OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
openra.net
openra.net
Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came with a boring windows installer.
Looks better than average installer, but still, but quite as great as in C&C1 )
When it started it blasted out at full volume, "WARNING! Military Software Detected!" which, at one friend's house, caused his mom to yell up the stairs at us "WHAT ARE YOU BOYS DOING???"
Edit: hah, beaten.
Green mono monitors are de rigeur for so much geeky computing. Linux terminals in basically every movie.
Knock knock, Neo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDt_Q1risk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nupLAa68rX0
While they were made by a community member, kudos to EA for shipping them. Really put a bow on the whole thing.
I don't believe installing a game is that much faster nowadays, but I'm sure people end up doing something else - something that was possible once windows came around.
* Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack.
* Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and instant-killed by tanks. The overall "death ball" of tanks can eventually reach endgame proportions of death, but the cheapest units are fully ineffective at death-balling.
* Starcraft had a 12-unit selection cap. It required a lot of clicks (on purpose) to create a death ball, so only the highest levels of players (with high APM) could attack-move with a whole army effectively.
So, a few hundred riflemen or dozens and dozens of tanks.
The death part of it comes from the numerical advantage, if an enemy unit walks into range of many times its number it'll get blown to hell before it can inflict meaningful damage, even if it is a technologically superior or inherently stronger unit.
If your knights are +2 armor and +2 damage, you'll probably want a mono-culture of knights. Futhermore, a singular upgrade (aka: Cavalier research) immediately applies to all knights.
Your +2 armor / +2 damage Cavaliers are probably superior to your +0 / +0 archers from the Feudal age, even if those archers are theoretically useful against some units.
Strictly speaking: its not a monoculture: Scouts + Knights is the common combination for cavalry civs, because Knights lose vs Monks/Archers, while Scouts win vs Monks/Archers. Furthermore, Scouts share the +2 armor / +2 damage upgrade with Knights. But still, the upgrade system almost "forces" a monoculture (or close to a monoculture): its far more efficient to only research one or two units, rather than researching many, many different kinds of units.
It results because of math. To defeat 100 units of equal strength requires *more* than 100 units (!!!).
Take for example 100 Zealots (Starcraft / Starcraft 2 melee unit). If you send 1-Zealot vs the 100 Zealots, it will die before it deals much damage.
In fact, even if you send 10 Zealots vs 100 Zealots, the 10-Zealots will almost certainly die before dealing any lasting damage. (All Zealots have a "shield" that regenerates. You probably won't even get past the shield).
As such, 100 Zealots can perpetually kill 10 Zealots over-and-over again. Your 100 Zealots can kill 1000+ Zealots (as long as they only attack 10-at-a-time).
----------------
Same thing with Axis-and-allies infantry / tanks, or many other strategy games. The "strength" of a ball of units is the *square* of their size.
That is to say: 100-Zealots is 100x stronger than 10-Zealots (!!), not 10x stronger as you may initially assume. As such, both players end up building a bigger-and-bigger death ball as a primary tactic (which is in fact, unfun and stale).
In Starcraft: Brood War, your 100-Zealots could only be grouped into groups of 12, meaning you need 18 actions to attack-move the group. In Starcraft 2: your 100-Zealots can all be in a single group, so you only need 2-actions (one selection + one A-move) to attack-move the group.
But it still means attack-moving 108 units (aka: 9 groups, all labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) requires 18-actions.
That is: 1 (select group 1), then a, then left click on the attack-area. Then 2 (select group 2), a, left click on attack area. Etc. etc.
That's a difference of 18-apm (Starcraft Brood War) vs 2-apm (Starcraft 2). Furthermore, that "Group 1" in SC2 could have 150-units or 200-units (or 400-zerglings, lol) in it. They pretty much made death-balls have 10% of the APM requirement in SC2 compared to SC:Brood War.
I'm all for making the game easier and more accessible: but the death-ball tactic was a little bit "too obvious" and kind of unfun to watch, compared to the tightly coordinated groups of 12 that SC: Brood War was famous for. The groups were too big, numerical advantage was the biggest advantage in SC 2 IMO.
Nuke and Psi Storm exist in both games, but Plague, Irradiate, Ensnare, Stasis Fields are all AoE effects... as well as AoE damage sources (Tanks, Archons, Valkyries, Devourers, and kinda-sorta Mutalisks).
-------
Lets put it this way: if you really wanted to, you could just have 12-units per group in SC2. But no one would do that, the APM-advantage of having a big group (and manually splitting in the rare cases where a split is needed) is far superior than using 9 groups to split up 108 units.
And sure, stronger players probably split their death-balls into smaller groupings of maybe 30 units or so (you don't want to just A-move all over the place, a degree of flexibility is useful), and only occassionally merges everyone together into a deathball. (Fast and loose is good: you don't want to dedicate an entire army to a battle, especially if they might lose).
But no one is making groups of ~12 in SC2. Its too small.
Lanchester's Square Law applies to Starcraft, AoE2, Axis and Allies, etc. etc. The assumptions therein are "ranged units all within fire of each other"
Lanchester's Linear Law applies to Risk, Hearts of Iron, and "bottleneck" situations in Starcraft/AoE2, etc. etc. The Linear law applies when units are no longer within reach of each other, and are instead seen as reinforcements to a limited sized "front" where combat takes place.
In Risk: only 3 units can ever be attacking, and only 2-units can ever be defending. This is the conditions of the linear law.
In Starcraft / AoE2, a "bottleneck" may force a limited number of melee units to fight, leading to a rare situation of the linear law in action.
Hearts of Iron "saturated frontline" concept also gets into the linear-law. Once the frontline is saturated, additional reinforcements do nothing to change the battle.
--------
Take those assumptions, craft a rather straightforward differential equation out of them, and solve. Bam, you've arrived at Lanchester's Laws (though Lanchester was the tactical genius who figured this out over a hundred years ago).
Modern board games almost always come back to Lanchester's laws. Lanchester wrote and published those differential equations so that generals could create wargames after all, to train their armies / commanders.
That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry-death balls nerfed.
An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat.
Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any possible opposition.
Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly does everything at very, very cheap prices.
But also if you play with anywhere near balanced resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's so dumb.
The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game designers balanced the game against abusing the AI stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush an APC around the edge of the map.
Advance Wars was a single player game (more or less). Fighting an overpowered foe and beating them with your brain was the whole appeal of a strategy game. Overcoming horrible odds was the point, both gameplay wise and narrative wise in pretty much every mission. It was super fun. The secret of strategy games is that they're much more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what drained the RTS genre of its appeal.
The "mech. infantry spam" almost made you C-rank (or worse) each map. Mech. Infantry was too slow to beat any mission. But if you wanted a reliable win-path (and didn't care about the time it took to win), Mech. Infantry spam was the way to go.
Adv. Wars "balanced" it out in their own way: not by nerfing units, but by simply encouraging the S-rank screen, taunting the player to beat the map faster (which meant building less-efficient, but faster, higher-cost units like tanks)
I'm sure the other games have their own terminology for the evolution of this "tactic".
One of the more interesting applications of this term I've seen is in TW WH2 (Total War: Warhammer 2) where a faction like Vampire Counts gets a lot of utility out of death-balling even trash tier units like skeleton warriors - so that opponent infantry and cavalry gets mired in the mass of unit collisions to make it easier to get a clean spell targeting off. I think the term is pretty well established at this point as evidenced by the derivative usages that are now popping up.
In a made up but typical RTS, one swordsman beats an archer, ten archers are an even match for ten swordsmen, and fifty archers beat infinity swordsmen. In a 10v8 archer battle, the bigger side survives with about 3 archers, but in a 100v80 archer battle, the bigger side survives with over 50. This game has archer death balls.
I rarely found occasion to use thieves, usually as raid into their ore patches to steal harvesters or as stationary vision-givers since they can cloak themselves.
https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/526252-newbie-question-about-...
I'm familiar enough with SCBW to have played on ICCUP (albeit as a D player)
Starcraft / Starcraft BW is very unusual as far as early RTS systems go, capping at exactly 12 units. When all your peers allow for infinite selection, and then you come out with a design that only allows for 12-unit selections... its clearly an explicit design choice.
From there, we need to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind the design choice.
--------
I too was a D player on Starcraft:BW. So much training and effort and yet only got to the bottom ranks...
my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range artillery, you've probably already won.
Hardly. My group had glorious 4v4 games where getting your swarm of 500 advanced construction aircraft to build vulcans and buzzsaws that would maybe get off a few shots before being destroyed by your opponents' counterparts was the name of the game.
In fact I remember my first internet game (after playing with friends for some time); noone even rushed me, and I had a chance to get to L2, expand as I always did and build a couple dozen Mavericks for my would-be attack. Then 10000 L1 missile vehicles rolled in and blew everything up.
EDIT: and one of my most epic games, a 3vs3 on a 3-bridge map with aircraft and navies disabled, actually involved blobbing nukes. The lone player on the "losing" side was able to hold me and the other "winning" survivor off behind batteries of artillery and infinite piles of wreckage for long enough to find our commanders and send enough nukes to overwhelm anti-nuclear.
I remember building them en masse.
Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units.
I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.
Nominally, it was rockets were the anti-tank infantry. But both grenades and rockets get squished with alt-move. Tanks are faster than infantry, so the tanks get the squish rather easily.
The infantry player can defend against the squish by spamming "X" (which scatters your units in random directions). But given that tanks are threatening a one-squish kill + have faster movement, grenades are a rather poor choice to "death ball spam".
Furthermore: a dead grenadier explodes, causing damage to all other nearby grenadiers (causing __cascading__ explosions), often times wiping out your own "death ball". That is to say: a "death ball" made out of grenadiers end up killing themselves more often than not.
Grenades are primarily anti-infantry and anti-building units in C&C. They serve the job well in that regards. But its incredibly dangerous to spam these units in C&C.
-----------
"Death Balls" existed in C&C, but you had to use far more expensive tanks to be able to get there. The cheaper units (rockets, grenadiers) were simply ineffective.
Nod arguably had a good death-ball strategy with bikes, but bikes were weak vs infantry (though they outran infantry pretty severely). Light Tanks was a more reliable Nod-based death-ball IMO.
> Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units.
Not like Starcraft 2, where you can save a singular group of 400 zerglings with Ctrl-1.
Even then, Starcraft 2 has Psi Storm and area-of-effect damage (banelings, colossus). So its not quite as easy to construct an appropriate "death ball", unless you've scouted out your opponent's build. So its not a "Braindead" kind of death ball, but... still a death ball at the end of the day.
> I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.
Nothing quite like Advance Wars mechanized infantry (aka: rockets). That was truly a single-unit deathball game, lol.
That's not how I remember things TBH. Only something like a nuke would kill all units on the same tile.
There were two exceptions, and one exception-to-the-exception.
* Cities had units die one-at-a-time. This means that to siege a city, you were forced to build a stack (!!!). Attacking cities was always a dangerous operation in Civ 1/2 (though made easier in Civ3).
* Fortresses had units die one-at-a-time, but were relatively difficult to build. IIRC, they also took up room, so no farms or mines if you build a fortress. Still though, they served as a "city-lite". Civ3 revamped the fortress system rather severely, so this only really applies to Civ1 / Civ2... and the top-tier fortress in Civ3 (lower-tier fortifications IIRC didn't defend vs stack kills, only provided a minor defensive bonus).
The exception-to-exceptions was the nuke, as you pointed out. A nuke can stack-kill even in the stack-kill immune zones (cities / fortresses).
This happened too MANY times to forget; and though enough time has passed that specifics have faded the pain and frustration never will.
=) Yeah I'm still kinda bitter about that.
You can search on "stack" in the Civ2 manual to see many, many references to how entire stacks will die all at once! (http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.365). This manual proves that Civ2 designers intended stacks to work like that.
Even the "glitchy" behavior of Bombers "defending" a stack (ie: bombers are an air unit, so they are "immune" to ground units attacking them. Therefore, a bomber "in a stack" makes the whole stack immune), is in fact referenced in the manual (!!!). The Civ2 developers had 100% intension of encouraging this "gamey" behavior.
-----------
Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game. (I'm pretty salty about militias beating my battleships in Civ1) But hey, Civ1 was just the first iteration of the game, lol. Civ2 was when the game was rebalanced / revamped into a better game.
Civ3 and Civ4 started to diverge from the original plans rather severely.
FreeCiv in general suffers from outdated UI-choices. QT-client solves a lot of the issues though, and hopefully will evolve into something better.
FreeCiv got an incredible "solver" embedded into its engine, allowing you to optimally place your citizens. But the use of this solver-engine is arcane. Proper use of it leads to cascading advantages over your foes however, so its a must have to learn. (especially in auto-calculating rapture situations)
The use of optimal trade routes (with a good solver available in the FreeCiv-GTK client, but not in QT ... at least last time I checked) also is a major advantage to the players who use it.
-----------
FreeCiv is likely a highly competitive, highly optimized game. But the community seems split and fractured. Some want to use FreeCiv-Web (and without the Governor / Trade route solvers, its a very different game), others like me prefer to play highly-optimal Civ2-like games.
FreeCiv's solvers (both the Governor solver, and the Trade Route solver) presents a difficult question to the community. Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair?
Its one additional step to learn before you can be an effective, competitive, FreeCiv player. But knowing that these lower-level items are "solved" by solver-systems makes it really, really difficult to go back to Civ5 / Civ6 (!!). So many times do I look at my citizens placement and realize that the AI-placement of citizens is terrible compared to the FreeCiv solver...
----
The "core" of FreeCiv is pretty incredible. The solvers to make provably optimal choices (well, at least "locally optimal", such as most trade from a collection of 12-cities trade routes + auto-caravan decisions). As well as the use of "symmetrical island maps" to ensure everyone has equal starting-positions, and the first to deploy "concurrent turns" (long before Civ5 did).
It plays like a macro'd up / steroids version of Civ2 + minor mods as a result. The community needs to unify and decide if this version of the game is how it should be... and if so, rebalance the game in this field.
Well, basically, FreeCiv-web vs FreeCiv-GTK/QT flamewars in a nutshell.
[1] https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Tileset_Downloads?file=Strat...
That gave the thing a very abstract feeling, some kind of mix between cyberspacy tron and armchair general. In my mind at least :-)
Another OSS re-creation I've had fun with lately is UnCiv. Though unfinished, it's quite good already.
Mu. An experienced game designer should have the perspective here that this part of the game is just a tedious bore.
1. The computer can calculate the optimal placement of citizens in a fraction of a second, and a micromanaging human will never exceed the best results. He can only find the same placements, only slower. That means there is no point in abstaining from using computer generated solutions.
2. The game allows to generate solutions that are strictly worse than another, e.g. 0 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy vs. 1 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy. There is no point to this.
The part of the game should be changed to make it fun. Either introduce meaningful trade-offs by interacting with a game mechanic where the optimal outcome cannot be simply calculated (complexity increase), or take away player control and completely automate it (complexity decrease).
During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time)
The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement.
But it only works if the human gives it the right goals.
Even with a science focused build, a city in rapture will generate more science. But do you solve for rapture conditions? Or do you solve for science optimization?
Is there a key science that will increase happiness (temples, banks, colosseums?). Is so, maybe having a short term science focus for some +happiness is going to be overall faster.
What if one city has more gold buildings? Should this city use the same solver as the rest of your cities? Or do you want this one city to focus on gold and let the rest of your cities handle science?
If the solver fails to solve for your conditions (ex: no starvation is a common solve condition. But maybe my enemies are pillaging my farms and starvation is always going to happen now...) How does the solver react? Should it reduce starvation as much as possible? Or should it stop and point out the problem to me?
Maybe I can't rely on food supplies in that city and need to build caravans to import food from a nearby city. The governor doesn't have control of units, only of the city. Maybe I need gold in my other cities to buy caravans to send food to the starving city, while far away cities continue to focus on science.
-------
EDIT: It should be noted that the Governor can sometimes be unhelpful. For example, if you have two cities within a rare "whale" tile (whales are one of the best tiles in the game), only one of those cities can benefit.
The governor of the two cities will fight for the whale, meaning one city will randomly not get the whale.
In such "fighting" situations, you disable the governor, then manually choose which city gets to work on the whale-tile, and then turn the governor back on. The governor is only "locally optimal". It still requires the player to make globally optimal decisions (ie: a bad choice for city B means city A benefits more, and maybe you have multiplicative bonuses in city A (due to trade routes, buildings, specialists etc. etc.) who can benefit from the whale more than B ever could).
Choosing to make "city B" play suboptimally is a strategy, to make your overall civilization more powerful. The governor doesn't have such insight, and must be disabled entirely in these situations.
That's what makes "using" the governor so hard. Its "just" a locally-optimal solver.
Nonsense, it's been that way since Civ 1. Demo (Freeciv 2.6.4): https://files.catbox.moe/3af6xu.webm
Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.
Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.
Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.
-----
Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.
Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)
I disagree. It is incredible game that did a lot of things right from the first try. It also had extremely nice VGA graphics: i still remember softly animated blue rivers and waves rolling onto green shores with hills and mountains.
And it was the only 'fresh' game, that could surprise you. Like you play on chieftain, have three cities on a nice island, and you are proud to have discovered sail before 1492, preparing for a voyage of discovery.
Next, an ironclad arrives leading frigate with musketeers that destroy your pathetic civilization.
All other games after the first were inevitably formulaic for me. Of course, players who have started on 5th might feel different.
Civ3 I skipped mostly, but Civ4, Civ5, and Civ6 are extremely different games from Civ2. Instead of iterating upon the formula, they've changed the game significantly. The basics of city construction (food and shields) remain the same, but even Civ6 has revamped the trade system entirely. (Tax rate, science vs gold, luxuries vs amenities).
---------
Only Civ1 and Civ2 play similarly. Civ2 revamped combat: your units have HP now and heal, rather than the weird full-random chance of win/loss in Civ1.
But Civ2 contains the "fight to the death on every combat", the similarities in governments (despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, democracy), similar multiplicative bonuses (market, bank, stock exchange), etc. etc. Civ2 really feels like they just wanted to make a "better Civ1".
It worked pretty okay too.
In other words your early game units are some of the strongest units in the game, just not by default. For example the Zergling could be upgraded 3 times for a stronger attack, 3 times for stronger defense, once for movement speed, and late game an upgrade for increasing attack speed.
But you can hardly have death balls because of the 12 unit selection cap you mentioned. Plus you wouldn't want to have death balls of a single unit because units were designed to work well together, ie: zerglings paired with defilers / lurkers.
Your workers had different HP, acceleration, and speed; this made each races economy slightly different (you could get away with a different amount of workers). You had high ground mechanics, where units on the low ground had a 50% chance at missing their shot.
The unit selection, as you stated.
The units for each race WERE broken and unbalanced. Lurkers were insane, siege units were, reavers were insane, etc; but every race had strong powerful units so it "felt" fair.
It was the culmination of all the little things that led to a great game that is still played professionally today, over the span of 20 years.
In fact, there's a great tournament that just started recently called the Afreeca Star League.
You can see the games on youtube (randoming jumping into the middle of one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYBYN4fuA0#t=56m0s&ab_chann...
i'm not sure the unit selection cap was a game design choice - i recall it was a technical limitation added to the game so that the AI pathing could work properly (if you had unlimited unit selection, the pathing could take too long to run).
But it turns out, this limitation also made the skill-cap of the game higher, and more fun in competitive mode.
Pathing in the 90s was all sorts of bad for all games except Civilization (because there's no collision detection in Civ, so... all units just walk on top of each other).
On more difficult AI levels (Prince or Emperor), the AI would meet you in the field, and you'd have to worry about stack kills. And also worry about cheating AIs who just had more resources than you...
Now, thinking of this further, i think I might misremember this because I've never let my stacks be attacked in the field.
Best tactics is to drive tanks via railroads up to the city (sometimes building them in the fly using a ton of settlers in one move) and attack it with 20+ tanks and then move in 10 mech infantry for defence, and I used fortresses extensively.
I remember in the original Red Alert, if you ordered an airplane to fly into the shroud, it'd just disappear into the darkness, but in OpenRA you can actually use them for scouting (which totally makes sense). OpenRA also has fog-of-war which suddenly makes planes and helicopters key units for ground support.
I don't like war. The arms trade should be abolished. We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders rather than build walls or drop bombs on them. Anyone working with defense in any capacity, like militarizing borders with drones or whatever, should immediately quit or turn whistle blower. Still, I find this war game incredibly enjoyable. Applause to the hackers.
One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth.
I second your comments about war.
Yea, Wesnoth has a lot of what made the earlier Heroes of Might and Magic games great. I like how many open source games are cool with sticking to 2D, making them accessible for older devices. Wesnoth graphics are first class mix of hand drawn and pixel art. (They could do with a few more unit animations though.)
> I second your comments about war.
There shouldn't be any contradiction in being okay with pixel people being blown up but not real ones, even though sometimes it feels like there is. I played OpenTTD and even though the graphics were awesome, I got a bit sad from clearing trees just to build roads for hordes of lorries to transport coal and oil and cattle to the slaughterhouse for no obvious "win" in the end (except money).
Do you really believe I'm arguing that there's nothing worth fighting for when I write that: "We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders"?
> Anyone working with defense in any capacity, like militarizing borders with drones or whatever, should immediately quit or turn whistle blower.
I'm aware that some people believe that you "fight for freedom" or "defend your nation" by building border walls, using Reaper drones to launch Hellfire missiles at strangers, putting kids in cages, and perhaps having 70.000 nuclear warheads around, just in case.
However, when you read certain reports (e.g. Daliel Hale's leaks about USA's assasination programme[1], or Collateral Murder[2]), then it becomes clear that weapons and wars (that we're simulating in Red Alert albeit in a contrafactual nazi-free timeline) are a major source of suffering and death worldwide.
"Defense" is a neat euphemism for attack.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/26/e...
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2021/07/30/daniel-hale-drone-whistl...
Note a lot of these like OpenRA are reimplementations of the game engines but want the original game media. A good deal work with GoG or Steam releases of the old games while some will want original media. For ones that want original media a lot of old game ISOs can be found on the Internet Archive.
But what I really want is a remaster of Red Alert 2!
From an official standpoint, I was able to pick up RA2 (not remastered) from Origin this summer. They make it incredibly difficult to find, and it's not part of the C&C Remastered Collection. But, I was able to pick up a collection of the non-remastered C&C games for $10 or $20. RA2 was a bit of a pain to get working in Windows 10. It took some manual tweaking to ini files, startup arguments, compatibility mode and manually reducing the game speed from very fast to medium to be playable (every game you start).
[edit] I think this is what I bought:
https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/command-and-conquer/c...
Still one of my all-time favourite games. I really enjoyed the unit design and character of the game.
More seriously though, if I had a billion dollars I'd spend most of it on tree planting. I'd probably keep back maybe 20 million for myself. If I had more, I'd spend it on Emacs and open source development. Or more trees.
When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Red alert. The sequels are pretty easy though
I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU, but only with my "Starcraft" training (huge focus on the economy, harassment of the opponent's harvesters, knowledge of the Lanchester's square-law in determining when to fight vs when to retreat, etc. etc.). Any decently strong player can probably beat the AI through "brute force" (in particular: attacking their harvester forces an "AI alpha strike", where the entirety of the AI's units attack your base). With good tactics, you'll often beat the AI in this exchange (AI is rather bad at tactics actually, you should be trading 2-for-1 in most situations, or even better).
2-for-1 isn't good enough though. You need 10-to-1 trades. That means retreating often, finding defensive positioning (good "concave" positioning, while forcing the opponent to be convex), attacking the opponent while they're on the move, utilizing your repair bay, etc. etc. A lot of defensive buildings are also amazing: not only do you have the "Repair" button (which effectively creates HP at fractions of the cost of a new building), but the defensive buildings are numerically superior against mobile units (higher HP / higher DPS per unit $$$).
Note: Defensive buildings are usually terrible vs humans. But vs AI who attacks in "obvious" and predictable angles... they're highly useful.
Finally: it means attacking the AI's harvester early and often: to prevent the AI from building up a critical "Death ball" of units that you can't beat. You're not necessarily trying to kill the harvester, but instead just provoking the "alpha strike" before the CPU's death ball is at critical mass. (Of course, kill the harvester if you're given the opportunity. But its easier said than done...)
-------
It seems like the "intended" way to beat the AI is through "underhanded" tactics: engineer into the ore refineries and/or silos to steal their money. Taking advantage of the "sandbag AI" (sandbags are effectively immune to the AI's knowledge, the AI will never attack a sandbag), etc. etc.
--------
C&C is a very "sharp" game. One mistake will require you to restart the level. The AI's tiberium advantage feels crushing, but you absolutely can work around it: either through brute force, or through underhanded / ai-manipulation methodologies.
I don't think they AI's spending was linked to it particularly directly though. Felt more like a simple counter "build 1 tank per minute" type deal
Its very difficult, because they have so much more Tiberium than you. But its possible and fully effective at shutting down the AI entirely.
You need to kill about... 6 or 7 harvesters... to get to that point. (For those who aren't experts at the game, each harvester costs roughly 2x the amount of a typical tank. So killing 6 to 7 harvesters is a really, really big deal).
If even just one harvester gets one collect back successfully, they'll give the AI something like 10,000 credits (vs the 700 credits you get from your own harvesters). So you need to perpetually dedicate yourself to killing literally all harvesters forever more, if you go down this route. Letting even one harvester escape breaks the strategy.
However, this means that if a remaster improves the AI in any way (perhaps using a bit smarter AI that was intended for a newer game) then the resource/production advantage can make the game extremely hard.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-10-the-command-an...
> This became even more evident, because there are a couple things we did try and fix. A good example of this is, there's a bug in the game where when the AI uses an airstrike against you, especially in the Nod campaign, the code stated it would always target the top-left enemy in the map. And so, people discovered this and what they would often do is they would just leave a single minigunner up at the top-left of the map and the AI would always waste their airstrike on that minigunner.
> Well, we we heard that bug from the community, and we're like, oh, we should fix that because obviously that wasn't intended. That was a bug, a miss-programmed thing. And so we fixed it. But we didn't really understand what the ripple effects of that were going to be. And once we released the game, we started getting reports of the Nod missions becoming incredibly difficult because the AI was now optimally using their airstrike and taking out key base structures, taking out your commandos so you would lose the mission entirely.
> All these things happened because we unleashed the AI to now be a lot wiser. And we're still tackling that issue. It's taken us two months to undo the impacts of that change. So, you just think about, okay, what if we had fixed the sandbag exploit? And now, in all these missions, wherever there's sandbag walls the AI knows how to deal with them. It would have dramatically changed the feel and the balance of all those missions.
---------
They "improved" the airstrike AI, but then they had to self-nerf the improvements, to make the campaigns easier again. They felt like they truly had to get rid of the "target top-left soldier" glitch and truly target strong units across the map... but they still didn't make it "smart enough" to target say... your command center (leading to probably a game-over condition).
The AI in the remasters target high-priority units (commandos, Temple of Nod / Nuclear launch Capabilities, and/or GDI's Orbital Cannon). So it sucks to see your endgame units one-shot. But you can at least rebuild them and continue the game (compared to if you lost your command center. Basically all hope is lost if that happens)
So many great memories.
OpenRA is a rewrite whilst Remastered was a rework on the original code.
I would have loved some of the OpenRA features to make it into the Remaster, and likewise the updated assets (sound, music and textures) into the OpenRA game
Tiberian Sun remains my favourite C&C game. I know it was rushed and had some bugs but... I mean: The Forgotten? Absolutely there should be a mutant commando walking around with a portable railgun, physics be damned!
I like C&C3, but it isn't TS and I feel it abandoned a bit the direction TS was taking us.
It works ok on smaller scales, but the bigger maps are really annoying to play, especially when you're being harassed by Sardaukar troops.
I think so many of the best games evolve randomly and unexpectedly while top down control from developers has stifled game play.
Not against developers protecting their IP. Do what you gotta do to make money.
But I enjoy seeing open source games giving players the ability to edit and improve game systems.
I think back to how many times Nintendo has shut down Super Smash Melee edits, how many hours of skill have been lost every time Riot made a change to League of Legends nobody enjoyed, how much World of Warcraft has essentially stagnated.
You want something like chess where the rules don't change drastically every couple months if you want to build a competitive scene. Something stable so strategies and a stable metagame can occur.
You download a thing, and click it to run it. No messing with a package manager or installer, no dependency hell, nothing but the software you wanted to run.
Tiberian Dawn, Skirmish 1v1, Me GDI against the CPU is my jam.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_...
the graphics and level of realism c&c zero hour had is years ahead of this.
It annoyed me that the movement was jerky and didnt seem to use vigh precision math, but actually it had to do with the upscaling of the graphics which happens at the last stage of the rendering pipeline, iirc.
Seems like an awful lot of work for some vaguely quasi-legal 'free-ness'