Yes it hurt looking up how old this game is already.

But to those who don’t know it: why is this game so great?

1. Because it’s lineage (from Total Annihilation to Beyond All Reason) is the only militaristic sci-fi strategy game I know, where it’s really a resource flow: you generate them, store them and then use them. You have an upper limit of depot space, so you can’t just hoard resources like in other games and then just instant build another army but rather need to smartly build your economy so that the produced resources are then used up and give you an increase in units, technology or economy. You need to constantly produce and not only periodically manufacture waves.

2. You don’t command little squads of maximum 100 units, you command armies with 1000 (unmodded unit limit) units. Those armies are land, air or sea based and each faction also has experimental weapons: big game ending weapons that will bring your economy to its limits by constructing them but also destroy half an enemy army by themselves. … Except if the game goes on too long and you are printing them en masse and it feels more like a Warhammer 40k battle than anything else. But that is great in it’s own right.

Strategic launch detected

That voice line will put fear into you if you haven’t build counter measures against them.

3. In addition to point 2, you really feel like a SciFi army commander, the atmosphere is great. For example: if you zoom out completely, you see that the game map is just an holographic reproduction inside of the commander robot, your most important and starting unit on the field. There is a rudimentary physics engine, which can lead to your air units intercepting the enemy nuclear missile by being just above their launch pad at the right moment by chance, leading to hilarious interactions. Or you can overlap your shield generators, so that they can recharge while the next ones hold the line. Or put your artillery behind a hill, so direct fire doesn’t hit them. So there are a lot of physics interactions you can use to your advantage.

4. They managed to create 4 factions that while fundamentally similar, have different play styles and also importantly: all have different design to them. The blocky UEF, the hexagonal, insectoid Cybran, the round style of the Aeon, which was inspired by the completely alien and levitating style of the Seraphim. All are wonderfully unique and not just a recolour of the same basic unit.

5. One reason why it’s still the greatest game to me is that sadly there are no real successors yet. SC 2 was a heresy against everything that made SC great and why? Because they wanted to port this mouse&keyboard centred game to consoles, which is a bullshit idea in the first place and it needed to be dumbed down in multiple ways to enable that.
   Then there was Planetary Annihilation which looked promising in the beginning but than revealed itself as early access cash grab by the developers which made them switch their name from Uber entertainment to Planetary Annihilation Inc. so that new players wouldn’t see the bad news about them. Fuck them!
   Most promising at the moment looks to be Beyond All Reason, which is a open source and free reimagining of the true spirit of SC and TA but still in alpha development. I wish the developers all the best in their endeavours, it looks promising.

At sale events you can often get SC:FA for under 5 € and I highly recommend you try it out at least once, because it is fun to create your army of titan sized robots and let them fight against other similar dimensioned enemies, especially with others in multiplayer against other humans or against the AI. For that you should use Forged Alliance Forever, which is a mod that adds another faction but crucially enables servers for online multiplayer after the original ones were shut down.