Yora plays Command & Conquer

[Grif]

The guy that plays Kane, Joe Kucan, is the director for several of the games.

As far as the games in general, I played the first 3 Tiberium games and the first 2 Red Alert games when they came out, respectively. I still play Red Alert 2 (now that I have it working again anyway). I've only played Generals and Red Alert 3 more recently after getting a collection of all of the games. I only played part 4 to satisfy my curiosity.

For anyone that likes the first Tiberium game and the first Red Alert, EA is working on a remaster of them to bring them up to modern standards. They have brought on several of the old Westwood people who worked on the games originally to do the job. Overall, they seem to be trying to focus on mainly updating graphics from what I have seen so far. They have discussed possibly updating a few features (the assumption online, from what I have read, seems to be that they are considering adding in features that most consider to be good additions that came about in later games like production queues and splitting up production a little more like RA2). The effort seems to be aimed at generating some good will so the prevailing hope is that EA doesn't push loot boxes and multiplayer above all else. I'm personally hopeful for the project.

I don't have high hopes for it. It is EA, after all. And Westwood (Pteroglyph) later attempts in the RTS genre did not impress. Only Universe at War showed really good promise, and it was a buggy, flawed unfinished mess.

I suppose there are only so many ways you can really screw up a remaster, so there might be hope something good comes out of this.

GDI Mission 09: Destroy Vega's Base

I am still having fun with this game, but Starcraft clearly is by far the superior game in every aspect except graphics. As a game, this really isn't that good. This is a really long game and I am not completely sure if I will have enough staying power to complete it. I also have the Firestorm expansion, but at this point I expect that I'll be skipping it.

You're about halfway through, if I still remember my TS correctly. On the issue of slow units, the GDI do get a few more toys later to mitigate their initial slow, but sturdy forces. You're right on the relative uselessness of the first Orca, but the Orca Bomber is whole different ballgame. Too bad you get it rather late, so there isn't much chance to play around with it.

You will also eventually get a Carryall, which is basically a APC for vehicles that flies. Good for lifting titans/disruptors about, though the issue of having to manually load and unlock them still persists. (If you can't tell, the aging control schemes are starting to show).

[Tyrant]

I don't have high hopes for it. It is EA, after all. And Westwood (Pteroglyph) later attempts in the RTS genre did not impress. Only Universe at War showed really good promise, and it was a buggy, flawed unfinished mess.

I suppose there are only so many ways you can really screw up a remaster, so there might be hope something good comes out of this.

Yeah, EA is my main source of concern. As you say though, there should be fairly limited ways to screw up a remaster. Nine times out of ten I would assume EA would decide to rise to that particular challenge and destroy their product. But I get the vibe this is to build good will and maybe revive the franchise. Alternatively, how likely are newer gamers to buy a remaster of a game this old? Meaning the main audience would likely be older fans, who are presumably not into the usual EA shenanigans.

[J-H]

A few things I forgot to mention in my earlier post -

Does the version you have still have deformable terrain? When TS was originally released, artillery blasts (and a few other things, maybe) could crater the ground, actually making quite deep slopes and craters over time. Since this was mostly done by Nod Arty, it was pretty overpowered. You could set up an artillery defense, and then really stop worrying about your base short of a major attack. Your base just gets farther and farther uphill....

Regular orcas, I think, were meant for precision strikes against a single target. Orca bombers were much more effective. When you get them, set up a big waypoint loop around your base, including a stop at the Service pad(Don't recall the name, but it's the repair pad) and a stop at some random helipad in the middle of your helipad field for them to reload more ammo. Get about 10 bombers on this, and they will kill almost any attacking force. Anyone who wants to shoot them down will have to send a lot of AA units, as 1 bomber can wipe out a few rocket men or cycles, fly on, get repaired, and keep going around and around.

The jetpack infantry have good line of sight and are not stopped by terrain. I liked to build a few of them at the start of a map, and send them off to the far corners to expose terrain, since TS normally has FOW off.

If I remember correctly, Firestorm has some tighter missions in it, with less of the boring-slow-crawl. The units added are pretty meh. The juggernaut is inaccurate, the mobile stealth generator only works when stopped, and the "mobile war factory" is pretty pointless. I don't remember the rest.

I usually ended up going with 3-4 refineries and 10-12 harvesters. IMPORTANT: Each additional Construction Yard, Barracks, or War Factory you build increases your build speed. If you build 4 war factories, you'll produce Titans/Harvesters/etc. substantially faster. I forget the ratio, but it's significant, and one of the reasons why the tank rush was so prevalent in RA1. You can click on a particular barracks or war factory and use the "deploy" cursor to make it the primary (ie, the one that spits out units). There's also a rally point function so your units don't just clog up the base when made. This should help speed up future missions.


You commented that the Wolverine was not very good. It's not... but it had to be in the game to fulfill an implied promise made in the trailer at the end of C&C1:

Although primitive now, this was a big deal and super cool at the time. I think that's also why we ended up with the Titan walker instead of a conventional tank.

The Mammoth MK2 was likely a late addition to the game based on popular demand. I recall hanging out on Tiberiumsun.com and I think PlanetCnc's forums a lot? There was a great deal of anticipation around TS.

You can also see the modular buildings that GDI has (power plant, turret base, and tech center). They failed to implement the ability to sell or remove the plug-in tops to swap them out.... it could have been better.

The Hunter-Seeker Drone upgrade was built specifically to deal with multiplayer games where "the enemy has 1 hiding infantry man left." Unfortunately, targeting was always a bit wonky, so sometimes it would zoom into your base and explode a new MCV, or your War Factory, or your Cyborg Commando, or something else.

My biggest objection to the -Craft games has been the lack of ability to control large numbers of units. Why am I limited to only selecting 10-15 tanks or walkers or whatever at a time when I have 60? What's with the low population cap?
Age of Empires 2 (AOK) did the best job with this, as you could select huge groups of varying unit types, and they would automatically march in one of several selectable and reasonably useful formations at the slowest unit's speed. I do not recommend AOK's single player campaign...just play some Skirmish missions or find multiplayer.
I went to a LAN party 6-8 years ago where they broke out AOK. I think I offered to take on everyone else, with just 1 computer ally to guard my flank. They agreed, I went Goth, and the Gothic infantry flood destroyed them all. Their fault for letting me boom economically all the way to imperial age.