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Slaan posted:Second best after Generals, but a very very close second Generals has...other issues pertaining to the time and audience to which it was released...which Red Alert 2 is thankfully innocent of. But yes here we are, the titan of the franchise. Red Alert 2 has a big toolbox, a solid franchise name with a proud history, and Westwood at their peak with a big-rear end cutscene budget. By now they had invested in a full in-house film studio just to film cutscenes. They knew what they had, and they played their hand superbly. If you didn't spot it in the opening post, go back and watch the video of the installation sequence again. The installation sequence. Heh heh "Oath of loyalty required to proceed". That gets me every time.
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Apr 1, 2020 22:07
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Groetgaffel posted:It is my absolute favourite intro though. It sets the stage so very well, and Hell March 2 starting up as the shadow falls over the statue of liberty is just It's always amazing to me that Westwood sat down, thought "how can we make a sequel to our dark, weird, time-travel alt-WW2 game? What bits shall we keep as the basis for RA2?" ...then someone stood up and said "The ridiculous B-movie atmosphere of the secret giant ant missions." And it worked.
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Apr 2, 2020 10:59
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Mokinokaro posted:One of the best things in RA2 is the greater focus on naval action. Deliberately, by all accounts. During the pre-release hype cycle for Tiberian Sun several interviewers asked Westwood why they'd switched from naval units to GDI hovercraft. They said it didn't fit the tone of the Tiberium setting and the devs felt large bodies of water just became chores to cross.
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Apr 3, 2020 10:37
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For what it's worth, garrisoning structures was supposed to be in Tiberian Sun but the devs ran out of time. The RA2 devs finished the game logic and got it working. I've always been very thankful the buildings auto-evacuate when they get into the red. It's a small QOL improvement to prevent a player from losing dozens of troops before they can scroll the screen over to an "under attack" message.
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Apr 3, 2020 10:42
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I don't believe an exact statement of the date ever appears in-game. I've seen RA2 placed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. As ever there's a bit more fluff in the PRIMA strategy guide, but I don't think anyone gives a formal date. You can just guess by the set dressing.
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Apr 7, 2020 12:04
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Mordja posted:I think RA2 was the point where Westwood finally decided that the two universes weren't connected after all. Former Westwood devs at Petroglyph did give a final answer to this. The short answer is yes, they did decide the two were not connected. They had intended to play with this a little, and we'll discuss just how in about three more games' time.
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Apr 7, 2020 17:42
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The problem with the Harrier is that it's tied to the RA2 control scheme, which itself is a hangover from the methods used to control ORCAs/Apaches all the way back to C&C1. The short version is that if you bind two of them to a hotkey you can reliably kill two Rhinos in a pass, and good MP players could reliably attack and defend that way (the Harrier missile has limited homing once launched but a Rhino can move fast enough to evade it when micromanaged by a human player). Yes the best way to use Harriers is in groups of eight or more for decapitation strikes, until better ways come along to use that style of anti-tank air unit in later years.
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Apr 12, 2020 02:32
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nielsm posted:It's odd how Allies and Soviet swapped AA strategy since RA1, where Allies used flak cannons and Soviet used SAM sites. All part of the 70s/80s tone. Allied AA batteries are explicitly Patriot missile systems, whereas the Soviets have moved from WW2 Stalinist walls of iron to the Cold War "Asiatic hordes" tropes - gas-masked conscript soldiers being the most obvious example we've seen so far. EDIT: Later, when we've seen more of both sides' air units, the specific reasons their AA weapons work that way will become more apparent.
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Apr 12, 2020 15:39
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Hm. Dunno if it's a modern sourceport thing, but I recall the missile actually launching, with nuclear attack sirens and everything before it cuts to the FMV.
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Apr 16, 2020 12:54
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Another victory for the Polish Covert Stealth Bovine Brigade! Cows are something of a running gag in this game. Cythereal posted:How did the Soviets move their army to North America with no one suspecting a thing, you ask? Of all things, the Prima Strategy Guide explained this - the Soviets are supposed to have staged a coup in an unspecified client state in Latin America and shipped their army to Mexico under cover of putting down the uprising.
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Apr 23, 2020 09:20
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It's worth noting that's a specific trigger in the mission to do that. In-game normally, a nuclear missile does not do enough damage to destroy a nuclear missile silo. It'll handily flatten (almost) everything else though. RA2's superweapons are the most powerful in any C&C game up to that point.
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Apr 27, 2020 10:06
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PurpleXVI posted:How many combo'd Prism Towers do you need to get the same damage as a single Tesla Coil? Two. A single tesla coil will two-shot a Grizzy, but two prism towers can one-shot Rhinos. I also remember a cash crate appearing south of the Pentagon if you repaired it. Another quirk of the C&Cnet version?
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Apr 30, 2020 01:32
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Mirage tanks are great but you tend to have an order for 20 Grizzlies queued up by the time they become available.
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May 29, 2020 13:53
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And now we have the other half of the unstoppable combo - the Chronosphere and prism tanks. Simply drop nine (or less if you're feeling cocky) prism tanks in the heart of an opponent's base and you can gut all production structures in three shots. This was considered unbeatable online and fear/anger over it drove pretty much every mod balance decision since, for good or ill.
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Jun 3, 2020 14:29
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nielsm posted:I see two defenses against it. The first is redundancy, if you're done for with a single pinpoint attack then you were weak from the start. The second is just not letting it happen. (I assume you have enough firepower inside your base to neuter those You have less time than you'd think from the chronosphere going off - prism tanks en masse will destroy even construction yards in very short order, and of course you drop them right outside the target's conyard. So in the vanilla game at least the conyard is an auto-loss. The attacker then targets your war factory (the only way to build MCVs and now irreplaceable unless you have a second conyard somewhere) and it's a race to see who fires first. Prism tank shots go over walls so it is entirely a damage race between your units and defences, and the attacker's prism tanks. I don't know the exact number of prism tanks that need to survive to take that second shot, but back in the day plenty of people did. Like all horrible cheese tactics it doesn't have to have a 100% success rate (like the Banshee rushes in TibSun before them, or Protoss cannon rushing in Starcraft 1/2), just be easy to execute, and not require much perceived skill to produce spectacular results. You very rarely saw Soviet players back in the day and if you asked why, you'd get rants about fukkin prism cheese. I'll pick this up later, when we can discuss the things that are obvious reactions to the outcry against chrono prism drops.
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Jun 3, 2020 22:30
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That amphibious note in the unit description is a good catch. I recall a while ago there was talk of a mod spotlight after Red Alert 2. We can discuss it more there, but this is a heavily redressed Tiberian Sun engine and it does have most (but not all) of that game's weird quirks and effects under the hood. I think the only things it doesn't have are the dynamic terrain deformation and trains.
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Jul 8, 2020 23:38
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V. Illych L. posted:i like the sea scorpion for the times where you can figure out the AI's staging area for aerial assaults, pretty much This is also why I DO buy the theory that AA weapons cannot garrison in buildings for balance reasons. It would make urban maps complete no-go zones for air units (and if you play that mod being mentioned, you'll see they got around this by making garrisoned AA units lose their AA capability).
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Jul 22, 2020 11:14
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Crazy Ivan's bombs just aren't powerful enough. They aren't one-hit-kills on structures like Allied SEALS' C4 charges, they don't do enough damage to make it worth rigging a vehicle and sending it at the enemy, and the AI never returns damaged vehicles home so there's no point to rigging enemy units either. Pretty much all Ivan can do is disrupt infantry waves since his bomb can at least kill basic troops. Something has changed with the tower, yes. When you first sight the tower, a little video in the radar screen plays of a tesla trooper explaining they will need to get close to it to charge the structure. Then it starts zapping everything, and the mission doesn't end until you destroy everything within range of it, and the range specifically extends all the way out to the Arc de Triomphe, which has a special collapsing animation. Not sure if the mission broke because you approached from the wrong direction, or what. Also this mission is more than a tad ironic given Red Alert 2 was released right before 9/11 and the US will spend the next decade sneering at the French military.
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Jul 29, 2020 02:12
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anilEhilated posted:I'm kinda weirded out by the sense of scale in this game, and it's not just where units are involved (where it is understandable) - the World Trade Center had around 400 meters and doesn't fit on the map, the Eiffel Tower is 3/4 that and you can comfortably see it whole with place to spare, not to mention their width. The WTC was clearly done that way to avoid having large areas of the map visually blocked by the towers. Notice how there's nothing behind them. The Crazy Ivan concept is not bad. There are mods that rescue the unit by making it tough enough to stand on the front line and fast enough to run into a battle, rig a few bombs, and hopefully run out again. That turns Ivan into a suitably annoying harassment and distraction unit. The unit as he is now is definitely a holdover from RA2's even wackier phases in development. There's concept art up online for an even sillier game with even crazier units than what we already have.
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Jul 29, 2020 10:59
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anilEhilated posted:Russia being GDI in TD. This bit about C&C1 coming from a Soviet victory in RA1 was made up by fans on the C&C wiki. I think it originally came from someone writing up the C&C setting as a unified timeline for a forum that discussed alternate universes. But Westwood certainly didn't come up with it. RA2 pretty much ignores any link by dropping Kane altogether, and RA1 was from a freewheeling era with a much more relaxed attitude to continuity.
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Aug 5, 2020 10:33
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Mokinokaro posted:What really makes the Soviet cutscenes more fun over the allies is that everyone is just chowing down on the scenery as opposed to only the President doing it in the Allies. I am saddened you have so swiftly forgotten General Carville.
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Aug 12, 2020 11:56
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The Chronosphere charges quite quickly, so you're likely to have it ready before the units you want to drop with it. So why not gently caress about with it? Miner dumping was an old classic.
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Aug 20, 2020 18:48
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Mokinokaro posted:The campaigns have a LOT of ground only missions. Ironically that is a side-effect of the setting. The game needs to show iconic US landmarks (and blow them up), and the new engine tech it plays with is all related to urban areas.
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Sep 3, 2020 15:13
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Radio Free Kobold posted:Playing the whole New York intro from the Soviet side would've been fantastic, like that one Chicago(?) mission on steroids. Fight your way past the coastal defenses (Grand Cannons, Aegis cruisers, etc.) using a limited number of zeppelins and naval units, then land some tanks and paradrop a bunch of conscripts to force a beachhead, get your MCV and set up shop, then push up the map to destroy the Statue of Liberty with a heavy focus on combined land/naval actions. Something like this maybe? There is a mod that does this - so precisely that I wondered at first if you were deliberately referring to it. And I wish, I wish so much, it had continued to be as awesome as its first missions.
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Sep 3, 2020 17:33
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Radio Free Kobold posted:What? There is? How, where, what name? I'll PM it, just to be on the safe side with spoilers.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:44
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This map is to the south of the Kremlin whereas the Allied final mission was to the north. Do we have a screenshot of the full map to compare the two? We saw the Washington DC map reused with bases in roughly the same area, so it would be interesting to see if the devs used the same terrain for this one too.
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Sep 11, 2020 13:54
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The Mental Omega mod is killed by its team's dubious politics. They had a cringetastic "as the Americans, defend the Mexican border against parties of troops led across the border by illegal immigrant spies" mission that was finally excised in the 3.3 update. The Allied campaign is grimdark bollocks and it's clear the designers would really rather have dropped the faction entirely in favour of their shiny new super-powerful Mary Sues faction they added in. There's some lovely level design and unit concepts in Mental Omega but every time I play the campaign, I find myself needing a bath afterwards to get the ickiness off. RA2 and YR work because they are goofy and so over the top you just start laughing. Mental Omega tries to be gritty and serious and manages to be firmly fascist in the bargain. Also it removes the Apocalypse Tank from the Soviet arsenal for not being serious enough. That should tell you all you need to know.
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Sep 24, 2020 11:27
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Hm, another missing scripted sequence. I'm sure I remember this mission opening with some Harriers making another run on Alcatraz Island during the opening camera pan. Did a late patch remove a bunch of scripting for some reason? Or is my memory playing tricks on me?
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Sep 25, 2020 10:04
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Poil posted:Patching out the voices was such a dick move. Sounds like a legal dispute, sadly. The grinder is an "anti-repair bay". Since Yuri as a faction is expected to mind-control lots of other units, they serve as a way to turn those units into cash and free up your Yuri Clones again.
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Sep 30, 2020 10:19
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Mokinokaro posted:The slave miner (I don't think it's a spoiler to give its proper name) is such a neat concept and must've been a coding nightmare on this engine since nothing else really functions the way it does. It was. Westwood's devs used to post on their forums back in the day about how hard it was to get working, particularly the slaves being freed by whoever destroyed the miner. It was almost cut.
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Sep 30, 2020 23:00
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The Battle Fortress's low HP means it needs to kill anything that looks at it, which is why it pairs so well with the Chrono Legionnaire. The big thing it does is give Allied high-damage-low-HP infantry some protection from the game's plethora of new instant-kill units. My go-to was always 4 Chronos and a Navy SEAL. Very expensive but two or three of them mixed in with a tank wave act as a huge force multiplier, especially if you go for big targets like Apocalypse tanks first. Oh and the Executive Order 9066 thing is just someone being edgy. It's forgotten now but Red Alert 2 had some cringeworthy advertising - the one that sticks in my mind is the website having a "Casualties" counter that constantly went up as you explored it. Yuri's Revenge was actually held back from release by several months after 9/11 while EA apparently made Westwood take out a bunch of stuff; I've always wondered just what they cut.
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Oct 3, 2020 08:33
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Allied Snipers caused no end of nerdrage about "rendering Yuri unusuable" in multiplayer. A few of them in IFVs can shut down a Yuri player's economy completely. You used to see games ban them before the Grand Cannon became the cheese unit du jour. They are certainly very very effective against Yuri Clones, and both outrange the Virus and fire at a faster rate. I always thought the Virus was specifically intended for use against entrenched GI sandbag positions or conscript waves. Yuri's defences are ironically vulnerable to infantry waves, and YR seems generally designed to encourage more infantry use. These missing scripted triggers are really weird. It's looking like the final YR patch triggered the removal of a whole load of scripted sequences across both original and YR campaigns. That's kinda sad, since the game is clearly diminished for it.
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Oct 7, 2020 14:12
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The robot tank has its uses. You can crank them out quickly and their gun has the same anti-tank bonuses as the tank destroyer. The hover movement also lets them pop up in unexpected directions. They won't win you a battle on their own but they can turn a flank or conduct a raid. Now, the force shield...that's one of the things I was talking about earlier when I said there were reactions to player outcry over prism tank chrono-drops. It's basically an instant "oh crap" button with a nasty drawback. It can keep a conyard alive when the prism tanks materialise next to it, or keep a war factory alive through a superweapon strike. The drawback of losing base power for a full minute afterwards is pretty severe though. An Allied player in particular will reach immediately for their aircraft.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:55
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That 50 health (and a similar +50 attack) is one of those small but highly significant upgrades. Three Black Eagles will do the work of four Harriers, and you'll get them all back much more often. You can use the Harrier to harass enemy vehicles and pick off structures; a squadron of Eagles will reliably get through all but the heaviest of AA to kill important base structure. Two full squads is potentially a game-ender.
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Oct 28, 2020 00:14
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Technically I don't think Black Eagles are replacements, but there might be one other that fits the bill from what I think you mean. They're replacements in the sense that Korean players cannot build Harriers, they just have a straight-up better plane. Yuri is strong in multiplayer unless you had Allied GB in the mix to shut him down with Snipers. By the time I stopped paying attention, the meta was Allied France (Grand cannon rushes) -> Allied GB -> Yuri -> All other Allies -> Iraq -> All other Soviets.
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Oct 28, 2020 14:38
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We're seeing Yuri's no-joke heavy hitters now. The Allies have an easier time with the Mastermind because they can drop Harriers on it (Black Eagles eat it for breakfast). They still make for a nasty "oh sheeeet!" unit when they loom out of the fog of war at you. The saucer is deceptively weak. It's no Kirov, but that laser packs a punch and 3-5 saucers will do a lot of damage to a base before they die (and then, like the Kirov, they'll fall onto whatever's under them). One nice touch - Carville is using his old headquarters from all the way back in Red Alert 1 (the Retaliation FMVs on the Playstation). Westwood even got the same actors back to play his aides at their workstations!
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Nov 4, 2020 11:03
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Cythereal posted:Mind control just seems like an awful gimmick to base a faction around, full stop. Westwood did a surprisingly decent job of it. If Jobbo videos a skirmish using Yuri, you'll see the whole faction fits together quite well around the idea of taking and using other people's stuff in interesting ways. Yuri doesn't just nick people's tanks and turn them around, and only seeing the faction when playing against it in the campaign sells it short a little. Now balance was hard. The degenerate online strategy actually ended up being Grand Cannon rushes, but Boomers and Discs always provoked screams of cheese online.
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Nov 4, 2020 17:43
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FoolyCharged posted:I think they more meant that yuri is not fun to play against because your stuff getting yoinked all the time is more frustrating than having it go boom. Yeah, as we'll see the Soviet options for dealing with Yuri are painfully limited. The Soviets get a bit shafted in YR.
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Nov 5, 2020 00:13
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The Allied campaign falters a little (I suspect it's where any cuts were made), but manages a decent finish. Yuri's AI is a bit more "player-esque" in terms of tricks like building gun turrets right next to captured buildings. He gives you a tough fight even on normal. The Allies have an easy solution to the Soviet base having no access to the water - just Chrono across batches of units left behind! I used it as a stash for powerplants, since the Yuri AI tends to aim the Dominator at clusters of units rather than structures (despite the structure damage really being the power of a Dominator; few players leave nine units in a nice 3x3 square with a Dominator out and ticking). Also, Eva and Tanya messing with the timeline just to get you on a date is hilarious.
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Nov 11, 2020 13:08
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I think WW themselves went on the record to say superweapons are in the game to crack unbreakable defence lines in multiplayer. It also fits the B-movie tone. The setting fiction needs nukes to make the fantasy Soviet Union hit all their cliches, and then the Allies and Yuri need one for game balance. Red Alert 2 has unusually strong superweapons for the RTS genre, so the temptation is always there to aim them straight at the enemy base. They're not the strongest superweapons in the series as a whole, but it is easy to fall into a frustrating game design fail-state where your opponent uses them to kill your war factory precisely every five minutes. It's worth noting C&C1 deliberately toned down the nuke in MP for this reason - smashing an enemy base with one shot in a SP setpiece can be fun! Less so to have your base smashed by your opponent in a MP match. More can be said on this further down the timeline, when we will encounter superweapons that are straight-up game enders.
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Nov 11, 2020 17:43
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