Did anyone play this? I’ve only started playing multiplayer with Streetfighter IV and Starcraft II, but I played a lot of RA I Skirmish mode back when it was popular, and I’m curious about what tactics people used, and how balanced it was. On the face of it, it seems like the soviet side would have the advantage.
Yeah, everyone I knew played that on Kali back in the day. That was back before people understood the genre in terms of macro and micro. I remember a lot of turtling behind tesla coils while building up a deadly tank push. My friend used to spam the hell out of Tanyas… effectively. I dunno. I didn’t really play it a lot since I was more into Descent.
Red Alert was amazing. It was the RTS until Starcraft got its balance patch (1.05?).
Interesting. Did anyone do V2 pushes? I used to do it on skirmish and it was fun if not hugely effective.
RA2, yes. On red alert one I just played offline.
Was disappointed they got rid of the field medics, and decoy home bases. Those were awesome. 
How would you win a multiplayer on the allied side if you weren’t near water, other than the aforementioned Tanya rush? Rocket troops?
You won the game with light tanks in under 5 minutes, or you didn’t win at all. Red Alert was not anywhere near to the par for what people would consider a playable multiplayer game these days, or really even the par then - its predecessor C&C had it beat hands down. The only positive thing I can say for Red Alert was that the tissue paper buildings at least took some of the focus off of the obsessive harvester hunting that the Dune 2 resource model always dictates.
Does anyone know if Red Alert was actually ever played competitively?
I’ve always heard that it came down to light tank rush for the win, but I’m wondering if it’s an oversimplicification, just like how Starcraft got stuck with 4pool for the win. Was there actually a game behind RA?
Thats sort of what I’m trying to determine, but it seems to me a bit like it was never really balanced - as far as I can tell, it was never really patched like starcraft.
Another Question - did anyone ever play the no buildings mode where you just started with up to 50 units? I can’t remember the proper name of this option. I do remember if you set it to a low tech level, the game would play very differently.
Found a good link:
The game, played seriously, was pure tank spam. Most of the other units could not even deal damage to them even before you counted in the advantage of firing on the move, and the combination of mobility and anti-armor damage type meant they were ideal for playing the centerpiece of the game: the harvesters. None of the earlier units in the tech tree could deal with them at all and the anti-tank defenses not only showed up at the same time or later in the tree but tended to actually lose to tanks dollar for dollar once you counted the power needed to run them…and that’s even before getting into the problems of static defenses in a game where far-roaming harvesters were 100% of your income.
If the game actually managed to last long enough to get into the final tech tier, the outcome was determined by the map design - if there was enough water in range of key areas, allied cruisers were an automatic win button, otherwise, the soviets got the free win.
In game design terms, it was wretched. The RTS genre was so new, though, that the flaws were either overlooked or taken for granted.
I don’t know about that last line. People had the option of playing the mirror-balanced Warcraft II, but I think Red Alert was more popular. Though I acknowledge that Warcraft II was imbalanced in favour of Orcs 'cause of the Ogre Magi’s bloodlust.
Also, mirror-balancing is a boring cop-out. I remember being pissed as hell when I realized that’s what they’d done with WC 2, even though they obviously needed to do something to rectify the Alliance advantage in WC 1.
Warcraft 2 had massively better mechanics in every way to red alert, although I did play red alert on lan with friends sometimes. If I ever played online I was always crushed by some guy following a checklist optimal strat that had 20 tanks in my base in about 9 seconds.
The mechanics on that game were downright stupid for the most part - the worst being the territory is totally black, until you uncover it, at which time you have gods eye view on it forever setup. The balance between major types of units was terrible. The resource gathering and base building were generally terrible. I actually played the game quite a bit, but in retrospect, after seeing what a well designed and balanced RTS game could be, warcraft 2 was way, way, way closer to the mark.
I thought the sides were fairly balanced in WC1. The extra archer range was a fairly strong advantage mid-game, but both unholy armor and daemon summoning were superb at breaking through the archer/catapult lines while the mage spells just kinda sucked at dealing with the opposing spearthrower lines. Invisibility didn’t become a real threat until Blizzard showed up to pair with it in WC2.
I never seriously played Warcraft 2 much. Once C&C had come out, going back to limited selection sizes, bad pathing and the clunky build system was just too painful. Warcraft 2 was a game where you needed to use 20 to 40 peons and a dozen barracks pumping out endless units, but you could only select, what, nine units at once, or one building, and you couldn’t save anything to hotkeys. Horrible. You fought the user interface more than you actually played the game. It took Blizzard until SC2 to seriously address the crippling flaws in their RTS UI.
I remember that priests were much much better than necrolytes and invisible water elementals were a serious danger/standoff breaker. But this is more than a decade ago and we weren’t super hard core or anything.
Blizzard created the industry standard for RTS UIs in Warcraft 3, which predates SC2 by a good decade.
The problem with WC2 was that it wasn’t quite mirror-balanced, either. Everything else being the same made the few things that were different stand out so much more, and the Alliance just didn’t have any equivalent to Bloodlust (plus, the Warlock spells were better than the Mage’s, for the most part).
But back to RA1: Back when I was in undergrad, we played it a lot (one of the professors had surreptitiously installed it on all the computers in the computer lab). Everyone always swore that it was just a matter of who could hit the tank button quickest, but I always found that one person on a team (we usually played 2v2 or 3v3) focusing on cruisers or even just destroyers could almost always turn the tide, as could a half-dozen MiGs (call it 8, to allow for some getting shot down) to the Construction Yard.
Harvester hunting was a viable strategy, but they have so many HP that if you escorted them properly, the tanks wasting shots on the harvester itself would get slaughtered by the tanks escorting it.
Static defenses weren’t any good for trying to wall off, but if the map already had good choke points, a half-dozen or so Tesla coils at each of them presented an impenetrable barrier to anything but V2s, cruisers, air, or nukes to the power plants. One in the middle of your base was also a good countermeasure to paratrooper drops, which could otherwise sometimes gut your base before you could react.
And nobody in my group used them, but I’ve heard that mine-layers (at least the Allied ones, that laid down anti-vehicle mines) were also a very strong option-- A single mine would take away over half of a tank’s HP, a minelayer started with 5, and could refill for free at the Repair Bay. The enemy could clear the mines by firing at the ground, but that would slow them down to the point of uselessness. And a minelayer only cost about as much as a single tank. So if you had the APM to micromanage a unit, they could be very cost-effective.
Really, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the game that couldn’t have been fixed by removing, or at least making much less effective, vehicles running over infantry. That killed a lot of the balance, by making infantry of any sort effectively useless against almost any vehicles.
All the Blizzard RTS UIs are the same basic structure with an additional layer or two of iteration between them, usually iteration using features that were well-worn in the RTS genre before Blizzard finally adopted them. I consider SC2 the first of them to be modern because it’s the first where there’s no limit on selection size (a basic necessity) and you can perform all rote research and unit production functions without shifting your map view or jumping through hoops. WC3 was not nearly as stone-age as Starcraft was, but the UI was still heavily impacting gameplay due to limitations that every other RTS had solved six years earlier. Even in SC2 you still have to fiddle with subselections to use staple unit abilities, even though there’s few enough of them to global hotkey most or all of them.
As for industry standard, the C&C UI model lived on through Total Annihilation, Dark Reign, Homeworld and, well, C&C, right up until the entire RTS genre itself rolled over and died once consoles got big. (by the by, Dark Reign had a fantastic RTS UI implementation - I’d still point to that as the best yet)
Dark Reign was good (especially the concept of unit behaviors), but it suffered from the same problem as the C&C games, that the developers never realized that mice have multiple buttons. I don’t play very many RTS games, but Blizzard is the only one I know of to have adopted the convenient and intuitive pattern of left click = noun, right click = verb. There’s no good reason to use the same button for selecting as for moving and attacking.
And there’s at least one regard in which the SC2 interface took a step back from the SC1 interface, that being the ability to act directly on your units via the selection panel. In WC3, if you had a group of, say, a paladin and a bunch of knights, you could see on your selection that one of your knights was getting into the red, and Holy Light targeting the red icon for that unit. In SC2, though, you can’t do the same thing with, say, a queen’s Transfuse ability. This is probably because SC2 has fewer abilities you’d use on your own units (or at least, the ones you do are mostly auto-cast), but for those where you do (like Transfuse), it’s annoying.