Total Annihilation is, without doubt, the greatest RTS of all time.
User Rating: 10 | Total Annihilation PC
Total Annihilation, released in 1997, is one of the few real time strategy games I have played that actually involved *strategy*. TA involves immense thought, both in economic and tactical planning due to the unique resource model and vast library of units, each one of which is extremely useful in its own rights. Matches in TA tend to last far longer than those of its contemporaries such as StarCraft and Red Alert (both of which it preceded), but this, by no means, indicates a lack of depth or speed to gameplay itself. Indeed, quite the opposite is true; there is always something to be done, and none of these things are ever trivial.
The biggest real problem with this game is the single player campaign, which lacked a good, or even existent, story, as well as relatively poor level design. However, the problem of poor level design does not carry over into multiplayer, which features some of the best-designed maps I have ever seen, featuring chokepoints and resource clusters placed in such a manner to make them extremely strategic positions and, consequently, the sites of some of the most epic battles the genre has ever seen.
