RTS Beyond all Reason (open source Total Annihilation spiritual successor)

[Fryjar]

Just by absolute chance I have stumbled two days ago upon the strategy game Beyond All Reason, which seems to be pretty much an open source spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, or at least as close as we will reasonably get in the foreseeable future.
It borrows elements like the strategic view from Supreme Commander but other than that seems to be much closer in terms of feel to the original TA in particular in terms of gameplay flow and mechanics. It sports almost 400 (!) units, has strong emphasis on terrain and macro strategy and decent graphics with an engine in which all projectiles are simulated in real time.

From what I have seen so far in the two days gameplay definitely seems to be decent and anyone who liked Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation or large scale RTS in general will likely have a good time with it.
Unfortunately (for me) the focus is here more on multiplayer and skirmish maps with AI, a single player campaign is absent. However, at least the multiplayer community seems to be reasonably active, with the solid AI/bots serving as a good way to get up to speed with the game.

Would be good to hear other opinions of people who have some more experience with the game than me.
Anyone who has become curious now can also try out the alpha themselves given its open source and available on the developer's website.

 

[Lagi]

Very nice wall of text,you could paste at least link to webpage.

Zoom out and icon play is a BIG con in my book. But BAR has this issue soften.

Controls are superb area mex build is a blessing same as zxcv keys for used all time eco buildings.

I love the damage representation on units. It's still hard to notice how much unit is damage,but it's a step in good direction. It allow to turn off the hp bars.

In general the modern shiny glowy graphic is absolutely anticlimactic. Total annihilation escalation 2d graphic, with unsurpassed vanilla sounds is better.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Endemic]

Zero-K seems to be a TA\Supcom clone in the same vein. https://store.steampowered.com/app/334920/ZeroK/

 

[lightbane]

There's being inspired and then there's being an almost carbon copy, with identical names in specific cases. But TA was good, so it's fine.

 

[deama]

This looks really, really similiar to zero-k, even model-wise too, is it made by the same guys or something?

 

[Lagi]

Great control feature of this game is building mexes or reclaiming wrecks in radious.

Also you can tell your unit to take position on the line shape you draw with mouse.

This guy is very new to the spring engine features. Even rts because he place rally point away from destinations,and need waste time to manually bring them back to he front line.

Btw i suck so bad myself in ta like games. But I praise the BAR for controls. Hope your video would be showing a bit more skilled gameplay

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Great control feature of this game is building mexes or reclaiming wrecks in radious.

Also you can tell your unit to take position on the line shape you draw with mouse.

This guy is very new to the spring engine features. Even rts because he place rally point away from destinations,and need waste time to manually bring them back to he front line.

Btw i suck so bad myself in ta like games. But I praise the BAR for controls. Hope your video would be showing a bit more skilled gameplay

1st gameplay video of this that I came across.

 

[Johannes]

Been playing this a good amount now, played Balanced Annihilation (step between this and TA) back around 2010 too. I'm one of the better players around, if any bros wanna check it out drop me a line.



Some gameplay footage from a 2v2 tourney, though in ridiculously long 8h format, just skip between the waiting to check out some of the matches:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1118988304

 

[anvi]

Been playing this a good amount now, played Balanced Annihilation (step between this and TA) back around 2010 too. I'm one of the better players around, if any bros wanna check it out drop me a line.



Some gameplay footage from a 2v2 tourney, though in ridiculously long 8h format, just skip between the waiting to check out some of the matches:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1118988304

Is this game good? I still play Forged Alliance, only just heard about this now.

 

[thesheeep]

I just had a few skirmish matches in it and yeah - it seems pretty good.

Bear in mind it is Alpha, though. You can have MP and skirmish (and some scenarios) but that's it.
Some QoL features are missing, UI is clearly not finished, etc.

I'll definitely come back to it once it has a proper campaign.

 

[Johannes]

It's mostly a multiplayer game, whether you like 1v1s, or 8v8 clusterfucks or smth in between. The best AI is still decent even without cheating, but idk how much of a campaign there will be, probably something eventually. There's also tower defense-ish modes called Raptors and Scavengers for more singleplayer content.

UI is more powerful than in p much any commercial RTS once you learn it, but kinda rough looking at places like infoboxes.



Compared to SupCom, the units are more interesting and there's more unit micro. Gameflow is overall good, though air units are kinda a weak spot.

 

[thesheeep]

The best AI is still decent even without cheating, but idk how much of a campaign there will be, probably something eventually. There's also tower defense-ish modes called Raptors and Scavengers for more singleplayer content.

Well, this ( https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/draft-of-the-lore-and-community-faction-logos-contestsays ) says:

‍Hello, folks! We are happy to inform you that we are finally on our way to reach one of the biggest milestones planned before launching BAR on Steam. For quite a while now we have been announcing that we would like to release BAR with a fully-fledged campaign and now we have most of the tools in place to make it a reality.

We want to make BAR awesome to all kinds of players, not only the try-hard competitive types. Therefore, our intention is to prepare something really special and interesting for all the lone-wolves and coop survival-lovers as well. We want BAR to appeal to all these groups. While the multiplayer competitive gameplay part is pretty much ready for a release, there is a big demand in the community for interesting single-player options and we want to address it...

 

[AdamReith]

How does this compare to Zero K?

 

[Johannes]

How does this compare to Zero K?

Not that familiar with ZK, but overall there's less crazy unit abilities in BAR. The designs more about simple tanks, artillery and so on, while ZK has all kinds of jumpjets and mobile shields etc.
BAR economy is a bit more complex than ZK, and can scale bigger in the lategame.
And BAR doesn't have the automation unit AI, where units can be put to skirmish by themselves without player input. BAR ui is powerful but you have to be there to put in the orders yourself.

 

[L'ennui]

How does this compare to Zero K?

Beyond All Reason sticks much closer to classic TA gameplay but refines and improves it, whereas Zero-K uses TA as a springboard but has a totally different (simpler) economics model and really goes all-out to give you a range of wildly different units and tactics.

Also, in Zero-K there are no "tech levels" (i.e. you don't need to build a tank factory to build an advanced tank factory afterwards), everything is available right off the bat and you are only constrained by your economic potential. So for instance, you can try to build a nuke launcher very early in the game, but most likely the energy and metal costs will cripple your entire economy and lose you the game. But still, there is no arbitrary tech level barrier preventing you from building anything.

Beyond All Reason looks much better than the cell-shaded cartoony graphics of Zero-K, but that might be a subjective preference on my part. Both are incredibly cool games and deserve a proper try.

 

[AdamReith]

But does it have jugglenaughts?

 

[anvi]

I've been playing it, pretty cool.

 

[spectre]

Well, it's basically modernized Total Annihilation. One difference seems to be in static defenses being less effective than I remember,
though that might be somewhat due to the improved AI (or does out of LOS accuracy basically suck until you build the radar pinpointing thingie?)
I've seen the motherfucker basically tiptoe the edge of the range circle and it seems to genuinely try and adapt to what it's seeing.

I've only just started playing it, but when I was doing the mission in which you and the AI are separated by an open body of water,
it can turtle like a motherfucker, if you let it, and puts up a fight even when confined to a 10% strip of remaining land, pretty impressive overall.

Good thing is you don't need to login if you just want to play single player skirmish.
There isn't a campaign, but it's got single player content, mostly consisting of "challenge" scenarios.
Some are pretty standard, like kill 3 AIs with your two AI buddies, others are pretty clever,
like the one where you need to win by only using mines, scouts and dragon's teeth, or another one that forces you to only use resurrected units.

 

[anvi]

Yeah I love it. It looks and feels like Supreme Commander, but with gameplay more like TA. I wasn't sure I would like it because it has all the gear from both games combined which I thought might just make for a lot of obsolete crap and then a few uber things you build every time. But so far I have managed to win with different approaches and the SimpleAI was good. It beat me the first few games until I figured out how the building is different from SupCom.

I haven't tried any challenges yet, just been doing skirmish. It auto sets the games up as 4v4 which is a pain for me because I prefer 1v1 so I have to click 12 times each game to remove them. But I played a match with 4v4 and it was smooth. SupCom runs like shit with multiple AI so hopefully with this game they got it working on all cores etc. It looked smooth to me with 8! But I hadn't found out how to change the gamespeed by then.

It looks like it still needs a bit of work on the UI. Also I don't like the music. But other than that it's great.

 

[spectre]

Skirmish was the best part of TA anyways, so I don't really mind having no campaign.
Plenty of maps are straight lifted from the original, which is nice.

IMO, the worst part of the UI is building icons, shit just looks samey and I keep wasting valuable seconds searching
where's what and double checking if the shit I'm building is a metal storage or a metal maker.
There are icons which might help to quickly identify stuff, so this will probably become less of an issue as I spend more time with it,
but I actually preferred the way it was group in SupCom. The game uses a tier-system for units and buildings anyways, so why not just roll with it?

It's also not exactly easy to see energy/metal consumption on units and buildings.
I think the UI could use a few extra passes to make it prettier and cleaner, though they seem to have just assumed people will use hotkeys and left it as is.

 

[anvi]

Really nice game! I suck at it though. I have been playing lots of Skirmish but tried the Scenarios and got whooped. First few are easy but the water one yikes.. I tried turtling and built lots of badass ships but the AI overwhelmed me with little sneaky bastards.

 

[spectre]

Yeah, turtling vs AI on that map (or any other map I tried tbh) doesn't really work for me either. The scenario is actually amazing at showing you ALL the ropes of naval warfare.
If it helps, I managed to "solve" that map with seaplanes, which pretty much let you dominate the whole water portion of the map - sonar craft will let you see everything coming your way, torpedo gunships will demolish all the packs of submersibles which were giving you a headache, and regular gunships will be great for hit and run tactics against things poking their heads above water
(this includes hovercraft, at some point the AI might sent T2 with lazors which immune to torpedoes, a nasty surprise if you've been 100% reliant on torpedo gunships).
You can also clear the islands with them, perhaps do some coastal raiding. One factory assisted by two construction towers lets you churn them ot really fast, so it's nice to have two whenever you need to replenish.
A little tip here, set you planes to withdraw at 80% damage, so they actually pull out and get repaired by carriers or repair pads.
Once they start receiving damage, they pop almost immediately, so the default threshold is too low.

The AI will get AA pretty soon (thankfully its submersible rocket bots can't shoot underwater), but it should get you going before you upgrade to T2 economy. The important bit is to kill of any shipyards and nip that little dream in the bud.
At some point, the AI will try and contest your air dominance with a few planes of its own, so don't get caught with your pants down.

With that in mind, I added a few AA ships, submarines and a pair of carriers as extra layer of defense. That's T2 factories, and you should build them close to the enemy lines cause they're slow af compared to aircraft.
After that, I would set the yards to capital ships to clear the shore. The only other T2 factory I used was for aircraft (builders, gunships, the transport craft has a paralyzing gun which can be useful). At this point, my blitzkrieg was halted,
cause anything going near the AI's strip of land would be obliterated, so I had to prep for D-day.

We're still far from done, cause the AI can turtle on its small scrap of land and will start churning out experimentals like mad. The scenario description suggests using nukes as the finishing touch, which is one way of doing it, but you can also do the classic bombardment from capital ships as well as build some long range artillery on the small islands (planes will probably get all shot up immediately by T2 AA, unless you're better at micro-ing them than I am, or perhaps the answer is in numbers).
Keep in mind, you need a few (2-3) fire control buildings to actually hit the shit you're seeing on the radar and the AI will also build its own counter-batteries and can be pretty damn smart with them, so consider jamming up and shielding up.

 

[anvi]

I beat that mission now, pretty easy. My first first attempts I built the huuuuge flagship which was awesome, but it took so long I ended up getting overrun with enemies. This time I didn't build anything in the water, just went straight to advanced planes. I love how the Atomic Bomber is really crazy powerful so I just flew some of those in and rekt his stuff. He started building nukes and went invisible the rest of the game but I built more bombers, picked off easy targets first then finished him off. I also nuked him a few times for fun :D

 

[anvi]

Now I'm stuck on the King of the Hill mission. My god it's hard... I usually win in this game by using those bombers early but they don't seem to work well on this map. I think the AI of patrol routes is a problem, they never seem to attack stuff fast enough. And the visual range is too low of units, the huge flying fortress you click on something to attack and it moves out of visual range and stops attacking... Really retarded. And the radars don't help because of all the land. I managed to nuke every corner of the map in one match but I still lost.

edit: I won :D I stopped trying to build defences in the 3 initial gaps. Instead just went straight to level 2 bots and experimentals and wandered them out to kill everything. Seemed to work fine. Also the radar bot was super useful.