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.
Real-time strategy
Allgames lists War of Nerves! as the first RTS ever. Ars Technica traces the genre's roots back to "Utopia" (1981), citing it as the "birth of a genre", with a "real-time element" that was "virtually unheard of", thus making it "arguably the earliest ancestor of the real-time strategy genre". According to Ars Technica, "Utopia" was a turn-based strategy game with hybrid elements that ran "in real-time but events happened on a regular turn-based cycle." According to Brett Weiss, "Utopia" is often cited as "the first real-time strategy game." According to Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice, "Utopia" "helped set the template" for the genre, but has "more in common with "SimCity" than it does with "Dune II" and later RTS games." Barton also cites "Cytron Masters" (1982), saying it was "one of the first (if not "the" first) real-time strategy games." On the other hand, Scott Sharkey of 1UP argues that, while "Cytron Masters" "attempted real time strategy", it was "much more tactical than strategic" due to "the inability to construct units or manage resources". "BYTE" in December 1982 published as an Apple II type-in program "Cosmic Conquest". The winner of the magazine's annual Game Contest, the author described it as a "single-player game of real-time action and strategic decision making". The magazine described it as "a real-time space strategy game". The game has elements of resource management and wargaming.