Command And Conquer series

They didn’t realize the pay to win microtransactions model of Battlefront 2 was going to be a disaster until it became one.

That Generals 2 was seen as a disaster in waiting must’ve been absurdly obvious because Battlefront 2 caused a number of states and countries to change their laws on the subject. Like it might’ve brought down the entire microtransaction business model kind of thing.

Either that or a hopelessly large monetary loss.

Tacitus, what difficulty level were you playing Tiberian Sun on? Hard is an absolute beast because of those artillery. Titans only barely avoid being two-shot, so anything less than full health means they will be. And considering it takes about a dozen shots to kill the artillery, their minimum range is your only friend but you still need to send them in huge packs to get anywhere.

The Hammerfest mission is thus arguably one of the hardest, for me, the terrain is really unforgiving and you don't have Disruptors yet (which are slow, awkward, can't fire through craters and cause friendly fire but are devastating even on Hard and can take a hit.)

It's actually possible to starve Nod out by shooting dead enough Harvesters with Jump Jet Infantry, but that's very slow. Otherwise you basically are forced to use like 40 Titans and just brute force it.

The Nod campaign on the other hand becomes stupidly easy once you get Artillery, even on Hard, as you can just use them as an Advancing Wall of Doom in most missions. Their hardest mission is the optional one to destroy the Radar Dome early on. It's timed, all you've got are Tick Tanks and you have two full GDI bases to push through to get to the targets. Even if you don't get unlucky and have Ion Storms smash your tanks for you, you have no efficient way of handling Disc Throwers (which can kill Buggies in about 3 hits) and you need a minimum 3 Tick Tanks for every Titan they have, and at that you'll probably still lose one. Realistically you do need to destroy the first base, which slows their attacks (12 or 15 Tick Tanks round the side can do it), then you rush through the second base to the Dome, but an hour and a half isn't a lot to make an offensive force of 30-40 tanks on top of what you need for defence and otherwise lose (especially as you don't have repair vehicles yet)/

In terms of the Air Force I actually did make good use of Orca Bombers on Hard as GDI, because they're Artillery killers, and clusters of them can hit missile silos in the later missions once you know where they are. It's expensive but so is everything else.

I really enjoy the TS campaigns, but they're brutal slugfests for sure.

Oh, Easy, absolutely. I'm after nostalgia, not a sweaty slugfest or a protracted siege. Missions take long enough already. Long enough for me to take a break from Tiberian Sun in favor of the faster-paced Generals gameplay.

Though the bloom's starting to come off that rose, I'll have to admit. First issue is my skill level - the Generals Challenge on Easy is too easy, because the superweapon timers are generous and the AI barely attacks, but Normal kicks my ass because the timers aren't generous and the AI is actually trying to kill me. I might have to see if there's some way to tweak the game config files to give me a "Normy" difficulty with some aggression but less superweapon spam.

Second issue is playing as the generals themselves, really experiencing their Crippling Overspecialization. If you've got an advantageous matchup like the Nuke General versus the Laser General, or Literally Anyone But The Infantry General versus Dr. Thrax, you're all set to steamroll with minimal difficulty. Then the later matchups come along and you're the Tank General having to play like the Nuke General because there's no way to get your armored columns over to the Superweapon General's island base. It's a challenge, yes, but it isn't a particularly compelling one.

Third issue is engine stuff. As the Tank General, I did a tank horde against the Nuke General, only to take 80% losses because my units couldn't pathfind successfully through the enemy base, allowing them to fight my horde two or three at a time with massed rockets and gatling guns. It was such a dismal result that the AI unlocked some general powers and started dropping artillery on me. And then there's some wonky line-of-sight issues with artillery and tanks, where I'm getting shot but can't shoot back. Nothing that completely derails the gameplay, but just enough to be noticeable and annoying.

I'd like to go back to Tiberium Wars at some point, see the distillation of the Generals gameplay in the classic C&C setting, except my understanding is that some multiplayer nerfs got applied to the base game to derail some campaign missions. Might have to finally do some Kane's Wrath stuff instead, get me some updated Titans and Wolverines.

The timers can be manipulated in one of the files. I set mine to 15 minutes apiece.

I know the higher difficulties of the Generals Challenge use default values for their superweapons on most levels.

Finally gotten around to trying out the Mental Omega mod...though "mod" is understating it at this point. It's getting closer to a total conversion, given that pretty much everything but the interface has been overhauled.

It's really very good, with a much more indepth plot, much deeper, better balanced factions and units, though having the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, significantly more time and no corporate pressure all help of course.

It's also Nintendo Hard, being utterly relentless right from the start, even on Easy. Some missions definitely feel like they'd benefit from Age of Empires style production buildings having their own queues, such is the need to crank out troops by the dozen near instantaneously and get them all over the battlefield. Good fun though!

Jelthid releases his plans for future videos: Red Alert coverage.

I did mention on his patron page about the (now defunct) database on Red Alert 3 whose unit articles were released gradually by the developers during the game's development (base game and Uprising). The wayback machine and I think the official wiki still has the text information preserved.

I think I found a name for my Generals mod. I shall call it The Terrible Balance Mod.

Why? Because I’ve done some tuning that is absolutely absurd yet amazingly fun.

Like setting the Nuke Cannon to 1000 damage up from 600 and increasing the blast radius by like 50 percent. And it’s the furthest shooting unit in the game at a whopping 600 range (greater than the size of the screen).

Bomb Trucks also when fully upgraded kill pretty much anything in one hit also with like a 50 percent blast radius increase. Like the only things that survive it are either Superweapons or the Command Center.

I’m still not done with such madness.

Curiously I am building the mod in such a way all the campaign missions are not only functional but winnable. Sure the cutscenes on a few have an element of broken to it but it’s still doable.

Out of curiosity, can you mod the GLA nuke truck in the first Chinese mission so that its blast hurts the player's starting base?

I think that one is mission triggers not actual weapon damage.

Yeah, the original game's nuke truck was just the typical Chinese nuke superweapon when detonated, which means it only just barely affected the entire screen. But the blast radius during the 1st Chinese mission extends far beyond that, almost to the point of being somewhat realistic for a small tactical nuke, meaning it's either a unit with modded stats or scripted like Major Tom said.

Edited by SgtRicko on Apr 30th 2024 at 12:40:11 AM

Now I remembered a certain mechanic in Yuri's Revenge, which always kind of bugged me.

When you use iron curtain on your vehicles, AI players units don't even try to attack them until the invincibility wears off. But your units do attack iron-curtained vehicles. Why is that?

This is a real bother if you play as France and use Grand Cannons. The invincible units just roll into your base, the cannon fires at them taking some of your buildings out. Probably the only way to counter this is to use the Force Shield so your power goes down and the guns stop working. But then you have to deal with a bunch of nasties wreaking havoc in your base.

I've got the Collection on Steam and it has been interesting.

RA 2 definitely feels better to play than TS, though I am still feels somewhat weird. But it at least has actual attack move. I've got to the Soviet defending tank lab mission for now.

Generals was annoying to get to even lauch and get a proper resolution. Then when I practically finished first China mission I Alt+Tabbed and it crashed -.- So I put off playing it for now.

Tiberium Wars was the one C&C game I played the most but I had only retail disc and my last two laptops had no DVD drive so it has been a while :/. I knew that newer version had some messed up things due to multiplayer patches but it didn't feel that bad. Mammoths felt kinda weak in Cairo mission.

At least until GDI Croatia and NOD Atantic Coast. I know I'm playing on hard (and I'll probably reduce difficulty if I keep being stuck) but these two missions are rough.

I know that for Croatia the best course of action is to sell walls for cash and rush north east base to capture it. But the combination of selling walls, attacking that base and making sure to not lose a defense structure for the secondary objective is a little much. Babysitting towers so the attack rocket squads and engineers so they don't get sniped by a random Venom is also annoying.

Atlantic Coast I honestly don't know what to do. My first attempt ended with me building additional Vertigos and then practically dying after I was rushed by some stupid big APC/Predator/infantry wave. Next attempt also didn't end up much better. Stealth Tanks feel useless or at least I'm using them wrong. I keep getting all of my army killed and end up out of money.

Also, for whatever reason TW is the only game that can handle being Alt+Tabbed. Geneerals crashed. RA 3 also I think was weird with that?

EDIT: Bruh, I've did a save during Chrono Defence mission, luckily before my Con Yard got destroyed, but for some reason RA 2 crashes while tring to load that save ;_;

Edited by SecondKaitenhammer on May 5th 2024 at 7:01:54 PM

The easier way to do Croatia is to steal the SW infantry base instead of north east. That let's you cut off Nod from the secondary objective, and you can turtle there with your new Nod base until you're ready to push out.

Daily bitching session at TD Remastered, GDI mission 5.

I get Grenadiers and APCs.

AI gets Rocket Infantry and Light Tanks.

AI can also replace its harvester while I'm not allowed to.

How is this fair?

Edited by amitakartok on May 11th 2024 at 4:39:49 PM

Welcome to Tib Dawn. It only gets worse onwards, and wait until their Construction Yard gains the ability to BUILD AND REPLACE OTHER CONYARDS, and with no connecting structures nearby to boot!

Yeah, I've seen that in the Nod campaign. Three conyards and the AI has infinite money. I had to sandbag the conyards just to be able to make any progress.

Edited by amitakartok on May 11th 2024 at 6:42:04 PM

The travelling sandbag is basically the only way I can win much of TD...

Don’t forget building as many of whatever at a time as they have factories of that type.

So three Conyards means upwards of three buildings simultaneously.

The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard indeed.

Got bored with Generals, tried some Kane's Wrath, and... oh, geez. I really want to like it, it's like the apex of the Tiberium series, but I keep comparing it disfavorably to Generals. All the movement feels just slightly too fast, with infantry running around like they did a line before leaving the barracks. Going back to build radii after being able to drive a dozer over to a chokepoint to put up defenses is just painful, even though the game made a secondary MCV for that very purpose. The monochrome UI makes it hard to distinguish abilities at a glance. The building garrisons just feel tiny. I could only do a bit of Steel Talons skirmishes before reluctantly moving on.

Which means returning to the Tiberian Sun GDI campaign. I brute-forced through "Retrieve Disruptor Crystals" by going straight toward the stopped train, blasting through all resistance, and similarly I think I was supposed to bypass that Nod Sniper Artillery in "Rescue Prisoners" instead of bum-rushing it, flattening the surrounding power plants, and going in the front door of the prison peninsula.

"Destroy Chemical Supply Station" was... well, the first Chem Missile that got sent at my base ended up doing loop-de-loops and zig-zags for a few seconds before exploding harmlessly off the map. After that I rushed five Jump Jet Infantry, flew them north up the middle of the map, and made a beeline toward the unprotected Tiberium Waste Facilities, shredding them before another missile could be fired. Then it was the joy of Orca Bombers wild weaseling through SAM defenses - two bombers concentrating on the same target can kill a SAM in one pass and have enough bombs to take down another, and if you send three wingpairs at once, that's six SAMs dead in one sortie. Some bombers will limp back to base with yellow or red health, but that's what the Repair Pad is for.

On that note - I had completely forgotten you could build Orca Carryalls in the campaign, I mistakenly remembered they were skirmish/multiplayer only! But with that realization, I was able to get tricksy, airlifting an APC with an Engineer in it to capture Nod Construction Yard, and from there build my own army inside their base. And then I won the mission wrong.

Yeah, turns out if you don't send a unit to the very northwest corner of that map to uncover the train station, you don't get the bonus objective to send a newly-arrived Ghost Stalker to board the train, missing out on the (third!) optional mission before "Destroy Chemical Missile Plant." Had to reload and win a little slower to enable that brief "Mine Power Grid" scenario, which wasn't anything to write home about.

When it was finally, finally time to "Destroy Chemical Missile Plant," I remembered how much I hated the fact that your base location is a depression that really fucks with your ability to put down pavement and walls. But I choked back my bitterness and gave up on attempting to fortify my base to concentrate on another Jump Jet rush, sending an aerial squad to once again destroy the unprotected Tiberium Waste Facilities before any missiles could be fired. And from there I misunderstood the consequences of "Mine Power Grid." I thought when the 30-minute timer finished, Nod's power would go down for a period, and so planned on using that window to take out SAM Sites with my flying infantry so the bomber wing could operate unopposed. Instead, the effect is to shut down the cloaking field around the middle-map gauntlet of Nod defenses, ignoring the main base.

So I brute-forced it again. Sent a Jump Jet formation along the southern edge of the map, CTRL-fired on the ground until I'd destroyed all the Banshees and helipads, then went north along the eastern edge. I lost a few dudes to SAM emplacements before they were able to land in a seemingly-empty parking lot, but of course that was where Nod's power plants were. Those six (five, four, three) brave chain-gunners did enough damage to knock out the power and reveal the enemy base, which gave my Orca Bombers a window to take out the Construction Yard, and at that point it was just a protracted mop-up action.

And I mean protracted. Tiberian Sun really makes you appreciate how in every later game, you aren't forced to destroy every last goddamned unpowered Laser Fence Post to win the mission.

Onward to "Destroy Prototype Facility," Croatia, to see the ruins of a Tiberian Dawn base.

It doesn’t help that TW/KW garrisons are weak as hell. The rifle and sniper infantry squads barely scratch the paint of anything not infantry. Grenadiers have no range and rocket soldiers aren’t great.

And heavy infantry like Zone Troopers can’t garrison at all.

And YOU CAN’T REPAIR ANY OF THEM! Also they have a ton of easy counters that either instantly flatten the building or empty it out.

I mostly use garrison as a temporary way to deny enemy access to Tiberium Spikes. The AI has a habit of throwing Engineers to their deaths until they eventually get a garrison-clearing unit.

Edited by RAlexa21th on May 15th 2024 at 2:07:33 AM

It feels like Tiberium Wars garrison mechanics are an overcompensation for Generals mechanics, except someone missed the memo. I never felt like infantry in buildings was overpowered in Generals, there was always artillery or aircraft or specific units with the ability to insta-clear an occupied building. Now, infantry in vehicles, that got ridiculous, yes. Pathfinders sniping from speeding Humvees while four Anti-Tank infantry shoot rockets out of the same vehicle is in a word, broken. In three words, ridiculous and broken.

Anyway, "Destroy Protoype Facility." I was misremembering that one, there weren't any charming ruins of vintage bases, just a field with six near-dead Mammoth MkIs the local Banshees use for target practice. And when they blew up, a gray Light Infantryman appeared to shoot at me for some reason. Anyway, use mutant commandos to find Nod's base, build my base, send some Hover YMCAs to blow up some cloaked power plants from the top of a cliff and from a lake behind their base, reveal the Nod base and knock out its defenses, send in the Orca Bom-

Wait. Why don't I have Orca Bombers? Oh, you want me to use the Mammoth MkII, don't you, game? Ugh, fine. Let's airdrop a lumbering super unit that can shoot once a month and consistently fails to hit targets with any sort of terrain variation between them and it. At least the mutants were around so Ghost Stalker could demolish stuff while the Budget AT-AT took out laser turrets and vehicles.

Now, "Weather the Storm." Many years ago, someone at Westwood got up in the morning, drove to work, and decided to devise a scenario in which the player starts jammed into a corner, low on resources and starting units, with enemies camping all the Tiberium fields, and Nod Sniper Artillery dug in atop cliffs and mesas on all sides. And then this person thought "No, that's not enough, let's disable the air units that counter artillery by having an ion storm raging the entire mission!" And nobody stopped them, nobody threw them out a window for suggesting that. In fact, that person got paid to devise that mission.

Well, maybe I'm being harsh, and no human played a part in the process. Maybe a creature from hell crept out of a smoking crevice in the Westwood Studios basement and coded the mission the night before the game CDs were burned.

"Final Conflict" coming up, wooo. Time to hunt some ICBMs on a timer with the entire GDI arsenal at my disposal.

Garrisons in Generals was borderline underpowered in concept. The ease of garrison clears was such that even with repairs it took very little to do.

It’s underpowered in concept enough that in my current mod, I actually disabled garrison clearing. Buildings are flimsy enough (and I increased their durability) that a determined attack or air strike or artillery makes short work of it even without clears.

Just the way it happens in reality I suppose.

Big news for fans of the C&C Generals mod Rise of the Reds: the original base game and expansion's campaigns have been "remastered" into using assets from the mod. I'll let the mod's announcement speak for itself:

I'm going to have to get into Generals modding someday. At the very least I want to learn to adjust superweapon timers in the Challenge, and fighting the Infantry and Demo generals would be interesting (though what I really want is a mod that lets you play a vanilla faction in the Generals Challenge). Something that spices up the main campaign could be fun, but as for that mod... I mean, I guess it's appropriate. The OG Generals was uncomfortable for being released during the War on Terror, and the plotline of Rise of the Reds is now uncomfortable for a whole new reason.

What I liked was that it gave infantry an actual use (beyond capturing structures). A good mix of infantry in the right structures could serve as a defensive line, or at the very least slow down an enemy advance until they got units with the range or abilities to deal with the garrison. But in most C&C games, infantry is just kind of pointless when you could be building tanks instead.

Now. "Final Conflict." It was bullshit.

You start the mission attacking a little Nod base, but you don't have an Engineer, and don't get your MCV until you completely clear the camp. Which means you're forced to destroy a Refinery you'd rather capture and use to jump-start your economy, which in the process spreads Tiberium where you're about to be building. Said base site also has dirt roads you can't pave over, and the ring of Nod walls around it is too small for a decent base, forcing you to micro-manage your Titans to blow them up. And after a few minutes, the Nod base across the river to the west will begin using Nod Sniper Artillery - firing from the safety of the base itself - to cover the only land passage to the rest of the map, also bombing any harvesters trying to reach the blue Tiberium on the ridge to the south. As soon as you destroy the first ICBM, or if you explore too far south, you reveal the rest of the map, including a Missile Silo that will proceed to bomb your cramped base with cluster missiles. And for that added dose of "Fuck You," the AI will insta-rebuild destroyed structures, to the extent that I had three Titans continuously re-killing the same Laser Turret without missing a beat in their firing cycles.

So, a long, long, slow, tedious earlygame, spending a small eternity slowly building refineries and harvesters, and slowly teching up to build enough Orca Bombers to blitz the first proper Nod base. You have to kill the Construction Yard right away, otherwise your bombers will destroy a SAM Site on the way in only to be shot in the ass by its replacement on the way out. Once that was done and I had air superiority, I took out the base's production structures and captured the silos for cash, but spared the ICBM for as long as possible, so I could build up a good squadron of Jump Jet Troopers. I sent those guys south of my base, over the water, to reach the island containing the Temple of Nod, Kane's Pyramid, and most importantly the Missile Silo. Most of the Jump Jets died to SAMs on the approach, but enough landed to be able to kill the nearby SAMs and Silo, and then imitate the sandbags of the First Tiberium War by standing where it was so the AI couldn't rebuild it.

With the threat of missiles gone and the island's northern SAMs cleared, that gave me enough breathing room to build up an assault force that consisted of an airdropped Mammoth MkII and an Engie in the APC. The Mammoth finished off the SAMs while the Engie took its Hand of Nod, which led to me capturing all the tech buildings on the island and building a War Factory inside the southeastern Nod base to attack it from the inside, taking out the second ICBM in the process. From there it was a matter of using aerial recon to find the last island containing the third ICBM, and sending in the Orca Bomber wing. And with that, the mission was absolutely not finished, no. You can't consider the war won until you've scoured the map for the last two deployed Tick Tanks along its southern edge and the pair of parked Weed Eaters on the western edge that didn't join the "all our buildings are gone" Zerg Rush.

So yeah, that's the grand finale of the GDI campaign. I barely got to use the Ion Cannon since it's an investment in credits and power that I really needed for other things for most of the mission, not to mention that it can only zap a single target every 8 minutes 30 seconds. The vintage Mammoth Tanks in the ruined Tiberian Dawn base on the northwestern edge of the map were completely useless to me, and since they're on the other side of a Nod base from your start position, right next to an Obelisk of Light, I'm curious what would be the optimal way to utilize them.

But the sad thing is... I kind of want to replay the mission, to try something crazy. It takes a few minutes for the northwestern Nod base to wake up, so I'm wondering if it's possible to take your initial force of infantry and elite walkers, along with your MCV, to force your way into that Nod base and start capturing it from the inside. Might have to tank Laser Turret fire with your MCV while the infantry and walkers run past, but if you kill the starting Tick Tanks and avoid the Obelisks, in theory...

UPDATE: Yep, it's doable. You have to act immediately, and your MCV will be tanking lasers and Tick Tank shells, but you can run across the bridge and up the edge of the cliffs to reach the rear of the Nod base before it wakes up on its own. Deploy your MCV right behind their Construction Yard, plop down a Power Plant and Barracks, then churn out Engineers to capture all those Advanced Power Plants - you'll want to disable the power before capturing Nod's Construction Yard and Refineries because they're all in range of an Obelisk. You'll also need to position your Titans carefully to kill what comes out of their War Factory while staying out of range of a nearby Obelisk. But this rush strat lets you take out an immediate threat and get a huge boost towards getting your own base going, if you ignore the ICBM and don't go too far south you'll have a full hour to prepare for the next phase of the mission, and of course you can supplement your army with Nod units. The big downsides are that there's no way to protect this mixed base from subterranean units, and you're across the river from the two green and two blue Tiberium fields you'd normally be harvesting, though I suppose you could always spring for an MCV and build a resource outpost where you're meant to build your main base.

Edited by Tacitus on May 16th 2024 at 1:42:36 PM