total annihilation aircraft were pretty fun things to blob, although they were fragile and vulnerable to splash damage, particularly to the flak weapons that were added in the expansion. a glorious thing about total annihilation was the ballistics model: ground units without dedicated anti-air weapons could attempt to fire their guns at aircraft -- nearly all the time they'd miss, but occasionally a heavy tank could land a lucky hit and maybe take out a cluster of aircraft.
my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.
There's a bunch of open source successors (e.g. they started as Total Annihilation clones) made on the springrts engine that you may be interested in. I believe both Zero-K and Beyond All Reason are still being actively maintained.
I just bought it on steam a few months ago. $5. On my 10 year old system I had I think there was thousands of individual units running at the same time. I downloaded the mid Escalation with amazing unit, and was playing against 4 AI. At one point there were thousands of units all running at the same time and the battles were epic. I would throw 500 Fidos (my favorite original unit) to the AI and they would slowly get mowed down, but then I would
Keep sending them in waves. It’s still so much fun!
> my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.
Hardly. My group had glorious 4v4 games where getting your swarm of 500 advanced construction aircraft to build vulcans and buzzsaws that would maybe get off a few shots before being destroyed by your opponents' counterparts was the name of the game.
my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.