Skirmish menu setup showing the maximum ten players, 5v5, hard difficulty and the map being The Cold Place
Likewise with many other RTS games, Total Annihilation has a Skirmish mode, which pits the player against a set number of CPUs in a customisable game, starting with just a single Commander unit.
Once the Skirmish button is selected in the single player game menu, the screen switches to the Skirmish menu, where the player can change different aspects of the game before they start the actual Skirmish, such as the faction, alliances, the number of players (there must be at least one human and one CPU), the team colors, the metal and energy storage values each player has, if the game ends if your Commander is destroyed, the map to battle on, the difficulty setting, etc. The Skirmish begins once the "Start" button has been selected.
Team color[]
All ten team colors
The team color is used to differentiate units from one another by changing the color of certain unit textures. It is one of the individual factors that can be changed for each player, along with the faction (ARM/CORE), alliance symbol and starting metal and energy; there are 10 different team colors in total, which correspond to the maximum of 10 different players.