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Regarding the indoor missions like Allies 013, something I don't think was mentioned was that if you're really having trouble keeping your infantry alive, the rarely-seen Formation command can occasionally come in handy to keep them in a line when moving down a hallway for example. Normally they like to bundle up in 5-man groups like this which can lead to a situation where half the group isn't in range of enemies ahead and you take some unnecessary damage or casualties:  In a formation they're more likely to stay in line, so to speak, which can help keep more guns ready for any surprise enemies ahead and maybe migitate the effect of grenades:  It's not 100% reliable or anything but hey, it's something to try if you're struggling. Kanfy fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 17:14
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Palladium posted:I had a Bradygames guide for FF8, it was full of inaccuracies and suboptimal strategies which I didn't noticed until I discovered Gamefaqs.
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Feb 9, 2019 17:42
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Also having just started the final mission I noticed something interesting: I don't know if this is the case on Normal, but at least on Hard the infantryman who runs in to shoot the barrels at the start of the level is so fast that (as far as I can tell) it's literally impossible to kill him before he blows them up and ends your mission instantly. Even putting game speed on lowest the best I could manage was a mutual kill. The only way to avoid failure 3 seconds into the mission is to immediately dodge to the south. Dunno if Easy is the only difficulty which lets you kill him or if Hard is the only one which makes it impossible to do so, but it's kind of a jerk move nonetheless.
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Feb 9, 2019 17:43
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Kanfy posted:Also having just started the final mission I noticed something interesting: I don't know if this is the case on Normal, but at least on Hard the infantryman who runs in to shoot the barrels at the start of the level is so fast that (as far as I can tell) it's literally impossible to kill him before he blows them up and ends your mission instantly. Even putting game speed on lowest the best I could manage was a mutual kill. You can definitely kill the soldier on Normal, but its pretty close, yeah.
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Feb 9, 2019 17:50
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I never actually realized the actual game speed is also affected by difficulty, I jumped right into the campaign so until you mentioned the game being slower on Easy I just figured RA was by default faster than TD was and I'd simply forgotten about it. But yeah, just like how on Easy the default speed is I guess one notch slower than on Normal, on Hard it's one notch faster. Not that it really matters since you can "cheat" and adjust the game speed whenever you like, I guess.
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Feb 9, 2019 18:01
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Kanfy posted:I never actually realized the actual game speed is also affected by difficulty, I jumped right into the campaign so until you mentioned the game being slower on Easy I just figured RA was by default faster than TD was and I'd simply forgotten about it. But yeah, just like how on Easy the default speed is I guess one notch slower than on Normal, on Hard it's one notch faster. The game speed is an additional speed ON TOP of the difficulty! 
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Feb 9, 2019 18:04
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Soviet Mission 01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAyH1dfJw-s Soviet Mission 01   Near Torun, as per the briefing.  Location: Torun, Poland Objective: Kill everyone in the village. Briefing: A pitiful excuse for resistance has blockaded itself in this village. Stalin has decided to make an example of them. Kill them all and destroy their homes. You will have Yak aircraft to use in teaching these rebels a lesson. Author's note: A nice introductory level for the Soviet campaign, showing off their airpower and the ability to drop paratroopers, and the volatility of Grenadiers.   Name: Joseph Stalin Aliases: Unknown Affiliation: Soviet Occupation: Leader of the Soviet Union Voiced/Played by: Gene Dynarski  Name: Gradenko Aliases: Unknown Affiliation: Soviet Occupation: Commander(?) Voiced/Played by: Alan Terry  Name: Unknown Aliases: Unknown Affiliation: Soviet Occupation: Unknown Voiced/Played by: Andrea Robinson   GRENADIER RANGE: Short ARMOR: None WEAPON: Grenade The Grenadier has a longer range and more destructive power than regular infantry. In groups, Grenadiers are effective against heavily armored units and structures. Author's Note: Oh... the Grenadier has a longer range alright! Kind of funny that the manual doesn't mention how volatile they are.  YAK RANGE: Short ARMOR: Light WEAPON: Twin machine-guns Sometimes called the “Infantry Eraser,” the Yak fires in strafing runs, swooping down on groups of marching infantry, potentially destroying them all in a single run. The Yak is not that fast, making it an easy target for Allied Rocket Soldiers – those that actually survive the first strafing run. Author's Note: The basic aircraft for the Soviets, they suffer from issues regarding targeting in this engine, meaning that, when possible, its better to target something in the middle of a group to maximize effect.  BADGER BOMBER RANGE: N/A ARMOR: Light WEAPON: Dropped bombs & paratroopers The Badger Bomber is the transport plane used for dropping Paratroopers and Parachute Bombs onto a designated target. It is somewhat slow, and its lack of armor can make it a snack for any enemy AA-guns that may be guarding the target. Author's Note: A unit that can never be built or selected by the player. They do, however, paradrop Soviet units into combat.  AIRFIELD ARMOR: Heavy PURPOSE: Builds & reloads airplanes The Airfield allows construction of MIG and Yak planes, and allows access to Paratroopers, Parachute bombs, and Spy Planes. Only one plane is allowed per Airfield that has been constructed. If an in-use Airfield is destroyed while its associated plane is still in the air, the plane will crash. Author's Note: A solid building that should ALWAYS be built if possible. We won't see some of these functions for a little bit, but they vastly increase the amount of harassment a player can do with them.
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Feb 9, 2019 18:35
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Aw yiss, no game ever gave me that "We are the baddies" feel as the soviet campaign.
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Feb 9, 2019 19:06
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Something that they seemed to struggle with in TD and RA is that when you are making the "bad" faction bad they ended up giving them a lot of personality, thus more enjoyable to watch. On the other hand with the "good" faction they end up being significantly short-changed because they have to be seen as the role models and unequivocally good. Thus, we end up having Stavros always being stunned and shocked by stuff, as opposed to with the Soviets we already have the 2 people under Stalin bickering at each other. Thankfully, they figured this out and the next games there will be more parity of personality between the factions
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Feb 9, 2019 19:58
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The difference in tone compared to the Allied campaign's beginning is hilariously stark, there it was like "HELL YEAH BLOWING UP THE BAD GUYS WITH OUR BADASS COMMANDO LADY AND SUPER SHIPS AND RESCUING ALBERT loving EINSTEIN", here we open with a recounting of how many seconds it took for what is presumably nerve gas to terminate children and our first job is to eradicate a Polish village to the last woman and child. Really making it clear from the start that we are now 100% in the villain camp and here to do some real terrible poo poo, none of that "potentially sympathetic baddies" nonsense here. But yeah, as RA is the first game in the series I played, this for me is the C&C campaign and the one I'll always remember the clearest. I love Stalin in particular, which I can assure you is not a phrase I'd use in any other context, and the first FMV already does a very good job at establishing his and his underlings' personalities and the dynamic between them. The accents are horrendously bad of course, but you could argue that's just part of the charm. As a side note, Westwood getting Polish geography wrong is almost like a running gag at this point. In Tiberian Dawn you had the small hamlet of Białystok which at the time of the game's release was a city of almost 300,000 people and this time you have the mountain village of Toruń which is actually a riverside city surrounded by plains. E: Also I always found it weird how when you first start up the game it automatically starts the Soviet campaign, and yet in the manual the detailed tutorial on how to play the game is based on the Allies campaign instead. Kanfy fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 20:45
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Gradenko gives me a very Seth vibe in the sense that I'm 100% sure he will not survive till the end of the campaign, and it's even odds on whether Stalin's intelligence lady kills him, or whether you get ordered to do it yourself.
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Feb 9, 2019 21:08
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the intro mission for the soviets is massacreing an entire polish village. of course. of course. how painfully soviet
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Feb 9, 2019 21:10
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I love the mountains of northern Poland there in the level ending cutscene
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Feb 9, 2019 21:17
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As a final note about the Allied campaign, having now beaten it I'm extremely jealous of your 1 hour run of the final mission with 358 soviet casualties. Maybe it's the difficulty difference but I felt like the soviet attacks were so relentless that I could never get an assault army going. Blood flowed like water in the Volga river and the scars of the earth will remain for generations to come.  War is hell Kanfy fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 21:18
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Kanfy posted:As a final note about the Allied campaign, having now beaten it I'm extremely jealous of your 1 hour run of the final mission with 358 soviet casualties. Maybe it's the difficulty difference but I felt like the soviet attacks were so relentless that I could never get an assault army going. Blood flowed like water in the Volga river and the scars of the earth will remain for generations to come. Lmao, nice.
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Feb 9, 2019 21:25
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Kanfy posted:Also I always found it weird how when you first start up the game it automatically starts the Soviet campaign, and yet in the manual the detailed tutorial on how to play the game is based on the Allies campaign instead. This depends on which CD you have in the drive when you start the game first time. Of course that only works with the original release which came on two CD-ROM, one Allies disc and one Soviet disc. For the TFD and download versions everyone uses these days, for whatever reason the Soviet data files take precedence. Each disc contains the FMV for that campaign, as well as a selection of the music. The base game files required to play either side are installed, but afaik. even in multiplayer, the available music depends on which CD you have in the drive. And yes, it was a valid (and probably intended) mechanic that you could play multiplayer with a single copy of the game, one player with each of the included discs.
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Feb 9, 2019 21:40
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Also I'm pretty sure the AI's nukes just plain aren't tied to the silos at least in that mission, I destroyed that silo relatively early on and guess when I got nuked? At the very end after I'd destroyed every soviet building and only a couple of stragglers were left to be cleaned up. And what else would they nuke except my tech center which... subsequently returned the fog of war to the entire map, hiding those remaining stragglers. Turns out the Allies had gotten so reliant on their satellite to see things that they immediately threw away all maps and intel and I guess purged the very idea of remembering what places looked like from their minds. "Incredible!", to quote one Albert Einstein. nielsm posted:This depends on which CD you have in the drive when you start the game first time. Of course that only works with the original release which came on two CD-ROM, one Allies disc and one Soviet disc. Ah yeah, that'd explain it.
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Feb 9, 2019 21:45
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Oh I'm sorry Kanfy, if you didn't want to see men dying in their thousands on the show than you shouldn't have invaded Russia. Goddamn that's a mini-Stalingrad you got there.
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Feb 9, 2019 21:47
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Kanfy posted:War is hell Jobbo_Fett posted:Lmao, nice. 
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Feb 9, 2019 22:29
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nielsm posted:And yes, it was a valid (and probably intended) mechanic that you could play multiplayer with a single copy of the game, one player with each of the included discs. Tiberian Dawn's manual and the DOS version's on-disc readme file explicitly point this out, the old readme even suggesting it be used at LAN parties to help people who don't own copies of the game(!), and saying that Westwood felt that "if we treat our fans right, they will treat us right". Oh Westwood. We need a crying mammoth tank icon.
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Feb 9, 2019 22:36
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stalin is an alias goddamnit That being said, this mission is Soviet to the extreme and not just in the sense of gameplay.
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Feb 9, 2019 22:48
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Did he even identify as Djogeshwilly or whatever past the 1920's? Eventually a moniker becomes a proper name.
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Feb 9, 2019 23:08
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If I ever become a psychiatrist, I'll use this digitally restored and colored aerial photo taken during the siege of Moscow in the war of [Present Day] as a personality test to see whether the patient recoils in abject horror due to the sheer brutality of the scene taking place, or if they instead say something along the lines of "lmao nice I bet that sounded reeeeal satisfying".  (sorry I'll stop trying to hijack the LP now) Kanfy fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 23:19
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Kanfy posted:If I ever become a psychiatrist, I'll use this digitally restored and colored aerial photo taken during the siege of Moscow in the war of [Present Day] as a personality test to see whether the patient recoils in abject horror due to the sheer brutality of the scene taking place, or if they instead say something along the lines of "lmao nice I bet that sounded reeeeal satisfying". 
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Feb 9, 2019 23:27
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Loxbourne posted:Tiberian Dawn's manual and the DOS version's on-disc readme file explicitly point this out, the old readme even suggesting it be used at LAN parties to help people who don't own copies of the game(!), and saying that Westwood felt that "if we treat our fans right, they will treat us right". ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.6 Do I need to buy two copies of the game to play on two computers? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have designed the game so that you won't need to buy two separate copies of the game in order to play with a friend. You can give away one of your CDs so that you can both play over the modem. In order to play the normal game, you'll need both CDs. The reason we're doing it this way is so that you can enjoy the multiplayer aspect of C&C more easily. Although we could have designed it so that two copies of the game must be purchased in order to use multiplayer, we are hoping that if we treat our fans right, then they will in turn treat us right. They really don't make 'em like they used to. 
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Feb 9, 2019 23:37
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anilEhilated posted:stalin is an alias goddamnit Maybe in this timeline his name IS Stalin 
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Feb 10, 2019 00:21
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I cannot wait for you to start RA 2 tbqh God drat did I feel like an rear end in a top hat playing the Soviet campaign in this.
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Feb 10, 2019 00:23
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Gradenko massacred his pronunciation of 'guerrilla' like a small Polish village
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Feb 10, 2019 00:38
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Crazy Achmed posted:From the official FAQ: It’s also great to point out that this was one of the last games of the era before CD keys became prominent. For a long time there were “is it possible to burn copies of RA” on Usenet posts that had replies like “sure it will combust”
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Feb 10, 2019 00:53
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Oh wow, I was looking up Stalin's actor to see what else he was in (because that guy does a hell of a Stalin in this game) and he was the power plant supervisor in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Who knew
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Feb 10, 2019 04:36
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Ahh, now for the Soviet campaign. I beat this one long before I could finish the Allied side, mainly due to always getting stuck on the Dark Horsemen levels, so I know these missions pretty well. So yeah, right from the get go it is pretty obvious that you are playing the bad guy side. Just casually talking about nerve gas and its' effects on a village like it is no big deal, yikes. Anyway, this briefing right away shows the temperament of the various Soviet commanders, which is nice, and already you can get an idea of what they are like. Oh, and as a nice touch, on the map, the crosshair is on London, while in the Allied campaign it was on Moscow, such a neat little world building thing there. Now, as for the mission, it is a great way to introduce the Soviet side. It is pretty much impossible to lose, as your Yaks are safe on the other side of the destroyed bridge and there is no unit that can shoot them down, so you could slowly win with them alone if needed. Honestly, there is not too much to talk about with this mission, kill a few enemy infantry and Rangers, blow up a few buildings and then win. Neat seeing the Grenadier trick in action though, didn't know about it until years after I had played through the game. But wow, had forgotten how dark the ending cutscene is though, really removes any and all doubt about the Soviet side huh? Anyway, a solid intro to the campaign. Crazy Achmed posted:From the official FAQ: Westwood was too good for this world.
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Feb 10, 2019 07:55
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By popular demand posted:Aw yiss, no game ever gave me that "We are the baddies" feel as the soviet campaign. Unlike the allies campaign where the op also destroyed villages and killed the civilians? In the last mission he burned and looted a church.
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Feb 10, 2019 08:09
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Why? 'Spawn copies' weren't exactly new at the time.
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Feb 10, 2019 08:11
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Bloodly posted:Why? 'Spawn copies' weren't exactly new at the time.
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Feb 10, 2019 10:15
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UED Special Ops posted:Westwood was too good for this world. It may be a fool's hope, but I'm hoping they keep the Westwood logo in the remaster for old times sake.
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Feb 10, 2019 10:16
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I like to imagine that the Commander is always silent because he's some idiot savant who's amazing at warfare and has the social skills of a box turtle. "Dr. Profkiev always had no control over his mouth and now that he is of no further use to us... I selected you personally to handle the assassination, do not fail me." "Da! Kharasho!"*Later*  "I did good!"
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Feb 10, 2019 11:45
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Okay about Allies 10, capture the missile control and deactivate the missiles, the "ouside" part is named SCG10EA.INI and the "inside" part is named SCG10EB.INI, so both are considered part of mission 10 by the game, not as mission 10 and 11 chained. (You can see the mission filename in the Options menu, right above the Briefing button, together with the game version.)
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Feb 10, 2019 15:14
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The commander stays quiet in order to reduce the amount of evidence for the eventual war crimes tribunal.
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Feb 10, 2019 15:19
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What tribunal? Either Stalin likes the cut of your jib or 
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Feb 10, 2019 15:21
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I like how Stalin casually strolls out of the room and declares his intention to boink the woman.
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Feb 10, 2019 15:52
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