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.
Red Alert 2's was pretty great, though not to the same level as C&C's.
When it started it blasted out at full volume, "WARNING! Military Software Detected!" which, at one friend's house, caused his mom to yell up the stairs at us "WHAT ARE YOU BOYS DOING???"
I loved the C&C/RA computer aesthetic. That's how I always imagined the future of UI. The modern digital experience is fine, but I sometimes wish we had more rotating graphics and phosphor green text.
I think especially in DOS, installing a game was an Experience on its own; like "unboxing", it made you hyped for the game. I'm sure market research showed that nobody cares.
I don't believe installing a game is that much faster nowadays, but I'm sure people end up doing something else - something that was possible once windows came around.
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 by tanks. The overall "death ball" of tanks can eventually reach endgame proportions of death, but the cheapest units are fully ineffective at death-balling.
* Starcraft had a 12-unit selection cap. It required a lot of clicks (on purpose) to create a death ball, so only the highest levels of players (with high APM) could attack-move with a whole army effectively.
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.
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 were insane, siege units were, reavers were insane, etc; but every race had strong powerful units so it "felt" fair.
It was the culmination of all the little things that led to a great game that is still played professionally today, over the span of 20 years.
In fact, there's a great tournament that just started recently called the Afreeca Star League.
You can see the games on youtube (randoming jumping into the middle of one):
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).
> 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.
That's not how I remember things TBH. Only something like a nuke would kill all units on the same tile.
Units in the field would die as a singular stack (aka: stack kill).
There were two exceptions, and one exception-to-the-exception.
* Cities had units die one-at-a-time. This means that to siege a city, you were forced to build a stack (!!!). Attacking cities was always a dangerous operation in Civ 1/2 (though made easier in Civ3).
* Fortresses had units die one-at-a-time, but were relatively difficult to build. IIRC, they also took up room, so no farms or mines if you build a fortress. Still though, they served as a "city-lite". Civ3 revamped the fortress system rather severely, so this only really applies to Civ1 / Civ2... and the top-tier fortress in Civ3 (lower-tier fortifications IIRC didn't defend vs stack kills, only provided a minor defensive bonus).
The exception-to-exceptions was the nuke, as you pointed out. A nuke can stack-kill even in the stack-kill immune zones (cities / fortresses).
I think the only improvement that can’t exist together with fortresses in Civ2 is the airbase, and that can be a nuisance because airbases are bugged and act as a farm even on mined squares.
Civ1, Civ2, Civ2 Call to Power, all suffered from stacked unit insta-kill glitch that OP mentioned. I have very unpleasant memories of a spearman somehow being hidden in stacks of tanks and losing them all to a crossbow or pike.
This happened too MANY times to forget; and though enough time has passed that specifics have faded the pain and frustration never will.
Its not a glitch. Its completely unrealistic, but its in fact designed like that to discourage death-balls.
You can search on "stack" in the Civ2 manual to see many, many references to how entire stacks will die all at once! (http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.365). This manual proves that Civ2 designers intended stacks to work like that.
Even the "glitchy" behavior of Bombers "defending" a stack (ie: bombers are an air unit, so they are "immune" to ground units attacking them. Therefore, a bomber "in a stack" makes the whole stack immune), is in fact referenced in the manual (!!!). The Civ2 developers had 100% intension of encouraging this "gamey" behavior.
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Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game. (I'm pretty salty about militias beating my battleships in Civ1) But hey, Civ1 was just the first iteration of the game, lol. Civ2 was when the game was rebalanced / revamped into a better game.
Civ3 and Civ4 started to diverge from the original plans rather severely.
> Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game.
I disagree. It is incredible game that did a lot of things right from the first try. It also had extremely nice VGA graphics: i still remember softly animated blue rivers and waves rolling onto green shores with hills and mountains.
And it was the only 'fresh' game, that could surprise you. Like you play on chieftain, have three cities on a nice island, and you are proud to have discovered sail before 1492, preparing for a voyage of discovery.
Next, an ironclad arrives leading frigate with musketeers that destroy your pathetic civilization.
All other games after the first were inevitably formulaic for me. Of course, players who have started on 5th might feel different.
Civ1 was groundbreaking for the time it was released. But Civ2 just improved on so many aspects across the board, that I'm not sure if there's any point in ever going back to Civ1.
Civ3 I skipped mostly, but Civ4, Civ5, and Civ6 are extremely different games from Civ2. Instead of iterating upon the formula, they've changed the game significantly. The basics of city construction (food and shields) remain the same, but even Civ6 has revamped the trade system entirely. (Tax rate, science vs gold, luxuries vs amenities).
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Only Civ1 and Civ2 play similarly. Civ2 revamped combat: your units have HP now and heal, rather than the weird full-random chance of win/loss in Civ1.
But Civ2 contains the "fight to the death on every combat", the similarities in governments (despotism, monarchy, communism, republic, democracy), similar multiplicative bonuses (market, bank, stock exchange), etc. etc. Civ2 really feels like they just wanted to make a "better Civ1".
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 solves a lot of the issues though, and hopefully will evolve into something better.
FreeCiv got an incredible "solver" embedded into its engine, allowing you to optimally place your citizens. But the use of this solver-engine is arcane. Proper use of it leads to cascading advantages over your foes however, so its a must have to learn. (especially in auto-calculating rapture situations)
The use of optimal trade routes (with a good solver available in the FreeCiv-GTK client, but not in QT ... at least last time I checked) also is a major advantage to the players who use it.
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FreeCiv is likely a highly competitive, highly optimized game. But the community seems split and fractured. Some want to use FreeCiv-Web (and without the Governor / Trade route solvers, its a very different game), others like me prefer to play highly-optimal Civ2-like games.
FreeCiv's solvers (both the Governor solver, and the Trade Route solver) presents a difficult question to the community. Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair?
Its one additional step to learn before you can be an effective, competitive, FreeCiv player. But knowing that these lower-level items are "solved" by solver-systems makes it really, really difficult to go back to Civ5 / Civ6 (!!). So many times do I look at my citizens placement and realize that the AI-placement of citizens is terrible compared to the FreeCiv solver...
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The "core" of FreeCiv is pretty incredible. The solvers to make provably optimal choices (well, at least "locally optimal", such as most trade from a collection of 12-cities trade routes + auto-caravan decisions). As well as the use of "symmetrical island maps" to ensure everyone has equal starting-positions, and the first to deploy "concurrent turns" (long before Civ5 did).
It plays like a macro'd up / steroids version of Civ2 + minor mods as a result. The community needs to unify and decide if this version of the game is how it should be... and if so, rebalance the game in this field.
Well, basically, FreeCiv-web vs FreeCiv-GTK/QT flamewars in a nutshell.
> Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone can use them, is that fair?
Mu. An experienced game designer should have the perspective here that this part of the game is just a tedious bore.
1. The computer can calculate the optimal placement of citizens in a fraction of a second, and a micromanaging human will never exceed the best results. He can only find the same placements, only slower. That means there is no point in abstaining from using computer generated solutions.
2. The game allows to generate solutions that are strictly worse than another, e.g. 0 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy vs. 1 nutrient, 1 mineral, 1 energy. There is no point to this.
The part of the game should be changed to make it fun. Either introduce meaningful trade-offs by interacting with a game mechanic where the optimal outcome cannot be simply calculated (complexity increase), or take away player control and completely automate it (complexity decrease).
During war, gold is useful in Civ as it can instantly create units. But science is better in the long run (a heavy science build can get ironclad battleships by 0AD in game time)
The FreeCiv governor is a solver where you input your goals (maximize science vs maximize gold) and then the solver solves the optimal placement.
But it only works if the human gives it the right goals.
Even with a science focused build, a city in rapture will generate more science. But do you solve for rapture conditions? Or do you solve for science optimization?
Is there a key science that will increase happiness (temples, banks, colosseums?). Is so, maybe having a short term science focus for some +happiness is going to be overall faster.
What if one city has more gold buildings? Should this city use the same solver as the rest of your cities? Or do you want this one city to focus on gold and let the rest of your cities handle science?
If the solver fails to solve for your conditions (ex: no starvation is a common solve condition. But maybe my enemies are pillaging my farms and starvation is always going to happen now...) How does the solver react? Should it reduce starvation as much as possible? Or should it stop and point out the problem to me?
Maybe I can't rely on food supplies in that city and need to build caravans to import food from a nearby city. The governor doesn't have control of units, only of the city. Maybe I need gold in my other cities to buy caravans to send food to the starving city, while far away cities continue to focus on science.
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EDIT: It should be noted that the Governor can sometimes be unhelpful. For example, if you have two cities within a rare "whale" tile (whales are one of the best tiles in the game), only one of those cities can benefit.
The governor of the two cities will fight for the whale, meaning one city will randomly not get the whale.
In such "fighting" situations, you disable the governor, then manually choose which city gets to work on the whale-tile, and then turn the governor back on. The governor is only "locally optimal". It still requires the player to make globally optimal decisions (ie: a bad choice for city B means city A benefits more, and maybe you have multiplicative bonuses in city A (due to trade routes, buildings, specialists etc. etc.) who can benefit from the whale more than B ever could).
Choosing to make "city B" play suboptimally is a strategy, to make your overall civilization more powerful. The governor doesn't have such insight, and must be disabled entirely in these situations.
That's what makes "using" the governor so hard. Its "just" a locally-optimal solver.
When two cities are close to each other, only __one__ of those cities can get the good tile.
Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.
Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.
Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.
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Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.
Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)
RA popularized plain old tank rushes though. They were somewhat mitigated by RA2 in that units other than basic tanks were actually worth spending money on. Finally, Generals brought in “death balls” of rocket soldiers.
> Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in C&C?
Nominally, it was rockets were the anti-tank infantry. But both grenades and rockets get squished with alt-move. Tanks are faster than infantry, so the tanks get the squish rather easily.
The infantry player can defend against the squish by spamming "X" (which scatters your units in random directions). But given that tanks are threatening a one-squish kill + have faster movement, grenades are a rather poor choice to "death ball spam".
Furthermore: a dead grenadier explodes, causing damage to all other nearby grenadiers (causing __cascading__ explosions), often times wiping out your own "death ball". That is to say: a "death ball" made out of grenadiers end up killing themselves more often than not.
Grenades are primarily anti-infantry and anti-building units in C&C. They serve the job well in that regards. But its incredibly dangerous to spam these units in C&C.
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"Death Balls" existed in C&C, but you had to use far more expensive tanks to be able to get there. The cheaper units (rockets, grenadiers) were simply ineffective.
Nod arguably had a good death-ball strategy with bikes, but bikes were weak vs infantry (though they outran infantry pretty severely). Light Tanks was a more reliable Nod-based death-ball IMO.
> Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 units.
Not like Starcraft 2, where you can save a singular group of 400 zerglings with Ctrl-1.
Even then, Starcraft 2 has Psi Storm and area-of-effect damage (banelings, colossus). So its not quite as easy to construct an appropriate "death ball", unless you've scouted out your opponent's build. So its not a "Braindead" kind of death ball, but... still a death ball at the end of the day.
> I remember building masses of the same unit in these games.
Nothing quite like Advance Wars mechanized infantry (aka: rockets). That was truly a single-unit deathball game, lol.
Civ2 added some absurd hidden bonuses to AI units to give them a chance in the endgame. My veteran armors will never forget getting mowed down by knights.
I dunno if that's an explicit discouragement though.
Pathing in the 90s was all sorts of bad for all games except Civilization (because there's no collision detection in Civ, so... all units just walk on top of each other).
Starcraft also had a really low unit-cap. I think it was 200 points, so aside from the zergling rush (zerglings counted for 1/2 a point, iirc), you just couldn't really human-wave anyway.
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 die before dealing any lasting damage. (All Zealots have a "shield" that regenerates. You probably won't even get past the shield).
As such, 100 Zealots can perpetually kill 10 Zealots over-and-over again. Your 100 Zealots can kill 1000+ Zealots (as long as they only attack 10-at-a-time).
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Same thing with Axis-and-allies infantry / tanks, or many other strategy games. The "strength" of a ball of units is the *square* of their size.
That is to say: 100-Zealots is 100x stronger than 10-Zealots (!!), not 10x stronger as you may initially assume. As such, both players end up building a bigger-and-bigger death ball as a primary tactic (which is in fact, unfun and stale).
In Starcraft: Brood War, your 100-Zealots could only be grouped into groups of 12, meaning you need 18 actions to attack-move the group. In Starcraft 2: your 100-Zealots can all be in a single group, so you only need 2-actions (one selection + one A-move) to attack-move the group.
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:
Lanchester's Square Law applies to Starcraft, AoE2, Axis and Allies, etc. etc. The assumptions therein are "ranged units all within fire of each other"
Lanchester's Linear Law applies to Risk, Hearts of Iron, and "bottleneck" situations in Starcraft/AoE2, etc. etc. The Linear law applies when units are no longer within reach of each other, and are instead seen as reinforcements to a limited sized "front" where combat takes place.
In Risk: only 3 units can ever be attacking, and only 2-units can ever be defending. This is the conditions of the linear law.
In Starcraft / AoE2, a "bottleneck" may force a limited number of melee units to fight, leading to a rare situation of the linear law in action.
Hearts of Iron "saturated frontline" concept also gets into the linear-law. Once the frontline is saturated, additional reinforcements do nothing to change the battle.
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Take those assumptions, craft a rather straightforward differential equation out of them, and solve. Bam, you've arrived at Lanchester's Laws (though Lanchester was the tactical genius who figured this out over a hundred years ago).
Modern board games almost always come back to Lanchester's laws. Lanchester wrote and published those differential equations so that generals could create wargames after all, to train their armies / commanders.
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.
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 400-zerglings, lol) in it. They pretty much made death-balls have 10% of the APM requirement in SC2 compared to SC:Brood War.
I'm all for making the game easier and more accessible: but the death-ball tactic was a little bit "too obvious" and kind of unfun to watch, compared to the tightly coordinated groups of 12 that SC: Brood War was famous for. The groups were too big, numerical advantage was the biggest advantage in SC 2 IMO.
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.
SC:BW still had AoE attacks, arguably more important ones too.
Nuke and Psi Storm exist in both games, but Plague, Irradiate, Ensnare, Stasis Fields are all AoE effects... as well as AoE damage sources (Tanks, Archons, Valkyries, Devourers, and kinda-sorta Mutalisks).
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Lets put it this way: if you really wanted to, you could just have 12-units per group in SC2. But no one would do that, the APM-advantage of having a big group (and manually splitting in the rare cases where a split is needed) is far superior than using 9 groups to split up 108 units.
And sure, stronger players probably split their death-balls into smaller groupings of maybe 30 units or so (you don't want to just A-move all over the place, a degree of flexibility is useful), and only occassionally merges everyone together into a deathball. (Fast and loose is good: you don't want to dedicate an entire army to a battle, especially if they might lose).
But no one is making groups of ~12 in SC2. Its too small.
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.
Personally, I disagree about the death-ball buildup being un-fun, and it's only really a thing with Protoss (or it was when I cared about SC2), and that's because you had some relatively immobile units that needed protection.
A large group of units, generally with ranged attacks, where the most effective positioning is clumping them up into a ball. They hit a certain tipping point where fewer and fewer things work to counter them. If both sides have a death ball, then the smaller one loses by a bigger margin the larger the death balls get.
In a made up but typical RTS, one swordsman beats an archer, ten archers are an even match for ten swordsmen, and fifty archers beat infinity swordsmen. In a 10v8 archer battle, the bigger side survives with about 3 archers, but in a 100v80 archer battle, the bigger side survives with over 50. This game has archer death balls.
Most games will counter this effect with area of effect damage. AoE has onagers for this purpose - which can easily deal immense damage to clumped and unaware archers - SC2 actually gives a lot of units AoE which is what prevents marine deathballs from being nearly as strong as they might otherwise be. 10 zealots and a clossus vs. twenty marines will be a pretty one-sided fight that will get more extreme the higher the numbers go.
A massive, monoculture blob of either the cheapest and fastest to produce, or a reasonably effective as far as cost/time/damage output unit, used to just roll over the opponent's base.
So, a few hundred riflemen or dozens and dozens of tanks.
The death part of it comes from the numerical advantage, if an enemy unit walks into range of many times its number it'll get blown to hell before it can inflict meaningful damage, even if it is a technologically superior or inherently stronger unit.
AoE2 is usually a monoculture, due to the nature of its upgrade systems.
If your knights are +2 armor and +2 damage, you'll probably want a mono-culture of knights. Futhermore, a singular upgrade (aka: Cavalier research) immediately applies to all knights.
Your +2 armor / +2 damage Cavaliers are probably superior to your +0 / +0 archers from the Feudal age, even if those archers are theoretically useful against some units.
Strictly speaking: its not a monoculture: Scouts + Knights is the common combination for cavalry civs, because Knights lose vs Monks/Archers, while Scouts win vs Monks/Archers. Furthermore, Scouts share the +2 armor / +2 damage upgrade with Knights. But still, the upgrade system almost "forces" a monoculture (or close to a monoculture): its far more efficient to only research one or two units, rather than researching many, many different kinds of units.
Absolutely, this can vary. IME at least in the old days, it did tend to be a single unit type (eg Red Alert Medium/Heavy tank rushes, or a well timed Zerg Rush) but it is by no means a hard and fast rule.
It's kind of clear from context, but still this is the first I hear the term (as someone who played those games) and DDG also doesn't come up with anything useful (top result, for example, is about some item in Dragon Ball). So I was also wondering if I got it right, especially when there's a hundred non-jargon and equally concise ways to say that, e.g. 'large group'. To me this seems like a valid question.
It's a common term in modern RTS, and it's got more meaning attached to it than simply "a large group". For example, in StarCraft 2, a full army of zerglings wouldn't be considered a "death ball" because it'd be so easily defeated with a few Colossus and high templars (units that deal a lot of splash damage, which zerglings are particularly susceptible to). A death ball is an army so powerful it's virtually unstoppable once it's formed. Players can try to achieve a death ball to gain a victory, but it's often expensive and leaves you vulnerable while you're building one. Also death balls are usually slow, and the opponent can use faster units to attack vulnerable parts of their base while the player building a death ball is out of position.
My use of the term originates from the Starcraft 2 culture. Search on "Protoss Deathball", which is a well known, highly effective "tactic"... if a bit obvious.
I'm sure the other games have their own terminology for the evolution of this "tactic".
AoE2 also uses this term extensively especially within the context of ranger infantry. A clump of forty arbs will chew through the armor of even intended counters (like knights).
One of the more interesting applications of this term I've seen is in TW WH2 (Total War: Warhammer 2) where a faction like Vampire Counts gets a lot of utility out of death-balling even trash tier units like skeleton warriors - so that opponent infantry and cavalry gets mired in the mass of unit collisions to make it easier to get a clean spell targeting off. I think the term is pretty well established at this point as evidenced by the derivative usages that are now popping up.
Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago they presented a significant challenge to pathfinding algorithms on slow CPUs. As noted above, different games used different strategies to address them.
C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be selected as a group.
That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry-death balls nerfed.
An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat.
I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty inexperienced at the game.
Advance Wars has a very similar unit composition to C&C units: rocket troops are cheap and can effectively damage tanks (while rifle infantry are even cheaper and go 1-to-1 vs rocket troops).
Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any possible opposition.
Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly does everything at very, very cheap prices.
I tend to think Advance Wars was remarkably well balanced. It was designed to be a single player game so some strategies like rocket troops wasn't too bad. They were very slow however, which made them a really inefficient way to win.
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 balanced resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's so dumb.
The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game designers balanced the game against abusing the AI stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush an APC around the edge of the map.
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 strategy games is that they're much more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what drained the RTS genre of its appeal.
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)
As someone who's introduction to RTS was C&C RA on PS1, pathfinding was definitely still an problem lol. You always knew when the AI was mobilizing a deathball because your frame rate would take a dive.
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 land a lucky hit and maybe take out a cluster of aircraft.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
Hmm, when I played TA blobbing was name of the game. The L1 missile vehicles shoot thru each other just fine, and for defense people used to start with infinite lines of missile towers, before adding other stuff.
In fact I remember my first internet game (after playing with friends for some time); noone even rushed me, and I had a chance to get to L2, expand as I always did and build a couple dozen Mavericks for my would-be attack. Then 10000 L1 missile vehicles rolled in and blew everything up.
EDIT: and one of my most epic games, a 3vs3 on a 3-bridge map with aircraft and navies disabled, actually involved blobbing nukes. The lone player on the "losing" side was able to hold me and the other "winning" survivor off behind batteries of artillery and infinite piles of wreckage for long enough to find our commanders and send enough nukes to overwhelm anti-nuclear.
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.
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.
You're talking to a lot of players who likely only played on Chieftan AI levels: where the enemy AI would rarely meet you in the field and often times only retreat to cities. Even then, they would rarely try to stack-kill the player. It was always possible, but since the easy-AI never attacked in such a manner, the mechanic was basically irrelevant on easy/Chieftan mode.
On more difficult AI levels (Prince or Emperor), the AI would meet you in the field, and you'd have to worry about stack kills. And also worry about cheating AIs who just had more resources than you...
Now, thinking of this further, i think I might misremember this because I've never let my stacks be attacked in the field.
Best tactics is to drive tanks via railroads up to the city (sometimes building them in the fly using a ton of settlers in one move) and attack it with 20+ tanks and then move in 10 mech infantry for defence, and I used fortresses extensively.
The two times a stack won’t die are if they are stationed in a city or fortress. Any other time the whole stack will die if the top defender gets destroyed.
I'm pretty sure that in Civ 2 all units in a defending tile did actually get killed if the defending unit was defeated. Getting killed when attacking didn't have this effect, of course, nor did it happen if your defending stack was in a fort or in a city.
Don't forget the rocketeers. I usually produce a 2:1 combination of riflemen and rocketeers (spamming if eco allows it), and support it with tanks and arty/v2.
I rarely found occasion to use thieves, usually as raid into their ore patches to steal harvesters or as stationary vision-givers since they can cloak themselves.
Total Annhilation replaced the deathball with automated death-streams, while the players focused on commando actions to sabotage the economic engines keeping the streams of death going.
No other game in that time (C&C or AoE) had a selection cap.
Starcraft / Starcraft BW is very unusual as far as early RTS systems go, capping at exactly 12 units. When all your peers allow for infinite selection, and then you come out with a design that only allows for 12-unit selections... its clearly an explicit design choice.
From there, we need to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind the design choice.
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I too was a D player on Starcraft:BW. So much training and effort and yet only got to the bottom ranks...
OpenRA is currently my favourite free/libre computer game. They've done a fabulous job at keeping the feeling of the original game while updating things like cross-platform support, screen resolution and network play and added build queues (and waypoints, I believe) that was present in later C&C games. They've also tweaked the game play, making thieves able to hijack vehicles and cloak (They are probably the most fun unit to micro around) and radar jammers able to deflect / confuse missiles, and added per-country special units like in RA2 (The French invisible phase transport is wild), and changed the tech tree so medium / heavy tanks require service depot.
I remember in the original Red Alert, if you ordered an airplane to fly into the shroud, it'd just disappear into the darkness, but in OpenRA you can actually use them for scouting (which totally makes sense). OpenRA also has fog-of-war which suddenly makes planes and helicopters key units for ground support.
I don't like war. The arms trade should be abolished. We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders rather than build walls or drop bombs on them. Anyone working with defense in any capacity, like militarizing borders with drones or whatever, should immediately quit or turn whistle blower. Still, I find this war game incredibly enjoyable. Applause to the hackers.
I played a round or four with my lab last night. Cross platform play, free hosting, good matchmaking and an excellent experience. The computers on equal number and an equal footing absolutely annihilated us. We were easily able to titrate the difficulty to make it fun. Honestly, a great game and very enjoyable (and I won the 6-player death match at the end with a total Deus ex Machina moment made possible by the fog of war, much to everyone's suprise, including mine).
One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth.
> One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth.
Yea, Wesnoth has a lot of what made the earlier Heroes of Might and Magic games great. I like how many open source games are cool with sticking to 2D, making them accessible for older devices. Wesnoth graphics are first class mix of hand drawn and pixel art. (They could do with a few more unit animations though.)
> I second your comments about war.
There shouldn't be any contradiction in being okay with pixel people being blown up but not real ones, even though sometimes it feels like there is. I played OpenTTD and even though the graphics were awesome, I got a bit sad from clearing trees just to build roads for hordes of lorries to transport coal and oil and cattle to the slaughterhouse for no obvious "win" in the end (except money).
Not to get political, but your last paragraph implies there's nothing worth fighting for. To paraphrase John Ringo, I desire peace, but I require liberty.
War is waste - but the only thing worse than war is loss of liberty.
> Not to get political, but your last paragraph implies there's nothing worth fighting for.
Do you really believe I'm arguing that there's nothing worth fighting for when I write that: "We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders"?
Well, how about this then: It's worth fighting against borders; it's worth fighting for refugees' right to exist and to ensure their safe passage (rather than forcing them to die of thirst in the desert, drowning at sea or getting caught and beaten by border patrols using drones with thermal cameras[0]).
I'm aware that some people believe that you "fight for freedom" or "defend your nation" by building border walls, using Reaper drones to launch Hellfire missiles at strangers, putting kids in cages, and perhaps having 70.000 nuclear warheads around, just in case.
However, when you read certain reports (e.g. Daliel Hale's leaks about USA's assasination programme[1], or Collateral Murder[2]), then it becomes clear that weapons and wars (that we're simulating in Red Alert albeit in a contrafactual nazi-free timeline) are a major source of suffering and death worldwide.
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 found on the Internet Archive.
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.
Yes -- install Morrowind from Steam, run it once (to make sure registry keys and the like are set up correctly), and then the OpenMW installer will copy the files it needs to run out of the existing MW installation directory.
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.
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).
You don't need a billion $ to remake Alpha Centauri as long as you don't want AAA visuals. I would wager an experienced team of 8-10 people can do it in 2 years (so ~$2m assuming $100k average salary cost per person year).
More seriously though, if I had a billion dollars I'd spend most of it on tree planting. I'd probably keep back maybe 20 million for myself. If I had more, I'd spend it on Emacs and open source development. Or more trees.
I can give you a dollar. But anyway, EA is sitting on its publishing rights, firaxis has the IP so it's deadlocked as far as I know. I cant recall what was the time for games to expire into public domain but I'd say that's the only way you are getting a remake IMO.
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.). Any decently strong player can probably beat the AI through "brute force" (in particular: attacking their harvester forces an "AI alpha strike", where the entirety of the AI's units attack your base). With good tactics, you'll often beat the AI in this exchange (AI is rather bad at tactics actually, you should be trading 2-for-1 in most situations, or even better).
2-for-1 isn't good enough though. You need 10-to-1 trades. That means retreating often, finding defensive positioning (good "concave" positioning, while forcing the opponent to be convex), attacking the opponent while they're on the move, utilizing your repair bay, etc. etc. A lot of defensive buildings are also amazing: not only do you have the "Repair" button (which effectively creates HP at fractions of the cost of a new building), but the defensive buildings are numerically superior against mobile units (higher HP / higher DPS per unit $$$).
Note: Defensive buildings are usually terrible vs humans. But vs AI who attacks in "obvious" and predictable angles... they're highly useful.
Finally: it means attacking the AI's harvester early and often: to prevent the AI from building up a critical "Death ball" of units that you can't beat. You're not necessarily trying to kill the harvester, but instead just provoking the "alpha strike" before the CPU's death ball is at critical mass. (Of course, kill the harvester if you're given the opportunity. But its easier said than done...)
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It seems like the "intended" way to beat the AI is through "underhanded" tactics: engineer into the ore refineries and/or silos to steal their money. Taking advantage of the "sandbag AI" (sandbags are effectively immune to the AI's knowledge, the AI will never attack a sandbag), etc. etc.
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C&C is a very "sharp" game. One mistake will require you to restart the level. The AI's tiberium advantage feels crushing, but you absolutely can work around it: either through brute force, or through underhanded / ai-manipulation methodologies.
I found a nice cheese that really helped me: Attack harvesters with a single soldier, run as soon as you get a hit in, the harvester will follow that soldier anywhere in order to try to run him over, right past all your static defenses or neatly lined up tanks for instance.
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.
I seem to remember building long strings of walls into the enemy bases - they didn't seem to attack them - and then walling off their refineries. The harvesters would just stop.
I‘ve tried the C&C 1 campaign when the remasters got released. Wow, the difficulty is brutal. To the point where it just doesn’t feel very fun anymore. I‘ve mostly been playing Tiberian Sun and RA2 as a kid and can‘t remember them being this hard.
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 resources while you're getting stronger.
However, this means that if a remaster improves the AI in any way (perhaps using a bit smarter AI that was intended for a newer game) then the resource/production advantage can make the game extremely hard.
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.
> 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)
I’m terrible at real-time strategy games, yet the campaigns in CnC1 and RA1 were among the few (possibly only) I was able to complete. I really enjoyed the theme and wanted to see all the cutscenes, which might have helped with motivation.
I could beat CnC2 and RA2 clean, but with CnC1 I could only get past IIRC about the half-way point by abusing sandbags. It seemed completely hopeless, otherwise.
Yeah... I'm trying to do RA campaigns in hard and some missions are really difficult (and I use the save a lot to backtrack in time). I always played in easy or medium as kid, so made there's that.
Hell march metal song and game play of Red alert 1 was the first time I looked at a PC and felt My beloved Amiga was growing old. Good and bad memories wrapped in an awesome game!
I spent hours playing Red Alert, and loved C&C as well. Something about the absolute craziness made it so much fun. Then RA2 amped it up even more, being able to train giant squid and teleporting infantry that erase units from the timeline.
OpenRA is one of my favourite games right now, I play it with a few of my friends on a regular basis and we have forked it to include the building specific construction from tiberian dawn in command and conquer.
Unfortunately owning the Remaster and playing OpenRA, they are two very divergent projects that cannot be merged.
OpenRA is a rewrite whilst Remastered was a rework on the original code.
I would have loved some of the OpenRA features to make it into the Remaster, and likewise the updated assets (sound, music and textures) into the OpenRA game
Tiberian Sun remains my favourite C&C game. I know it was rushed and had some bugs but... I mean: The Forgotten? Absolutely there should be a mutant commando walking around with a portable railgun, physics be damned!
I like C&C3, but it isn't TS and I feel it abandoned a bit the direction TS was taking us.
On the flipside it is one of the most annoying to play. You can't mass select units and also units won't auto-engage when attacked. So of you have some tanks guarding a harvester and something with longer range starts plinking them they'll just sit there until they get destroyed. And of course moving those tanks up to engage is maximum micromanagement.
It works ok on smaller scales, but the bigger maps are really annoying to play, especially when you're being harassed by Sardaukar troops.
I loved Dune 2000 when I was a teenager, but I remember never finishing it. The last couple of maps were just too hard for me to beat for all the reasons you listed. I think my sister managed it but it took several goes.
I think you are right. It was called Dune 2. Came on a small number of floppy disks. IIRC it was the first title that Westwood developed, and definitely one of the first RTS games.
It the first PC RTS to gain popularity that is more or less similar to modern RTSs (they all in 1 way or another been inspired by it or its successors). Westwood developed a bunch of titles before it (including some very popular RPGs) but their line of RTS are definitely what they're remembered for today!
The 3D Dune strategy was also great, for a Dune fan at least. Not sure if it stands the test of time, but it seemed extremely loyal to the book and enjoyable
I tried that, but my favourite for C&C is
"Dawn of the Tiberium Age" [0].
It combines the units of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert.
Plus there are a lot of extra units, it's super fun in multiplayer! I love it...
I think so many of the best games evolve randomly and unexpectedly while top down control from developers has stifled game play.
Not against developers protecting their IP. Do what you gotta do to make money.
But I enjoy seeing open source games giving players the ability to edit and improve game systems.
I think back to how many times Nintendo has shut down Super Smash Melee edits, how many hours of skill have been lost every time Riot made a change to League of Legends nobody enjoyed, how much World of Warcraft has essentially stagnated.
You want something like chess where the rules don't change drastically every couple months if you want to build a competitive scene. Something stable so strategies and a stable metagame can occur.
You download a thing, and click it to run it. No messing with a package manager or installer, no dependency hell, nothing but the software you wanted to run.
I'm happy to see this on the front page. My friends and I played the originals as kids and have revisted the game with openra about 7 years ago. The devs have done a fantastic job.
Most definitely it's fixed in OpenRA. I have not heard good comments about remaster other than graphics due to them not addressing mechanics/gameplay issues such as balance.
I assume the circulating camera motion in the menu is still there.
It annoyed me that the movement was jerky and didnt seem to use vigh precision math, but actually it had to do with the upscaling of the graphics which happens at the last stage of the rendering pipeline, iirc.
It seems you need the original game CDs to get the music on OpenRA. Incidentally, I have both the original 3 1/2" disk and the remastered CDs from the early 2000s -- but no computers with CDs or floppy drives. I'm willing to even purchase the music a third time, but seems OpenRA wants a CD -- has anyone gotten around this?
Are fog of war, veteran units, hotkeys, stances, game replays, mods, custom maps, and custom campaigns really considered "modern" "post-90s" features? Myth: TFL had all of them in 1997.
Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came with a boring windows installer.
[1]: https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc