Command and Conquer: Your Favorite Factions and Strategies Thread

[Youdontwanttoknow]

I love Nod, Soviets and in Generals the USA....

You just cant go past the hand of nod, the tesla coils and the patriot missile batteries.

 

[Thande]

I love Nod, Soviets and in Generals the USA....

You just cant go past the hand of nod, the tesla coils and the patriot missile batteries.

I think the USA is a really poor side in Generals. It gets better in Zero Hour, but in vanilla Generals it's stupidly vulnerable to attacks by both infantry and, once out of the base, aircraft. (Although it's not quite as bad as how vulnerable the GDI is to air attacks in TIberian Sun).

 

[alt_historian]

I love Nod, Soviets and in Generals the USA....

You just cant go past the hand of nod, the tesla coils and the patriot missile batteries.

Heh, it's China for me - combination of 2x Gatling guns and 2x bunkers filled with RPG troopers makes for apretty much impregnable strongpoint. Well, unless you're playing against a real person I suppose...

But yeah, I like what you can do with Humvees... specially if you put into them 3x Missile Defender and 2x sniper. Then make 6x those, = Ultimate Kill Everything Force TM.

 

[alt_historian]

True. The Tiberian universe is good. Though the RA universe pre-RA2 was also worthy (when, as LI will remind us, it was the same one).

I'm currently playing the GDI campaign on Tiberian Dawn. I'm noticing a few things -

You mean you NEVER PLAYED C&C?

Man, I was 11 years old when I first played that! Maybe 12. Came with our first PC I think... Never actually finished, though, so who am I to criticise?

1. Awesome geopolitical stuff, much more attention to detail than in subsequent games. Given the mid-90s vibe, it's quite prophetic in some ways with the descriptions of Nod terrorism and GDI responses. Although it clearly sees the terrorism as being primarily related to the breakup of the USSR.

Hmmm... that makes some sense with RA1 as a prequel. Still...

2. Compared to modern C&C games, it really makes you work with a low tech base in the early missions. Nowadays you get one or two missions where you only have the bottom of the tech tree and they're quite trivial. Tiberian Dawn, however, makes you play four or five missions against quite determined enemy resistance, with turrets and everything, using only basic infantry and Hummvees (anti-infantry vehicles). I'm actually learning to use grenadiers properly - in RA1, I just dismissed them as being too friendly-fire-prone and turned to tanks, which you get very quickly. Tiberian Dawn makes you work at learning the units' strengths.

Yeah, I loved that aspect... have you learned the grenadier throwing-distance cheat (which I assume also works in TD as it did in RA1)?

3. I hadn't realised how RA1 is basically a mod for the same game, apart from a few graphics tweaks. I remember some bloke made a mod where you could play all the Tiberian Dawn and RA1 sides in the same skirmish, although money had to come from crates due to the lack of a common collection method.

Pretty much is that... I doubt Westwood was huge at the time, and they probably wanted to capitalise on how popular C&C was, so they brought out RA1 as the prequel within a year or so.

4. Compared to Tiberian Sun (and, I assume, Wars) Tiberium is treated as very benign here. I had assumed it was treated as a B-movie evil from outer space from the start, but here it's treated as a miracle process capable of isolating metal from ore as part of its growth process (and I hadn't thought they ever explained just why Tiberium = money; now I do).

Well, yeah, for the most part... you just try leaving your troops in a patch of it though! And yes, I like the whole "sucking valuable minerals from the ground like a sponge", EVA explanation.

5. Why do the Harvesters for Tiberian Dawn look better and more futuristic than the ones for Tiberian Sun? And why do both TD and TS have that annoying thing where the Harvester unloads one box at a time, while RA1 the ore truck empties all in one go?

Well, because in RA1 it was a dumper truck. Duh.


Couple of things...
- did you use my suggested "DVD/CD drive emulator & ISO image" combination? Or old-fashioned actual CDs?
- about the grenadier thingy: what you do is, tell the grenadiers to hit something which is within their range. Then, while they're in the action of throwing, tell them to hit... well, any point on the map, really. You can get them to throw grenades right across the map that way! Have to line up the shots again each time, though, and takes some practice to time it right... also I suppose you need to use map save points, however that's done.
Still, makes for a decent surprise/harassing attack. Plus you canuse it to take out awkward turrets/SAMs.

 

[Blizrun]

3. I hadn't realised how RA1 is basically a mod for the same game, apart from a few graphics tweaks. I remember some bloke made a mod where you could play all the Tiberian Dawn and RA1 sides in the same skirmish, although money had to come from crates due to the lack of a common collection method.

Not exactly. They both use the same game engine (much as RA2 uses the TS one), but with slight modifications.

I remember I once poked around the internal settings file for C&C using some third-party software. After comparing it against the Rules.ini file for RA, I discovered that the tanks in C&C all had the same armor, where the difference was speed, weapon and hitpoints. If I recall correctly, it was something like:

Light tank: 400 HP
Medium Tank: 600 HP
Mammoth Tank: 800 HP

Mammoth could also be 1000, but I don't know if that's from my conversion attempt of Red Alert to C&C (of which there have been many). I changed the Soviet Heavy Tank into the Nod Boggy. Can't recall what I used for the Recon Bike.

 

[Argosh]

China, Tank rush.
Couple of tanks with bunkers (rocket soldiers inside), some with gatlings and one or two with healing speaker towers.

 

[Thande]

You mean you NEVER PLAYED C&C?

It had already been and gone by the time I discovered strategy games in about 1995 or 1996. Never played Warcraft I either; I started with Warcraft II and Red Alert 1.

- did you use my suggested "DVD/CD drive emulator & ISO image" combination? Or old-fashioned actual CDs?

"Old-fashioned"? It's about a billion times better than using a daft emulator, because it 1) takes up no hard disk space and 2) means you can install them on other computers, as I intend to. I'm going to put Tiberian Dawn on the same computer on which I have Red Alert 1, which I have recently put a modern monitor and speakers on, but dates from 1995 and runs the games much better than a modern computer. And CDs are a hell of a lot easier way to do that than messing around with 500 mutually incompatible disk formats to get it on that way

- about the grenadier thingy:

I know about the grenadier bug, but it always struck me as being more trouble than it's worth. I was told, however, that the effect was much more pronounced on the DOS versions of RA1 and TD.