History VideoGame / TotalAnnihilation

* CoolGates: 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.

* EnemyExchangeProgram: Commanders have the ability to capture enemy units. Trap a single builder somewhere (or immobilise it with a spider) and cap it and you can now have a combined Arm and Core army. Core Contingency makes it even easier, at least for Core - kill a builder, then resurrect it using the Necro KBot.

* YetAnotherStupidDeath: It's possible to wipe out your own forces and buildings with careless use of the [[Disintegrator Ray D-Gun]].

* ArbitraryMinimumRange: Bertha/Intimidator are super long-range guns that can be used both defensively or offensively. The catch is that they cannot depress their gun below 0 degrees, resulting in a large blind spot.

** The planet Rougpelt is periodically bombarded by meteor showers, which can destroy weaker structures/units and generally do a fair amount of damage to anything 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. Temblor has a similar mechanic which has much lighter but more frequent earthquakes, while Gelidus takes it UpToEleven with absolutely massive hail storms that can last minutes and vary in intensity.

* RealLifeWritesThePlot: Chris Taylor chose a futuristic setting with robots because the game's engine wasn't yet sophisticated enough to handle realistic-looking human troops, risking the UncannyValley. Perfecting the engine made this possible, leading to ''VideoGame/TotalAnnihilationKingdoms''.

* StunGun: The Arm Spider unit is armed with one. Somewhat a case of WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway, because the point of the Spider is that it can scale even the steepest terrain, but you need a way to get other units over it anyway if you want to do more than stun the enemy when you get there. It can, however, be effectively used to stop the slowest (and thus heaviest) reinforcements from arriving into the battle, and often that's enough to move the equilibrium.
** Using the Spider to stun a unit for capture is actually a great way to get the opposing side's technology!
** As noted elsewhere on this page, the otherwise almost unstoppable Krogoth isn't immune to this effect at all, enabling Spider to stunlock the most expensive and powerful unit in the game.

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: Pretty hard for an RTS setting. See ShownTheirWork below.

* WalkDontSwim: The Commanders, the ActionBomb units Invader and Roach, the Triton and Crock amphibious tanks, and Core's [[UnfortunateNames Gimp]] amphibious Kbot. The Arm's equivalent to the last does in fact 'swim' on the surface rather than walking on the seabed.

''Total Annihilation'', then, is set at the very end of a vast galactic civil war that has utterly destroyed the once-great Arm and Core civilisations. Advanced resource extraction, transmutation and construction technology have allowed entire worlds to be stripped bare and turned into war machines in a matter of ''days'', entire worlds built up and torn down again and again. The Core's mass-duplication of patterns to be downloaded into war machines was countered by a mass cloning programme by the Arm, creating endless armies of identical and utterly disposable combat units; there are no such things as civilians, there is no such thing as peace. The very reasons for the conflict have been largely forgotten over four millennia of hyper-efficient industrial warfare. Only the shattered military remnants of Core and Arm survive, still bitterly fighting over a ruined galaxy, reducing worlds to nothing but barren graveyards of broken machines.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.
** The manual outright states that tremendous amounts of energy are needed merely to open a Gate: it has to be charged up for ''weeks'' before it can be activated, and considering the amount of energy that these civilizations are capable of producing, that's saying something. In addition to the energy limitation, the Gate collapses as soon as a few thousand kilos pass through it, which makes it most cost-effective to send a Commander through most of the time.
** The official strategy guide mentions that Galactic Gates are technology level 10, like Commanders (everything else is 1, 2 or 3) which also implies that they are a LostTechnology that can no longer be built--explaining why it's so important to capture them intact in-game.

* FrickinLaserBeams: Used by both sides, but especially the Core.

** Arm as a whole tends to favor conventional ordnance and rapid-fire weapons while Core favors slower but more damaging weapons and FrickinLaserBeams.

* BonusLevelOfHell: The Krogoth Encounter included with the expansion, an absolutely brutal fight against a massive Core Krogoth manufacturing base.

%%* EnemyExchangeProgram

* GuiltFreeExterminationWar: Both factions use this and ''have'' to be sure they've wiped the other side out or they'll just rebuild with {{nanotechnology}}.

* MundaneUtility: most of your Commander's D-Gun shots won't be directed at the enemy - rather, they'll be force-fired by you at the surrounding terrain to clear it of wreckage, plants and general annoyances that prevent you from building there.

** Unless you count the Arm campaign mission 'Vengeance!', where the whole mission is just to take a great big bunch of premade troops and [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge charge around obliterating]] [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome all the Core units on the map]] for capturing and torturing some of your guys to death.