Second, you only have access to a fraction of the tech tree. Your choice of where to go and who to fight is entirely meaningless. Trouble is, it's paper-thin and once again badly executed. Planetary Annihilation has a promising "Galactic War" mode in which you lead your faction from system to system, headhunting other commanders, unlocking new techs, and conquering territory.
Even the good ideas end up going to waste. Maybe faction design matters slightly less in this style of RTS, where mass production and weight of numbers carries the day over individual unit tactics, but the lack of variety is still disappointing. There's no faction design, just different skins for the all-important Commander units who lead identical armies of robots and tanks.
On the other hand, it's in keeping with a general "half-baked" quality that pervades Planetary Annihilation. That's a shocking oversight, as is the fact that you must be online to play even a single-player skirmish. Yet Planetary Annihilation gives you no option to save your skirmish or multiplayer game to pick it up later. (There’s no single-player campaign.) This is a big game and, like a lot of its predecessors, things can drag on for more than an hour as up to eight sides bash away at each other. Even more unforgivable is the lack of a save option, either in single-player skirmish or in multiplayer. In fact, I think my preferred setup for play would be one of those banks of security camera monitors - maybe then I could see all the angles I need to. On the other hand, it's not as good as actual multi-monitor support, a feature that’s desperately needed but does not seem to be supported. To Planetary Annihilation's credit, the "picture-in-picture" option makes it easier to juggle two things at once, and does a great job of giving multi-monitor advantages to single-monitor users. Note to developers: Googling unofficial Planetary Annihilation wikis to learn the basics of your game’s controls is not an appropriate substitute for a manual, and promo videos explaining the rudiments of RTS games are not substitutes for a tutorial. I launched the tutorial to see what I was missing, and was treated to a low-res YouTube video that seemed more like a pitch for Planetary Annihilation than a guide to playing it. For starters, there’s little in-game help, and what's there is worse than nothing. What sinks it, tragically, is the lack of care and attention shown to the details and player aids. Those big problems would be enough to make Planetary Annihilation a flawed-but-fun experiment. It's a fog-of-war you can never dispel even when you have radar coverage of an entire planet, your situational awareness is severely reduced. But then you start zooming out, and begin to realize that while you're able to see more territory, the curvature of these tiny globes means that you can still only see a fraction of the playing surface before you have to spin the camera to another position over the planet. It’s exactly the Total Annihilation formula, and it’s a great place to start. Marrying supply to demand is the key to success here, and the challenge of managing it at the same time as your battle plans is intense and rewarding, and having to protect your Commander from assassination keeps you on your toes. Everything plays out via a rate-based economy, and scales up from a single Commander unit to vast armies of several hundred units by harvesting resources and building factories.
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Planetary Annihilation never solves the central challenge of its main conceit: how do you make an intuitive, graceful RTS interface for a game that's not contained on one map? The result is a game that always left me feeling like I was wrestling with an overloaded shopping cart with a wobbly wheel, even after I'd learned how to play it reasonably well. Planetary Annihilation's biggest problem is one of usability - and not the manageable one that comes along with being a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, which are both large-scale real-time strategy games with complex economies.
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