OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
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Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#2So many hours spent playing C&C over our local network at home!
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#3I actually own the remasters, did anyone else notice these games are absurdly hard.
When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Red alert. The sequels are pretty easy though
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#4Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games.
* 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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#5I actually own the remasters, did anyone else notice these games are absurdly hard. When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Red alert. The sequels are pretty easy though
C&C gives a huge monetary advantage to the CPU players. Something like 10x the resource collection per harvester/ore truck, or there-abouts.
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...)
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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.
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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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#6Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * 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 b…
What’s a “death ball”?
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#7Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * 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 b…
What’s a “death ball”?
A massive, monoculture blob of either the cheapest and fastest to produce, or a reasonably effective as far as cost/time/damage output unit, used to just roll over the opponent's base.
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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#8Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * 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 b…
What’s a “death ball”?
A situation that arises rather often in Axis and Allies, Civ4, Starcraft 2.
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).
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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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#9Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * 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 b…
What’s a “death ball”?
Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago they presented a significant challenge to pathfinding algorithms on slow CPUs. As noted above, different games used different strategies to address them.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#10So many hours spent playing C&C over our local network at home!
When I was a kid I shared the second Red Alert CD with my friend. We used the Modem multiplayer option to dial each other directly to play 1:1.
So many great memories.