Complete destruction, huge battles, massive scale, planet smashing, explosions and robots. There you are, Planetary Annihilation in a single sentence. You send units to planets and asteroids, construct bases on them and use asteroids as big kinetic bombardment weapons to smash your enemy’s planets. That’s Planetary Annihilation alright.
Uber Entertainment, home of some of the guys that developed the 1997 sci-fi RTS Total Annihilation are now on Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, in what they call to be a “truly innovative spin on what RTS games can and should be”.
Planetary Annihilation is inspired by Total Annihilation’s gameplay, now on a bigger scale. You’re to expand over several star systems to collect resources and create vast armies to annihilate planets to ultimately win the war. There’s a multiplayer skirmish system planned where you can play against a friend or team-up against the AI but you can also play single player against the AI.
I didn’t play Total Annihilation. Guess I was busy playing Master of Orion 2 at the time. But, it’s amazing the number of great scores this game has received.
Things are looking good for Planetary Annihilation, with still 21 days to go on Kickstarter they already got about 80% of their funding goal. But, it’s not time to relax yet. If you are a big fan of Total Annihilation or sci-fi RTS games in general you should take a look at this. $20 give access to the PC or Mac game version. $40 give the game plus early access to the beta and a copy of the soundtrack.
\Edit (29/08/2012): 900K funding reached. Planetary Annihilation will be a reality. Devs goal achievement video here.
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Dont like the look or sound of this one Adam. I guess for the rampagers destroying planets might make them feel…something or other….god knows what….but definitely not for me.
Don’t know David. Maybe not for everybody but it does look cool. Guess only the people who played Total Annihilation will know how cool this one may be. Scores for the 1997 classic are very high. It may be clickfest and it may not, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t play the original Total Annihilation game.
Total Annihiliation is by far the best RTS ever created. One should look at TA as the precursor of Supreme Commander, but without the strategic zoom. Although this sentence does not do the game justice.
I think one should look at TA at the time it came out. 3D top down perspective, with physics and hit calculations based on ballistics. So no diceroll stuff. So units on top of a hill actually could fire a greater distance, that sort of stuff. Pretty advacned stuff for 1997.
And the music that game had. No rock & roll, but classical masterpieces that could fit in a Dark Knight movie. Ohh the memories…. ooh well back to Imperium Galacitca, I need to kill them damn Garthogs. Man I love DosBOX :-) Have a good weekend my spacesector friends.
Have you tried Open-IG? http://code.google.com/p/open-ig/
Haven’t tried OpenIG yet. it’s not yet feature complete. It also uses java, shich I avoid like the plague.
Besides DOSBox works perfectly with IG1, super smooth.
Any information on a demo? I have a friend who loved TA, it could make an interesting gift.
So you get a refund from the early access if you don’t like it?
This looks awesome! I’ve been looking for a game that seamlessly blends ground combat with space battles and empire building. There was this old rts called empire earth and the expansion added space mode, where planets were just flat disks to expand to, and it was the most fun I had in a while. This seems to take it a step further, they definitely have my money! Thanks for the news!
TA was awesome… ie massive stationary cannons, massed nuclear strikes etc. I will buy this.
TA was really great. Sure most of the units were more or less the same, but its scale was huge. It supported any resolution, Multiplayer with AFAIR eight players, really huge maps and what i really liked was the production. While nowhere the production queue of an building unit or factory was shown, it had no practical limit, you could queue up tons of units and even better, you could give orders to the factories and the units built where would start with these orders. As ressources were unlimited (the more “mines” the more ressources per time unit you got) you could make a war by simply commanding your factories to attack or move into the enemies base and then see a stream of units attacking him. and with dead hulks laying around after fights you could really see the carnage after any battle. Hot spots littered with dead units… you could even recylce. It’s the predecessor of Supreme commander and very similar.
Looks great. I player TA 2 and it was OK. It had a rough release if I remember but they eventually patches it up. But now days we need innovation and stable releases. I think these kick starters or cash cows if you will, give the developers not only the money to make the game they intend to make without publishers forcing them to release in alpha stage as some others game I odnt have to mention but it also give them time to work with players and iron out the bugs to make their game worthy and stable. So I support not only Uber but any developer that goes this route and not the way of the Darkside.
My $100 pledge just hit the table… Any game that provides an epic win by driving an asteroid at mach 5 into an inhabited planet has my vote! Oh yeah… :D
You havent played TA!?!?? Get out there and get a copy, it was class. This has potential, but if it suffers from the crippling slowdown supreme commander did on large maps or long games it just wont work. Great idea, fingers crossed they sort out all the performance kinks early doors.
Yea, strange right? Judging from TA’s release date the only explanation was that I was playing MoO2 at the time. And I played all the old RTS classics: Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Homeworld, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Starcraft but not TA, as far as I can remember at least.
You can also try Spring engine (http://springrts.com/) that is TA in 3d
I hope it will be as good as Supreme Commander, but a little bit more optimized :)
I can’t wait ’till this thing comes out!
Ps. I loved SupCom’s unit movement queue managment thingie. I hope they’ll remake that too :)
SupCom took that from TA, it’s the first game that came up with it. So they will use it for PA and want to improve it even.
the astroid bombardment is very “Shiva Option” – if you get the reference, im impressed
Love that series of book by David Weber!
recommend a book as good ?
I can recommend many books. :)
Start with any series of book by David Weber. I like his earlier written books.
Books I like from David Weber that has similar Space Opera theme are
1) “In fury born”
2) Honor Harrington series. Start with “On Basilisk Station”
3) Dahak series. Start with “Mutineer’s Moon”
You can LEGALLY download the ebooks by David Weber from
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
Alternatively, other space opera series that I like, written by different authors are
1) Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. Start with “Shards of Honour”
2) Night’s dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton. Start with “The Reality Dysfunction 1: Emergence”
3) Lensman series by E.E. “Doc” Smith. Start with “Triplanetary”
With the above recommendations, I hope you find something you like.
This is truly a next generation rts.
Wow this one looks really neat and original. I remember playing Total Annihilation when I was younger and really like that. Going to other planets and asteroids looks really cool. I’m excited to see if this gets the green light
This title is what I call “taking it to the next level”, TA that spans solar systems? I am backing right now. =)
Yeah Sid Meir/Will Wright this title is punching you in the face, what a Civilization that goes into this type of inter solar system expansion, then even galaxy wide?
The game spore tried to be in the space stage?
TotalBiscuit just did an interview with the developers. For those who want some more details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqDSh34VoPY
98.4% funding goal reached with 16 days to go. Looks like PA may be hours away from succeeding at Kickstarter. But they have secondary goals…
Yeah it looks like PA is gonna make it. Oh and for those like me who can’t use kickstarter for payment. The paypal pledges may not count for kickstarter but they do count for the stretchgoals.
Wholymoley they just made their plegde goal. That was fast… :-)
Funding has just been reached!
@JD
Thanks for sharing that direct donations with paypal (through the main site: http://planetaryannihilation.com/) also count.
Oke to get back to the strech goals; that they count is the common saying on the uberent forums, however this is the only offical quote from unberent I have been able to see:
“If it makes the different we’ll use it to reach a stretch goal”
So lets assume they count here. My bad, I should’ve looked at this better as in an offical quote from the developers.
Oke now it’s time for me to update my pledge, I want some goodies ;-)
Ha. So it’s unsure if the direct donations count for the secondary goals or not. Thanks for clarifying that.
Actually I went through the FAQ on the kickstarter page and I found the answer.
Will Paypal donations count towards stretch goals?
Yes! At the end of the campaign we will add funds from Paypal to the final amount to determine which goals we have met.
Hopefully they won’t get into trouble. PayPal does not allow “Preorders”.
http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/good-riddance-paypal/ <– was in the news lately
This is so awesome ! Can’t wait to get my hands on this game! Hope they make the 1.1M pledge also, sounds awesome to also have naval units at your disposal !
If I could I would pledge 1 million dollars to make sure this becomes the seminal game of the decade. Hope they accomplish all their stretch goals, I am squealing like a schoolgirl i anticipation.
If Chris Taylor is involved in this, this game will be bad.
The only very good game that was good to the end is TA, and all the rest that followed was just made to maxx the money he made with it. If you say he didn’t make money but instead the publisher, ok, then they did.
Always they started with big promises and ended up dead.
Supreme Commander Forged alliance had a good look and feel and I’ve played it a lot with friends, BUT where were thos big maps from TA? Where was the ability to shoot from top of a hiull further that from leveled ground? Even the shells were limited to some artillery stuff, the dragonteeth were useless and walls you had to dream of.
Then they abandoned the game, and the crappy GPG-net was also left dead..
Then the Supreme Commander 2 came and they made a joke out of the whole FRANCHISE.
I am so disappointd of Steve Taylor.
So if you can tell me he is not involved at all and the team of Planetary Annihilation is eager to make an TA with planets, THAT would be really an awesome project.
But we all were so many times disappointed by buying a product that didn’t deserve to wait for..
I do not know if I should like Kickstart Projects. Because they play with our imagination. All of us have a different dream of how a game should look like.
If it is not ready and we see just a screeny, ell, everbodies mind blows of how it will look like.
And then this project takes a: too long to be good (Duke nuke em) b: the have no money and ship the alpha or c: it is nice but lacks of so many nice units or deepness that there are pushed many DLC (downloadable contents just months later and the original game is again.. left unpatched or dead).
Of course there are more possibilities, but today, all games lack of so many things..
So indeed, good games that come out today are indy titles like i.e. Pirates and Zombies or Star Ruler.
If they could increase the deepness, it would be mindblowing!
But there is one game I bought because it deserves it: Distant World: Legens, But again, I hate ti know, that there is coming out a new Addon that would in former times would be calles a patch.
And there we are back by TA:The Core Contingency. Until then, they made us pay for more units that should be there right from the start.
And I can’t believe that there are only players out there that want so stupid units like those at Supreme Commander 2. Why do they make an Dinosaur Unit? Why make a huge Robot that look so stupid and shoot with a fireball that could destroy the whole earth but is not stronger than a little shell? The D-Gun was a nice weapon and this graphical super crap über Mega Cannon that just let the GPU roam is sooo bad!
I want tactical battles that can compete with chess in the depthness and not stomping commanders that can do nothing! I think they should not try to bring up the coolness factor to a new level (and fail) but make them more easy looking and mightier in action (not in animations that are very uncool in fact).
I make a stop here, because I could write night and day, moaning whats wrong.
Instead in my spare time now i play OOLITE and try to mod it somehow to a new level.. ;-)
P.S. Thanks Adams Solo for this exhausting and intense Game Tests. I love them and read them in my spare time. Many times that is better than playing them :-) I can remember when the Civilisation Video came out ( the one where it Zooms in the End out of an Eye..) it is years way back, THAT was awesome. It struck my imagination so hard, it goes deep into the heart with the feeling we all have inside us, that we are more than just the body that surrounds us… And it tickled the mind and soul for the wish having such a feeling while playing such a great game.
IT NEVER CAME THAT FAR (okk, counterstrike was intense in former days and had the ability to raise the heartbeat to 180) but never ever, iI had the sam efeeling then in those time when MOO2 hit the market.
So long, live long and prosper.
Sorry for the language, thats not my motherlanguage..