Is there a bug in Chernobyl? We weren't able to capture the missile silos with engineers.
OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
The formalization of this is "Lanchester's Laws", equations that estimate the strength of unit numbers. Here is an excellent video explaining these laws in the context of Age of Empires 2: https://youtu.be/wpjxWBwLkIE
Two laws, for two different situations.
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.
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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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#33I love the migs and missile submarines
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#34Hell march metal song and game play of Red alert 1 was the first time I looked at a PC and felt My beloved Amiga was growing old. Good and bad memories wrapped in an awesome game!
hell march is awesome
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#35OpenRA is currently my favourite free/libre computer game. They've done a fabulous job at keeping the feeling of the original game while updating things like cross-platform support, screen resolution and network play and added build queues (and waypoints, I believe) that was present in later C&C games. They've also tweaked the game play, making thieves able to hijack vehicles and cloak (They are probably the most fun…
I played a round or four with my lab last night. Cross platform play, free hosting, good matchmaking and an excellent experience. The computers on equal number and an equal footing absolutely annihilated us. We were easily able to titrate the difficulty to make it fun. Honestly, a great game and very enjoyable (and I won the 6-player death match at the end with a total Deus ex Machina moment made possible by the fog of war, much to everyone's suprise, including mine).
One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth.
I second your comments about war.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#36Would be nice to have the original discs with videos &c.
You can legally download them for free at https://archive.org/details/Red_Alert-Cutscenes, and then install them into open-ra.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#37Something 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 large group of units, generally with ranged attacks, where the most effective positioning is clumping them up into a ball. They hit a certain tipping point where fewer and fewer things work to counter them. If both sides have a death ball, then the smaller one loses by a bigger margin the larger the death balls get.
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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been a long time, but IIRC you could still group units in SC1 and bind them to number keys. So maybe only 12 at a time, but you could still navigate multiple groups of 12 with just a few keypresses.
Yes, you can. 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…
SC2 having larger groups has allowed a different focus of micro though - stutter-stepping marines is a tactic that was out of reach of most players in SC1 but an absolute necessity in SC2 and the addition of unit abilities has decreased the utility of giganto deathballs - the micro is still very much a requirement.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be selected as a group. 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 the…
I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty inexperienced at the game.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#40Would be nice to have the original discs with videos &c.
It seems you need the original game CDs to get the music on OpenRA. Incidentally, I have both the original 3 1/2" disk and the remastered CDs from the early 2000s -- but no computers with CDs or floppy drives. I'm willing to even purchase the music a third time, but seems OpenRA wants a CD -- has anyone gotten around this?