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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

#161

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mactrey wrote: post #134
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…

Starcraft I also discouraged death balls of ground units with the terrible pathing..

Isn't that part of where the "high APM" thing comes from - players having to micromanage their army movement?

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

#162

Post by micheljansen »

Lammy wrote: post #54
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

RA2's was pretty fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjPls9YGcI

This took me way back. What an experience that was back in the day.

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

#163

Post by MayeulC »

dragontamer wrote: post #117
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you make of FreeCiv? http://freeciv.org/

FreeCiv has largely succeeded in making a "more fun" Civ2-like environment. They've backported some things from Civ4/5/6, like hex-maps, culture, and also changed some mechanics to better interact with these backported items (Democracy's "Deployed Troops" penalty now extends to your culture-zone, instead of cities/fortresses only, which makes sense). FreeCiv in general suffers from outdated UI-choices. QT-client solv…

Thank you for the perspective! I guess such solvers would be quite easy to implement client-side with some webassembly.

Another OSS re-creation I've had fun with lately is UnCiv. Though unfinished, it's quite good already.

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

#164

Post by rcxdude »

munk-a wrote: post #38
dragontamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention AoE attacks making splits important, as well as melee units still requiring careful setup of engagements for success. SC2 is extremely micro intensive, especially for how fast it is (in fact I dislike how heavily weighted it is towards success), and it feels a lot less like you're spending your APM fighting the game and your own units and more like you're helping your own units against your opponent's units.

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

#165

Post by chii »

azemetre wrote: post #147
suby wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are many things that went in favor of SC1 versus SC2. 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 wer…

> The unit selection, as you stated

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.

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

#166

Post by stonecharioteer »

handrous wrote: post #72
giantrobot wrote: post #59

Here's a nice list of open source remakes of commercial game engines in the spirit of OpenRA: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes 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 foun…

OpenMW (for TESIII:Morrowind) is amazing . Strictly an improvement on the original. Far more stable—I finished the main campaign and several major side quest trees with a bunch of mods active and experienced zero crashes, which is unheard of with the original engine—and somewhat better-looking. Runs just about everywhere. It's great.

Does this run with Steam?

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

#167

Post by lmm »

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

Particularly frustrating when trying to install Red Alert 2 on Linux via Wine, because the installer itself had copy protection.

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

#168

Post by lmm »

chii wrote: post #165
azemetre wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many things that went in favor of SC1 versus SC2. 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 wer…

> The unit selection, as you stated 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.

That's a matter of opinion. For my friend group it felt like "fake difficulty", where you're fighting the controls more than your opponent, so we stuck to other games (mainly Total Annihilation and then Supreme Commander).

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

#169

Post by glenstein »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #148
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…

In Civ 1/2 you definitely DID NOT kill all stack of units if you killed one. I played them both a lot (and actually prefer them to newer installments), so I know for sure.

Also not how I remembered it, although my experience is from Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri. There are a bunch of people who don't have this experience so I wonder what's going on.

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

#170

Post by lmm »

shoo wrote: post #99
avereveard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

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