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.
Empire: Total War
The campaign mode is similar to those in "" and "", but with several enhancements. It features three main theatres of play: Europe (which also includes North Africa and the Middle East), the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent, as well as four minor trade theatres: the East Indies, the Ivory Coast, the Straits of Madagascar and Brazil. The way provinces work has been decentralised: although a central settlement is still used, other locations within a province can generate trade and technology, allowing factions to disrupt a province's productivity without assaulting the main settlement. Diplomacy, taxation, and trade have been streamlined to reduce the need for micromanagement, including allowing the player to appoint ministers to govern the nation. Previous Total War games required the player to promote a governor for each major city, whereas in Empire ministers' qualifications affect the government of all cities, modified in each case by the size of the metropolitan administration, reflecting the shift from premodern city-statehood to modern nation-statehood. The wandering scholars, spies, emissaries and assassins used in previous titles to deal with diplomacy, trade and espionage have been replaced with just three units: gentlemen, rakes, and missionaries. The former handle research and can challenge other characters to a duel (thus eliminating the diplomatic risk of being implicated in an assassination plot), while rakes perform clandestine tasks such as spying, assassination, and sabotage. Missionaries serve to convert the populace to the state religion, which reduces religious unrest and softens cultural unrest. Isomorphic units also exist for the Ottomans, Persians, and other near eastern nations, replacing rakes with Hashashin, while Indian nations use Thugees for the same purposes, and all nations south and east of the Ottoman Empire use Eastern Scholars instead of gentlemen (although these cannot duel). The isomorphic religious leaders are Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant missionaries, Imams, and Brahmin. The way armies are produced also differs: in addition to being produced at settlements, generals can now build their armies in the field by recruiting from nearby settlements. Players can now research technologies along a technology tree, advancing in areas such as infrastructure, politics, agriculture and the military.