WarCraft was a huge part of our LAN parties, but mechanics wise, Total Annihilation was a much bigger leap forward in terms of use of 3D terrain and ballistics and commands, so we played that a lot more.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
Huh. I'm familiar with the Spring RTS FOSS project (https://springrts.com) which started as a reimplementation of TA, and of course Planetary Annihilation, but not "Beyond All Reason" - do you have an authoritative link?
It's an open-source project that started as a fork of SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of Supreme Commander.
I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
Well, when I saw the first Supreme Commander video it looked a lot like Sprint RTS running Balanced Annihilation to me. Right down to how the terrain deformation worked and the command queuing.
Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase.
http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
And Supreme Commander too, although it's a bit dated now / has some technical issues - although at the time, it was one of the first games that could use a multicore CPU. Not SupCom 2 though, that felt off in comparison.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.