[pzaich]

Total Annihilation was great. The big difference for me that made Starcraft superior was the uniquely balanced set of races to choose from. The two factions in TA were essentially mirror images of each other. Starcraft always felt like it had another layer of depth to strategy as a result of the various matchups between races.

[Nition]

Totally agree that the different balanced factions made Starcraft superior BUT, the beautifully designed interface made TA superior in another way. Coming from clunky predecessors like Red Alert, the removal of micromanagement in TA was a revelation.

You could queue multiple units to build, adding in multiples of 1 or 5 (Supreme Commander later made this into an even more powerful system). You could queue an infinite amount of orders for each of your units - not just pathing waypoints but everything. I used to set my Commander up to do about 15 minutes of building at the start of the game.

You could tell buildings to "move" somewhere and all units coming out of those buildings would go there when built. You could tell construction units to patrol and they'd automatically repair damaged units and collect resources on the way. You could tell construction units to assist buildings and they'd help build new units. You could press Ctrl-A to select all units, Ctrl-W to select all fighting units, and other ones for airplanes, ships etc. And so on.

I think it pretty much shaped the attitude I have today where in game design, I think everything that has one "correct" answer should be automated away, and everything else made as simple as possible.

Of course when TA first came out the battle wasn't yet between TA and Starcraft, but between TA and Dark Reign.

[pfarnsworth]

If I remember, each unit was rendered in 3D so it was visually stunning as well, as opposed to Starcraft that looked flat and old to me. The graphics during huge fights were really awesome, and you got a lot of time to admire it when you had huge battles and it slowed the frame rate down to a crawl.

[Nition]

Yep and not only are the units rendered in 3D but the unit's projectiles really move in 3D and get blocked by terrain etc, and line-of-sight gets blocked by hills and so on as well. The terrain is just an image but it's calculated via a 3D mesh that underlies it.

Also, TA supports all screen resolutions your monitor does, so far from needing a Remaster, TA still looks surprisingly good today at high resolution. The interface (which is designed to work with 640x480) quickly gets tiny though.

[zamalek]

> get blocked by terrain

This made the green race (forget their name) in Supreme Commander quite overpowered - as artillery doesn't suffer from line-of-fire and that race had the most powerful artillery.

The simulation of projectiles also made the game run like a dog, but we loved that slow dog.

[TulliusCicero]

Starcraft's graphics have aged considerably better than Total Annihilation's. Starcraft looks like classic pixel art where TA looks like 90s 3D.