Even more unforgivable is the lack of a save option, either in single-player skirmish or in multiplayer. In fact, I think my preferred setup for play would be one of those banks of security camera monitors - maybe then I could see all the angles I need to. On the other hand, it's not as good as actual multi-monitor support, a feature that’s desperately needed but does not seem to be supported. To Planetary Annihilation's credit, the "picture-in-picture" option makes it easier to juggle two things at once, and does a great job of giving multi-monitor advantages to single-monitor users.
Note to developers: Googling unofficial Planetary Annihilation wikis to learn the basics of your game’s controls is not an appropriate substitute for a manual, and promo videos explaining the rudiments of RTS games are not substitutes for a tutorial. I launched the tutorial to see what I was missing, and was treated to a low-res YouTube video that seemed more like a pitch for Planetary Annihilation than a guide to playing it. For starters, there’s little in-game help, and what's there is worse than nothing. What sinks it, tragically, is the lack of care and attention shown to the details and player aids. Those big problems would be enough to make Planetary Annihilation a flawed-but-fun experiment. It's a fog-of-war you can never dispel even when you have radar coverage of an entire planet, your situational awareness is severely reduced. But then you start zooming out, and begin to realize that while you're able to see more territory, the curvature of these tiny globes means that you can still only see a fraction of the playing surface before you have to spin the camera to another position over the planet. It’s exactly the Total Annihilation formula, and it’s a great place to start. Marrying supply to demand is the key to success here, and the challenge of managing it at the same time as your battle plans is intense and rewarding, and having to protect your Commander from assassination keeps you on your toes. Everything plays out via a rate-based economy, and scales up from a single Commander unit to vast armies of several hundred units by harvesting resources and building factories.
#Planetary annihilation titan how to
Planetary Annihilation never solves the central challenge of its main conceit: how do you make an intuitive, graceful RTS interface for a game that's not contained on one map? The result is a game that always left me feeling like I was wrestling with an overloaded shopping cart with a wobbly wheel, even after I'd learned how to play it reasonably well.
#Planetary annihilation titan series
There's a championship series with monthly tournaments (opens in new tab) running right now.Planetary Annihilation's biggest problem is one of usability - and not the manageable one that comes along with being a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, which are both large-scale real-time strategy games with complex economies. to take over patches and balance updates, and have been running regular tournaments for its community ever since. Though the original team moved on in 2018, some of the developers formed a mini-studio of their own called Planetary Annihilation Inc. At the time I played four or five hours and thought maybe it was just a bad idea, then played Supreme Commander instead.īut developers Uber Entertainment stuck with it and released Planetary Annihilation: Titans in 2015, a standalone expansion that contained the entirety of the original game, with a raft of improvements (opens in new tab). The original Planetary Annihilation was a Kickstarted RTS that promised "Total Annihilation-inspired gameplay on a planetary scale." (opens in new tab) When released in 2014 it was a bit underwhelming, with dinky Little Prince planets that felt too small to give a sense of grandeur, and attacks that could come from any direction while you tried to keep track of multiple worlds making it simultaneously feel too big.
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