"So you have a human hand placing stuff, and this is augmented by the new terrain features that are in Titans. "We've added a bunch of maps with custom-built terrain to the actual roster," lead designer Tom Vinita said.
#Planetary annihilation titans tutorial series
Others are separated from each other by a series of hills and canyons that are perfect for setting-up choke-points. Some starting location let you set up a base on a large hilltop that forces opponents to assault up a ramp with no line of sight. There's actual terrain that you have to utilize or overcome. The maps themselves are more interesting, too. So you're jumping around multiple planets in the solar system, and it's pretty damn cool. If you're in combat on another planet, it'll bring up a PIP and you click on it and it'll bring you right to the action. "How navigate all that? In Titans, we've come up with some pretty awesome techniques for jumping from planet to planet with a picture-in-picture notification system. "That was a challenge that we had on Annihilation," art director Steve Thompson said, when I asked about how much more playable the game seems. But a lot of those subtle gains in usability are new to Titans. Some of it, like the oceans and rebalanced navies, had been fixed via patches to the base game. Or there's the way the game simply looks a little more epic and a little less comical: zoom-out and the smallest bots become less than specks on the map, while the most powerful buildings and units are visible from high orbit and cast shadows across entire continents. There were planets with vast oceans where the previously irrelevant naval units suddenly reigned supreme. Pop-up notifications that told me when my units had scouted an undiscovered enemy base, or found their Commander, or when one of my factories was under attack. I played it before I talked to the developers, and had a couple notebook pages filled with new things that I didn't remember being in the game at launch. And all of this was pulled directly from either reviews or conversation with the community."Ĭoming to Titans after roughly a year away from playing Planetary Annihilation, it's a striking change. The ability to add new terrain to maps so that they have choke points and elevations and what not. We've gone through and added new gameplay modes. "We expanded the unit roster, we flushed out orbital gameplay so it didn't feel so empty in space, we added giant Titan class units, which is what were called in the past Experimentals.
"And the stuff we heard that wasn't on that plan is what became Titans," Ables said.
#Planetary annihilation titans tutorial free
Titans is absolutely free to everyone who backed the original Kickstarter, and people who already own Planetary Annihilation will be able to buy Titans at a substantial discount. You can't accuse it of being a "paid patch," either. Planetary Annihilation: Titans comes out today, and while the enormous super-units are what give the expansion its name, it's the plethora of small, thoughtful changes that make a bigger impact than any super-weapon. Planetary Annihilation's flaws were of a scale to its ambitions, and while it developed a passionate following, it always felt like there was a better game somewhere inside Planetary Annihilation, buried beneath a poor interface and a hurried release.Ī year later, and Uber Entertainment have unearthed that better game. There were bugs everywhere, and the tutorials were of poor-quality.
Controlling the action on multiple, " Little Prince"-sized planets was difficult and disorienting. The procedural map generation created battlefields that were as flat and featureless as a dining room table. When it came out, however, reviews were generally mixed.