Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency

The Core Contingency is the first expansion for Total Annihilation. Cavedog released it on 29 April 1998, and it reached shops in the United States on 30 April. It needs the original game, and it adds new units, two short campaigns, a bonus mission, new worlds, new maps and Cavedog's own map editor.

The Story

The expansion begins after the Arm victory at the end of the original Arm campaign. The Core has lost and the galaxy is being rebuilt. However, a Core Commander was hidden near the end of the war as part of a contingency plan. He is searching for an alien artifact, the last thing the Core needs to destroy the Arm and the galaxy with it.

The Arm search leads across four planets. Hydross is a water world with no land and hostile Sea Serpents. Lusch is a world of bogs and swamps, home to Scorpions. Temblor suffers earthquakes, and Gelidus is a world of ice. The Core turns the artifact, an alien beacon, into an implosion device. In the last Arm mission you have 90 minutes to destroy it. In the last Core mission you must defend it for 60 minutes.

Missions

The expansion has 25 missions:

The Krogoth Encounter takes place on Core Prime during the original war. You must destroy every Krogoth and the gantries that build them. The readme says the mission is for advanced players, and that changing the difficulty setting does not make it easier.

New Units

Cavedog announced 75 new units, plus more than 20 units that had been free downloads. In the game data, 109 unit files first appear in The Core Contingency: 53 for the Arm and 56 for the Core. The readme marks 21 of them as earlier downloads, for example the Arm Warrior and the Core Toaster. The total also includes 12 mines and 8 mission objects. These are the alien beacon, the implosion device, the Scorpion and the Sea Serpent, each stored once for each side.

The main additions were:

  • The Krogoth. The Core's experimental Krogoth Kbot can only be built at a Krogoth Gantry. Cavedog said it is nearly three times the size of a Commander and can survive three nuclear missiles. In the game data it has 29,918 hit points, against 3,000 for a Commander. It costs 29,489 metal and 116,664 energy.
  • Hovercraft. A new Hovercraft Platform builds units that cross both land and water, such as the Anaconda and the Snapper hovertanks.
  • Underwater bases. The Advanced Construction Sub builds the Seaplane Platform, the Underwater Fusion Plant and the Advanced Sonar Station. Seaplanes can land under the water when they are not fighting.
  • Mines. The Arm Podger and the Core Spoiler each lay six kinds of mine, from small charges to a nuclear mine.
  • Heavy defences. The Arm Vulcan and the Core Buzzsaw are rapid-fire plasma cannons that need huge amounts of energy.
  • Radar targeting. The Targeting Facility lets your units attack any enemy that your radar can see and that is within weapon range.
  • Spies and decoys. The cloaking Infiltrator and Parasite are unarmed spy Kbots. The Decoy Commander looks like a Commander but has weaker weapons.
  • Amphibious Kbots. The Arm Pelican skims across water, and the Core Gimp walks under it.

Six New Worlds

The readme describes six new worlds:

  • Acid World has tethered gasbags that you can reclaim for energy. Its green acid seas slowly damage ships, but not hovercraft.
  • Crystal World has sharp, jagged terrain and few features to reclaim. Its purple seas are safe for ships.
  • Lusch World has dense forests, swamps, high cliffs and steep mountains.
  • Slate World has clouds that only aircraft can cross. Metal comes from rocks and deposits in the cracks of the ground.
  • Urban World is covered with the ruins of an Arm civilisation. Most metal must be reclaimed, because deposits are only in the few city parks and under the rivers and lakes.
  • Water World has no land at all. Metal comes from deposits under the sea, and coral reefs affect movement.

Cavedog's announcement counted 50 new multiplayer maps. They all work in Skirmish and in multiplayer.

The Map and Mission Editor

The disc includes the Total Annihilation Map and Mission Editor (TAE) as a bonus. It is the tool that Cavedog's team used to make the maps and missions of the game and the expansion. A free beta of the editor was already available for download from 27 March 1998. Cavedog provided it with no support. The largest maps, 40 by 40, need a Pentium 200 with 128 MB of RAM.

Interface Additions

The readme lists several new controls. Ctrl+M selects all mines, and other new shortcuts select armed aircraft, radar units or all armed mobile units. In multiplayer, chat commands such as +sharemetal share resources with allies. Holding Shift over a unit shows extra information: queued build sites, a cloaked unit's detection radius, or a mine's trigger and blast areas. A factory can also be given a squad number, which every unit it builds then joins.

Not Part of the Expansion: Six Bonus Units

Cavedog later released six more units as free downloads. For the Arm, they are the FARK, the Flea and the Scarab. For the Core, they are the Hedgehog, the Immolator and the Resurrection Kbot. They are not on The Core Contingency disc. The GOG edition includes them as separate files beside the game.

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