Total Annihilation: Kingdoms

The Good
Total Annihilation: Kingdoms was released early-to-mid summer of 1999, before Tiberian Sun and Age of Empires 2, and more than a year since StarCraft, being one of major mainstream real-time strategies of those times. Yet you will not find this game in "top best rts of the past" lists, nor will you find reviews from major sources, which would dare to call it something above "good" and you won't even find it among answers to "best obscure rts worth playing?" question. Amounts of deranged nonsense, lies and obscurity surrounding this game are ridiculous. I will try to counter this.

Aesthetic value of games is often ignored, which greatly devalues many titles. Kingdoms stands out in this area, having truly beautiful graphics (this ranges from little details and special effects to overall look of the game, including loading screen, interface, mini-videos (just animated race emblems) and pictures during narrative sequences), and wonderful instrumental music by Jeremy Soule (Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege 2, Oblivion, Skyrim and other). Sound effects and voiceover are nice too. Weapon-hits-object sounds actually depend on type of target - flesh, stone, wood, which is unusual. Game's plot is presented as war chronicle themed narrative, and leaves very good impression too.

Kingdoms has proper simulation of 3D space (rules of this space apply to everything - no cheating), which allows many interesting things, for example: melee attack can miss if target suddenly moves away, catapult can accidently hit flying unit, walls block all projectiles, but defensive towers can easily shoot above walls (because of height difference) and winged units never hang in one place without purpose, instead flying somewhere or landing if idle. Melee units can attack on the move, and many can hit targets at different ranges (if i am not wrong) and possibly in a wide arc (this depends on weapon and attack animation randomly chosen for current strike).

Maps aren't small and can have cities, villages, forests, lakes, ocean and other, often including lots of "unnecessary" space. All settlements are inhabited by npcs and cattle, and wilderness by various animals. As a result maps feel like proper parts of imaginary world, instead of stupid cage for a player with pre-determined scenario of what will happen and how (excellent example of such approach is Wings of Liberty). Highly detailed pre-rendered 3D landscapes and overall nice and detailed graphics in combination with proper 3D physics create interesting feel of "being there", which isn't possible in much more abstract 2D rts (and interestingly most of 3D rts too). Of course to achieve this you need to play in 640x480 resolution, as increasing it will simply make everything smaller, and very distant.

Kingdoms has amazing quantity of unit types, many with interesting and often very powerful special abilities (permanent petrifying, paralysis, mind control (includes mass-control variant) or resurrection of any units to player's side (which means you can use enemy race), waterwalking, invisibility, raising dead as ghouls, various area of effect damage spells and more). Studio like Blizzard would deem most of units "unnecessary" and abilities "too powerful", but luckily Cavedog had different views, creating interesting and varied gameplay as a result, instead of boring multiplayer-oriented balance. Some of interesting units and buildings are bomber-dirigibles, floating (on water!) towers and trebuchet, game includes early guns and cannons too. Proper naval gameplay is present (for example building land army on a small island to attack continent), as well as possibility of full-scale air attacks (such possibilities depend on race).

Players with imagination are rewarded with interesting sandbox-style gameplay, considering all possibilities available. Resources are infinite, everything (even buildings) slowly regenerates hit points, and units (and defenses!) gain levels (within single mission). AI is often allowed to develop itself (it likes to build multitudes of towers in some missions, which makes enemy base much more fun to attack - you need to give AI enough time to achieve this, and not to hurt its economy, as it may never rebuild it), and is even able to develop your race's buildings and units - if it mind-controls your builder). Obviously if you rush to "complete" the game ASAP, you will miss all this, as many reviewers did.

Controls are very advanced (you will have to check game's readme file to learn all available hotkeys), clearly surpassed only by much newer Supreme Commander. Interesting and fun (and i suspect is largely unknown) unique possibility is to assign multiple factories to control group (for convenience - this way you can select all produced units by selecting this control group), and create "patrol" path (with multiple patrol nodes) leading to enemy base and covering it fully, and then order infinite unit production (of cheap units, zombies work best) - this will produce infinite automatic attack on enemy base, which can be very entertaining. Pure "attack move" function is missing, but is easily replaced with "patrol" function combined with aggressive unit behaviour. You can even drag-select an area to be cleared by a builder, and pressing "tab" will expand mini-map to fullscreen mode, allowing easy targeting of enemy units by "radar" (useful for trebuchet for example). Game speed has many levels, and can be slowed down to a level of "slo-mo", if you so desire. One review here says that mouse control is single click, but this is wrong, as it is possible to enable starcraft-style right click move/action.

The Bad
Game has some minor problems, but these are insignificant (for campaign mode at least). Units sometimes may go to "sleep" (if defensive unit behaviour is selected), forgetting to shoot enemies in range, but this is easily countered by refreshing unit's behaviour. In some (typically rare) cases pathfinding does not work well, but this can be circumvented by assigning multiple path nodes. Unusual structure of campaign sometimes disallows you to properly (with building bases and units) play certain races at certain campaign stages, but overall there are more than enough good missions, so this is not a problem. What is really sad is that AI does not want to create armies in "skirmish" mode, instead sending lone units to wander the map, but for "campaign" mode AI does work properly. Some missions are a bit strange - too easy or short, but this does not affect better parts of campaign in any way. Multiplayer never was the strongest part of this game, but this hardly matters nowadays.

The Bottom Line
What do we have overall? Excellent (mostly) quality, excellent and somewhat unusual gameplay (and with many interesting possibilities too), exceptional aesthetic value. I think that combination of wonderful music and graphics makes this game absolutely untouchable by most other games, as gameplay alone can never give such impressions. For that reason this game stays among the very best for me. But even for people who do not care about music or graphics, Kingdoms is one of the few great rts games of the nineties (and early 2000s), one of those elite games of the past, and it still has great gameplay.

In its time, lack of VIP-status "can write only good" for this game (hey, you are not C&C and not xCraft and not AoE - you are out of luck then!) and general stupidity of many reviewers (which disallowed them to see anything truly worthy in this game, and allowed to see "problems" which never existed), has led to Kingdoms being marked as some generic "ok game", not worthy of any major attention. But in reality it is truly wonderful game (a little miracle, really), which never got recognition it deserved - as it never had something obviously amazing for its time to attract people, and in addition was a bit "strange". If you have a good taste and some imagination, there's a very good chance of suddenly discovering one of the best rts (and maybe even games) in Total Annihilation:Kingdoms - if you give it a chance.

p.s. Kingdoms isn't really difficult or anything like that, because it was aimed at the masses, just like Tiberian Sun, Age of Empires 2 and other hits of those times, so you shouldn't be scared to try it. Add-on for the game - "Iron Plague", is mostly excellent too, and has many very good (especially naval) missions.

Some useful info (as it is very easy to not know this): - Choosing (by separate exe file) 3D-accelerated rendering mode (Direct3D or 3Dfx Glide) will make some effects look better and add some new. - Patched game version decreases visual size of dirigible, which is obviously wrong. Version 1.0 is fine (if it works for you).