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
In January 2009, after the delay of the release of Empire Total war, the addition of a full campaign multiplayer mode was unveiled. The technology to create a multiplayer campaign game was not available in previous Total War games, and the extended development, due to the delayed release, allowed the Creative Assembly to implement the underlying technology for such a mode in Empire: Total War. On 7 December 2009 Sega released keys for a beta multiplayer campaign where two players could play online together as separate nations. Eventually, due to the incomplete and buggy nature of the beta alongside other development focuses, it was cancelled, never being fully patched into the game. In 2013, CA's community team released some additional keys for Fans of the Game, so they could play the incomplete Multiplayer Beta. Even after the closing date at the end of 2013, beta keys for the campaign was still available from Sega customer support.