No love for Red Alert 3?

The Game Room
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The latest saga in EA’s Command and Conquer franchise was released this week and I’m surprised there isn’t anyone talking about it here.

LIKES:
Jenny McCarthy makes a great Tanya. She sounds very confident and not at all like the stereotype of Jenny McCarthy that I had in my head before seeing her in action in this game. The only other thing I’ve seen her in previously was BASEketball, which didn’t exactly highlight her confident demeanor.

I love the dual abilities of every unit. Combining the units to find a good balance is a bit of a challenge. The Allies don’t seem to have a stomp-all-comers unit just yet but I’m only a few missions into the game.

The better aspects of previous C&C games have all been rolled up into this game. So you can use ore trucks to act as surveyors, engineers to set up field hospitals, et cetera.

The explosions are beautiful. When you’re in the process of killing something, random chunks will fly off of it. My soldiers had a big battle beside a civilian building and when it was all over there was a hole in the side of the building where they had been fighting.

Full motion video with ham and cheese! Unlike original C&C, which tried to be serious but came across as cheesy, this one is just full on cheesy and makes no apologies for it. The actors are hilarious.

DISLIKES:
The yellow outline around selected units is just ugly.

The “generals” powers are bizarre and not very useful early in the game. So far I’ve seen a freeze ray, a bomber that does minimal damage and an aircraft upgrade that does nothing discernible at all.

The “guard” mode is sketchy and some units will just sit there getting shot until you order them to shoot back.

I don’t really like having a companion commander on the campaign missions. I do like how they’re constantly providing some low level harassment to the enemies but I don’t like it when they complete my objectives for me. It seems like I could just turtle up and let the other commander fight for me.

Troops don’t shoot out the windows of troop carriers. That sucks! Nothing compared to a humvee full of promoted rocket soldiers in Generals.

Overall, this seems like it’s going to be an incredibly fun game, especially for skirmishes. Anyone else playing it at the moment?

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Just got the game. Pretty much the same formula as most RTS and C&C3

I was quite excited about the co-commander feature, but I think it is badly executed (I thought the AI will take control of my own forces, so I can forget about doing defense while attacking. It lets me down).

Anyway interested in a co-op campaign game?

Anyone has tips for “No Tomorrow for Traitor” soviet campaign mission?

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I plan on picking it up later this week. Although I only ever play the campaign and “skirmish” mode. I get my ass kicked in real multi-player because I don’t use the right strategy, which is apparently just spamming with about two or three types of units early in the game, not actually building up through the tech tree.

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I’ve played a little bit, I’ve been very busy since I picked it up, but have had the chance to do a few skirmishes to feel out the units and such. So far, it’s enjoyable. Very much a blend of Generals and RA2. The one power up that I did like was the teleporting time bomb that the allies have. Does an incredible amount of damage, and against the computer, it’ll kill a lot of units, since they all gather round to attack it.

So far, so good. Going to start the campaign mode tomorrow.

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There’s already a thread on it here, but it only has a whopping two posts. Maybe a mod can close one/combine them?

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Eh, kinda looks totally ridiculous to me. Red Alert was always campy fun, but I don’t think it translates as well into 3D for some reason. Tiberium Wars had the same problem, just not the right…feel. Naturally, I blame EA.

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Boycott campaigns have been going around on gamer forums for the past while, since EA have decided that anyone who gets perma-banned from their forums also gets perma-banned from their games. All their games. Permanently. (Sure, you can probably work around it - it’s not like your computer violently uninstalls the game and has the DVD drive chomp on the disc - but it’d be a hassle and it’s stepping way over the line from EA’s sde.)

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SPOILERS

If I’m remembering right, that’s toward the end, right? Where you’re attacking the allied naval&air base in Iceland and suddenly get rolled over and fucked up Andrew Divoff? My only tip is to go for the throat of the western airbase ASAP and giving the order for your co-general to do the same. Hold off attacking Krukov until he shivs you, as well - his blimps will steam over you unless you have a squadron of ATA-fighters ready and the cash to recuperate the losses rapidly. The NE allied base will mostly be choked in by the turntail general and their meagre airstrikes can be held off by some token air-defence in your base as well as some AA boats placed close to a naval yard (for the repair benefit)

Once Krukov does turn on you and the expanded Allied base comes into play, you’re on your own, though. I managed it in one because of excessive luck and careful micromanagement of my commando, who managed to take out a considerable amount of Krukov’s production facilities before being casually turned into geography by a Kirov.

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I reported my own thread (never thought I would do that!) so hopefully a mod will be along to combine this one and the other one soon enough. It’s a bit hectic on the boards tonight though so I imagine it might be a while.

I’ve heard some grumbling about the DRM in this game too. Apparently you can only install it five times before it will refuse to authenticate anymore. I think this is just for online play as a careful look at the DVD case doesn’t mention anything about a limited number of installs. In any case, I only played this online in beta and I’m not an online gamer myself. I just like skirmishes and campaign missions.

As for the game itself, I forgot to mention that I love having a really powerful commando unit again. It was very annoying in C&C3 having a commando who could kill infantry like no tomorrow but who was totally at the mercy of anything with wheels on it. Tanya is wicked tough in this game and she seems to get promoted really fast too.

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Seeing as this thread is picking up steam, I might as well join in the party here.

I have just finished the Soviet campaign and feels sort of underwhelmed. The difficulty at Medium isn’t too punishing, though the enemy keeps up waves after waves of attack. Strangely, the middle of the campaign is tougher than the final battle (and only for one reason). As long as you are able to out-produce the CPU, it’s not too hard.

LIKES

Mecha.

DISLIKES

The story didn’t explore too much of the changing of the time-line. The plot is rather weak. (Yes, yes this is a RTS. But even Tiberium Sun bothers with a plot twist)

Units are like paper. They get shred to pieces really easily. The scissors-paper-stone design meme is tweaked to the extreme here.

If your forces are attacked by an unit which they cannot retaliate against, they just sit there dumbly (for example, Twinblade vs. Dreadnoughts) while their health get chewed away and destroyed. I have to baby-sit every unit.

Your AI friend auto-attacks beneficial buildings that can be captured, like Oil Rig and Banks, which is ultra-unhelpful.

Air combat is a drag. You got your anti-air units and your anti-ground units separately. It’s just so cumbersome.

The manual is really, really lacking. Looks like photocopied pages stapled together. The background at times contrast badly with the text which makes it hard to make out.

The three sides are almost identical. Could be good or bad.

Overall, I think Tiberum Sun is better than Red Alert 3 (it feels like a Tibersum Sun re-skin) and well, CoH/Warhammer beats them both (this is a very humble IMHO :smiley: )

Conclusion: A very old school and traditional RTS.

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Threads merged.

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Thanks fluiddruid!

I’ve found that if you combine your generals powers you can get way more of a punch out of them. For example, using the freeze ray to freeze a building (power plants are vulnerable, not sure which others might be) and then using the tactical bomber to smash the frozen building. Because the tactical bomber comes swooping in so fast, it can deliver the hit before the target unfreezes.

I thought the mission to kill the big Japanese floating city was going to be a lot harder. But it was actually pretty simple: defend against their harassment forces, chew the defenses off the outside of the thing, invade and set up a beachhead on it, destroy internal defenses, capture two power plants. Easy, especially with those big bombers that can take tons of punishment and drop about a dozen bombs in a nice line.

This game is still in need of some patching. The last mission I did had a few glitches in it. Both my units and the enemy units forgot to attack each other at times. One of the Japanese mini subs parked behind my naval yard and just sat there doing nothing until I killed it. One of the co-commander’s engineers took on the assignment of capturing a power plant but decided he’d rather walk up to it and stand outside doing nothing instead. An ore refinery refused to build even though the spot to plunk it down was lit up green. The pathfinding in this game isn’t all that great either. Units seem to love taking the long way around to get to things, especially if you order them into the water and they’re not standing right in front of the beach.

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I was curious about how the sides match up. It seemed like the all the cool and fun units were in the Japanese Empire (psychic schoolgirl commandos, laser-samurai) or Soviet camps (troop-launching APC, killer bears), with the Allies getting the shaft with re-treads, variations, and the removal of chrono technology.

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The three sides feel the same, though I have never tried the Empire of the Rising Sun units yet.

Basically put, all sides have a basic infantry, an anti-air/anti-armor infantry and finally, a specialized infantry (Spy, Telsa Trooper and Shinboi) and a unique commando. That’s the first toss-up

Units also have a number of secondary abilities. Those ranged from debuffing, self-destruct, alternate modes of operation and so on. However, you can largely group units by anti-tank, anti-infantry, anti-air, anti-naval and transport. Some units double as attack and transport, mostly the Soviets.

I daresay I dislike the Soviets’ attack/transport units - it just make it a chore to manage. There are two transports - the Twinblade and the Bullfrog, and they double as attack and transport at the same time. The Twinblade is a chore to micromanage as it has low HP. The Bullfrog is for infantry again and strangely, has an anti-air gun (why? I don’t know. And unlike the APC from C&C3, infantry inside cannot fire out)

RA3 seems to enjoy giving oddball combo to units. Like giving the Bullfrog transport an anti-air gun but no ground weapon. One of the Allied unit, the Carrier has an EMP missile (huh…?) and its artillery unit can shield itself instead of attacking. The most crazy idea must be giving the Attack Dogs and Soviet Bears (yes, you read it right. Bears) with barks/roars that stun.

But basically, each side is more or less the same - I haven’t try the Rising Sun’s hybrid unit yet. The AI never switch mode on me before (at Medium difficulty). It seems that even without mode switching, the Japan faction has an unit for every occasion.

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On the Allies: they still have Chronosphere. Their overall armor and firepower is weaker than the Soviet, but they have excellent range and secondary abilities, such as stealth, increase damage output and more useful amphibious warship. However, now on playing the Allies campaign, whenever I see a Soviet Dreadnought, I run.

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No more chrono commandoes? Lame!

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Tanya can teleport back in time 5 seconds to regain health but you can’t really pick where she ends up. She just ends up exactly where she was 5 seconds ago. So she’s almost a chrono-commando.