Different Styles Going Head-to-Head

Saludos all, and welcome to my inaugural column for Cavedog.

By way of introduction, my online handle is Brave Sir Robin and I’m a 29-year-old software developer who’s been playing Total Annihilation since the day it was released more than a year and a half ago. I’ve been one of the most vocal fixtures of Cavedog’s Comments Forum and I’ve logged a lot of hours in multiplayer TA, which are the only reasons I can think of that might have led DMFrank to tap me as one of the authors of Cavedog’s new weekly columns.

When Frank contacted me, the last thing I expected to have trouble with was choosing a topic. However, you’d be amazed how hard it is to pick just one thing to talk about for a few hundred words. I finally settled on a subject that I’ve seen a lot of discussion and debate about lately -- what happens when different kinds of TA players go head-to-head.

There are almost as many different kinds of TA players as there are different personalities in the world, because TA is a game of great versatility and depth that lends itself to a broad range of playing styles. At one extreme you have the "play-for-fun" types who couldn’t care less about winning or losing, and who play because they enjoy the game itself. At the opposite extreme are the win-at-all-cost players who care only about their win/loss records. These guys are the ones who build only the most effective units and who will exploit any known advantage to come out of the game with a win.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, naturally. If you’re hard-pressed and you need a lot of units, it’s hard not to queue up a few dozen Flashes and send the whole horde on its way. There’s no denying that on large, flat maps, large groups of Slashers are brutally effective. The prowess of the Hawk Swarm is legendary. The broad categories of "win at all costs" and "play for fun" break down when you consider the player who enjoys playing (and will experiment a bit) as long as he’s winning, but who reverts to fifty Storms when he’s hard-pressed to hold off a pack of Mavericks and Fidos.

If your opponent has a juicy nest of Fusion Reactors in the back of his base – outside the range of your long-range plasma cannons and protected by killer anti-air defenses – your opinion might change about the fairness of flying a wing of bombers off the edge of the map.

The only time all this becomes a problem is when players with different mindsets go head-to-head, and one of them gets riled at the other guy’s tactics. I’ve seen a lot of arguments lately between TA players who all love the game, but who have different opinions over how it should be played. One player might contend that exploiting a known bug is a cheesy way to play, and go on the record as saying that he can’t believe that anyone would play that way. Another player counters by saying that since everyone has the same bugs at their disposal, it’s perfectly fair. Things usually go downhill from there, as invariably one side accuses the other of trying to take the "high ground," and then there’s no point in continuing the discussion.

In any competitive game, there will always be those who play because they enjoy playing and those who don’t enjoy playing unless they’re winning. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play TA, after all. Ultimately it’s just a matter of opinion, and one thing we’ve all got is opinions.

The bottom line is that who you play can be just as important as how you play. Guys who like to experiment with different combinations of units won’t enjoy a game with a top player who Slasher-rushes on Painted Desert because that’s the most effective way to play that map. If you like to play according to certain Rules of Honor, then you need to make sure that your opponent understands (and agrees to) those rules. Otherwise, you’ll probably be confronted by tactics that you consider lame, and that leads to the inevitable shouting match during and after the game. Is the Commander Rush fair? Do you like to play with an initial 10-minute cease fire? If two guys get together for a game on Metal Heck and one likes to rush with fifty Flashes while the other likes to build Nukes and Intimidators, no one’s going to have any fun … and what’s the point of the game if no one enjoys it?

-- Brave Sir Robin

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