Command And Conquer series

I agree on that strategy, but I think you're referring to the wrong mission. For the final Soviet mission I tend to launch a nuke onto the Soviet Beacon, immediately sell the silo, then use my newly-acquired nuke (which likely has been constructed before the Weather Control Device) to nuke the Allied Beacon, and then start spamming Grand Cannons to destroy either of Yuri's superweapons.

Prism Tanks aren't the answer, they're the question. The answer is "yes."

You can kind of cheese Sydney if you're willing to put off ending the Boomer threat. On Easy, at least, the Yuri AI doesn't start its grand garrisoning spree until you blow up one sub pen and encourage the Black Eagles to blow up the other. So if you can spare the time and resources - aided by capturing an Airfield at the bottom of the map - you can garrison most of Sydney with a GI in each building, which will if nothing else deny them to the enemy. The important thing is having a full garrison in the tissue box, because Yuri transports will spawn offscreen to land on the northern shore of your base.

"Trick or Treaty" is neat, the freedom of having the map to yourself for X minutes but also the tension of not knowing where the enemy will be coming from (everywhere). The defenses around the Machine Shop on the northeastern edge of the map tagged a few Lashers on their way in, but there just isn't enough space around Parliament to build walls and such, so I had a formation of Win Buttons rolling back and forth to wherever the enemy was pushing at the moment, supported by a Guardian-packed Battle Fortress to deal with the Discs. The Soviet naval reinforcements that eventually showed up didn't do much beyond kill a few Boomers, my now-elite group of Everything On The Same Plane As Us Is Dead was able to wipe out the Yuri base after it was revealed. Though since this was happening at the same time as the river clash, I can confirm that 1) Prism Tanks can target Boomers from the shoreline and 2) they don't do squat against that armor.

"Brain Freeze" is kind of the inverse of the final Soviet mission, as instead of going up against all the factions, you're leading a combined force of two factions against the third. Eventually. Theoretically. You can kind of cheese it if you put off building your Soviet Radar to hoard resources when the only threat is intermittent transports landing on two beachheads, and in my case I used the time to build up power plants in anticipation of the second half of the mission. Once you build the Soviet Radar and your Allied MCV warps in on the bottom half of the map, you have about ten minutes (on Easy) before Yuri can get you with the Psychic Dominator.

My first attempt was to rush out All Solving Hammers to cut across the bottom half of the map to get to the Dominator, but that just isn't feasible, there's not enough time to build up a force capable of blasting through all those turrets and towers and tanks in the way. The solution is obviously to build a Chronosphere, but that makes Yuri much more aggressive, sending Discs at the Soviet base and land battle groups at the Allied base. But I weathered that storm and Deep Striked a little force into the southeast corner of the map, shooting down the towers and then over the wall to kill the Dominator. That group had some tense minutes dealing with a swarm of vengeful Yuri units, but was able to survive and get teleported home to rejoin my main army. Then it was another careful advance across the map, but with the drama of the Prism Tanks' greatest enemy - sheer cliffs with defenses on the top of them! Fortunately, you don't have to completely clear the map, killing all of Yuri's units fulfills the win condition.

Oh, and Yuri had a Genetic Mutator, but nothing to do with it. At least until I blew up some Slave Miners and freed the prisoners with jobs. Who then got turned into Budget Hulks and were blasted into light by the Disco Tanks. Poor guys. Like it wasn't enough to have to work in Antarctica without shirts.

Final analysis of Yuri's Revenge: the fundamental problem is mind control. It's just not fun to play against, to instantly lose a unit and have it turn against you, or get teamkilled by the rest of your squad before you can click on the Yuri Clone or tower controlling it. It's worse than having an elite tank one-shot by a Prism Tower or Tesla Coil, because your loss is the enemy's gain. If Yuri didn't have so many ways to steal your units, his faction might be kind of a wacky, ultra-gimmicky opponent instead of one that encourages very specific strategies to neutralize that mind control mechanic. Instead, it's Prism Tank horde micro or swarms of Drone tanks.

Still, Red Alert 2 as a whole has held up very well. The conventional forces are much more balanced against each other than they were in the original game, and the gameplay is faster and more action-packed than Tiberian Sun - I played a few missions of the GDI campaign and was struck by how slowly everything happens, from movement to construction to combat, even on the same game speed. It's going to be hard to commit to playing through that campaign again when I could be doing a quick, fun RA 2 skirmish instead.

People just overall do not seem to like the faction due to how heavily it relies on gimmicks.

It's just too much micro, which is a pain in the ass in an rts game.

Though I will admit that as much as I didn't like their actual gameplay, I did like the Gatling Tower and Tanks visual and sound effects. The Gatling fire becoming louder and faster and flashier was cool.

Edited by M84 on Mar 22nd 2024 at 5:58:20 PM

Not just micro, but micro in a game where hotkey is limited. It's not like Red Alert 3 where every ability is the same button.

Excepting weapon specific abilities like Crazy Ivan bombs or Tanya C4, all abilities are controlled by the same hotkey. D for Deploy.

GI sandbags and machine gun, transport evacuation, MCV building, Yuri Clone Psi-blast, stuff like that all one button.

In that regard both RA 2 and RA 3 are identical controls. Can even remap the Deploy key to something else.

Also the unit and building construction is controlled by only four hotkeys. Q for Buildings, W for Defenses/Superweapons/assorted powers, E for Infantry and R for vehicles/ships/aircraft (all of which have separate queues).

You just can’t build stuff through the sidebar via hotkeys.

I also think there's no way to produce more than one unit at a time with a single click (not to be confused with the maximum units you have in production, which is 30); the newer C&C titles produce 5 of a given unit with a shift-click.

I meant that people hate playing against the faction. When you look at it, a very large part of Yuri's arsenal (mind control, mutation, berserk gas) consists of various means of making your units involuntarily kill each other, making massed attacks typical of C&C ineffective.

Not in the TW/RA3 sense where each individual factory/barracks/airfield/navy yard was its own queue (like in Generals before that).

Individual classes of stuff can be separate. Like you can build Giant Squid out of your shipyard while building Kirov Airships out of your War Factory and then Harriers from a captured Allied Air Force Command Center all simultaneously. Despite all three things being the same tab on the sidebar.

Also the queue maximum can be easily tweaked in the rules file. I set mine to 120. (119 technically because it’s that variable plus one in function).

Edited by MajorTom on Mar 23rd 2024 at 5:43:12 AM

TBH I prefer the slow build ques of the earlier games, it helped prevent spam of hundreds of units a bit.

Not totally prevented mind, but there was much less of the game turning into a wave of 100 tanks.

There's that too, but I was referring to having to click once for one unit at most rather than the convenience of clicking once (with shift) to put five of that unit in the queue. I believe building more of a given production structure at least speeds up the production time for that category overall.

I bound one of the middle buttons on my Razer mouse to click 30 times per second for cookie clicking purposes, but I ended up never changing it back because it turns out that even though it's not useful for gameplay in other games, it's useful for menuing in almost everything.

I don't have a problem with massive armies myself. In fact, it's a draw to me in RTS.

Rather ironically the focus on using unit abilities and hard counters of the later games runs parallel to its use of separate production queues that would have been useful for the early games' tank spams, yet those games only permit a single queue for infantry, vehicles, aircraft, and vessels no matter how many of those production structures you build.

Speaking of the old games. Is anyone vexed that TD SAMs can only score hits on air units moving towards the SAM?

The Steam release is such a faithful reproduction of Red Alert 2 that the Skirmish mode retains a bug where the button to confirm a map selection is labeled "Random Map." It also takes so long to load the Skirmish menu after selecting it that I thought my game had locked up. I can't remember if that was a thing when running the game off a CD or not.

Skirmish AI is... a thing. An Easy AI basically builds a little base for you to come knock over whenever you're ready. The Medium AI does the same, but builds walls around its Construction Yard, Battle Lab and superweapons, and occasionally sallies with small attack forces - a Terror Drone quartet, a mixed half-dozen Rhino and Tesla Tanks, a Flak Track loaded with Terrorists. It actually had some success one time, rushing a Flak Track loaded with Engineers while I was busy managing a creeping advance against another AI, which cost me my Construction Yard and any ability to replace it. Fortunately, my Refinery, Barracks and War Factory were intact, and by that point I had enough elite units on the field to win without difficulty.

I had a Normal AI ally for that skirmish, which did literally nothing but sit in its corner of the map. 0 kills, 0 losses. It even built a Chronosphere and Weather Control Device, but never fired them even after the countdown reached zero. Is it because it was French and was programmed to turtle around a Grand Cannon?

The AI isn't very good at reacting, either. It might send a unit or two against a Chrono Legionnaire zapping a superweapon, but it won't go charging to the rescue of its Harvesters unless they're being attacked inside the base. At least it's smart enough to build Attack Dogs to protect against Spies, except it seems programmed to train them a few minutes after building a Battle Lab, to give a human player the opportunity to infiltrate its base.

Oh yeah, if you're like me and got real tired of how the same seven Yuri's Revenge tracks are the only music options when playing the expansion, the folks at cncnet have a thread on the matter, with a link to a simple mod that adds the base game's soundtrack when playing the expansion. Download, extract, drop in your "Command & Conquer Red Alert II" folder, easy.

Gave it a try. It works, except that it seems that the iconic track "Brain Freeze" is missing as a result.

Edit: Did a bit more research, found a post containing a file that helps sort out the soundtracks, both base game and Yuri's Revenge included:

Edited by RainingMetal on Mar 23rd 2024 at 6:02:59 AM

Red Alert is the same way. Soviet SAM sites cannot effectively engage a retreating aircraft or helicopter. All missiles in the TD engine work this way. Best used against approaching or stationary foes (like Orcas or Hinds) but not anything on its way out.

Starting with the TS engine does the franchise have SAM sites that can engage both approaching and retreating aircraft with equal efficiency.

Re: Yuri soundtrack.

The thememd.ini file contains the original RA 2 soundtrack simply Dummied Out. The MIX file that has the music for Yuri’s Revenge does have the original tracks in them.

Simply uncomment the older tracks and they show up. Even have proper titles.

I'm more irritated by the fact that it takes something like a dozen reloads of the same save per A-10 strike to successfully intercept them before they reach their target, which is almost always the Commando. Everything, SAMs, rocket soldiers, rocket bikes, they all get ONE shot off each before the A-10 gets past them and the second salvo misses.

It's not just retreating either: shots fired from the side also miss.

Edited by amitakartok on Mar 24th 2024 at 2:50:47 PM

Oddly I found no thememd.ini in my game file, so I had to go get one.

It's inside ra2md.mix, I think.

Yeah using the various archives of extracted ini files is better than finding it yourself.

XCC Mixer can extract the thememd.ini file but if I remember correctly it’s a different MIX file than you’d find the rules file and most of the rest.

Edit: the above jogged my memory right. It’s in RA2MD.MIX.

Edited by MajorTom on Mar 24th 2024 at 7:10:04 AM

Remastered made the Warthogs much harder to deal with by making them actually pick targets properly, whereas in the original they always only hit the northern most unit.

Which meant you could cheese it in two ways - leaving a sacrifice unit further north than anything else, or sending a fast unit through the enemy base as the planes approached so that they'd napalm their own troops. That was a lot of fun, but does not work anymore.

Edited by EruditeEsotericist on Mar 24th 2024 at 8:50:57 AM

Currently if I have at least 4 Artillery units clustered together with others is the ONLY time they go for that instead of the Commando.

The definition of hell:

• Have six minigunners, six rocket guys and four Artillery.
• Have to get through a very narrow pass guarded by 5-6 Grenadiers.
• Have to do it fast because said pass is right next to a Gunboat's patrol route and it's headed this way.
• Can't wait for the Gunboat to turn around because the first A-10 strike will kill the Commando if I wait that long.

The definition of mega-hell is all of the above but the A-10s kill the Artillery first, then turn around and kill the Commando too despite this having explicitly been patched out of Remastered!

Edited by amitakartok on Mar 24th 2024 at 5:32:08 PM

That mission was an absolute living nightmare on Remastered. It was so much easier when you could just use a single rifleman at a time as food for the planes!