There are two games tucked away in Planetary Annihilation. These are questions with one ugly answer. Why the sprawling naval tech tree? What good are flamethrower tanks? When's it worth building base defences when the enemy can approach from anywhere? You know what I think is next? The option to select your units, bases, even planets and toggle AI on and off. In what situations should you choose robot factories over vehicles? The seas, when they appeared, always seemed peculiarly small. I wasn't expecting StarCraft-like levels of balance, but I wanted to learn the point of all these toys. As you'd imagine, I started wanting to learn the correct answer to what factory to build first, and which of the four unit types to build from any given factory, and in what combination. Where Planetary Annihilation started to lose me is the instant the game began getting tougher. Your first few hours with Planetary Annihilation will see you thrilling at this as you and your stocky little Commander trundle slowly through one of the randomised Galactic War campaigns, picking up new tech and taking joy in the construction of thingies and the destruction of other thingies. Chunky, noisy little robots that lay waste to forests and structures the second they open fire. Every construction hints at what you might build next and all of it looks lovely. Feel like harvesting the resources of the nearby gas giant, letting you spew out the most advanced robots without a second thought? You got it. You want to fill the skies with planes? Sure. You see, Planetary Annihilation offers less of a tech tree that players are doggedly climbing up and more of a set of laterally-sprawling monkey bars. See the five arms around the laser? Those are the enormous buildings you have to construct to use it. It takes you just a few seconds to assign orders to your fabricators to build more than 30 metal extractors spanning the entire globe. a Nuclear Silo?! You set it building, only for the little thing to immediately drain your inadequate power and metal reserves. Click click click, you summon your Commanders and Fabricator vehicles to speed up its construction by spraying their metal particles directly onto the unit.ДЇinished, the dinky little thing rolls onto the planet. Now you're building artillery emplacements, radar, your huge advanced vehicle factory producing even bigger tanks, and what's this? Oh my goodness! The Advanced Vehicle Factory can produce an Advanced Fabricator! You can't build it fast enough. Your mouth forms an 'o' as you notice that the Fabricator robots you can produce at your factories can produce more advanced things than your Commander can, including Advanced Factories. Barely two minutes into the game you'll be producing an unending stream of tanks, your opportunity to expand further limited only by how fast you can click and think. A vehicle factory comes next, as well as some defensive towers. Picture it: with a few clicks and a shimmering spray of particles your Commander whips up a metal extractor and a power plant, increasing your steady influx of resources. In the style of Total Annihilation, players all start with a mighty-yet-curmudgeonly Commander robot, and win if they eliminate (all) the enemy Commander(s).

Planetary Annihilation just loves STUFF.Д«etter, then, to focus on the game proper, which seduces almost immediately. Scout units will circumnavigate even the largest planets in just a minute or two, and your interstellar transports will rarely take longer than a few minutes to travel between them. Yes, you can annihilate a planet by building a gun into a moon - orbital craft joining ground, sea and air units as a fourth category - but you're also doing it in the cutest widdle solar system. chased after emotional peaks, Planetary Annihilation only makes headway in yet another kind of scale. Just as Supreme Commander imagined endgame units towering over crowds of smaller robots, Sins of a Solar Empire bore a proud, operatic texture or R.U.S.E.

This month Uber Entertainment declared Planetary Annihilation complete and is selling the finished game with an even more arresting image: a screenshot of the 'Annihilaser' which arrived in the last patch, allowing players to turn any of their metal planets into a Death Star and pop celestial bodies like balloons.ДЇor posterity's sake, then: is this the biggest, silliest RTS ever? The image? A moon, rigged with the enormous engines of player one, rocketing straight towards a temperate world hosting the impenetrable base of an unsuspecting player two. The dream was a noble one: the robotic conflict of Total Annihilation on an interplanetary scale. Planetary Annihilation is a real-time strategy game founded on a dream, and funded on an image.

Planetary annihilation build order