The bigger a map is, the harder it is to take out an enemy. By the time your forces arrive at an enemy's base, it may be a well-defended fortress. Also, your Intimidators or Big Berthas might not be able to shoot far enough to reach an enemy. In this instance, Nukes may have to be used.

Mobile attack units can also be used to defend a base rather than attack one.

The army that doesn't expand and collect resources is the army that loses.

The army that attacks first is usually the army that wins (if its base is expanding while attacking).

A Big Bertha needs a Fusion Reactor as well as an Energy Storage unit to maintain its fire.

The enemy AI player knows where all your units are, even if you use jamming. Its mobile units will approach yours head-on. But they won't fire on your units until they are within firing range and have visually sighted your units. The only time enemy AI units will fire at yours without having to visually see them fist is by using a Targeting Facility to auto-fire at your units it sees on its radar. NOTE: Jamming your units will prevent them from being seen on enemy radar and getting fired at by enemy Berthas that use Targeting Facilites. But enemy AI mobile units will still come at your units and shoot after your units are sighted.

Radar units are only good for detecting blips on a map. That's it. It helps a player make decisions about where to maneuver and where to attack. Both human and computer units will attack enemy blips that are in range only if they have an operating Targeting Facility. Otherwise, visual confirmation is necessary in order to attack.

A Targeting Facility needs a Fusion Reactor to power it. It helps units fire their weapons on their own without you having to manually click on each individual enemy blip that's within its firing range that appears on the mini-map. Normally, weapons will only fire on their own at units that are in their field of view. But when a Targeting Facility is online, weapons don't have to have visual confirmation first before firing at a target. If an enemy is detected by radar, that's all the info they need to starting firing at it. All your weapons will fire at any unidentified enemy blip that's within their firing range that appears on the mini-map. Think of if as having an "Auto-Kill" setting for all your operating weapons.

NOTE: Targeting Facilities and radars are not needed if you have permanent line-of-sight enabled.

The AI will not build any units until it has enough metal and energy to build with. Once building has started on a unit, the AI will continue building it whether it still has enough metal or energy to finish the job.

The AI collects 100% of its resources in Hard mode, 75% of its resources in Medium mode, and 50% of its resources in Easy mode.

Units firing from higher terrain have a hard time hitting units at lower levels. This is mainly because nearly all units can't aim downwards, but only upward or straight ahead. So units located at the bottoms of cliffs actually have a better chance of wiping out any invading armies that are situated on the cliff edges above.

Flakker weapons are great for bringing down Brawlers and Rapiers. They don't work much at all on Hawks or Vamps. Use Missile Towers for those.

A cloaked unit is invisible to the eye. But radar can see it. A Targeting Facility will allow weapons to open fire on those blips. Otherwise, manually selecting the blips to be fired upon becomes the standard operation.

A stealth unit is visible to the eye. But radar can't see it.

Units that can travel on water do not cast a shadow. TOTALA.EXE is an unfinished game in that respect. I would like to see someone modify all Hovercraft units so that they travel the same way as a Construction Aircraft. They would takeoff vertically and float like CA's do. And they would cast a shadow. Hovercraft would then be more realistic in my opinion. Boats and amphibious units would still have the "shadow casting" bug though.

Here are some good commands to use the first time you play the game:
+clock: Turns on the game time clock.
+dither: Makes the "fog of war" look better than just having it grayed out.

Here are some important commands to use in a game:
+shootall: Sets the default setting of your weapons to fire at any enemy unit. Not just the hostile ones.
+shareradar: Share your radar info with your allies.
+sharemapping: Share your mapping info with your allies.
+sharemetal: Allows you to begin sharing your metal with your allies.
+setsharemetal #: Share any metal above # amount with your allies.
+shareenergy: Allows you to begin sharing your energy with your allies.
+setshareenergy #: Share any energy above # amount with your allies.

If you want to play a skirmish game with ten players (you and nine AI players), type *x while in the Skirmish Setup screen.

The TAB key is very important in multiplayer games for accessing even more team player options.

Some players like to play with building rules like the famous "10 minute" rule where players cannot attack each other during the first 10 minutes of a game. In general however, most games of TA will play out something like this:

00:00:00-00:10:00: Players build their initial bases and gather enough resources to begin their attacks with Level 1 units.
00:10:00-00:20:00: Players progress on to Level 2 units while expanding their hold on the terrain.
00:20:00-00:30:00: Players build their Level 3 fortifications to accelerate them through to the game's end.
00:30:00-00:40:00: Players fight their last battle with everything they've got.

This item might be more of a trouble-shooting subject than a playing subject. But if you fix just one unit in TA, make it the Necro unit. The original Necro wasn't finished or play-tested before Cavedog closed its doors. It was released as-is after the company's 25th hour. The Necro fails to repair units or assist with building and is more of a hindrance than a help for Core players, human or AI. A fixed Necro unit can be found here.

The AI plays against the map, not against you. It sees your units as simply features on the map, and will aim all of its units at the closest unit of yours. If you lose a battle, it's because the AI just out-grew the map and you were in its way. It's nothing personal. If the AI builds the right units at the right time, it is by chance only.

Don't build maps based on any particular AI profile. A map should be designed first, then a particular AI profile (that determines which units get built/used) should be designed for it.

When designing a map, use a SurfaceMetal value of 255 for metal terrain and a SurfaceMetal value of 1 for all other terrains. The TA engine will ignore any MohoMetal or SolarStrength setting given.

Make sure the entire surface area of a map is viewable. This will prevent lines in your height map from over-lapping which will only confuse the TA display engine which is trying to render units on your terrain.

Creating a new kind of ramp for use when making metal maps (and watching how your armies use them via their pathfinding) can be really fun!

Be sure to include ten starting points on your map whether they'll all get used or not in gameplay.

When profiling an AI, get the thing to build a good solid base without nano-stalling. Use the +view # command (#=0-9) to see how well the AI is using its metal and energy. Once its "base building" is down to a science and fully operational, start adding attack units to the AI's build list. Don't add every unit to the build list at once, or you won't know where to start desk-checking it when your AI goes out of wack!

If an AI profile is told how often to build Geothermal Plants, the AI still has to manage to pick a spot on the map that is near a thermal vent and that isn't blocked in some way. Otherwise, a Geothermal Plant never gets built by the AI. So make sure the map you're designing has lots of thermal vents on it to increase the chance of one being built.

Be sure to click on (and read) the Total Annihilation Map and Mission Editor's Help Menu for instructions on building your own TA maps!

What is really required to write an at least decent Total Annihilation II style game is creativity and an understanding of the mechanics of the original game as well as a logical direction for the innovations in the GUI and game engine to take. It wouldn't hurt to have the new game take place before the first Total Annihilation, since there is only one race left now. And it would be very cool to see the Arm and Core armies when they were in their prime. See also the TA2 wish list.

Be sure to use a 63.44° camera angle when rendering a 3D terrain map for TA. This is the same angle that Annihilator and TA use when viewing contour lines on a map.

It's fine if you create new units and features for Total Annihilation. Just don't pack them into UFO map files, as they will cause conflicts that are hard to diagnose.

Install the DirectX 5.0 software included with Total Annihilation only if you're using Windows95 and currently have an older version of DirectX installed. WindowsNT only supports up to DirectX 3.0a which gets installed by the NT Service Packs. Total Annihilation will still run fine on such configurations. Newer versions of Windows come with newer versions of DirectX already installed. Total Annihilation may not recognize the newer DirectX versions, but it will still run.

If some of the audio from the units is not being heard in the game, you may need to turn down (or off) your audio card's acceleration setting.

If you want to hear the game music while playing, make sure that the game CD is in the first CD-ROM drive found on your system and that its audio cable is connected to your audio hardware. Also make sure the volume control for your CD-ROM is not muted. You can listen to any audio CD while playing if you want.

This one is an obvious one. There's nothing worse than playing TA with either no picture at all (only sound) or with a flickering refresh-rate. So set your video adapter's refresh rate to one that matches the specs of your monitor for a 256-color screen using the resolution you'll be playing the game at.

Be sure to use HPIView on maps you've never played before so you can see if there are new units or AI's included in them that you should know about. It's always good to know the AI profile used by any map so that you can use your favorite AI's on them as well.

Don't assume the sections you're using to build your terrain have the correct height map assigned to them. You can use the +contour 5 command in gameplay to verify a terrain's height map. The +contour 0 command turns off the height map display.

When adding AI players in a multiplayer game, do not remove an AI player once one has been added and do not cycle through the team logos (for example: choose the last team logo for the first team created, then choose the team logo before that one for the next team created, and so on). This will prevent problems like not being able to fire on AI players you are not allied with.

Confused by your Commander not wanting to move to the deep end of a water map? The Commander can only go to a water depth of 100. If his water depth is below 100 at the start of a game, he'll be stuck and won't move at all.

There is a bug in Cavedog's Total Annihilation Map and Mission Editor that will cause it to crash in Windows98 when it is used on a disk partition larger than 4GB. In WindowsXP, the editor works fine with any size disk partition. Annihilator 1.5 does not suffer from this bug. But it does not allow the making of campaign maps.

If you're playing behind a firewall, you may want to configure it for playing TA online. See settings.