[HN Gopher] OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, R...
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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.
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