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.
Creative Assembly
Despite speculation that Activision might buy Creative Assembly, as the publisher had done with previous successful developers under its wing, the Japanese company Sega announced on 9 March 2005 that they had sealed an acquisition deal with Creative Assembly, purchasing all issued shares in the company. Sega explained that the acquisition was to strengthen Sega Europe's presence in the European and North American video game markets. All preceding titles in the "Total War" series had been exclusively computer games. By July 2005, Sega had acquired the publishing rights to "Rome: Total War" from Activision, and built on the brand strategy by releasing two expansion packs: "" in September 2005 and "" in September 2006. "Spartan: Total Warrior" was released in October 2005 on Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube, receiving a mixed reception from critics.