Total Annihilation Remake Released

Pxtl writes "The long-awaited remake of Total Annihilation (considered "#1 RTS of All Time" by Gamepsy), "Spring" has hit its first official public beta release. The game reimplements the original Cavedog game in a full 3d environment, replacing TA's fixed-angle view. It also brings other new features to the table, such as revised physics and a 1st-person-shooter mode. Spring reuses the original TA content and is backwards compatible with the old unit packs. While the game is currently win32 only, its source has been released under the GPL, so fixing that is only a matter of time. Get to the download page now and help out with the torrents."

Re:Single Player

[wongn]

I lost all interest after reading that.

It's quite possible that someone will be nice and make a mod for single player.

Re:TA Reminiscing

[Cecil]

The Vulcan was a truly awesome weapon. Admittedly, it was slow to build and relatively fragile. It's range was not nearly as limited as you imply though, in my memory it fired at least 3/4ths as far as a Bertha.

I'll agree with you that it was an excellent base defense but not so great as an offense. For a obsessive porc like myself though, they are a dream. On large metal maps, you *need* a vulcan, if not several, to defend your base. It is absolutely unbelievable the amount of bots the AI will send at you if you give him a good 4 hours to get his base setup.

The major downfall of the vulcan was the fact that as you let it collect kills (it would generally have at least 200 after a few minutes of operation) it would be upgraded to uber-veteran status until it was pinpoint accuracy. That's nice for most units, but for the vulcan, it's massive spread was the best thing about it. I don't think I've ever had a vulcan that got over about 400 kills. It becomes nearly impossible to get the kind of widespread destruction it enjoyed in its non-veteran days. :P If that problem had been fixed somehow, I think the Vulcan would've been an indispensable unit for long games. As it stands, it's just "good". Although the satisfaction of watching it firing for extended periods of time is still worth it.

I definitely agree with you on the immense utility of Bertha/Intimidator batteries though. Not only are they reasonably quick (albeit resource intensive) to build, but as soon as the first one goes online you can start firing, you don't have to wait for them all to finish. They also take much longer to succumb to the veteran problem, since the kills are distributed across the entire array.

Personally, my favourite was when I built a battery of roughly 150 Berthas, and (this was the hard part) enough fusion plants and energy storages to power them all. A Vulcan is satisfying, but there's nothing quite like the ominous turning of 150 barrels, and then the roar of all the berthas firing simultaneously at my command. Best done after pressing 'T' to track their shots. Follow the swarm of tightly grouped little yellow plasma pellets into the enemy base, watch it as it gets literally wiped off the map.

I have yet to discover something quite as enjoyable as that in any other game.