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Total Annihilation Kingdoms
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Commonly abbreviated as TA:K or TAK, this Real Time Strategy is the follow-up of the successful Total Annihilation made by the now-defunct company Cavedog Entertainment, and sadly, Needs More Love. The latter's setting, centered around mechs and vehicles and never showing humans, had been chosen partly because it had been thought that the much-admired 3D engine was not capable enough to depict them. Later, however, improvements made TA:K possible. TA:K has number of differences separate from its predecessor. Firstly, it is set in a magical-fantasy world called Darien rather than a Grim Dark science fiction future; secondly it has four sides rather than just two(The expansion adding a fifth one); thirdly said sides' units were very divergent, rather than almost every Arm and Core unit having a direct other-side analogue as in Total Annihilation. TAK also introduced mana batteries and multiple selectable attacks. TA:K was not as successful as Total Annihilation, and parent company Cavedog shut down due to bankruptcy shortly after the release of its Expansion Pack, The Iron Plague. However, the game enjoys a strong fan community and its versatile engine led to many mods and new side additions - probably the best-known fan-created side is the Azurians. The Plot: All-powerful magician Garacaius conquers a fair portion of land and gains immortality. Of which he soon grows bored of ( relatively speaking), and gives all of said lands and power to his children to rule over with artifacts and 'lodestones' that harvest mana and disapears. Needless to say, the siblings soon end up fighting over both. Drama Ensues when the Steam Punk Creonites enter the fray and take the quest of wiping out all magic. Who turn out to be trainees of Garacaius who learned and taught science in his exile. Oops. Each Monarch has his/her own Nation to rule over: - Elsin, Neutral Good Mage King of Aramon has your stereotypical medieval country with castles, farms, wizards, evil, backstabbing nobles and all the intrigue that comes with the package. Aramonian bases are well-known for their amazing ability to protect themselves, without much effort put into supervision; letting an Aramon player to build up a decent fortress in multiplayer will likely lead either to a long stall, or a fast and easy win for the iron-clads. Aramon also possesses the strongest army aside from that of Creon, to compensate for their almost nonexistent air and water unit repertoire. Allied with Veruna.
- Kirenna, also Neutral Good Sea Mage of Veruna, a Roman-Italian-Scottish-and-whathaveyou nation spread over numerous small islands, has the most powerful naval force in the game under her command, only challenged by the Creonite fleet. They also perform suprisingly well on the land, despite most of their troops being pushovers and Glass Cannons, but only have a handful nigh-useless air units. Allied with Aramon.
- Lokken, the very Lawful Evil Necromancer of Taros rules over a barren wasteland, which has more undead, demons and other monstrosities to it than anything else. His armies are balanced on all sides and employ brutal force for a living, along with amusing amounts of collateral damage, and, as such, the best suited for offensive approach, yet, if handled carelessly, can prove quite self-destructive. Defense isn't really their thing, and the speed of progression is largely dependent on management, making new players somewhat weak against early rushes and very weak against Creonites who advance to double the power during that time. Allied with Zhon.
- Thirsha, True Neutral Huntress of Zhon, rules over a savage, wild land inhabited by primitive tribals and monstrous beings who worship her as a goddess. The army, or more accurately, the entire population of Zhon is the most versatile, presenting a great variety of troops among which are the best of their kind, and the winged beasts of war they employ are unmatched, except by, of course, Creon. Their utter ignorance of the concept of basic defensive structures such as walls, housing or pretty much anything else aside from magical campfires and totems is somewhat of a drawback, however... Allied with Taros, for some unexplained reason.
- And the expansion gives us the nation of Creon, ruled by Lawful Neutral Mendalos The Sage, whose strongly Steam Punk-themed forces can be desribed as a comfortably paced, impenetrable wall of mass destruction. They were intentionally made more capable in all but the strongest aspects of the other four; abusing their slow advancement is the only way to beat them for sure.
One reason for TAK's failure is that it did not continue some of the trope-aversions its predecessor had been praised for. These include: - Crippling Overspecialisation: The presence of setting-appropriate melee units meant that Total Annihilation's quirky exception of 'everything can shoot at everything' was not in place.
- Do Not Run with a Gun: Units failed to engage enemies while moving from place to place. Many early fan mods focused on trying to fix this problem.
- Palette Swap: There are different terrain designs, but they are purely cosmetically different, as opposed to the original TA's different planets with different characteristics such as varying resource levels and preventing the use of certain units.
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: The effect used was similar to the nanolathes from Total Annihilation, but was supposedly meant to indicate 'being magically summoned into existence'. Fine, except two of the sides (three with the expansion) were supposed to have an ideological thing about not using magic for mundane things, or at all...
- Units Not To Scale: Ships did not appear large enough to transport the units they did, although the effects used when loading units might imply that they were being somehow stored in the magical equivalent of a teleporter.
Tropes that TAK did successfuly avert include: - Everything Fades: Not done as consistently as in Total Annihilation, because the corpses of organic units will behave differently to the wreckage of robots. However, non-organic waste such as the statues of units that have been turned to stone will never just vanish on their own.
- Friendly Fireproof: Especially with magic attacks, which have a tendency to destroy your own side as well if you're not careful.
- No Canon for the Wicked: Averted in a very strange way (and one not very popular with fans) - all the missions are canon, but unlike e.g. Starcraft where one campaign follows the next, instead the player plays a mission as Aramon, then one as Taros, and so on...including at least two cases where he first has to command one side and win a battle, then take over the other one and undo his previous victory.
- Our Elves Are Better and Our Dwarves Are All the Same: While numerous fantasy races are featured, the two most obvious ones are not.
Tropes employed include:
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