictGraveyard (Turned the ''entire galaxy'' into one of these.)

* EasyLogistics (Possibly Justified)

* ExpansionPack (Two: ''The Core Contingency'' and ''Battle Tactics''. The first was a full expansion complete with campaign and dozens of new units, the second a map and mission pack.)
* FactionCalculus: ARM (Subversive) vs CORE (Powerhouse), although the differences are fairly small.

* FragileSpeedster (Arm's Zipper K-Bot, and other units such as the Jeffy/Weasel recons, the PeeWee/A.K. scout K-Bots and the Flash/Instigator light tanks (Arm version/Core version)).

* GameMod (Many, many mods. Many even continue to this day.)

* GiantSpider (Arm, well, Spiders.)

* GuiltFreeExterminationWar (Both factions use this and ''have'' to be sure they've wiped the other side out or they'll just rebuild with {{nanotechnology}}.)
* HeroicMime (Taken to extremes; neither faction's Commander has any personality to speak of, and everything else is a plain robot.[[note]]Although technically, so is the Core Commander.[[/note]])

* HopelessWar (When an entire civilisation can be built from nothing as fast as you can tear it down...)
* HumongousMecha (Depending on your scale, either everything from the infantry Kbots on up, or just the seriously big ones like the Core Sumo and Krogoth.)

* InvisibleWall (Zig-zagged. You can't order units off the edge of the map, but air units will happily disappear off the edge for a moment while maneuvering.)

* MeaningfulName (The planets' names):

* MechaMooks (Everyone except the Commanders.)
* MightyGlacier (Core Cans and Sumos.)

* {{Nanomachines}} (Ubiquitous, used for construction, reclamation, repairing and just about everything else.)
* NoCanonForTheWicked (The Arm campaign victory was confirmed as the canon one by the story in ''The Core Contingency'')

* PalmtreePanic: Thalassean and Nigh Pilago.

* RidiculouslyFastConstruction ([[JustifiedTrope Justified]].)
* RiskStyleMap (The Boneyards ranking system meta-game, until it was taken down.)

* ShownTheirWork (The manual's glossary explains much of the technology in TA as according to real-life science. One example: the Moho Mine, which is an advanced metal extractor, is short for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity Mohorovicic Discontinuity]], which is the distance between a planet's crust and its mantle. As the manual says, the Moho Mine drills for metal at distances anywhere between 10 to 50 kilometers deep, depending on the planet. The glossary also goes into ridiculously detailed science as to how the Commander's Disintegrator Gun works and why nothing can defend against it.)
* SingleBiomePlanet (Mostly; occasionally several different styles would be used on one map to suggest climatic variations, e.g. ice + temperate + urban).

* SpiritualSuccessor (''VideoGame/SupremeCommander''.)

* SpritePolygonMix (All units are polygonal, as are some projectiles like missiles, whereas the maps and other projectiles are sprite-based)
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism (Although the game noticeably lacked much background material, what does exist is ''extremely'' dark, focusing as it does on the descent of a fundamentally idealistic civilisation into a civil war of utter annihilation.)

* TeleportersAndTransporters (Galactic Gates. It's implied that using them consumes huge amounts of energy, making it impossible to teleport troops en masse. Hence only the Commanders are sent to conquer the enemy worlds.)

* UnderTheSea: Hydross, which has no dry land at all (though a Commander can climb onto a coral reef to surface, he cannot build on it).

* WeaponOfMassDestruction (The nukes, obviously, but the expansion pack's plot revolves around a plot by the remnants of the Core to destroy THE ENTIRE GALAXY with their appropriately named Galactic Implosion Device, which appropriately is the biggest structure in the game by a long way)
* WeCannotGoOnWithoutYou: In skirmish and multiplayer games, you have the option to set whether destroying one player's Commander takes the entire side with it, or not. The latter seems to be the 'canon' option, as destroying the enemy Commander in the last campaign mission does not take everything else with it.
* WeHaveReserves (Neither side attach any importance to the lives of its individual units; the Arm clone all their pilots, the Core can simply download another copy of the pattern.)

* VariableMix: This was performed by switching music tracks on the CD. This resulted in a jarring transition whenever you entered or left combat. In addition, the version before any patches were applies would always select the first music track, which cut down on variety.

* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman (The whole thing started because the Arm considered patterning too "inhuman".)
* YouRequireMoreVespeneGas (The game had an original ResourceGathering system where players had both an income and expenditure flow of metal and energy.)

* ZergRush (Arm's "Flash" Light Tank is the staple unit for one of these, offering a very nice balance cost, speed and firepower).

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[[redirect:TotalAnnihilation]]