Keeping occupied when the internet is dead

[memnus]

The AI in Total Annihilation is certainly silly. Not only does it fail to have any plan of attack, it is also miserable at coordinating any defense other than "you cannot overwhelm my massive swarms and randomly placed land guns". Therefore I've managed to make it fall victim to the silliest strategy I could think of: the Flea rush. When you play as Arm, in one of the expansions (or maybe it's an extra) there's a scout kBot that has decent speed and climb rates, is ridiculously cheap, but also has the lowest damage and hit points of anything I've seen. Setting the Commander to guard the kBot lab can produce one about every ten seconds. Even though a single LLT shot, or two from the Commander, can destroy one, in the very early game I've discovered that a swarm of about fifty can pretty reliably take out an AI commander (of course, the blast wipes out all in shooting range, usually the entire first wave), crippling the computer's production and leaving them open to your remaining 25-50 Fleas that walk in and pick everything else apart. (Slowly.) The end of game stats screen is usually amusing: "Victory! Kills: 27. Losses: 62."

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Comments

[iluvsheep.livejournal.com]

Dude, that's almost as good as the old Sumo rush. That is the funniest thing ever to see crossing the screen.

Basically you just mass build Sumos and send them off as they are built. The beauty is that they move so slow that you have about your unit max in them before the first wave hits. That, and they move so slowly that the enemy will think they are buildings on the radar.

I will definately have to look into this "flea rush" thing.