Command And Conquer series

I wanted to name it "Command And Conquer General", but that would've been ambiguous.

Well, Discuss the Command And Conquer Tiberium and Command And Conquer Red Alert series' here, before Einstein goes back in time and fucks everything up again.

I might be the only person who liked Tiberium Wars. I place it on the same level as the first two Tiberian Saga games.

Tiberian Twilight can go to hell, though.

but not C&C Generals? :(

Why not C&C Generals???

I don't suppose I can pimp the fact I know just about everything concerning rules.ini files for RA-RA 2 can I? (No really, there are few things I don't know inherently or have figured them out.)

Also who here has made mods for CNC games? I've made rules mods and more for everything I have sans Renegade and the first. (I don't have TW or TT.)

TW wasn't at all a bad game. In fact, I'd say it was pretty damn good.

The new sidebar mechanics are, while they feel a lot like the original, I liked how you can now individually manage each one of your production buildings rather than having to set one and just one as the one that will produce units, meaning you can now make various types of units simultaneously, and let's face it, guys, Nostalgia Goggles off, the sidebar from Tiberian Dawn towards Red Alert wasn't "the perfect way to manage your base and unit production". It's certainly better than Warcraft's slow unit based building mechanics, since you didn't depend on actual "workers" to get the job done. Less micromanagement, more efficiency without technically dumbing it down. However, TW's handling of those mechanics and changing them around the way they did feels like the natural evolution of that concept, plus the production values are through the roof, and it shows in the FMV's, which at least look pretty good, the acting was better than the old, campy stuff of the first couple games, plus, Joe Kucan is as awesome as always. And I really liked Scrin in general.

TT can go step on a lego for all I care. Generals wasn't technically bad, but I never really figured out why they needed to have it named "Command And Conquer", if not just for brand awareness.

The sidebar in TD-RA was rather clumsy in hindsight. (Especially since everyone prioritized putting their high-tech units like Migs, Longbows, Mammoth tanks and tanks in general on the top of the listing since they never sorted themselves.)

TS tried to improve but kinda failed. RA 2 got it right.

RA 2 was definitely a step in the right direction from TS, but I beg the question, why did they decide that the "shut down the power for individual buildings" function had to go? It was pretty good, at least it let you actually defend your base if you get a surprise attack or lose one of your power plants in the heat of a tank rush.

On the subject of RA 2, I once played Yuri's Revenge online and found that if you dare choose Yuri as your faction, people will hate your guts forever.

Not that I can blame them, all the Yuri faction was missing was an "insta win" button.

I loved Tiberium Wars for both its gameplay and story; for me it was better than Tiberian Sun and probably superior to Tiberian Dawn if you account for how badly the game has aged.

Red Alert 3 and especially Tiberian Twilight..... not so much. But you can't go on a C&C youtube video and not have the top rated comment be "EA sucks".

If EA's gimmick was acquiring companies and just give them money and expect something in return, it'd be great. When they start getting their hands on the games in question, or pushing releases... Yeah...

Red Alert 3 stand for being wackier, like red alert 2 and yuri revenge, so campy that its delight me, also, its still fast based combat

Were it not for the gameplay and graphic style, RA 2 wouldn't have done it for me. I could barely tolerate the campiness. I mean, the previous games were pretty low-budget, but at least they weren't straight out camp. It was serious, and you could tell they were trying to make it look as such. RA 2 was just... eh, I'm sticking to the multiplayer.

I liked that C&C3 kept the size of the infantry looking somewhat real compared to Red Alert 3.

Like, how a whole squad was needed so we could actually see the infantry.

You really got an impression the Mammoth Tank was freaking huge.

Funny, RA always felt campy, Tiberian Dawn too, what with the slap slap kiss scene and the kid tv

It's funny how the hardcore portion of the fanbase absolutely insists that the first Red Alert game was the most grim, serious and realistic of all the C&C games, and constantly complains about how EA is being "unfaithful" to the design of the series. I'd say it's the other way around: EA's team recognized that the whole RA universe was always whacky to begin with, and designed accordingly. Red Alert 3 was a bit extreme in it's cheesiness, but still I find that a lot of the hate is undeserved since they actually made a fun, well-balanced RTS under all that.

And just in case you guys missed this from the previous post I made on the Generals 2 thread, check out this vid:

Battlefield 3: Operation Red Alert

Red Alert 1 was just somewhat campy, in terms of acting. The units and such were more in line with 50's-to-80's-comic-book sci-fi, and that was when it wasn't something logical, like the Phase Tank or the Mammoth Tank. Most of the other units made relative sense, such as the Medium Tank and Yak Plane.

edited 27th Mar '12 9:52:59 PM by RocketDude

I'd place it higher. Better pacing, better balance, better combat, better production values, better everything... well, it could've used a decent "Act on Instinct" remix. I'm not too fond of the one from Kane's Wrath.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Generals was excellent. I still find myself going through the Generals Challenge once a year or so, which is more than I can say for Tiberian Sun or the original Red Alert. I'd probably like it even more if they'd named it First Strike or Operation Cheese Penguin or whatever.

I'm not sure anyone's calling it "realistic," but please remember that this was the game where the first Soviet mission involved razing a civilian village, with an ending cutscene to make it emphatically clear that you're the bad guy. Yes, the effects and acting were on the cheap, and yes the design took a lot from cheesy sci-fi, but the overall tone is quite different from its sequels.

The problem with Tiberium Wars is that the game focused too much on build orders, stealth detectors were cheap and plentiful (which made stealth units useless), and until the later patches there wasn't much incentive to use the more unique units. But the biggest issue was with the very design philosophy behind the game itself. EALA intended the game to be extremely "fast, fluid, and fun" and allow the use of large armies with plentiful resources, but what happened was that the game slowly became more about spam and who uses the correct build order, not tactics. And there was the dreaded "spider base" tactic (if you can even call it that), which involved a player using buildings with build radiuses to start building a ton of defense turrets (namely storm columns and sonic towers) until they reach your base and sealed you in.

EA tried to patch the issues and listen to suggestions from the fans, with some success. But the later patches got carried away and started totally changing core aspects of the gameplay, such as the cranes, the amount of resources the harvesters could carry, and severly nerfing some units to the point of uselessness. Hell, a lot of the campaign missions have become a lot more difficult or impossible thanks to the changes.

Please keep in mind: I'm not saying that C&C3 was terrible. All things considered I agree with you Tactitus: the production values were good, the campaign was fun, I actually liked the soundtrack and the spammy nature of the game had it's charm, but in comparison to the other C&C games the balance was very weak.

The Spider base tactic was nothing new - it was just a more convoluted version of the Travelling Sandbag tactic from Tiberian Dawn, which completely broke singeplayer. Wait, that didn't affect multiplayer. Not so bad then, but still not original

C&C has escaped my radar for a while now, what with other games like Metroid Prime and Descent keeping me occupied. Just recently got back into it, though, not counting Emperor: Battle For Dune (which, since it basically uses the same mechanics, is basically a C&C with a Dune flavor).

Haven't gotten into Red Alert lately, so I've been playing Tiberian Sun and Generals mostly, the latter of which unfortunately bugged out on me. The former's campaigns were great, but when you get to those squad-based infiltration missions, the difficulty quickly changes gear to System Shock 2 murderous.

More recently, I've played C&C: Renegade, which is simply amazing, if a bit challenging.

Maybe it's because of my love of Portal, but I tended to call the Tiberium-based weapons Neurotoxin Guns, especially the Chemical Spray. Also, the announcements made by the CABAL in the last mission sounded a lot like something GLaDOS would say if she had the Fact Sphere attached to her and somehow got high or drunk. He mostly spoke in American proverbs kind of like this.

"Attention! There's no business like show business. Don't throw stones in glass houses without proper protection. That is all."

There was much lulz.

@LOEADITO - I wouldn't say "campy" as much as I'd say TD's low budget in the cutscene department really shows, same goes for RA. RA 2 pretty much jumps headfirst into the Camp wagon and dances around naked in it. An aspect which RA 3 was actually pretty loyal to.

TS' cutscenes were pretty amazing for their time, too.

About Generals... It wasn't my cup of tea. It felt like it was trying a bit too hard to do too many things at once, and didn't quite get them right. It does the whole "modern-middle eastern conflict in Notiraquistan" thing (albeit before it became a trend), which fails to work since the bad guys are just sort of bland. And yes, I know NOD is actually pretty damn bland themselves, but at least in future installations of the series' they get some solid characterization, even if they have shady goals. The GLA was just a stereotypical group of Terrorists who followed a nondescript blank goal simply called "THE CAUSE!". The chinese were kind of cool, I guess. There was also the new control scheme. No sidebar, you right click to move units, you get this "special actions" for every kind of unit, it's just a population cap away from being a Warcraft clone. It just felt it was So Okay, It's Average, and, again, other than the obligatory "Eva" character (if you can call her that), it bears absolutely no resemblance to Cn C in the slightest. Maybe the sequel will fix this, I don't know.

Well, Command And Conquer was a byproduct of Dune II, so I guess that's pretty fitting. EA really killed that franchise. I loved Dune 2000 back in the day.

edited 28th Mar '12 7:24:43 AM by ThatOneGuyNamedX

Generals had more influence on the design of the future games than any other C&C before it, and mostly for the better. The ability to use multiple factories for production and not just a build speed increase, the introduction of unit abilities, the support powers, the increased emphasis on expansion and not just turtling in your base, encouragement to mix your units and not always stick to tanks, and more - all of that carried on to the next installments in the franchise. There's a reason why it's still loved by a lot of competitive RTS players today.

Not necessarily a good thing. In Generals you could win with straight riflemen or RPG Troopers or tanks (you might take extreme casualties but you could) but the RA 3 style requiring 5 separate unit types just to defeat a basic strategy? Unacceptable. Real world military doctrine chooses to reduce the number of model types in the field. It's why Soviet tank divisions in 1967 were (depending on unit) T-55s, T-62s or T-64s (T-72 was not yet ready) followed by the AK-toting conscripts with their Dragonuv marksmen support and their AT-3 Sagger crews in BMP-1s. Two unit types to transport an entire mechanized battalion and fully engage the enemy. Then artillery in the Soviet era was pretty simple, any one would work on the same target as another you just had to know which you had to use or needed to use (saturation fire was the MLRS platforms like the BM-21 for instance).

There is no such thing as a purely anti-infantry platform in real world armies, no such thing as purely anti-structure or anti-air. Take anti-air units for instance. The ZSU-57-2 SPAAG of the 1950s was good enough at the ground role it could take on anything lighter than an M4 Sherman Medium Tank and win handily. That meant anything lighter and weaker than a full on main battle or medium tank was a likely liability to fight these without getting the drop on such a platform first. (And at the same time you had to worry about its contingent of T-54/55 tanks all around.) The Canadians have a thing called the ADATS (Air Defense Anti-Tank System) which is basically an M113 APC armed with 8 missiles able to engage and destroy any aircraft and any tank at the same time. In RTS terms that's both AA unit and tank destroyer all in one. Don't forget other things too. The RPG-7, great at cutting open any tank built before 1973 and just about everything currently fielded less than a tank in weight is exceptionally lethal towards infantry at the same time. You don't shoot dozens of them to kill one rifleman unlike Generals. More often than not one RPG-7 round inflicts multiple rifleman casualties of varying effectiveness. (Anywhere from shell shock and bumps/bruises/minor cuts from debris to full on Ludicrous Gibs.)

In short, what the later CNC's did was not necessarily a good thing.

I've always thought the lack of damage from missiles on infantry was pretty stupid. It'd make sense to be expensive, and slow firing and purely long ranged, but it would hurt infantry.

^^Tiberian Twilight was probably worse than RA3 in that regard because the armor system made it so that an Obelisk of Light takes several shots to kill one infantry unit, even with the linking bonus. Combat was reduced to rock-paper-scissors in a rather bad way.

^Missiles have always been rather effective against armor, structures and aircraft in the series, so nerfing them against infantry allows for more interesting strategies.

edited 28th Mar '12 6:59:50 PM by RocketDude