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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

#121

Post by farmerstan »

bradleypowers wrote: post #106
shoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

total annihilation aircraft were pretty fun things to blob, although they were fragile and vulnerable to splash damage, particularly to the flak weapons that were added in the expansion. a glorious thing about total annihilation was the ballistics model: ground units without dedicated anti-air weapons could attempt to fire their guns at aircraft -- nearly all the time they'd miss, but occasionally a heavy tank could…

Gosh, I really miss TA. I never felt like another RTS matched TA for variability, even though I basically only ever played against one friend.

I just bought it on steam a few months ago. $5. On my 10 year old system I had I think there was thousands of individual units running at the same time. I downloaded the mid Escalation with amazing unit, and was playing against 4 AI. At one point there were thousands of units all running at the same time and the battles were epic. I would throw 500 Fidos (my favorite original unit) to the AI and they would slowly get mowed down, but then I would Keep sending them in waves. It’s still so much fun!

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#122

Post by farmerstan »

avereveard wrote: post #70
dragontamer wrote: post #4

Something 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…

most total annihilation units couldn't shoot past each other, the one who could where large, slow, fragile or otherwise unable t effectively blob due high weapon spread or vulnerability to splash damage.

If you download the Escalation mod, the new units are amazing. The TA community 25 years later is still amazing!

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#123

Post by spookthesunset »

jbay808 wrote: post #29
dragontamer wrote: post #8

Earlier 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

Wiki article for more context

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#124

Post by gfunk911 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #53

One thing i remember best about the original C&C is a gorgeous installer [1]! Being one of the first games that came on CD, I thought it is the standard of the things to come. Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came with a boring windows installer. [1]: https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc

Yes! As a kid, I specifically remember thinking that even the installer was cool.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#125

Post by ww520 »

Ah, CC and Red Alert, the joy of LAN party. We played so many hours on company's dime on the office network. The controller from finance was actually a pretty good player. One day he brought his teenage son to the office to play with us, and that's the time I introduced the uneven pincer movement to his awareness with a crushing defeat. Good time.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#126

Post by suby »

dragontamer wrote: post #4

Something 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…

That's an interesting observation that I hadn't thought about before. Another interesting thing, to me anyway, is that for Starcraft 1 allowed for upgrades which improved the utility of your early game units.

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.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#127

Post by hermitdev »

vyrotek wrote: post #76

I love the C&C series. Really enjoyed playing through the remaster recently. Way more difficult than I remembered. But what I really want is a remaster of Red Alert 2!

I was poking around the github of the OpenRA project - they have an RA2 mod project, but I can't speak for it's readiness. It's not advertised on their homepage, so guessing "not ready".

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).

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#128

Post by stonith »

stickfigure wrote: post #21
dragontamer wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

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.

I don't see it mentioned here but the other limiting factor in Brood War is the pathfinding AI doesn't use modern techniques like flocking, so moving 100 zealots in the same direction is actually a lot of work if there are any obstacles along the path.

Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era

#130

Post by concordDance »

bradleypowers wrote: post #106
shoo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

total annihilation aircraft were pretty fun things to blob, although they were fragile and vulnerable to splash damage, particularly to the flak weapons that were added in the expansion. a glorious thing about total annihilation was the ballistics model: ground units without dedicated anti-air weapons could attempt to fire their guns at aircraft -- nearly all the time they'd miss, but occasionally a heavy tank could…

Gosh, I really miss TA. I never felt like another RTS matched TA for variability, even though I basically only ever played against one friend.

There's a bunch of open source successors (e.g. they started as Total Annihilation clones) made on the springrts engine that you may be interested in. I believe both Zero-K and Beyond All Reason are still being actively maintained.
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