Well, I wouldn’t really categorise this as a ‘new’ game either. I played and loved these in the 90s but should’ve been content to leave it there. Though if we are counting new old games, there is of course Age of Empires II, which I picked up for the first time (ever, I mean) a month or two ago and holds up waaaaaaaay better than this. That game is probably peak harvester if that’s what you’re yearning for.
Are you asking if you should play it if you’ve never played it before? Probably not. Maybe this niche of the genre has been a bit of a desert lately but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend you play this when both C&C3 and RA3 remain playable, even if you’ve ‘done’ those before. Load up the Challenge Mode in RA3 Uprising, it’s as good as the solo play ever got in my opinion (though C&C3 entire is still very good). I still crank that one up from time to time for a replay.
Just you wait until you land on a beach with a MCV and 2 grenadiers under assault by 3 turrets! (Oh and there is definitely a flame tank nearby too)
The hardest GDI mission in the game. You have to go right and then north under sustained turret fire. Find the clearing, and then build your base there. Then you should produce 2+ crucial bazooka infantry and a handful of rifle pawns. Have all the assaulting tanks fire on the pawns while your bazooka infantry do the work. Micromanage until you are strong.
I have to admit, the screaming is the saving grace when rollerskate flamethrower dude flambés 20 troops in one go because they’re too busy snapping themselves to the grid to shoot back (not that they often bother with that even when they’re stationary).
Holy shit, good ol’ C&C certainly has that one-more-round je ne sais quoi. Lovin’ it!
Also some missions are just bastards. This one I left the game on had me land six grenade chuckers and a base on a hot beach. Three turrets and a tank that just moseys on up. Can’t start building as there’s no room on the beach. I fought through the turrets and tanks with the six dudes. Started looking for a place to build a base. Ran into a flame tank. Thought “let’s try that shit again later”.
If that’s the mission where you’re trying to rescue Mobius, then you’re best off trying to run the MCV directly past the turrets, up to the right, and sneak your way up a bit before setting down your Construction Yard. Don’t bother trying to actually clear the landing zone since it’s not really viable with your starting forces anyway.
After somewhat bouncing of the original C&C remaster I decided to give Red Alert a go and, wow, it is so much better. Once upon a time I knew this fact already, of course, but the balancing and QOL jump from one to the other is a pretty stark contrast.
Coupled with the modern UI options I’m actually, dare I say it, having fun. Frustrations and imbalances are still there, sure, but this is a substantially better experience. Fingers crossed somebody makes use of that ‘open source’ code to crowbar the RA changes into C&C.
My wish was answered. :) These mods make noticeable improvements to both games, probably not essential for Red Alert but absolutely so for Tiberian Dawn. Though that said I did end up missing the rally point/A* search moving back to Red Alert after playing improved Tiberian Dawn. Easy to tweak if you feel like some of the options stray too far from the vanilla experience.
I once made a vast edit to the core mechanics of Red Alert with the RAedit software. I also did the same to Tiberium Sun. Including new unit types. Oh to be young again.
I, too, messed around with that editor way back when. Mostly I just made units shoot out streams of dogs which, naturally, would explode in nuclear fire upon reaching their target.
The first patch is coming out later today, and while they didn’t add rally points or attack move, they did fix a crapton of random bugs and tweaked a lot of other things in ways I’d consider to be nearly all positive.
Some highlights:
Stuttering mitigation by force-loading textures, increasing load times but reducing the need to load during the game
Private game lobbies
The “deploy” key now works on everything that can deploy instead of just MCVs (transports, minelayers, Chrono/MAD Tanks, etc.)
Tweaks to Tiberian Dawn’s “hard” difficulty to make it less unreasonable
Adjustments to unit queueing to be more consistent with later games in the series
Adjusted harvester logic for slightly greater intelligence
More mission- and game logic-related bugfixes than you can shake a stick at
Quickmatch is no longer completely unfair to GDI and Soviets (no more starting units)
