http://tauniverse.com/?p=playta

The game lies here in the store for just €2,50 euro's.

Okay I picked up Total Annihilation. Couldn't resist. Downloaded some recorded games and loved watching them again. They're like regular movies with all the boring parts taken out.
Checked out the forums at TAUniverse, too. They talk about the game changing, which I find hard to imagine, as it hasn't been patched in what, ten years? Even the "vanilla" unmodded game.
Real surprised to find most of the hundreds of recorded games were on the same few maps, Gods of War and Gasplains and Comet Catcher and Johns Pass. Yawn. Also, they were recorded with so many different versions of the TA Recorder that I couldn't watch most of the games I downloaded. Quite a bummer, there.
The graphics looked good at 1024 x 768, which is the default resolution the game installs at now. The buttons are small but not too small. I've seen the game screens at really high resolutions, and it turns the commander the size of a pencil eraser, which would make unit control too dicey. Sometimes you have to reclaim and d-gun precisely, and I don't want to lose that.
I think I played this game all the way through before going into multiplayer when it first came out, which I never do these days, as campaigns are just too dull. I might try it out again this time, though, at least long enough to get my bearings.
Unfortunately, the strat guides I've bumped into so far say little to nothing about build orders, which puts me substantially behind where I used to be no matter how fast I pick everything up again. And the explanations of different codes, which I need refreshing on, is at best very widely scattered around the net. A lot of things are going to take time to figure out. TA Universe's FAQ, unfortunately, just ain't that hot.
If people played a greater variety of maps these days, learning would be easier too. How did everybody get so dull? In TA's heyday, we played every map out there. Except maybe Yerrott's Mountain, which was so big it took forever and lagged everybody out.
Oh well, I guess I'll have to mostly figure everything out from scratch again. That'll be a bit of a slow road. I just hope when I get good enough for multiplayer I can find people who don't want to play just 3 or 4 maps.

Stayed up way late last night watching replays and practicing build orders again. The replays are just as fun as I remembered, and trying to remember good build orders, or figure them out again after not playing the game for 10 years, is a bit frustrating but still fun.

Heh, I loved TA, but I absolutely hated pretty much every stock map.
For me, the fun was setting up WWI-esque stalemates and then slowly pushing through. And that needed chokepoints, of some form.
Sounds kind of lame, and I would get shredded in MP, but there is nothing more satisfying than advancing your units under cover of two or three Big Berthas (while the AI continually carpet bombs you).

Really? There were very few Cavedog maps I didn't like. I used to play every map. The only one that nobody played much was Yerrott Mountains, because it was so big it lagged like heck, and some of those pukey green gas planet ones with the floating plants, because those lagged a lot too. Thank goodness that broadband is not out of reach anymore, and computers are easily fast enough for a game like TA though.
Re: chokepoints -- You can make your own chokepoints with vehicles, defensive towers, and dragons teeth, too. Even with solars, in a pinch.
Sounds like you played mostly AI then and are thinking a lot about porcing (holing up in your base until you become unstoppable). TA was a great game in general, and I'm having a blast relearning maps and watching recorded games again, but the really outstanding thing was the multiplayer. After learning how to survive online, fighting even multiple AI's on hard becomes pretty easy.
Course, I'm more than ten years out of practice, so I suck now. I sure wish they would do this game all over again, changing almost nothing, but updating the graphics to sell it to a new generation. Best gaming experience I've ever had, by far.

Porcing was fun for me when I was little, I would get 4+ Big Berthas lined up and have them lay down suppressive fire, make a firebase, move forward, make a firebase. Loved the FARK when the patch came out with it, it was quick enough to help me build things fast for the firebases.
By the way Porcing comes from porcupine as a reference to defense, I had to search that back when I first had the game because people would message to me that I'm a lame Porcing noob, heh.

Sounds like you need to try out TA:Mutation. Start up with Cost Cutter, QuickBuild 4x, and the brutal AI. It's insane!

So Jeremy Soule composed the music for TA...
His work is attached to some of the greatest PC games every made. Hell, his music is a selling point to me.

Yeah, but the Impulse/Atari version doesn't play the music, even though it is included in a subfolder. Shame, as that was really great music. You didn't often hear music anywhere near that good in games back then. And it was timed well too, never seeming out of place.
That said, back in the day, it could add to lag, so it was common to turn it off when playing online. I'd like to have it back for skirmish, though. TA Universe has a procedure to do it, but it involves installing this and that and a fair bit of work IMO. I hope Impulse just finds a way to fix it.
About using mods, I don't want to get used to something other than vanilla TA. That's the one I'm most likely to get a game on, if I ever get good enough again to bother.
Some exploits have become accepted in the community that I'm not sure will make online as fun for me. They seem detract from the spirit of the game. "Sprarking" comes to mind, where you shoot at either a moho metal maker or a moho metal extractor before it is finished, and it starts producing right away. You can do that with a few other things too. Also, I'm not interested in playing above the 500 unit level. Reading the TA Universe forums, people are playing 1500 limit and 5000 limit games, and then saying TA is all about playing level 1 only except for maybe Hawks. Well yeah, if you don't have to worry about unit limits, you never have to make sure you have units tougher than level 1 units. But where's the fun in that? It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, I'll have to see how I feel later. But I'm having a surprising amount of fun just practicing skirmish for right now.

According to people on the Impulse forums, you can get the game to play the music:
1) Burn the mP3s (the Impulse version comes with the soundtrack on mp3) onto a CD-R in audio CD format, but make sure to leave a filler track as track 1, since that is traditionally the data track
2) Insert the CD into your drive and boot up the game
3) The game will access the CD and load the correct music as it wishes

I found that out when i went to play a mission and my sisters ballet music started playing.

Back in the day i did this with a disturbed Album... not quite Mr Soule but it did fit rather well :)
Yeah the TA CDs doubled as audios, meaning as a lucky and rather cool side effect from the way the game handled music you could play them anywhere you like :D
IIRC the system was based on track groupings with procedural triggers... it fit so perfectly well to whatever was going on on the screen. Sorta makes you wonder why modern games dont use anything as innovative as this....

It really was completely untiresome. That's a pretty remarkable accomplishment.