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I always figured the game's weird time-mixing was part of the atmosphere (yes I know it was largely accidental due to recycling of C&C: TD artwork). Time is Out Of Joint after Einstein's little jaunt, and the world is plunged into a strange, dark and industrial take on WW2 where technology and the course of history have both gotten severely messed up.
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Jan 13, 2019 01:12
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Kibayasu posted:Actually I remember a probably little known RTT game called Joint Task Force that had something like that. If you did things that looked bad on TV your funding was cut and you couldn't replace any many units (just for that mission I think) but if you did things that looked good on TV you got more money (again, just for that mission). I remember a game like this that went full-on RTS, or at least the demo. I don't remember what it was actually called. It used journalists as resource collectors - the !GDI side had to embed them with frontline troops and ensure they saw action while !Nod (who were called GHOST I think) could try and bait the other side into causing collateral damage to hurt their income. It was a very interesting concept but the execution was rather iffy
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Jan 16, 2019 10:54
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Hunh. The Engineers got their one-hit building capture back in all the rest of the games. That's odd. Player outcry over the power of engineer rushes in TD, particularly in multiplayer. Later games would either have one-engineer capture back because it was fun, or have it only in single-player. I seem to recall RA2 let you set it in the oprions menu for multiplayer matches.
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Jan 17, 2019 13:24
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Armoured warfare is rough in the early Allied missions because of how outmatched the Red Alert Light Tank is against Soviet heavy armour. You have to rely heavily on rocket soldiers and medics, and get very good at microing your infantry to avoid them getting crushed. This makes the flame tower a deceptively powerful defence and makes this campaign quite hard for a new player. Allied mission 3 not having a briefing FMV brings up another point - Red Alert, for all its vast success, was intended by Westwood to be a between-projects moneyspinner. It was thrown together on a budget to bring in cash and keep the company running while they worked on Tiberian Sun (and oh boy will we have lots to say about TS's protracted development when we get there). That's why it uses a mildly-upgraded TD engine and recycles a great many TD graphics. The success of TD meant it had a solid marketing budget and a considerable amount of hype, and of course the gaming public lapped it up, but from Westwood's POV this game was a sleeper hit and that will be steadily more apparent as we get further into the campaigns and expansions.
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Jan 20, 2019 12:42
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As we'll see with a later unit, Red Alert tried to expand on the success of TD's engineers by giving the Allies a whole spectrum of infiltration units, and then created the attack dog to counter them. This creates cool and evocative single-player missions like the one we just saw. Sadly in any kind of MP situation all those units get gunned down in short order by anyone paying the slightest bit of attention.
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Jan 21, 2019 11:20
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BiggestOrangeTree posted:In that cutscene those are clearly gap generators at either side of the ship but they say it's the chronosphere, something doesn't add up. Giant tuning forks are versatile pieces of equipment and have a great deal of uses!
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Jan 26, 2019 11:37
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This is a lovely back-to-back sequence and such a surprise the first time you reach it. The original game's interior missions are excellently done (the expansions got rather carried away, but we'll get there when we get there), and the amazing new tileset and presence of medics went a long way to solving the problems with these five-guys-versus-the-entire-map mission types. Filling the command centre area with Soviet AP mines is also such a last-minute gently caress-you when the player inevitably panics and throws in an engineer rush.
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Jan 29, 2019 11:11
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UED Special Ops posted:Well, to be fair, it was only the control center for the nukes, I don't think that the actual warheads were stored in the area your troops run through. Although, thinking about it, where on Earth did all those Mammoth and Heavy Tanks come from if the area the mission takes place in is multiple stories underground? Funny fact - you come down the elevator in the centre of all four nuclear control terminals. Each terminal has an octagon shaped area near it with radiation warnings. And if you look at the original map and the layout of the Soviet base when the GPS launches, you'll see the four silos are laid out around the command centre in the same shape. I think the tunnels are meant to be the underground portion of the Soviet base your men and tanks just overrun on the last level. The control terminals are "under" each missile silo, or as close as the map designers could get them. If you continue with this pet theory of mine, the tank park is...right under where the war factory was!
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Jan 29, 2019 17:26
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Ah, the Thief. Preview material for Red Alert said the Thief stole technology rather than funds. I wonder if Westwood had trouble getting it to work. Regardless, it's clear they looked at the fun people had with Engineers in C&C:TD and decided to build on that. Red Alert was hardly alone in having dubiously-useful infiltration units. The 90s RTS boom saw dozens and dozens of variations on the "sneaky trooper that steals stuff" idea, usually requiring impossible-in-real-gameplay stuff like infiltrating a building and then sneaking back home again (you might get them into a base once but you sure as heck weren't getting them out, not against an AI or a human paying any attention). Dark Reign had the hilarious guys with holosuits who could disguise as trees, but that just meant you force-fired your artillery against the suspiciously moving shrubbery the moment you stopped laughing. Ironically it wasn't until RA's own sequel that anyone really got the hang of making them fun and useful.
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Feb 6, 2019 18:31
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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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nielsm posted:Maybe it's actually possible to do the grenade glitch with dogs too? Get Superdog leaping across half the map, homing in on the fleeing spy. This is in fact the case, and it's how people break this level. Once the dog leaps, the dog is invulnerable and will home in on its target like a jugular-seeking missile no matter where the target runs.
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Feb 15, 2019 10:43
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I'm wondering if the modern emulator is having the AI bug out or something. I've never seen it be anything less than ruthless in defending that northern base from paratrooper assault.
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Feb 26, 2019 21:25
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UED Special Ops posted:Odd how that the repair pad didn't work correctly though, I remember some similar happening one time way back when I played this mission. Might be the scripting of the truck follow AI messing with things. Weird. Given the way that base's infantry just sat there and refused to return fire after the barracks was lost, I wonder if the AI is set to switch off when its production structure is destroyed. That might explain the useless service depot, if a trigger fired to make the structures dormant before it was captured. And yes, that Mig-29 is a big contributor to Red Alert's weird time fuzziness. I wonder if Westwood started with their FMVs, did one of a MiG-29 destroying a clearly modern tank, and then grandfathered it in. The MiG unit itself doesn't look much like a MiG-29 in-game (although I suppose for the 90s the MiG-29 was the most easily-recognisable Russian jet aircraft to the target audience). I dimly recall a developer interview saying that at one very early pre-production stage Red Alert 1 was a straight-up World War 2 game, but they baulked at the thought of a playable FMV-laden Nazi campaign so went with the alternate Russians instead. Who knows, maybe that FMV was thrown together on a lark. RA1 has just as many unused FMVs as the original C&C, but shuffled them into trailers and spinoffs instead of hiding them on the discs.
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Mar 2, 2019 15:29
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:All anyone ever played online was custom gem-heavy flat 4v4 maps anyway Westwood's developers actually cited this tendency (I think in a PC Gamer UK or PC Review UK interview?) as the reason they shipped Tiberian Sun without a map editor. One of the MP bigwigs apparently encountered someone who liked to use a "special" custom map where his start point had a huge field of gems, and his opponents got a handful of ore each. He then concluded the playerbase couldn't be trusted with custom maps. It might have been a nice story to cover for resource shortages during TibSun's protracted development, but if it was true then this moment of petulance probably cost WW their dominance of the RTS genre when Starcraft rolled through.
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Mar 4, 2019 02:42
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Plek posted:That's a fair point, but then we'd expect to see superior soviet tech in TD like the tesla stuff, right? GDI is almost entirely allied tech. Well, sort of. Has any of the designers ever actually talked about this stuff or is it just a bunch of us fans trying to stitch their lore together? Maybe there was another war between the remnant Allies and US vs the Soviets after RA and before TD that was just never explored that was supposed to tie everything together. anilEhilated posted:Hell, wasn't that even confirmed by some ex-Westwood dev on forums somewhere? Long after Westwood went under, one of their devs posted on a Petroglyph forum about their original plans. It's hard to discuss them without C&C3 and RA2 spoilers, but the short version is that Westwood changed their mind a couple of times. Red Alert 1 was intended to be a prequel to TD but not very hard; Red Alert was a between-games moneyspinner intended to fund development of the game engine for Tiberian Sun. So RA1 just drops hints; the Allied campaign mentions GDI, and Kane acts ominously at people in the Soviet cutscenes. One of the early RA1 magazine previews suggested the tiberium meteor was going to impact during the game but this was either wishful thinking or dropped in pre-production. Then they did Red Alert 2, which was very different in tone to RA1, and dropped the idea of the two universes being linked. Then they had some ideas after C&C Renegade's development. Renegade 2 was cancelled but would have deliberately set out to weld the two timelines into one. Some concept render work exists that plays with the idea of Nod-controlled Soviet remnants and RA1-style structures in ruins. And then again during the development of Westwood's version of C&C3 (which never really saw the light of day before EA broke them up), there were plans to include a very explicit nod to both RA1 and RA2 in the first act of the GDI campaign, which would have confirmed C&C1 taking place after RA1 and that RA2 was an alternate timeline spinoff. That'll have to wait a looooooong time before it can be discussed without spoilers, and I will respect the no-linking policy and just ask people to Google it for themselves or PM me if they're desperate  To top all this off...a particular fan theory about RA2 being a sequel to an Allied victory and TD being a sequel to a Soviet victory got posted on a bunch of wikis as if it was fact, and gets repeated as same by a lot of the fanbase. Loxbourne fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Mar 10, 2019 |
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Mar 10, 2019 13:40
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Yeah that mission is strange and atmospheric and lovely.
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Mar 14, 2019 10:42
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Presumably that's to stop script collisions if the player activates both vehicles.
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Mar 14, 2019 12:48
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Well I suppose that explains why Stavros was so messed up later in the Allied campaign if he saw his homelands bombed flat in person. .. / .--- ..- ... - / .-- .- -. - / -.-- --- ..- / - --- / -.- -. --- .-- / - .... .- - / .. / ... . . / .-- .... .- - / -.-- --- ..- .----. .-. . / -.. --- .. -. --. / .... . .-. . .-.-.-
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Mar 17, 2019 18:46
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It's been a long time but if I remember rightly, on this map the nuclear materials trucks come out of a war factory in the Soviet base, i.e. they're a unit the AI is set up to build when a trigger fires. Then they drive for the edge of the map. The ones already in the base are probably placed at map start, so might be normal trucks that don't drop anything. Oh and the submarines belong to the orange team so the map can use a "destroy all units" victory condition without dooming the player to hunting down invisible units.
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Mar 24, 2019 10:56
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Ah yes, the overall gimmick of the Soviet campaign kicks off in the first mission. This was key to Counterstrike's mixed reception from the audience (critics loved it, gamers less so). The thing you have to realise is that all the stuff you are about to see was promised as part of the tech tree. To be fair to Westwood some of that might have been misinterpreted from early previews, but when the magazines say "nuclear submarines! Allied aircraft!" and then it turns out these are just one-mission gimmick units that might have been modded in by a rules.ini hack...well, players got restless.
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Mar 26, 2019 15:53
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Did the "I've got a present for ya!" clip play there at mission start? Nice callback if so.
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Mar 29, 2019 21:15
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I wonder if the older script had more time and characterisation for him, and perhaps Westwood felt he'd been given an unfair shake in the original. Still, above all other considerations Stavros has a unit ready-made with art and audio. He was presumably easy for map-makers to slot in.
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Mar 31, 2019 09:20
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Yeah this mission is what the outcry was centered on in the UK gaming press. Some of which ties into Westwood's press releases and reactions to Red Alert itself. Firstly, RA1's nukes in multiplayer are way, way below what they do in single-player. They're worse than the TD ion cannon (which can still be used to pick off structures). A Red Alert 1 multiplayer nuke can barely kill a basic power plant with a direct hit. (Interestingly enough in TD multiplayer the Nod nuke was similarly toned down - it would one-shot large structures but not a ConYard) Secondly, player outcry at the way the Soviets had the "best" tanks, strongest base defences, and almost all the air units. Yes, the balance is better than it looks, but people weren't bothering to test it. They saw the Soviets with mammoth tanks, tesla coils, and MiGs and screamed blue murder. So then Westwood announces Counterstrike. And Counterstrike will have new units! Tesla tanks! "Nuclear submarines" (oh har har), "plutonium bomb" upgraded nukes (I think this referred to the nuclear trucks in the Siberia missions)...and "Allied superjets". Fans were ecstatic. At last, Allied air units! Then Counterstrike was released and people saw the reality, and oh were there some angry letters to the editor in UK gaming magazines for months. Aftermath would have its own take on all this stuff, and go some way to plugging the holes, but we can discuss that when we get to it.
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Mar 31, 2019 23:06
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Ahhh, Paradox Equation. Westwood looking at their fans' love of rules.ini tweaks and basing an entire mission around it, with the idea "what if all these tweaks weren't done at your command". You get a warm feeling of recognition playing it, like the tower defense map in Frozen Throne.
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Apr 6, 2019 15:36
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The reason for the trigger weirdness is that nests are not buildings. They are map doodads (that term wouldn't have existed back then, it originated in the Starcraft level editor, but everyone knows what I mean). Ant spawns are entirely accomplished with map triggers on timers. Presumably Westwood couldn't get the spawn triggers to turn off after a nest was gassed, so they rigged up a kill zone instead. (Also the combined tech tree and unit colour seems pretty clearly intended to recreate GDI from the previous game).
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Apr 13, 2019 11:22
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That "lights out" effect is worthy of mention. Y'see, one criticism leveled at the original C&C by reviewers and fans alike was that once a base was scouted, it was permanently scouted and open to attack and superweapon deployment. This was in contrast to the Warcraft titles (and the flood of C&C clones now streaming out onto the market, mostly to be forgotten), where you had fog of war that grew back if it wasn't directly in a unit's line of sight. Westwood weren't terribly keen on that (and they'd go on the record about it in previews for their next game), and their approach was to weaponise this with the Gap Generator units, turning it into a specific faction advantage. But to cater to their fans they did provide a "shroud regrows" option for Red Alert multiplayer games. Setting it makes the fog of war steadily grow back.This is the only time it's ever used in single-player, and you can instantly see why.
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Apr 14, 2019 21:03
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The Thief is actually a weirdly high tech level unit (that's why he appears so late in the campaign). No idea why. Aftermath's new units were, of course, mostly the actual ones we were promised with Counterstrike - but they are well-integrated into the tech tree and are all generally useful. The Allies get a big jump in power with the Mechanic enabling them to have a perpetually healthy army in the field, the demo truck is useful to both sides, and we'll come to the Soviet units in time but they generally fill needed roles. The Chronotank is an excellent raider and we'll see it has devastating armament but suffers, like all Allied units that aren't the medium tank, from dying rapidly to tesla coil blasts. Aftermath was another moneyspinner for Westwood as Tiberian Sun's development dragged on and on; critics were lukewarm. TS and Starcraft were both on the horizon, and Aftermath felt like an apology for Counterstrike's half-assed rules.ini editing. The gamesplaying public ignored such naysayers and lapped the expansion up; Red Alert was still going strong firmly into 1997 and Westwood were riding high on their success. EDIT: It occurs to me that the demo truck nuke we saw was considerably more powerful than the multiplayer nuke. I wonder if the MP nuclear nerf hits them too? If so their main use in MP would pretty much be charging defence towers, since the RA1 MP nuke can't even kill a power plant.
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Apr 20, 2019 11:53
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ZenVulgarity posted:I don't remember any of these missions for some reason. In the UK at least, Counterstrike got loads of coverage - reviews, guides, tips pages etc. Aftermath got a bare fraction.
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Apr 22, 2019 00:56
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Fangz posted:I find it amusing that the Soviets still build the Berlin wall in this timeline. Yeeeeah it kinda gives the impression of some people who have a list of "Soviet" things but no real idea of what makes them Russian.
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Apr 24, 2019 20:20
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The M.A.D. tank is hilarious. Incredibly situational and utterly useless 90% of the time...but hilarious. The damage it does is percentage-based, so three of them at once will wipe out a base if you can get them into position and guard them during their countdown (they also make this comedy "sproing" noise as they detonate). They do actually have a radius for the effect, that map was just designed to have them detonate in the centre of it and thereby damage both bases. This video also demonstrated one of the big problems with the Chronotank. You can't teleport them in groups! You have to manually trigger the chronoshift on each individual tank, meaning they arrive piecemeal. They'd be a bit more viable for surprise assaults, rather than just raids, if you could ensure they all showed up at the same time. (I always have a soft spot for the Chronotank - the UK PC Gamer's review of Aftermath included a bitter screed about Allied balance and said the "much-vaunted Chronotank is just tesla-fried along with all the rest the moment it pokes its snout into the enemy base", which is frustratingly untrue. They ARE useful units if you don't put them in the front line).
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May 4, 2019 10:28
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As that video showed, shock troopers are drat fragile and prone to killing themselves. They pack a mean anti-tank and anti-structure punch, though.
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May 8, 2019 10:35
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The Aftermath versions of The People's Heroes are sadly heavily nerfed whenever they're controllable. Volkov loses his anti-tank gun and armour and Chitzoi's HP are greatly downgraded (he probably loses armour as well). This is clearly making them vaguely usable in more serious missions (their Counterstrike appearance seems to be more a sort-of comedy one-off than anything else), but it is a bit of a shame. I always wondered how on Earth Volkov and Chitzoi came about. Just someone feeling silly that day in Westwood and having a free mission slot in the expansion, I guess.
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May 10, 2019 10:06
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Red Alert actually has an undocumented waypoint-based movement mode, too (hold Q when giving multiple move orders in succession).
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May 11, 2019 15:46
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Just tested dogs and mammoth tanks in Top O' The World. No issue noted. Presumably he was hoping for the mammoth tank to copy the dog's movement move and begin gaily leaping o'er cliffs and streams.
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May 11, 2019 16:36
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A very quick mission but I am sorry to inform you that yes, that IS the Aftermath version of Volkov.
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May 13, 2019 20:29
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Putting this mission at the very end implies the canonical ending for the Soviet commander in Red Alert 1 is either dying or fleeing after being targeted by the Elite Guard. Sad, but very Stalinist-era USSR.
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May 18, 2019 09:04
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That Tanya FMV using in-game sound effects was a nice touch. It suggests that's just what the Red Alert universe sounds like.
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May 25, 2019 11:05
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