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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 a

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)

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)