Frequently asked

Yes. TA Reborn contains no original game data: no units, maps, art, sound, music or video. It plays the data of your own copy, read in place from its install folder, and never changes it.

Total Annihilation: Commander Pack, with The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics, from GOG.com or Steam: both ship the same data files, and the launcher finds either by itself. Other copies work too.

Nothing. TA Reborn is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License v3 or later. All you need is your own copy of Total Annihilation.

No. TA Reborn is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the owners of Total Annihilation. It is a clean-room reimplementation: a new engine, written from scratch in Rust on the community's decades of research into TA's file formats, without the original game's code.

Windows 10 and 11 on x64, and Windows 11 on ARM64; macOS 13 or later on Intel and Apple Silicon; and Ubuntu 22.04 or later and Arch Linux on x64 and ARM64 (Arch Linux ARM).

Windows has an installer and a portable ZIP, macOS an app ZIP and a disk image, and Linux DEB, Arch and portable packages.

One with DirectX 12 or Vulkan on Windows, Vulkan on Linux, or Metal on macOS; integrated graphics play on Low. High wants 6 GB of video memory and Ultra 10 GB, and ray tracing a card that traces rays. The launcher itself needs OpenGL 2.0.

The launcher's benchmark plays eight scenes on TA Reborn's own worlds in about five minutes (QUICK RUN takes a minute and a half): it scores your graphics card, processor and memory, says what each effect costs, and recommends the settings that hold 60 frames a second.

Builds that are not signed with a paid certificate make Windows and macOS cautious the first time.

On Windows, if SmartScreen says it protected your PC, choose More info, then Run anyway. On macOS, if the app cannot be opened, open System Settings → Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway. Every release lists SHA-256 checksums to check the files against.

With the primer on this site: the Arm and the Core, your Commander, metal and energy, factories and orders. In the game, the tutorial teaches the same in three short guided games on Painted Desert; then play a skirmish against an Easy computer player, then Normal.

Every unit, map, campaign and sound of TA's comes from your install; everything around them is new, 28 maps of TA Reborn's own among them. The simulation runs at TA's 30 ticks a second and TA's own unit scripts drive the units.

You can keep TA's 1997 interface and its oblique view (F5), all of TA's controls and chat commands, and its way of moving: the movement rule "As in TA" turns formations off.

Every campaign of your install, with TA's own mission scripts: the Arm and the Core, and The Core Contingency's and Battle Tactics' if you have the expansions. Conquest takes a galaxy of TA's worlds system by system, and eight scenarios (Last Stand, King of the Hill, Doomsday Clock and more) each have goals of their own.

Yes. Multiplayer runs in lockstep over a local network or the internet, with a lobby, spectators, chat, rejoining, and an ally taking over a lost player's army. Skirmishes take up to ten players, with computer players at three levels.

Every game is recorded: seek through it, watch it as a tournament's cast, see its highlights, or export it as an MP4 video, 720p to 4K, with the battle's sounds and music.

Yes, and they need no code. The launcher's mod library installs community conversions from ModDB in one click, Total Mayhem, Talon and Total Battletech among them; TA: Escalation and The Final Frontier come from their own websites, and Have the file? checks the download and installs it. Mods load from folders or TA's own archives, later ones over earlier ones.

Every mod is checked in the background against the game without it, with a readable report of anything it breaks. The map editor saves its maps as mods that the skirmish page lists at once.

Yes, the Steam Deck's included. Keys can be rebound, orders given with either mouse button, and units drawn in colour-blind colours; the launcher's and the game's Accessibility settings hold the rest.

Fourteen: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

On Windows, shared mods, skin packs and downloads live in %APPDATA%\TA Reborn, and each commander profile's settings, saves, replays and progress below profiles\<id>. Screenshots and photos go to Pictures\TA Reborn and videos made from replays to Videos\TA Reborn. Your Total Annihilation install stays as it is.

In Rust, as sixteen crates: TA's file formats, a virtual file system over the install and the mods, a deterministic 30 Hz simulation in fixed-point arithmetic with a virtual machine for TA's unit scripts, the computer players, lockstep networking, a wgpu renderer with ray tracing, unit skins and video export, then the game, the launcher and the data tools on top of them. Every computer in a game computes the same battle, which is what multiplayer, replays and rewinding stand on.