Which is better StarCraft or Total Annihilation?

     Having played both, I'd have to say if you give TA a chance, you will probably like it more than StarCraft.  It plays differently than other RTS's, so you can't expect to pick it up as easily.  The major differences is the presence of wreckage, a resource system that has a steady income, and paying for buildings and units bit by bit like command and conquer. 

     You also aren't as limited in what you can use to counter different units.  When Cavedog made this game, they didn't have any particular units in mind to counter other ones.  For example, if someone has a swarm of gunships, you should counter with flak cannons, or mass amounts of guided missiles.  However, depending on the swarm, I have seen tanks do rather well, as well as MRPC's.  I once tried to airlift some units onto a beach, and thought "I took out all the air defense, now to land some units to wipe out the artillery."  The artillery fired, missed, fired, missed, then fired and hit.  I lost all but one. 

     To be fair, I compared both games to each other, taking the side of each in turn.  Unfortunately, most things in StarCraft that are compared to Total Annihilation, Total Annihilation has some sort of alternate advantage, such as StarCraft does have a better map editor, but Total Annihilation does not have tile sets, so you can make your own tile sets.

StarCraft versus Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation versus StarCraft

Then I have complaints about Starcraft.

     Overall SC is a good game.  I used to play it a lot online.  It was fun, and it had good gameplay.  It was fairly well balanced, and it had interesting races.  I did like it better than AoE.  Once I found TA, I didn't want to play SC. TA had better graphics and cool animations when something is built.  It also has more opportunities for strategy because of the flexibility of the game engine, and the addition of several new ideas into the RTS genre, such as wreckage, 3D environment, physics, and a full navy.  There were other nice additions, like a complete air-force, but mostly just a drastic improvement over other RTS's in other area's.