Time to put on that favorite pair of combat boots and prepare for new battles on familiar terrain! TAG_Venom's long-awaited Total Annihilation mod, ProTA has reached the milestone of its first official release!


From the beginning, the raison d'être of ProTA was to take the original framework of Total Annihilation competitive gameplay and make delicate, surgical tweaks to that framework in order to enable new strategies for both Arm and Core that would be viable alongside the battle-plans of yesteryear, while still retaining that original cataclysmic feel. The list of alterations includes:

• Careful, thoughtful and considerate balance changes for both Arm and Core units and structures,


• Assorted gameplay tweaks and bug fixes,


• Quality-of-life improvements including alterations to the construction and unit orders menus,


• Build hotkeys for quick-queueing fresh units,


• Visual improvements including to mini-map dot colors, team colors, plus to unit models and textures!

ProTA has been extensively play-tested during every step of its development by some of the most valiant and legendary of Total Annhilation commanders, alongside the wisdom, advice and support of fellow mod developers from both present-day and our community's past. Your download link can be found at this location and if you need troubleshooting help or would like to arrange an online game, feel free to stop by the #prota channel on our very own TAUniverse Discord server!

Total Annhilation community jack-of-all-trades Postal has returned from a short hiatus and has uploaded a new Total Annihilation Replays commentary!


Continuing his series of uploads for the famous (and remarkably pretty for its age) Total Annhilation map Painted Desert, and featuring A_Novice_ToS & TAG_Mastah opposing TAG_Souledge & Gnug115, this match clocks in around 30 minutes long and goes great with a coffee and a snack. If you haven't already, definitely get your D-Gun ready and aim for that subscribe button!

We have received word that competitive gamers from three different Total Annihilation-inspired game communities are on a collision course!

A series of tournament-style multiplayer matches that have been dubbed the RTS Triathalon will take place on June 5th 2021, that will be casted live on the Forged Alliance Forever Twitch channel, with players from the Forged Alliance Forever, Planetary Annihilation, and Beyond All Reason fandoms taking part across all three separate gaming canvases.


Further information and a list of participants for these glorious battles can be found here, and if you wish to closely follow and discuss the event, there has been an Official Discord set up for the occasion! We would like to wish the Commanders good luck and good shooting.

The Total Annihilation Escalation team recently upped the ante with the release of their Tier-4 collection of ultra-destructive weaponry! Currently available are twenty new units and structures for Arm and Core, enhancing combat on land, in the air, and on the sea! Showcased below are some of the awesome air and naval units that you can expect to play with!


Of course, there are other topics to speak of as well! ESC main-man Wotan has been hard at work expanding the battlegrounds of Total Annihilation with an upcoming tileset and some new maps! The map on the left is entitled Dark Prime Rising and it is the test-bed map for the new Dark Prime tileset. The map on the right is tentatively titled Wotan's Gambit. Both maps promise to provide a fitting canvas for whatever style of gameplay you prefer.


I also have a replay of recent TA Escalation gameplay to share! This quick and explosive match is fought between ESC community members Harald and N3XT_R[A]cE.


High-resolution versions of all these pictures, gameplay discussion, download links and upcoming previews can all be found on the Total Annihilation Escalation Discord server!

Community veteran and your local Ubercrack dealer BLITZ_MOLLOY has opened up shop on his very own Youtube channel for streaming and commentating competitive Total Annihilation games! His channel is entitled Better Than Starcraft and his casts are resplendent with BLITZ_MOLLOY's irreverent brand of humor.

Of special note is his recent Valentine's Day cast, where he added in a bit of smooth jazz to get you in the mood to love TA just a little bit more. Definitely worth checking out!

Another exhibition match recently took place showcasing the Supreme Commander Total Annihilation (or SCTA) project, which featured Forged Alliance community member Boom facing legendary competitive Total Annihilation online player, TAG_ROCK! The footage is over two hours long, so grab a beverage and click below.

TAUniverse would like to extend the warmest holiday greetings to all who will read this message. We hope that your holidays will contain the same spirit of graciousness and good cheer regardless of the things that have happened around us, and hope for good tidings - and good gaming, in the New Year.

If you will allow a flashback and a question, I found this treasured momento while doing some spring cleaning recently, and want to share because I received it as a gift for Christmas of 1999. Do you have any treasured Total Annihilation momentos or holiday season gaming memories that you'd like to share? Feel free to comment on the forum.

Recently, an epic exhibition battle occurred between Forged Alliance Forever tournament director, Swkoll, and the mastermind behind Total Annihilation Replays, Postal! This gameplay took place utilizing the SCTA mod that aims to recreate Total Annihilation's valiant Arm warriors and deadly Core battalions within the framework of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Video is shared below.

The long-awaited new verbal joust between the self-described last Core Commander and Total Annihilation Replays mastermind Postal, with the undisputed first Arm Commander and strategy gaming kingpin, Chris Taylor, has been released!


The marathon interview clocks in at over two hours, tells the story of Total Annihilation and also goes in-depth on many of the hot-button issues that Total Annihilation has accumulated along its long history (game bugs and resulting strategies, intellectual property and modding, the gaming business and successor games, and much more), then finishes with a discussion of and update on Chris Taylor's newest venture, the cloud-based gaming platform Kanoogi!

Our friends over in the Supreme Commander: Total Annihilation project (or SCTA for short) have announced an upcoming, four round 2v2, double elimination-style tournament will be taking place with cash prizes and forum bonuses for the top 3 winning teams, that will begin in two weeks time on Saturday, October 17!


What is SCTA, you might ask? It's a mod for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance that aims to faithfully recreate the Arm and Core factions from Total Annihilation, inside the Forged Alliance framework, and balance them against the other armies within the base game. In order to participate in this tournament, you must have a Steam copy of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance and have downloaded the Forged Alliance Forever gaming client, which is available on the Forged Alliance Forever website. Then, grab yourself a copy of mods entitled SCTAFix and SCTABalance from the Mod Vault located inside the client.



For more details on the structure of the tournament, the prizes that will be available and the maps that the tournament players will do battle on, please visit this forum post, and don't forget that your destination for status updates on SCTA, more detailed installation instructions and troubleshooting tips, and to arrange multiplayer matches is the SCTA Discord server!

In celebration of Total Annihilation's 23rd birthday I do indeed have some newsbits to share!

First up is that our community play-by-play man Postal has shared another of his renowned Total Annihilation Replays reviews, and this one is pretty special. Straight from the secret archives of the legendary Gnug615 comes a match between himself and Gnug725 against TAG_Warlock and Aslan on that famous battleground map, Gods of War! This replay dates back over 20 years to April of 1999 - those primordial days where Cavedog still haunted the RTS gaming industry, and features tactics the likes of which you may have never seen before.


Second up is that Total Annihilation Escalation main-man Wotan put together an incredible new piece of eyecandy to salute the valiant and venerable game that his project is built upon, and to showcase the flight and fury that Escalation contains! The preview image is below, but the ultra 8K version resides on the Escalation Discord server! You may even spot units yet to be released - and long awaited, in the expanded view!

Total Annihilation turns 23 years old this weekend! Do you have any treasured memories you'd like to share from your time playing the game or being a part of the community? Share them in the comments below!

Thanks to a contribution by TA community member, SnakeInTheMirror, Total Annihilation has seen what may be the first attempt at using neural network AI technology to enhance and upscale some of the venerable and memorable CG video that came with the game. So, below is the introductory video from Total Annihilation for your viewing pleasure:


Upon clicking above, the enhanced video will play first, and then a split-screen is is employed so that you can compare with the original footage. The improvement is noteworthy, and it's definitely worth checking out if you haven't come across it already.

Today I have an interview to share with Wotan, co-founder and leading man of the runaway train known as Total Annihilation: Escalation. Without further ado..


What was your entry into the TA community? When did you first get the game and what were your initial thoughts about how it was constructed and its playability?

My brothers and I opened up one of the very first LAN gaming sites in the USA back in 1996, which we trademarked as the ‘Matrix’, before shutting it all down right before a certain movie came out years later… Anyway, we got heavily into real-time strategy gaming via Command & Conquer, that first year, when we started reading about this new ‘3D’ game in PC Magazine called Total Annihilation. With games like Quake and Magic Carpet, 3D was really in vogue as the Next Big Thing back then. TA looked cool, but at first it did not really seem all the much different than Dark Reign and some of the other next gen RTS titles on the horizon. That changed in the fall of ’97 when we first started up TA though. We had these "ginormous" 20” CRTs (you could play games on these for an extra $2.50 an hour) running TA at 800x600. My first memory of the game is playing on ‘Rock Alley’ as Core (color red, of course) looking at the massive Goliath tanks pushing northward toward my Arm enemy (blue, naturally). The depth, both map terrain and the amount of units was jaw dropping. I’d be lying if I said that is what hooked me on TA though – the real grab came a bit later when we found we were able to make maps after the release of Total Annihilation: Core Contingency. The seemingly endless creative potential as much as the playability is what really struck me about TA and it has remained that way ever since.

How did Escalation come about and what were your initial goals for the project?

The road to Escalation was quite a long and winding one on my side. I started out making maps and was really into the TAMEC scene early on. My younger brother introduced me to 3rd party units and I was again smitten with the concept of realizing one’s own vision for the ideal game. Like anyone else, I started out patching together different units into a collection to fill out the game. It was fun, but they were not my units and many others were doing it better, especially Uberhack and Brave Sir Robin. I really started to cut my teeth into learning about modding with Uberhack along with running a community of like-minded players and would-be modders by participating there. NJ_Thug was also a huge help and taught me 3D texturing in Rhino. C_A_P taught me the conversion process for adding Total Annihilation: Kingdoms tilesets and features into TA (I did the Creon, Zhon, and Aramon conversions that many still use today). I did a lot of small collaborations with Genghis Khan X, Caer, Silencer, Chinahook, VanTheMan, Sinclaire, Immerman, and many others before meeting this guy who was working on a new race called The Talon… It was not until two years later though, and after working on my own popular mod (with help from Boogalizer and Warlord), that TheRegisteredOne, The Talon’s founder - and I realized that we could do something really special for TA. In a nutshell, merge the production quality standards of TheRegisteredOne's brilliant work with the popular concepts and scope presented in my project into the ‘Ultimate TA Mod’ - Total Annihilation: Escalation.

What do you envision the end-result of this momentous amount of work, the creation and execution of Total Annihilation: Escalation to be, and has that vision changed over the course of time due to the advancements in scripting and engine knowledge that have occurred over the years?

Until recently, the end result was really nowhere in sight – just churning out new ideas and concepts in line with all the new hacks and tweaks made available through the hard work of guys like Xon, Zwzsg, xpoy, and Admiral_94 and many others. Escalation certainly evolved with these new capabilities as we often forged them into unexpected and new units and concepts for the game. So many fresh ideas bore fruit early on that we soon realized that The Talon would likely have to be mothballed in favor of a more "fleshed-out" Arm and Core. This resulted in completing a true Level-3 tier and even larger Tier-4 units. Collaborations also continued to help round out the overall game with help from Archdragon, N72, R1ME, Keeper, Idec, Zodius, MattyWS+, Nightmare, and others. Now, years later, the answer is clear at least for me: Wrap up Tier-3 development, finish the Tier-4 ‘mini-tier’, and re-introduce The Talon in some form.

Do you hope that Escalation will outlive and outgrow Total Annihilation as a game, in the same way that a project like Zero-K arguably outgrew its origin?

I’d say yes being a bit selfish in that regard, and in a way that has already happened. Over the years we worked with so many talented, but different folks (both players and creators), such that the net effect has become greater than the sum of its parts. If you go online where TA is still played most (GameRanger), far more people play Escalation than OTA and that has been the case for quite a while now. Many of the former professional TA player ranks have gravitated toward the mod and have contributed also. However, Escalation is still "locked" within the TA ecosystem given that its assets are derived conceptually somewhat from TA itself. Personally, I’d love to see Escalation go beyond the TA engine, but unless that engine supports the core essence of TA (Robot War Engine being the best possibility!), it likely won’t happen anytime soon. The best possibility for any TA mod to outgrow the venerable TA engine though really lies with Total Annihilation: Zero in my opinion – it is truly a remarkable and fantastic achievement by Vohvelieläin!

Do you feel that a project like Escalation could be considered a more faithful "spiritual successor" to original Total Annihilation than the new real-time strategy titles that have been labeled as such, outside of the fact that Escalation is built on TA's engine? What, if any and in your opinion, were the key ingredients of Total Annihilation that the "spiritual successor" games missed out on?

As for all the so called "spiritual successors", the problem in my mind is that they fail to follow the very basics of what made TA so great! That starts with the left mouse click functions (why do all ‘modern’ games shy away from this!?). To all Devs out there: If it is not left-mouse click, it is not TA no matter how it looks, so start here with your next "spiritual successor". Next, is the infamous ‘strategic zoom’ (aka Icon Wars). While, in principle, this is a really cool feature in new games, the creators of Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation forgot something very important: the more you zoom out, the less detail you should have on your own and your opponent’s forces. Namely not having icons that tell you exactly what type and level the unit is, along with full control of said icons such that zooming back in is unnecessary or even detrimental to winning a completive. Keep the action where it is – the tactical layer. Finally, I’d add the immersive-ness of that close up action as an important factor along with a rich variety of units. I found SupCom’s units to be ‘holographic’ often lacking mass and feel, made worse by the very soft weapon and explosion sounds. Planetary Annihilation was hamstrung by round planets (kudos for trying something different, but…), a single race, and the strangely unnatural, natural "flow field" pathing mechanics. Ashes Of The Singularity suffered from a lack of essential unit basics like mechs and tanks and also stealing our color schema and name in their sequel!

What work remains in order for you to consider Escalation to be a finished product, and do you imagine that there will be new territory to explore once main production has ceased?

Aside from the goals mentioned earlier (wrap up T3 development, finish the T4 ‘mini-tier’, and re-introduce The Talon in some form), it will be great to finally have a polished installer (KmKickle and Draken have started), a finished AI (TaFan97 & Fortitude are on this), and cleaned up Windows 10 support (Thaldren's Project Valkyrie). As for the Escalation community and our future, FN202 has our growing player base in great hands with the Total Annihilation Demo Archive and the new competitive gameplay ladder - with a 'locked' in Total Annihilation: Escalation, we're poised for an even richer asset of games and hopefully some big tournaments again! I would really like to sit back and enjoy the game as a player for once while taking on less demanding projects like revisiting the possibility of Escalation based missions (hopefully with Warlord) and sunset things with getting back to where it all began – map making. I think there is still untapped potential with maps and tilesets in TA - both making larger maps playable online and in creating some awe-inspiring masterpieces. I am actually surprised that this has not happened already on a larger scale given the tools out there. MattyWS+ has started some incredible work here, but there are still many new worlds yet be explored.

Our distant cousins over in the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Forever community also have an interview series going with real-time strategy notables, with the most-recent entry being the sci-fi strategy kingpin himself, Chris Taylor. This in-depth and very conversational interview covers many topics including the storied history of Gas Powered Games, the process of building new RTS titles from scratch, navigating the stormy waters of the gaming industry and Chris Taylor's legacy in it, where the Supreme Commander franchise stands today and what its future may look like, along with discussion on Chris Taylor's future projects. It's well-worth your time to check out and is shared below.