Total Annihilation
"Total Annihilation" was one of the first RTS games to feature radar that showed enemy units within its radius on the minimap. This added an additional element of electronic warfare to the game: players could construct radar jammers that prevented units in a small radius around them from appearing on radar. Mobile radar jammers could be used to create surprise attacks, necessitating the deployment of scout units on a regular basis to reveal said units visually. In addition, radar jammers could disguise the presence of visually cloaked units, such as the commander or land mines. Radar fields rendered cloaked units detectable; a radar jammer could make said units undetectable until the radar jammer was destroyed. "Total Annihilation" was also one of the first RTS games to point the way towards battlefields with hundreds and thousands of units. Previous games could field a hundred units or so. However, Total Annihilation initially permitted 250 units per side which was later patched to 500. A third party patch allowed up to 5,000 units per side.
Total War: Warhammer
While "Total War: Warhammer" is built around the "Total War" system of city and unit building, army manoeuvring and diplomacy with other factions, it has numerous new elements that differ from previous "Total War" games. In addition to those already mentioned, they include the ability of agents to participate in battles to give your army an edge; a wider variety of animations, with 30 different types of skeleton and body types compared to only five or six previously; flying units such as dragons, which make use of the new animation capacity; corruption is now caused by the presence of Vampire Counts or Chaos armies, rather than internal factors; the renaming of Generals as Lords - they now fight as individuals rather than embedded within a bodyguard unit, and can be upgraded via skill and equipment trees to boost both their own and their army's power; and the addition of a quest mode which tasks players to complete missions and battles to receive unlockable items and abilities. One of the most significant new elements, however, is magic. Different factions have different amounts of access to the various "lores" (types) of magic, with some, such as the Dwarfs, having no access whatsoever. Units with access to magic can turn the tide of battles - their abilities are far more powerful than any available to battlefield units in previous games.