4 ms·

I actually own the remasters, did anyone else notice these games are absurdly hard. When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Re

by 41209 5y ago

I actually own the remasters, did anyone else notice these games are absurdly hard. When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Red alert. The sequels are pretty easy though

dragontamer 5y ago
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...) ------- 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. -------- 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.
- NohatCoder 5y ago
  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.
- Havoc 5y ago
  >I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU I don't think they AI's spending was linked to it particularly directly though. Felt more like a simple counter "build 1 tank per minute" type deal
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    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.
    - King-Aaron 5y ago
      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.
traspler 5y ago
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.
orhmeh09 5y ago
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.
- handrous 5y ago
  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.
PeterisP 5y ago
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.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  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. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-10-the-command-and-conquer-remastered-developers-left-in-a-25-year-old-exploit-so-players-still-had-a-fighting-chance https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-10-the-command-an... > 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. --------- 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)
tasogare 5y ago
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.

by 41209 5y ago

dragontamer 5y ago

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...) ------- 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. -------- 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.

NohatCoder 5y ago
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.
Havoc 5y ago
>I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU I don't think they AI's spending was linked to it particularly directly though. Felt more like a simple counter "build 1 tank per minute" type deal
- dragontamer 5y ago
  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.
  - King-Aaron 5y ago
    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.

traspler 5y ago

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.

orhmeh09 5y ago

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.

handrous 5y ago
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.

PeterisP 5y ago

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.

dragontamer 5y ago
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. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-10-the-command-and-conquer-remastered-developers-left-in-a-25-year-old-exploit-so-players-still-had-a-fighting-chance https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-10-the-command-an... > 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. --------- 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)

tasogare 5y ago

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.