Total Annihilation was a gigantic leap forward in most every aspect of strategy gaming. From sound effects to terrain effects to mobility, this game destroyed every competitor in the genre for years afterward.
Up to this point in RTS history, terrain was restricted to one role: movement prevention. Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Starcraft...the only effect terrain had on the battle was to keep troops from moving everywhere through the use of cliff faces and water. In Total Annihilation, you can gain tremendous advantages from the landscape. The land has gradual hills that can provide cover from direct fire weapons because projectiles operate on an arc, and thus height plays a factor. In fact, unlike most other rock paper scissors systems where artificial bonuses are used to balance the game, certain types of weapons are advantageous on certain terrain (missiles fire vertically and then fall on their opponents, vastly improving their capabilities over cover).
This game's scale is not matched in a strategy game until Rome: Total War. TA battle consist of hundreds and hundreds of individual robot soldiers all with different AI assignments. As a result, this game is also one of an elite few RTS's where tactical nukes do damage on a realistic scale. The game is also not just three different troops on each side cloned a million times over; each side, in the original game, boasts at least 40 unique warriors between the first and second level of the KBot Labs, Vehicle Plants, Naval Shipyards, and Aircraft Platforms. Admittedly, some of the units from the lower tiers are overlapped by the higher tier troops, but because of the extreme fluctuation in time and resource costs mean that you can easily overwhelm an opponent who is using level two troops with level one troops. Level two troops simply increase your options.
The game sounds like an epic war movie, and justly so, because the soundtrack was created by the one-and-only Jeremy Soule; I consider this particular set of pieces to be the best music he has ever written. I can't satisfactorily describe the music here; it has few equals.
If you are uninitiated in the realm of the RTS, don't bother going this far back. Dawn of War and, once you have some experience under your belt, Company of Heroes are the best strategy games on the market by far. This title is worth checking out if you simply missed it; it is still incredible despite its age.
