Welcome to Total Annihilation: Twilight v2.0 Beta

Please note that due to some hosting issues, the News, Multiplayer, and Documentation links up above are non-functional for the immediate future. However, TA:Twilight v1.9 was released March 12, 2011, and can be accessed from the Downloads link, the steps for installation are still shown at the Installation link, and the Forums link still takes you to the TA: Twilight forums where you can find other players to play with or ask any questions or make any comments you might have. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for visiting!

-Twilight (March 12, 2011)

What is Total Annihilation: Twilight

Put simply, TA:T is an extension of OTA (Original TA), balancing old units and adding in new ones, as might have happened had Cavedog (The maker of Total Annihilation) not gone out of business and continued to update TA.  Take a look at some of the features of TA:T

TA: Twilight strives to make all of the original units useful, as well as adding in new ones to fill strategic roles, all while keeping the original TA feel. While there are many units, they have been added for the purpose of filling specific roles and to generally improve gameplay and fun, and not just so we can say we have lots of units. The idea is that every unit should have a good reason to be built and used. There are some units that are more specialized, and whose ideal situation may not happen all of the time, but the goal is to never have a unit that is just not worth building, either because it is worthless in the first place, or because other units do what it does just as well. Some overlap is fine, as long as each overlapping unit has a solid reason to be built in and of itself.

From the Absolute Annihilation Twilight Betas to Total Annihilation: Twilight

Here's the short summary of where we came from:

Twilight had been a player of the Absolute Annihilation mod for quite a while (Which was itself descended from the very popular UberHack TA mod), but when Caydr, the maker of Absolute Annihilation, decided to stop supporting the OTA version and only release new versions for the Spring engine, Twilight asked for permission to continue to work on AA and release new versions of it.

Caydr granted this permission, and so since about November of 2005, Twilight had been maintaining and releasing "Twilight Betas" of Absolute Annihilation, which continued to fix bugs and adjust balance issues found in AA version 6.0. For a few months the forums had been hosted at Caydr's own website, www.caydr.com, but an announcement on the front page of the site on January 30th, 2007 stated that he was too busy to keep the site going, and was going to let it lapse. The "Twilight Betas" had changed things substantially since Twilight had taken over development, and he wanted to avoid confusion between the latest "Beta" (Released February 13th, 2007) and the last "official" release of Absolute Annihilation for the TA engine (Instead of the Spring engine), which was put out in the summer of 2005. Because of this, Twilight had been planning to break off and rename the mod, so that he could drop the tenuous "Beta" pretense, and just develop this new mod officially. Caydr's announcement sounded like a good excuse to get that moving, and so, with deep thanks to TAUniverse's gracious hosting, Total Annihilation: Twilight began!

Since taking over in November 2005, Twilight released about 12 new "beta" versions of the AA mod, ending with Twilight Beta 5.7. Instead of 5.8, the next version was Total Annihilation: Twilight v1.0, released in March of 2007. TA:T is now up to version 1.7 (As of June 30th, 2009), and Twilight continues working with the community on fixing bugs, balancing units, adding in new units to fill needed roles, etc. TA:T has a small but active community who post quite frequently in the forums regarding balance, new ideas, etc, and we usually have several multiplayer games going on each day and evening.

We are a very welcoming and friendly group of people, and primarily are looking to find new people to play with on-line and introduce to the fun of TA. We have started a tournament recently, but generally just play friendly games. Veteran players and newcomers alike are both welcome!