Total Annihilation is a Real-Time-Strategy game (RTS), it contains a style of gameplay that offers a change from games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer.
There are a large number of units and buildings in the game and more have been released by both Cavedog themselves and other 3rd party producers.
Strategies for use against the computer:
The Artificial Intelligence in Total Annihilation is reasonably smart, although it does have a few flaws you can exploit.
It is vulnerable to having it's construction units (and sometimes commander) stolen by air transports, provided your watching the radar and keeping a few transports handy you will notice that the computer tends to send individual construction units out to build metal extractors, just go over, pick them us, and carry it away for capturing.
In skirmish mode, if you play on a water map with small islands, you might that the computers commander will decide to go and build metal extractors on other metal deposits on other islands, usually leaving it's main base completely vulnerable to attack. Feel free to bomb, blast or even grab his commander as he wades through the water.
On water maps the computer will usually build a large number of ground units before moving to sea and air. Generally it amasses quite a sizeable force (and mix) of sea-based units, and it generally blasts your base with long ranged units and missile launchers without land-based defences being able to return fire.
Strategies to use on Humans:
Humans are generally smarter than the computer, they don't wait for a pre-determined amount of time before attacking and they target more important structures not just whatever they find first.
When attacking focus on critical targets such as power generators and metal extractors.
Assemble a couple of small groups of bombers and fighters to pick off anything moving outside of the range of their base defences.
Other than that outresourcing and outproducing your opponent will generally win you any RTS game, however it does not work as well in Total Annihilation because resources do not "dry up" and you cannot just contain your opponent until they have run out and are unable to produce anything.
Construction Units:
Although they carry no weapons they can actually be used to attack units and structures, however they must get quite close to do it.
All construction units have the ability to reclaim, and you can use it against defenceless buildings to get metal out of them, you can even use it on units that you have picked up with your transport (although capturing them is probably a better idea), using it on other units in usually quite difficult as they must stand still or the construction unit will keep pausing to shift positions and get closer to reclaim.
Links: TA Universe - Here you can find News and information on all sorts of things related to Total Annihilation.
Total Annihilation - The official Total Annihilation site maintained by Cavedog. Cavedog Entertainment - These are the people that created Total Annihilation.
*Copyrighted images, text and/or materials that are the property of Cavedog Entertainment are reproduced with the permission of the folks at Cavedog Entertainment.
