The winner tends to be whoever can expand their economy fastest and most efficiently. Gameplay wise, the game revolves around economic management and expansion. This makes commander sniping a part of the game that cannot be eliminated only mitigated through proper defense. What cannot be changed is the win condition: last team to still have a commander standing wins. Options for custom games include an economic bounty on each player eliminated dynamic alliances that allow sharing of vision and economy to other players before they backstab you spawn anywhere, which allows you to forgo the carefully placed spawns on worlds to let the player who picked the most isolated spawn win and shared armies, which allows players on a team to control each other's units and specialize in some areas while letting their teammates pick up the slack in others (or just argue about whose unit is whose). The games can range from 1v1 ranked games on a single planet, to 10 player free for alls on the moons of a gas giant, to massive 5v5s across an entire solar system, to everything in between. The meat of Planetary Annihilation is in the multiplayer mode. If that's your thing, then it's great, but if it's not then the singleplayer will be a let-down. This AI is competent and can be replaced by the modded Queller AI to become nightmarish, but it's still a skirmish mode. As a result, the regular skirmish mode provides a much greater challenge than does the galactic war. While this can be addressed via mods, less easily addressed is the fact that the Galactic War AI, even on the hardest difficulty, has been made stupid after complaints that pre-date the existence of the game's tutorial about difficulty. Your own army improves faster than the enemy ramps up, resulting in the campaign getting easier as it goes rather than harder. The single-player mode is inadequate it consists of conquering a galaxy in a series of skirmishes with initially gimped technology that improves as you go along. While commanding an interplanetary legion is never easy, the UI makes it manageable and there are numerous mods to extend it further. These include Picture in Picture, which gives you two viewpoints at once area commands, which let you give patrol and attack commands over a variable area alerts, which tell you important events and can be clicked on to take you there or managed through their own picture in picture and infinite build, which allows you to order your production lines to produce never ending streams of units. The scale may seem daunting, but there are a number of good UI tools to help you manage it. After 20 minutes your armies can number in the thousands and your base span multiple planets. Planetary Annihilation is an RTS on a massive scale. Rest assured that TITANS is worth it as a $14 expansion to the original game or as the $40 stand-alone, and that Uber Entertainment is not made up of the unethical satanists that some reviews would have you think you'd be supporting by purchasing TITANS. Uber made some mistakes with the TITANS launch, although the problem there was far more with some well-meaning but misinformed users and some less well-meaning trolls who took it upon themselves to ensure that TITANS was a failure. Virtually every missing feature has been added, and TITANS adds some proper end-game to the game and fixes the bulkiness of the orbital layer. Every action taken thereafter however has redeemed Uber and Planetary Annihilation. The follow-up kickstarter for Human Resources was disastrous and I opposed it at the time, although in 20-20 hindsight I wish it had succeeded. The launch of the Alpha in June 2013 for one and a half times a AAA game wasn't well handled and PA was launched in September 2014 in an incomplete state. I've spoken out against much of what Uber has done both gameplay wise and community wise over the years, including getting a 3 day ban in July 2014 from their forums over an incident where a backer exclusive commander was being sold in the game's shop for charity. "Let me get this out of the way: Planetary Annihilation has been an imperfect game with an even worse community management. Please upvote to push this to the front on the store page.
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