Born as an open-source reimplementation of Total Annihilation, the Spring engine now supports a wide variety of real time strategy games.
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Pros
Pro Simple to learn
Cons
Con Playing with icons
The 1944 team seems to have gotten its inspiration, strangely, from SupCom, of all RTS games, as opposed to games like Blitzkrieg or Company of Heroes. Units are so tiny on the maps that most of your time will be spent playing with these units as icons as opposed to enjoying the visual effects and actual models.
Con No downloadable version on the official site
You must create an account, and log in to a game, in order to download it. This can be a huge set back for people who want to play lan, but don't want to log in on each computer to download, or simply don't have internet available at the playing spot.
Luckily there are other sites that host the actual download, where it can be downloaded without login.