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.
Herzog Zwei
The game concept of a central command/fighting vehicle directing other friendly units to attack remote enemy base appeared in past games, such as Sir Tech's 1984 game "Rescue Raiders". However, Scott Sharkey of 1UP.com states that the 1988 game "Modem Wars" was possibly "[t]he closest predecessor" to "Herzog Zwei", but that it "was fairly primitive and abstract by comparison," that earlier such games lacked the ability to construct units or manage resources which made them "much more tactical than strategic," and that the slower processors made the ticks "so long that the games were practically turn based". "Total Annihilation" (1997) and its spiritual successor "Supreme Commander" also inherit the concept of a large robotic command vehicle which is used to construct and command an army. However, "Total Annihilation" and "Supreme Commander" are controlled in similar fashion to traditional real-time strategy games; unlike in "Herzog Zwei", the command vehicle in those games is mainly nothing more than a particularly powerful and versatile unit.