[HN Gopher] OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, R... ___________________________________________________________________ OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era Author : azalemeth Score : 311 points Date : 2021-09-13 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.openra.net) (TXT) w3m dump (www.openra.net) | mothsonasloth wrote: | Unfortunately owning the Remaster and playing OpenRA, they are | two very divergent projects that cannot be merged. | | OpenRA is a rewrite whilst Remastered was a rework on the | original code. | | I would have loved some of the OpenRA features to make it into | the Remaster, and likewise the updated assets (sound, music and | textures) into the OpenRA game | hjek wrote: | OpenRA is currently my favourite free/libre computer game. | They've done a fabulous job at keeping the feeling of the | original game while updating things like cross-platform support, | screen resolution and network play and added build queues (and | waypoints, I believe) that was present in later C&C games. | They've also tweaked the game play, making thieves able to hijack | vehicles and cloak (They are probably the most fun unit to micro | around) and radar jammers able to deflect / confuse missiles, and | added per-country special units like in RA2 (The French invisible | phase transport is wild), and changed the tech tree so medium / | heavy tanks require service depot. | | I remember in the original Red Alert, if you ordered an airplane | to fly into the shroud, it'd just disappear into the darkness, | but in OpenRA you can actually use them for scouting (which | totally makes sense). OpenRA also has fog-of-war which suddenly | makes planes and helicopters key units for ground support. | | I don't like war. The arms trade should be abolished. We should | help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders rather than | build walls or drop bombs on them. Anyone working with defense in | any capacity, like militarizing borders with drones or whatever, | should immediately quit or turn whistle blower. Still, I find | this war game incredibly enjoyable. Applause to the hackers. | azalemeth wrote: | I played a round or four with my lab last night. Cross platform | play, free hosting, good matchmaking and an excellent | experience. The computers on equal number and an equal footing | absolutely annihilated us. We were easily able to titrate the | difficulty to make it fun. Honestly, a great game and very | enjoyable (and I won the 6-player death match at the end with a | total Deus ex Machina moment made possible by the fog of war, | much to everyone's suprise, including mine). | | One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to | Wesnoth. | | I second your comments about war. | hjek wrote: | > One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly | second to Wesnoth. | | Yea, Wesnoth has a lot of what made the earlier Heroes of | Might and Magic games great. I like how many open source | games are cool with sticking to 2D, making them accessible | for older devices. Wesnoth graphics are first class mix of | hand drawn and pixel art. (They could do with a few more unit | animations though.) | | > I second your comments about war. | | There shouldn't be any contradiction in being okay with pixel | people being blown up but not real ones, even though | sometimes it feels like there is. I played OpenTTD and even | though the graphics were awesome, I got a bit sad from | clearing trees just to build roads for hordes of lorries to | transport coal and oil and cattle to the slaughterhouse for | no obvious "win" in the end (except money). | Arrath wrote: | Did OpenRA and/or the Remaster ever fix the infinite-range | grenadier bug? | veidelis wrote: | Most definitely it's fixed in OpenRA. I have not heard good | comments about remaster other than graphics due to them not | addressing mechanics/gameplay issues such as balance. | hyperstar wrote: | Would be nice to have the original discs with videos &c. | azalemeth wrote: | You can legally download them for free at | https://archive.org/details/Red_Alert-Cutscenes, and then | install them into open-ra. | TuringNYC wrote: | It seems you need the original game CDs to get the music on | OpenRA. Incidentally, I have both the original 3 1/2" disk and | the remastered CDs from the early 2000s -- but no computers | with CDs or floppy drives. I'm willing to even purchase the | music a third time, but seems OpenRA wants a CD -- has anyone | gotten around this? | neuronexmachina wrote: | Does it play the music via Redbook audio? I wonder if you | could "burn" mp3s to a virtual audio CD and then mount it. | fivestarman wrote: | I just installed openRA and it says you can use an | installation or cd. Maybe you could find an installation | online and use your unlock key? | rnoorda wrote: | I spent hours playing Red Alert, and loved C&C as well. Something | about the absolute craziness made it so much fun. Then RA2 amped | it up even more, being able to train giant squid and teleporting | infantry that erase units from the timeline. | giantrobot wrote: | Here's a nice list of open source remakes of commercial game | engines in the spirit of OpenRA: https://github.com/radek- | sprta/awesome-game-remakes | | Note a lot of these like OpenRA are reimplementations of the game | engines but want the original game media. A good deal work with | GoG or Steam releases of the old games while some will want | original media. For ones that want original media a lot of old | game ISOs can be found on the Internet Archive. | handrous wrote: | OpenMW (for TESIII:Morrowind) is _amazing_. Strictly an | improvement on the original. Far more stable--I finished the | main campaign and several major side quest trees with a bunch | of mods active and experienced _zero_ crashes, which is unheard | of with the original engine--and somewhat better-looking. Runs | just about everywhere. It 's great. | MomoXenosaga wrote: | Dune 2000 is so underrated, I endorse this game for any Dune fan! | jandrese wrote: | On the flipside it is one of the most annoying to play. You | can't mass select units and also units won't auto-engage when | attacked. So of you have some tanks guarding a harvester and | something with longer range starts plinking them they'll just | sit there until they get destroyed. And of course moving those | tanks up to engage is maximum micromanagement. | | It works ok on smaller scales, but the bigger maps are really | annoying to play, especially when you're being harassed by | Sardaukar troops. | noneeeed wrote: | I loved Dune 2000 when I was a teenager, but I remember never | finishing it. The last couple of maps were just too hard for | me to beat for all the reasons you listed. I think my sister | managed it but it took several goes. | ido wrote: | Are you sure you're talking about Dune 2000 and not the | original Dune 2? IIRC Dune 2000 uses a c&c-like interface. | jandrese wrote: | I think you are right. It was called Dune 2. Came on a | small number of floppy disks. IIRC it was the first title | that Westwood developed, and definitely one of the first | RTS games. | wellthisisgreat wrote: | The 3D Dune strategy was also great, for a Dune fan at least. | Not sure if it stands the test of time, but it seemed extremely | loyal to the book and enjoyable | vyrotek wrote: | I love the C&C series. Really enjoyed playing through the | remaster recently. Way more difficult than I remembered. | | But what I really want is a remaster of Red Alert 2! | pixel_tracing wrote: | This!!! I love the new memes by Scorched Earths YouTube | channel. RA2 was my most favorite game back in the day | jploh wrote: | I remember seeing a JS/HTML5/browser version a couple years back. | How feasible is it to port this to WASM now? | [deleted] | postalrat wrote: | I'm sure the major hurdle is how do you get the required | artwork to the client without violating copyright. | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | One thing i remember best about the original C&C is a _gorgeous_ | installer [1]! Being one of the first games that came on CD, I | thought it is the standard of the things to come. | | Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came | with a boring windows installer. | | [1]: https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc | Arrath wrote: | Red Alert 2's was pretty great, though not to the same level as | C&C's. | | When it started it blasted out at full volume, "WARNING! | Military Software Detected!" which, at one friend's house, | caused his mom to yell up the stairs at us "WHAT ARE YOU BOYS | DOING???" | | Edit: hah, beaten. | sleavey wrote: | Wow, there's a blast from the past. I think the full phrase | was "WARNING! Military software detected. Top secret | clearance required." | Arrath wrote: | You're right, I was wracking my brain trying to remember | the full phrase but just couldn't. | merb wrote: | not very epilepsie friendly | imwillofficial wrote: | How so? | midasuni wrote: | As a hormonal teenager I was far more interested in Tanya. The | file copying process was not the type of install I was | interested in. | rastafang wrote: | the installer... that is what caught your attention? | Lammy wrote: | RA2's was pretty fun | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjPls9YGcI | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | Never saw that one, RA1 left me disappointed, so i never | checked next installments. | | Looks better than average installer, but still, but quite as | great as in C&C1 ) | endgame wrote: | Every other game _except C&C remastered_: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDt_Q1risk | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nupLAa68rX0 | | While they were made by a community member, kudos to EA for | shipping them. Really put a bow on the whole thing. | gfunk911 wrote: | Yes! As a kid, I specifically remember thinking that even the | installer was cool. | rnoorda wrote: | I loved the C&C/RA computer aesthetic. That's how I always | imagined the future of UI. The modern digital experience is | fine, but I sometimes wish we had more rotating graphics and | phosphor green text. | ww520 wrote: | Ah, CC and Red Alert, the joy of LAN party. We played so many | hours on company's dime on the office network. The controller | from finance was actually a pretty good player. One day he | brought his teenage son to the office to play with us, and that's | the time I introduced the uneven pincer movement to his awareness | with a crushing defeat. Good time. | Ericson2314 wrote: | Also check out https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla- | Conquer which is a modernization of the original code (!), rather | than a rewrite with liberties. | hjek wrote: | How's the network code? | Ericson2314 wrote: | I'm not sure, I haven't had the time I wanted to catch up | like I used to in the binary patching days. | wyuenho wrote: | Ohhhh the glorious days of dialing to your friend's PC directly | for a match after school! | spookthesunset wrote: | So many hours spent playing C&C over our local network at home! | pytlicek wrote: | The same here. I remember very much the hours spent playing | this game. Actually, I also still play OpenRA here and there. | akamia wrote: | When I was a kid I shared the second Red Alert CD with my | friend. We used the Modem multiplayer option to dial each other | directly to play 1:1. | | So many great memories. | boboche wrote: | Hell march metal song and game play of Red alert 1 was the first | time I looked at a PC and felt My beloved Amiga was growing old. | Good and bad memories wrapped in an awesome game! | lolski wrote: | hell march is awesome | hyperstar wrote: | Is there a bug in Chernobyl? We weren't able to capture the | missile silos with engineers. | imwillofficial wrote: | I loved the original C&C so much. C&C rivals was a surprisingly | interesting game, it has none of the fun of the originals. | josefresco wrote: | I play this 3-4 times a week. It's like therapy for my brain. | Simple, hypnotic, perfect. | | Tiberian Dawn, Skirmish 1v1, Me GDI against the CPU is my jam. | lolski wrote: | I love the migs and missile submarines | bloopernova wrote: | Can someone please give me a billion dollars, so I can fund a | modern remake of Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire? | | Still one of my all-time favourite games. I really enjoyed the | unit design and character of the game. | Thev00d00 wrote: | Civilization: Beyond Earth was fun | ido wrote: | You don't need a billion $ to remake Alpha Centauri as long as | you don't want AAA visuals. I would wager an experienced team | of 8-10 people can do it in 2 years (so ~$2m assuming $100k | average salary cost per person year). | BugsJustFindMe wrote: | Are fog of war, veteran units, hotkeys, stances, game replays, | mods, custom maps, and custom campaigns really considered | "modern" "post-90s" features? Myth: TFL had all of them in 1997. | elif wrote: | Genuinely curious at what point in development this team was | informed about C&C remastered, released earlier this year... | | Seems like an awful lot of work for some vaguely quasi-legal | 'free-ness' | arendtio wrote: | I think OpenRA is one of the reasons why the remastered | collection [1] exists, as they have kept the community alive. | | [1] | https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_... | peanut_worm wrote: | These sorts of projects are always my favorite. OpenTyrian and | OpenMW are some other great projects similar to this. | yur3i__ wrote: | OpenRA is one of my favourite games right now, I play it with a | few of my friends on a regular basis and we have forked it to | include the building specific construction from tiberian dawn in | command and conquer. | 41209 wrote: | 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 | orhmeh09 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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- | 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 wrote: | 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. | traspler wrote: | 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. | dragontamer wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | >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 wrote: | 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. | dragontamer wrote: | Something to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of | cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy | games. | | * Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit | in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death | balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the | whole stack. | | * Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and | instant-killed by tanks. The overall "death ball" of tanks can | eventually reach endgame proportions of death, but the cheapest | units are fully ineffective at death-balling. | | * Starcraft had a 12-unit selection cap. It required a lot of | clicks (on purpose) to create a death ball, so only the highest | levels of players (with high APM) could attack-move with a whole | army effectively. | [deleted] | k__ wrote: | Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in C&C? | | I remember building them en masse. | | Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had 60 | units. | | I remember building masses of the same unit in these games. | dragontamer wrote: | > Wasn't the grenade infranry pretty good against tanks in | C&C? | | Nominally, it was rockets were the anti-tank infantry. But | both grenades and rockets get squished with alt-move. Tanks | are faster than infantry, so the tanks get the squish rather | easily. | | The infantry player can defend against the squish by spamming | "X" (which scatters your units in random directions). But | given that tanks are threatening a one-squish kill + have | faster movement, grenades are a rather poor choice to "death | ball spam". | | Furthermore: a dead grenadier explodes, causing damage to all | other nearby grenadiers (causing __cascading__ explosions), | often times wiping out your own "death ball". That is to say: | a "death ball" made out of grenadiers end up killing | themselves more often than not. | | Grenades are primarily anti-infantry and anti-building units | in C&C. They serve the job well in that regards. But its | incredibly dangerous to spam these units in C&C. | | ----------- | | "Death Balls" existed in C&C, but you had to use far more | expensive tanks to be able to get there. The cheaper units | (rockets, grenadiers) were simply ineffective. | | Nod arguably had a good death-ball strategy with bikes, but | bikes were weak vs infantry (though they outran infantry | pretty severely). Light Tanks was a more reliable Nod-based | death-ball IMO. | | > Also, in StarCraft you could save groups, with 1-5 you had | 60 units. | | Not like Starcraft 2, where you can save a singular group of | 400 zerglings with Ctrl-1. | | Even then, Starcraft 2 has Psi Storm and area-of-effect | damage (banelings, colossus). So its not quite as easy to | construct an appropriate "death ball", unless you've scouted | out your opponent's build. So its not a "Braindead" kind of | death ball, but... still a death ball at the end of the day. | | > I remember building masses of the same unit in these games. | | Nothing quite like Advance Wars mechanized infantry (aka: | rockets). That was truly a single-unit deathball game, lol. | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | Do you have a source for the 12-unit cap being a game shaping | design decision? | myhf wrote: | There's some good analysis here: | | https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/526252-newbie-question- | about-... | munk-a wrote: | My Civ 3 pikeman has something important it wants to say to | that tank of yours. | avereveard wrote: | most total annihilation units couldn't shoot past each other, | the one who could where large, slow, fragile or otherwise | unable t effectively blob due high weapon spread or | vulnerability to splash damage. | shoo wrote: | total annihilation aircraft were pretty fun things to blob, | although they were fragile and vulnerable to splash damage, | particularly to the flak weapons that were added in the | expansion. a glorious thing about total annihilation was the | ballistics model: ground units without dedicated anti-air | weapons could attempt to fire their guns at aircraft -- | nearly all the time they'd miss, but occasionally a heavy | tank could land a lucky hit and maybe take out a cluster of | aircraft. | | my favourite highly blobbable unit for fooling around in | single player was advanced construction aircraft. i guess if | you've got enough resource income to support 20+ advanced | construction aircraft rush building lines of long-range | artillery, you've probably already won. | ikiris wrote: | spring is the equivalent TA continuance compared to this | post about openra | bradleypowers wrote: | Gosh, I really miss TA. I never felt like another RTS | matched TA for variability, even though I basically only | ever played against one friend. | wingmanjd wrote: | If you're feeling nostalgic, GoG.com has it for sale: | https://www.gog.com/game/total_anihilation_commander_pack | farmerstan wrote: | I just bought it on steam a few months ago. $5. On my 10 | year old system I had I think there was thousands of | individual units running at the same time. I downloaded | the mid Escalation with amazing unit, and was playing | against 4 AI. At one point there were thousands of units | all running at the same time and the battles were epic. I | would throw 500 Fidos (my favorite original unit) to the | AI and they would slowly get mowed down, but then I would | Keep sending them in waves. It's still so much fun! | farmerstan wrote: | If you download the Escalation mod, the new units are | amazing. The TA community 25 years later is still amazing! | peder wrote: | > Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one | unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, | "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack | kills the whole stack. | | That's not how I remember things TBH. Only something like a | nuke would kill all units on the same tile. | dragontamer wrote: | Units in the field would die as a singular stack (aka: stack | kill). | | There were two exceptions, and one exception-to-the- | exception. | | * Cities had units die one-at-a-time. This means that to | siege a city, you were forced to build a stack (!!!). | Attacking cities was always a dangerous operation in Civ 1/2 | (though made easier in Civ3). | | * Fortresses had units die one-at-a-time, but were relatively | difficult to build. IIRC, they also took up room, so no farms | or mines if you build a fortress. Still though, they served | as a "city-lite". Civ3 revamped the fortress system rather | severely, so this only really applies to Civ1 / Civ2... and | the top-tier fortress in Civ3 (lower-tier fortifications IIRC | didn't defend vs stack kills, only provided a minor defensive | bonus). | | The exception-to-exceptions was the nuke, as you pointed out. | A nuke can stack-kill even in the stack-kill immune zones | (cities / fortresses). | UI_at_80x24 wrote: | Civ1, Civ2, Civ2 Call to Power, all suffered from stacked | unit insta-kill glitch that OP mentioned. I have very | unpleasant memories of a spearman somehow being hidden in | stacks of tanks and losing them all to a crossbow or pike. | | This happened too MANY times to forget; and though enough | time has passed that specifics have faded the pain and | frustration never will. | | =) Yeah I'm still kinda bitter about that. | dragontamer wrote: | Its not a glitch. Its completely unrealistic, but its in | fact designed like that to discourage death-balls. | | You can search on "stack" in the Civ2 manual to see many, | many references to how entire stacks will die all at once! | (http://www.replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.365). | This manual proves that Civ2 designers intended stacks to | work like that. | | Even the "glitchy" behavior of Bombers "defending" a stack | (ie: bombers are an air unit, so they are "immune" to | ground units attacking them. Therefore, a bomber "in a | stack" makes the whole stack immune), is in fact referenced | in the manual (!!!). The Civ2 developers had 100% intension | of encouraging this "gamey" behavior. | | ----------- | | Civ1 likely was the same, but was a much worse game. (I'm | pretty salty about militias beating my battleships in Civ1) | But hey, Civ1 was just the first iteration of the game, | lol. Civ2 was when the game was rebalanced / revamped into | a better game. | | Civ3 and Civ4 started to diverge from the original plans | rather severely. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | What do you make of FreeCiv? | | http://freeciv.org/ | dragontamer wrote: | FreeCiv has largely succeeded in making a "more fun" | Civ2-like environment. They've backported some things | from Civ4/5/6, like hex-maps, culture, and also changed | some mechanics to better interact with these backported | items (Democracy's "Deployed Troops" penalty now extends | to your culture-zone, instead of cities/fortresses only, | which makes sense). | | FreeCiv in general suffers from outdated UI-choices. QT- | client solves a lot of the issues though, and hopefully | will evolve into something better. | | FreeCiv got an incredible "solver" embedded into its | engine, allowing you to optimally place your citizens. | But the use of this solver-engine is arcane. Proper use | of it leads to cascading advantages over your foes | however, so its a must have to learn. (especially in | auto-calculating rapture situations) | | The use of optimal trade routes (with a good solver | available in the FreeCiv-GTK client, but not in QT ... at | least last time I checked) also is a major advantage to | the players who use it. | | ----------- | | FreeCiv is likely a highly competitive, highly optimized | game. But the community seems split and fractured. Some | want to use FreeCiv-Web (and without the Governor / Trade | route solvers, its a very different game), others like me | prefer to play highly-optimal Civ2-like games. | | FreeCiv's solvers (both the Governor solver, and the | Trade Route solver) presents a difficult question to the | community. Is the use of arcane constraint-solvers part | of the metagame? If deployed for free so that everyone | can use them, is that fair? | | Its one additional step to learn before you can be an | effective, competitive, FreeCiv player. But knowing that | these lower-level items are "solved" by solver-systems | makes it really, really difficult to go back to Civ5 / | Civ6 (!!). So many times do I look at my citizens | placement and realize that the AI-placement of citizens | is terrible compared to the FreeCiv solver... | | ---- | | The "core" of FreeCiv is pretty incredible. The solvers | to make provably optimal choices (well, at least "locally | optimal", such as most trade from a collection of | 12-cities trade routes + auto-caravan decisions). As well | as the use of "symmetrical island maps" to ensure | everyone has equal starting-positions, and the first to | deploy "concurrent turns" (long before Civ5 did). | | It plays like a macro'd up / steroids version of Civ2 + | minor mods as a result. The community needs to unify and | decide if this version of the game is how it should be... | and if so, rebalance the game in this field. | | Well, basically, FreeCiv-web vs FreeCiv-GTK/QT flamewars | in a nutshell. | systemvoltage wrote: | What's a "death ball"? | Aachen wrote: | It's kind of clear from context, but still this is the first | I hear the term (as someone who played those games) and DDG | also doesn't come up with anything useful (top result, for | example, is about some item in Dragon Ball). So I was also | wondering if I got it right, especially when there's a | hundred non-jargon and equally concise ways to say that, e.g. | 'large group'. To me this seems like a valid question. | dragontamer wrote: | My use of the term originates from the Starcraft 2 culture. | Search on "Protoss Deathball", which is a well known, | highly effective "tactic"... if a bit obvious. | | I'm sure the other games have their own terminology for the | evolution of this "tactic". | zeven7 wrote: | It's a common term in modern RTS, and it's got more meaning | attached to it than simply "a large group". For example, in | StarCraft 2, a full army of zerglings wouldn't be | considered a "death ball" because it'd be so easily | defeated with a few Colossus and high templars (units that | deal a lot of splash damage, which zerglings are | particularly susceptible to). A death ball is an army so | powerful it's virtually unstoppable once it's formed. | Players can try to achieve a death ball to gain a victory, | but it's often expensive and leaves you vulnerable while | you're building one. Also death balls are usually slow, and | the opponent can use faster units to attack vulnerable | parts of their base while the player building a death ball | is out of position. | munk-a wrote: | AoE2 also uses this term extensively especially within the | context of ranger infantry. A clump of forty arbs will chew | through the armor of even intended counters (like knights). | | One of the more interesting applications of this term I've | seen is in TW WH2 (Total War: Warhammer 2) where a faction | like Vampire Counts gets a lot of utility out of death- | balling even trash tier units like skeleton warriors - so | that opponent infantry and cavalry gets mired in the mass | of unit collisions to make it easier to get a clean spell | targeting off. I think the term is pretty well established | at this point as evidenced by the derivative usages that | are now popping up. | jtolmar wrote: | A large group of units, generally with ranged attacks, where | the most effective positioning is clumping them up into a | ball. They hit a certain tipping point where fewer and fewer | things work to counter them. If both sides have a death ball, | then the smaller one loses by a bigger margin the larger the | death balls get. | | In a made up but typical RTS, one swordsman beats an archer, | ten archers are an even match for ten swordsmen, and fifty | archers beat infinity swordsmen. In a 10v8 archer battle, the | bigger side survives with about 3 archers, but in a 100v80 | archer battle, the bigger side survives with over 50. This | game has archer death balls. | munk-a wrote: | Most games will counter this effect with area of effect | damage. AoE has onagers for this purpose - which can easily | deal immense damage to clumped and unaware archers - SC2 | actually gives a lot of units AoE which is what prevents | marine deathballs from being nearly as strong as they might | otherwise be. 10 zealots and a clossus vs. twenty marines | will be a pretty one-sided fight that will get more extreme | the higher the numbers go. | Arrath wrote: | A massive, monoculture blob of either the cheapest and | fastest to produce, or a reasonably effective as far as | cost/time/damage output unit, used to just roll over the | opponent's base. | | So, a few hundred riflemen or dozens and dozens of tanks. | | The death part of it comes from the numerical advantage, if | an enemy unit walks into range of many times its number it'll | get blown to hell before it can inflict meaningful damage, | even if it is a technologically superior or inherently | stronger unit. | teawrecks wrote: | Not always monoculture. The most effective deathballs have | a balanced composition of units which complement each | other. | Arrath wrote: | Absolutely, this can vary. IME at least in the old days, | it did tend to be a single unit type (eg Red Alert | Medium/Heavy tank rushes, or a well timed Zerg Rush) but | it is by no means a hard and fast rule. | dragontamer wrote: | AoE2 is usually a monoculture, due to the nature of its | upgrade systems. | | If your knights are +2 armor and +2 damage, you'll | probably want a mono-culture of knights. Futhermore, a | singular upgrade (aka: Cavalier research) immediately | applies to all knights. | | Your +2 armor / +2 damage Cavaliers are probably superior | to your +0 / +0 archers from the Feudal age, even if | those archers are theoretically useful against some | units. | | Strictly speaking: its not a monoculture: Scouts + | Knights is the common combination for cavalry civs, | because Knights lose vs Monks/Archers, while Scouts win | vs Monks/Archers. Furthermore, Scouts share the +2 armor | / +2 damage upgrade with Knights. But still, the upgrade | system almost "forces" a monoculture (or close to a | monoculture): its far more efficient to only research one | or two units, rather than researching many, many | different kinds of units. | dragontamer wrote: | A situation that arises rather often in Axis and Allies, | Civ4, Starcraft 2. | | It results because of math. To defeat 100 units of equal | strength requires *more* than 100 units (!!!). | | Take for example 100 Zealots (Starcraft / Starcraft 2 melee | unit). If you send 1-Zealot vs the 100 Zealots, it will die | before it deals much damage. | | In fact, even if you send 10 Zealots vs 100 Zealots, the | 10-Zealots will almost certainly die before dealing any | lasting damage. (All Zealots have a "shield" that | regenerates. You probably won't even get past the shield). | | As such, 100 Zealots can perpetually kill 10 Zealots over- | and-over again. Your 100 Zealots can kill 1000+ Zealots (as | long as they only attack 10-at-a-time). | | ---------------- | | Same thing with Axis-and-allies infantry / tanks, or many | other strategy games. The "strength" of a ball of units is | the *square* of their size. | | That is to say: 100-Zealots is 100x stronger than 10-Zealots | (!!), not 10x stronger as you may initially assume. As such, | both players end up building a bigger-and-bigger death ball | as a primary tactic (which is in fact, unfun and stale). | | In Starcraft: Brood War, your 100-Zealots could only be | grouped into groups of 12, meaning you need 18 actions to | attack-move the group. In Starcraft 2: your 100-Zealots can | all be in a single group, so you only need 2-actions (one | selection + one A-move) to attack-move the group. | stickfigure wrote: | It's been a long time, but IIRC you could still group units | in SC1 and bind them to number keys. So maybe only 12 at a | time, but you could still navigate multiple groups of 12 | with just a few keypresses. | dragontamer wrote: | Yes, you can. | | But it still means attack-moving 108 units (aka: 9 | groups, all labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) requires | 18-actions. | | That is: 1 (select group 1), then a, then left click on | the attack-area. Then 2 (select group 2), a, left click | on attack area. Etc. etc. | | That's a difference of 18-apm (Starcraft Brood War) vs | 2-apm (Starcraft 2). Furthermore, that "Group 1" in SC2 | could have 150-units or 200-units (or 400-zerglings, lol) | in it. They pretty much made death-balls have 10% of the | APM requirement in SC2 compared to SC:Brood War. | | I'm all for making the game easier and more accessible: | but the death-ball tactic was a little bit "too obvious" | and kind of unfun to watch, compared to the tightly | coordinated groups of 12 that SC: Brood War was famous | for. The groups were too big, numerical advantage was the | biggest advantage in SC 2 IMO. | munk-a wrote: | SC2 having larger groups has allowed a different focus of | micro though - stutter-stepping marines is a tactic that | was out of reach of most players in SC1 but an absolute | necessity in SC2 and the addition of unit abilities has | decreased the utility of giganto deathballs - the micro | is still very much a requirement. | jbay808 wrote: | The formalization of this is "Lanchester's Laws", equations | that estimate the strength of unit numbers. Here is an | excellent video explaining these laws in the context of Age | of Empires 2: | | https://youtu.be/wpjxWBwLkIE | dragontamer wrote: | Two laws, for two different situations. | | Lanchester's Square Law applies to Starcraft, AoE2, Axis | and Allies, etc. etc. The assumptions therein are "ranged | units all within fire of each other" | | Lanchester's Linear Law applies to Risk, Hearts of Iron, | and "bottleneck" situations in Starcraft/AoE2, etc. etc. | The Linear law applies when units are no longer within | reach of each other, and are instead seen as | reinforcements to a limited sized "front" where combat | takes place. | | In Risk: only 3 units can ever be attacking, and only | 2-units can ever be defending. This is the conditions of | the linear law. | | In Starcraft / AoE2, a "bottleneck" may force a limited | number of melee units to fight, leading to a rare | situation of the linear law in action. | | Hearts of Iron "saturated frontline" concept also gets | into the linear-law. Once the frontline is saturated, | additional reinforcements do nothing to change the | battle. | | -------- | | Take those assumptions, craft a rather straightforward | differential equation out of them, and solve. Bam, you've | arrived at Lanchester's Laws (though Lanchester was the | tactical genius who figured this out over a hundred years | ago). | | Modern board games almost always come back to | Lanchester's laws. Lanchester wrote and published those | differential equations so that generals could create | wargames after all, to train their armies / commanders. | spookthesunset wrote: | Wiki article for more context | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws | TameAntelope wrote: | Personally, I disagree about the death-ball buildup being | un-fun, and it's only really a thing with Protoss (or it | was when I cared about SC2), and that's because you had | some relatively immobile units that needed protection. | teawrecks wrote: | Large ball of units that you move into your enemy territory | to cause death. They can be a lot of fun, but 20 years ago | they presented a significant challenge to pathfinding | algorithms on slow CPUs. As noted above, different games used | different strategies to address them. | dragontamer wrote: | C&C is a clear counterexample however: all units can be | selected as a group. | | That is to say: pathfinding was fast enough that it clearly | wasn't a problem in C&C. But they clearly wanted to nerf | infantry-based death balls. And boy oh boy, are infantry- | death balls nerfed. | | An occasional infantry unit still finds its uses in C&C. | They're incredibly cheap after all, and tanks have a | difficult job killing infantry with their tank-cannons. So | as long as you have a wall of tanks in front of your | infantry, their rockets can contribute heavily in combat. | teawrecks wrote: | As someone who's introduction to RTS was C&C RA on PS1, | pathfinding was definitely still an problem lol. You | always knew when the AI was mobilizing a deathball | because your frame rate would take a dive. | jbay808 wrote: | I find that scattering rocket soldiers randomly about the | map and one's base is a far better and cheaper anti-air | defense than building dedicated SAM sites. A small | investment makes aircraft almost useless. But I'm pretty | inexperienced at the game. | dragontamer wrote: | Advance Wars has a very similar unit composition to C&C | units: rocket troops are cheap and can effectively damage | tanks (while rifle infantry are even cheaper and go | 1-to-1 vs rocket troops). | | Advance Wars has a bit of a rocket-troop deathball | problem however. Rocket troops are so cheap and | effective, that large masses of rockets overpower any | possible opposition. | | Its clear to me that C&C had designed the "instant kill | squish" effect to mitigate this problem. Maybe in | playtesting, they tried it out and realized that rocket | troops are just too powerful. A singular unit that truly | does everything at very, very cheap prices. | spywaregorilla wrote: | I tend to think Advance Wars was remarkably well | balanced. It was designed to be a single player game so | some strategies like rocket troops wasn't too bad. They | were very slow however, which made them a really | inefficient way to win. | jandrese wrote: | Odd because I was just thinking that Advance Wars was one | of the worst offenders for being unbalanced. Most | scenarios give the AI anywhere from a huge to an enormous | resource advantage, one that immediately disappears the | instant you abuse the AI brain damage to run infantry | over to their capital and completely own everything | because the AI never thinks to defend its capital. | | But also if you play with anywhere near balanced | resources between the sides you will crush the AI. It's | so dumb. | | The crazy thing is that to get a good score (that coveted | S rank) you have to abuse the absolute ineptitude of the | AI to do a commando raid on its capital. The game | designers balanced the game against abusing the AI | stupidity. Strategy and tactics are mostly there to delay | the AI and it's 50x production advantage while you rush | an APC around the edge of the map. | spywaregorilla wrote: | I was never much for cheese when I played that game as a | kid but I'm pretty sure I got S ranks on most things | without it. | | Advance Wars was a single player game (more or less). | Fighting an overpowered foe and beating them with your | brain was the whole appeal of a strategy game. Overcoming | horrible odds was the point, both gameplay wise and | narrative wise in pretty much every mission. It was super | fun. The secret of strategy games is that they're much | more fun this way. Focusing on multiplayer is what | drained the RTS genre of its appeal. | dragontamer wrote: | I too think Advance Wars was really fun, and the AI was | in fact smarter than say... Wargroove (Chucklefish did a | good job with Wargroove too though, but were clearly | leaning on the "resource heavy" approach moreso than Adv. | Wars). | | The "mech. infantry spam" almost made you C-rank (or | worse) each map. Mech. Infantry was too slow to beat any | mission. But if you wanted a reliable win-path (and | didn't care about the time it took to win), Mech. | Infantry spam was the way to go. | | Adv. Wars "balanced" it out in their own way: not by | nerfing units, but by simply encouraging the S-rank | screen, taunting the player to beat the map faster (which | meant building less-efficient, but faster, higher-cost | units like tanks) | tomjen3 wrote: | When the remastered Red Alert came out, I beat the AI by Zerg | Rushing medium tank production and just send overwhelming | numbers, aiming to take out key buildings with the first or | second wave. | | It worked pretty okay too. | suby wrote: | That's an interesting observation that I hadn't thought about | before. Another interesting thing, to me anyway, is that for | Starcraft 1 allowed for upgrades which improved the utility of | your early game units. | | In other words your early game units are some of the strongest | units in the game, just not by default. For example the | Zergling could be upgraded 3 times for a stronger attack, 3 | times for stronger defense, once for movement speed, and late | game an upgrade for increasing attack speed. | | But you can hardly have death balls because of the 12 unit | selection cap you mentioned. Plus you wouldn't want to have | death balls of a single unit because units were designed to | work well together, ie: zerglings paired with defilers / | lurkers. | hjek wrote: | In OpenRA infantry has a chance when a tank tries to run them | over; especially thieves are good at this. | blueflow wrote: | Don't forget the rocketeers. I usually produce a 2:1 | combination of riflemen and rocketeers (spamming if eco | allows it), and support it with tanks and arty/v2. | | I rarely found occasion to use thieves, usually as raid into | their ore patches to steal harvesters or as stationary | vision-givers since they can cloak themselves. | skunkjoe wrote: | I tried that, but my favourite for C&C is "Dawn of the Tiberium | Age" [0]. It combines the units of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert. | Plus there are a lot of extra units, it's super fun in | multiplayer! I love it... | | [0] https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age | aliswe wrote: | I assume the circulating camera motion in the menu is still | there. | | It annoyed me that the movement was jerky and didnt seem to use | vigh precision math, but actually it had to do with the upscaling | of the graphics which happens at the last stage of the rendering | pipeline, iirc. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-13 23:00 UTC)