Command And Conquer series

I don't really like factions that focus on the sea in most games like this. Mostly because water isn't guaranteed to show up on every map. Otoh, you're always going to have land and air.

Worse, the water units are balanced like land units. Very short range and limited to no amphibious capabilities.

Even aircraft carriers and battleships are pathetic in terms of reach. They barely out range a tank in RA 3.

...But the whole point of aircraft carriers and battleships is range.

Have we been playing the same game? All the artillery ships in Red Alert 3 have the range to attack defenses without getting shot by those defenses themselves. I'd say that's usually enough to serve their purpose well.

It’s still tiny though. The original Red Alert had Cruisers which could fire like two full screens worth of range.

RA 2’s capital ships had better range.

RA 3 felt like everything had claustrophobic inversion, nothing really seemed to have any major range that wasn’t a one off like the coastal guns on the first Allied mission. Even the aircraft carriers suffered from amazingly short range.

Part of it is due to the gigantic footprint those ships have but they don’t have a great reach either compared to predecessor ships.

Compare Tiberian Sun’s Nod Artillery vs RA 3 capital ships and I think advantage goes to Nod. Not simply because the Nod weapon has a smaller graphical footprint but genuinely greater range in terms of compared to total map distance.

Should they have been like the ships in Generals and could fire anywhere on the map without moving? Maybe not.

Could it have been done a lot better? Absolutely.

I feel like the Cruisers in Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Sun's Nod Artillery felt more like an overpowered exception rather than the rule.

Agreed. Neither were particularly well balanced, but the RA 1 Allied Cruisers were on a league of their own. Their range was so ridiculous that back in the day players would insist upon either playing Allies vs Allies or avoiding maps with large bodies of water altogether out of fear of how damned far those Cruisers could shoot. And even that wasn't 100% safe since the Chronosphere could potentially drop a Cruiser into an unreachable area with a sufficient water tile and begin shelling your base into oblivion.

There's a reason artillery has pathetic ranges in the C&C games. Realistic ranges just don't work.

Edited by SgtRicko on Apr 2nd 2024 at 2:11:40 AM

More like they just gave up at any sort of balance or counter.

I’ve done increased ranges to units and structures in my mods for earlier games. It’s not impossible to balance long range stuff with full screen plus shooting ranges.

Difficult yes on some games owing to various limitations, but not impossible.

The only real problem with having increased weapon ranges is stuff with deliberately short range by concept like the Nod Flame Tank or Yuri’s Brutes become severely weakened simply because they’re under fire for longer even if you didn’t adjust anything else under the hood.

Same thing for suicide and collision based units like GLA Bomb Trucks and Terrorists and Hijackers.

But given those such things are either incredibly niche and noncompetitive themselves or are simply fluff at best, the balancing act for them is a simple matter.

It'd help a lot if pre-Generals games had the structures block line of fire. That way long-range units couldn't utterly dominate everything.

That’s mildly doable in TS engine games owing to wall logic and cliffs/elevation.

Not full line of sight or collision like Generals and later but possible.

It’s peculiar as hell though. Some things ignore walls and wall logic is more than simply being “solid” with regard to projectiles in flight colliding with something not the target.

Also it requires doing an ROT=1 hack on (technically) unguided, non-instant hitting munitions. That one collides with terrain if there’s something in the way like a raised hill or a cliff. Or a wall.

Not possible in TD/RA owing to full 2D and walls are hardcoded to be the way they are and terrain has zero effect on projectiles in any way outside of one special case (torpedoes).

Doing some TD Remastered at the moment. Hair-tearing stuff:

• Why does EVERYTHING do splash damage friendly fire? Flametroopers killing themselves with their own splash damage are of course the worst offender, but Stealth Tanks damaging each other down to red HP (thus slowed and unable to cloak) from NON-MISSING shots against an enemy harvester is ridiculous.
• Why is splash damage from tank shots so inconsistent against moving infantry whose fire I want the tank to draw before the Glass Cannon behind the tank line hits first and aggroes everything?
• Why are minigunners so effective against everything? They literally kill Light Tanks faster than the other way around and auto-scatter on crush attempts.
• Why are sight ranges shorter than the AI's guard radius? They're already moving to attack before you can even see them, massively reducing the time you have for micro.
• Why, oh WHY do units react to getting their path blocked by an enemy unit for a SPLIT SECOND by aborting their current order in favor of attacking the unit in their way?!

Edited by amitakartok on Apr 2nd 2024 at 8:40:40 PM

Welcome to the Early-Installment Weirdness of the original game. It was there back then too.

The splash damage of tanks is weirdly inconsistent against infantry because it used an accuracy penalty rather than the shot simply doing less damage. A proper hit does huge damage but grazing splash does barely any at all. Can lead to devastating tank rampages that seemingly have no counter or defeating tanks with rocket soldiers and barely taking damage or losses.

This also affects other weapons too. Machine guns for instance can do almost nothing or almost a one hit kill.

Naturally this was all disposed of in Red Alert for the more streamlined system used from then on to Generals.

I'm fine with the tank shell doing minimal damage as long as it goes ANY damage so that it draws aggro away from squishier units. It makes the difference between killing that incoming grenadier without fuss on hard difficulty and him two-shotting my entire group of rocket soldiers.

Edited by amitakartok on Apr 3rd 2024 at 11:54:09 AM

Continuing my replay of the Tiberian Sun GDI campaign, just successfully assaulted Vega's island. By land. Because two laser turrets, a gate, and a single artillery piece aren't much of a barrier to a squad of Titans with some air power behind them. The only Amphibious APC built was to get an Engineer into their base instead of watching the guy waddle across the map over a half-hour.

And man, what a mission. Having to put Pavement on every inch of land around your base to prevent subterranean infiltration, and effectively building two walled bases because you can't pave over a dirt road. Rediscovering how useless GDI airpower is in the face of SAM spam, and how long it takes to rearm an Orca. The horrible realization that your only anti-air unit at the moment is your Jump Jet Infantry. The frustration of not being able to repair any of your damned vehicles. The nightmare of being bombarded by Nod Artillery. I don't think the Firestorm accuracy nerf is applying to this rerelease of the vanilla campaign.

And boy oh boy do I miss the game knowing when the mission is over, instead of making me walk around and destroy every. Last. Structure on the map, from depowered SAM sites to depowered Laser Fence posts. The temptation to abandon the campaign in favor of the Generals Challenge grows ever stronger.

Yeah, the Orcas were pretty useless in Tiberian Sun.

They have a hard time killing infantry, needed to be massed to destroy structures, their odd janky movement made them frequently miss fast moving targets, and any AA sites would shred a whole group of them, making Orcas too cost-inefficient. Methinks redesigning the Orcas to behave like the Commanches from Generals would've been a far better solution; wouldn't even need the rocket pod upgrades to be viable.

At least the Orca Bombers kinda make up for it, but they're still really fragile against SAM sites.

Edited by SgtRicko on Apr 6th 2024 at 1:43:52 AM

Either make em like Comanches from Generals, just keep them working like Apaches from Red Alert or make them truly Fighter-esque like Harriers in RA 2 or Raptors/Migs in Generals.

Or make em work similar to Orcas or Firehawks in TW.

Either way the version used in TS wasn’t great. Then again aircraft in general aren’t good in TS. Only Banshees are the only thing worth building.

Edited by MajorTom on Apr 5th 2024 at 5:40:23 AM

Zade "Reviewed" C&C Legions as best as he possibly could.

Suffice to say whoever's in charge of the game's western iOS/Google Play store release cares very, very little about quality and is doing the absolute bare minimum to effectively communicate with the community or even give accurate information. A beta period was supposed to have taken place already along with a full release on iOS by spring 2024 (it's already out on Android), but none of that has occurred. The social media accounts are largely useless too; most accounts are being ignored, with only Facebook semi-frequently posting random quizzes with odd emoji usage and grammar, indicating whoever is writing is probably doing so via a translator (or just has poor English language skills).

And while Zade thinks the game has voice actors, I strongly suspect both the text and voice were done almost entirely by AI: it would explain the odd vocal tone and syntax. Don't bother with trying to make sense of the lore either: it still doesn't make any sense and contradicts itself nonstop.

Gameplay hasn't changed from what little we've seen previously; it's just another mobile P 2 W base builder, with the combat being noting other than sending doomstacks of your units with a higher overall attack score to attack smaller groups with lower scores. No tactics or strategy required at all.

Oh, and after all this time only GDI's still playable - I don't think we're ever gonna see Nod. Dunno if they got rid of all the infantry units that were direct model rips from Halo yet.

If EA is willing to release that, I am morbidly curious about how bad Generals 2 was for it to be canceled.

What's weird is that Generals of course had Comanches that were permanently flying/hovering, and rearmed their missiles in the field instead of returning to a helipad, but when Tiberium Wars came out a few years later, it still had Orcas launching from and returning to an airfield to rearm. But in that very same game, Nod's Venom gunship could stay in the air indefinitely! Did they just grandfather clause Orca behavior in that game?

Successfully recaptured Hammerfest (2030 with special guest Firestorm). If you send your Engies after the Barracks, War Factory and two power plants first, you can build a small task force to clear out the SAM emplacements around your base, earning more reinforcements you can then use to kill all the Nod troops sitting around the Firestorm barriers on the near side of the bridges. That means, once you capture the Construction Yard and get full control of the base*, you won't immediately lose those Firestorm barriers when Nod starts attacking them. Not that the Firestorm barrier is a particularly great defensive structure, it can mostly buy you some time for a guard group to get over and rescue the Vulcan turrets you Silo'd out to the bridgeheads from getting killed by a single Tick Tank that outranges them. That freebie RPG turret in the base is a goddamn tease.

The asterisk by "full control" is a reminder that all those concrete walls around the Hammerfest base are still considered neutral property, so you have to blow up and replace, rather than repair, them. Oy, my OCD.

From there it was patiently building up a force of Titans, Wolverines and new Hover BAMFs to circle around and thrust deep into the Nod base's backdoor. The prepwork was sending my starting APC on a suicide run to reveal where their Artillery was, building up some Orcas, and then Silo-ing an EMP cannon as close as possible to their base. Zap their power plants to knock out the SAMs, send in Orca flights to attack the Artillery, watch in horror as they struggle to hit a target on top of a cliff even though they're fucking flying units, start swearing as basic Rocket infantry costs you thousands of credits. You know how it goes. At least I could finally build a Service Depot to repair the Orcas that managed to make it home.

I'm just impressed that the game didn't make me cross the map to kill the four Nod Infantry standing where a sold Obelisk of Light was before admitting I'd won the battle. Small courtesies.

And after that I got distracted by installing some mods to let me play Zero Hour on a modern resolution with a sensibly zoomed-out camera. It's kind of painful to admit that I'm having a lot more fun playing this least Westwood-y entry in the C&C franchise than I am its classic titles.

And I think Kane's Wrath introduced another aerial unit for GDI that had infinite ammo and resupplied its rockets like the Comanche and Twinblade. So I'm betting it's very much a Grandfather Clause scenario as the Firehawk serves of a more modernized jet aircraft for the faction.

Are you sure that was a matter of quality rather than expense and/or willingness to court controversy?

Yea, every thing I heard from people who had played it is that generals 2 was okay, and that EAs claims of canceling due to quality issues were just making up an excuse for whatever reason really caused it.

Honestly with it being brought up I can totally see the second reason... there is no way you could get away with making generals today.

Edited by Imca on Apr 6th 2024 at 8:00:03 PM

I remember some of the beta testers claiming two major issues with Generals 2: first, the developers were having a hard time trying to figure out the general tempo of the gameplay. They didn't know if they wanted to mimic Star Craft's more speedier movement or the original slower momentum from the first Generals. This was made worse when players pointed out how the average unit moved so fast they could reach the other side of the map usually within a minute, and in smaller maps it came down to whoever rushed out a strikeforce towards the enemy base first to spawncamp and kill anything that was built. Units no longer had realistic movement, instead preferring the Starcraft style of instantly spinning around and accelerating to top speed to face whatever target they faced, making the supposed directional armor mechanic the game had mostly useless. At one point the Command Center was removed altogether as the starting structure and replaced with the Supply Depot - logic being that too many players, as a rush strategy, both in the original Generals and new game were selling off their Command Centers for extra cash.

Second, the developers couldn't figure out an effective monetization scheme that satisfied EA. Remember, this was supposed to be a Free-to-Play game, meaning players would have to pay for something. And that something was, in addition to the usual cosmetics, taunts, and other items, going to be the addition of newer Generals. Also, the generals themselves were rather underwhelming; whereas a General in Zero Hour was basically an entirely new subfaction, Generals 2 reduced them to only adding in a new support power, a new unit, and a perk - that's it.

For example, One Chinese general's loadout was basically napalm artillery to replace the normal artillery support power, a flame turret to replace the normal anti-infantry turret, and an improved Dragon tank. Nothing else. Another Chinese general, this one themed around rockets, had a unique rocket tank, rocket artillery instead of the ordinary artillery, a rocket turret - at least she actually got a new unit out of the deal. And while a singleplayer paid campaign was proposed apparently it was some sort of last-ditch effort to gain both public attention and cashflow, but it failed, which was another nail in the coffin which ultimately convinced EA to cease development.

Edited by SgtRicko on Apr 7th 2024 at 12:59:43 AM

And worse both the models and cameos for the Orca feature a gun it can use on top of those missiles. The movie playing in Skirmish lobby even has those Orcas firing said gun!

Why couldn’t it have been like the Comanche in the end? Maybe work it in with a gameplay mechanic like the gun can fire indefinitely but gotta return to base for repairs/more missiles.

And the Orca isn’t even very capable in TW. It takes like half the ammo from one full airfield worth just to destroy one Scorpion tank.

With that level of weak it should’ve been either Comanche 2.0 Sci Fi edition or a good deal of buffs needed.

I was in the Generals 2 Alpha, it was very bare bones. Most Commanders played exactly the same and only had different commander abilities which didn't even differ between factions so the GLA tank general had the same repair, mines, atk boost abilities like the China or US general. I think there were also only like 3 or so unique units which were just reskins with +10% dmg or something.

The units were also very bland and had not very impactful abilities so there was almost no micro outside of throwing you abilities at your mob and 90% of time mass just won.

You had to unlock your generals with a premium currency and then level each general to unlock and level up your abilities and being matched against someone who had a higher level than you was almost guaranteed to be a loss since they could spam more abilities. It was clear that EA wanted to milk this like one of these MOB As where you had multiple Double Unlocks to create player attachment.

Edited by Kiefen on Apr 8th 2024 at 12:42:36 PM

I knew about unlocking the Generals with premium currency, but not having to grind and upgrade their abilities... which I recall the promo material and interviews released by Victory Games promised they wouldn't do.

All the more reason I'm glad they didn't go through with Generals 2, guess even EA realized it was gonna be a disaster.

Edited by SgtRicko on Apr 8th 2024 at 8:10:22 PM