Ohhhh the glorious days of dialing to your friend's PC directly for a match after school!
OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
101–110 of 204 posts
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#102Earlier 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…
spring is the equivalent TA continuance compared to this post about openra
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#103I 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
At least the originals were easily beatable by determined kids. However, the general pattern of those games was that the opponent had an overwhelming material advantage that compensated a quite AI that wouldn't exterminate you early and would routinely send attacks that are too small to be effective and (given proper play) would be eliminated with insignificant losses on your side, thus burning the opponents resource…
The remaster devs were very careful at only improving AI in "safe" ways, understanding full well that the original game was designed for a resource-advantaged AI.
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.
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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)
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#104I 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!
This!!! I love the new memes by Scorched Earths YouTube channel. RA2 was my most favorite game back in the day
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#105Something 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…
When the remastered Red Alert came out, I beat the AI by Zerg Rushing medium tank production and just send overwhelming numbers, aiming to take out key buildings with the first or second wave.
It worked pretty okay too.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#106Earlier 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…
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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#107One 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
Every other game _except C&C remastered_:
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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#108I 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.). An…
>I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU
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
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.). An…
>I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU 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
If you kill all the harvesters in C&C (and literally all of them), the AI stops producing entirely.
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.
Re: OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Odd because I was just thinking that Advance Wars was one of the worst offenders for being unbalanced. Most scenarios give the AI anywhere from a huge to an enormous resource advantage, one that immediately disappears the instant you abuse the AI brain damage to run infantry over to their capital and completely own everything because the AI never thinks to defend its capital. But also if you play with anywhere near b…
I was never much for cheese when I played that game as a kid but I'm pretty sure I got S ranks on most things without it. 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 st…
I too think Advance Wars was really fun, and the AI was in fact smarter than say... Wargroove (Chucklefish did a good job with Wargroove too though, but were clearly leaning on the "resource heavy" approach moreso than Adv. Wars).
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)