Spring RTS Engine

Recently C&C Tiberian Sun has become freeware as sort of a teaser for C&C 4:

http://www.commandandconquer.com/news/y ... are-awaits

So if you never played it and are curious I guess it's worth a try although I always found it to be pretty sucky (especially with the original release balance (spam Nod artillery = win) but I guess they worked on that later on)...

thanks for the tip... I need a bigger hard drive.

Downloading.
Hope its nicely balanced and allows multiplayer play.
I always found it to be charming even though visually it looks like shit.

I dont mean to rain on this parade, but I found tiberian sun to be the weakest installment in the series. Even good old Red Alert 1 and 2 beat the pants off tiberian sun. (Who remembers 100% hit chance awesome NOD arty?

Maybe with the add on and patches?

Beherith wrote:I dont mean to rain on this parade, but I found tiberian sun to be the weakest installment in the series. Even good old Red Alert 1 and 2 beat the pants off tiberian sun. (Who remembers 100% hit chance awesome NOD arty?

Just thought I'd point out that Red Alert and Tiberiam Dawn are also available for free on the linked site.

I agree. I kinda catched on the hype about it back then but was so disappointed when actually getting my hands on it. The designers made so many mistakes and it seems to me that they rushed things at the end. As shown in the preview articles they wanted to do jack with day & night cycles and fancy lighting stuff but all that remained in the end were those useless watch towers with the spotlights. The units in general were boring and despite their names had little to do with the initial C&C. Although it had their hyped voxel engine it didn't really deliver really good visuals but I guess what made them do this as voxel engine again were some feature not really included in the final title as it has nothing about it that would have needed this unusual approach. I especially was dissapointed about the Nod cloaking tanks. Those had been my favorite in C&C1 but they didn't just look ugly and static in Tiberian Sun but also weren't that good anymore and the cloaking animation had become into a few steps of getting transparent in contrast to the cool cloak-effect in C&C1...

The worst thing for me was the gameplay. In general it of course follows the C&C standard unlike the upcoming C&C4. Balance was just horrible though and to be true next to not-existant. Initially Nod was so overpowered that it's hard to believe this has had some extensive testing. The artillery most certainly being the worst of all: Not too expensive, short deployment time and a guided, high-traj projectile with 100% hit chance killing tanks with like 2-3 hits while afaik also dealing nice AOE damage against infantry. So all you had to do is build them like crazy and most of the enemy units died before even being in range. With Nod also having the underground tank things really get unfair because this in the end was an all-terrain tank with invulnerable periodes while being underground. I also was very sad when I for the first time built the mighty GDI Mammoth MKII walker. I still would vote for this being one of the worst units in an RTS ever (unless they finally changed its stats in the later versions). It was expensive like hell, so slow that you would call a Sumo from TA a "racer", could only fire forward (and as you might guess turning felt even worse than its movement speed) and it still followed the stupid concept of being bad against infantry. It was just pathetic to see it being demolished by a couple of rocket infantries its railguns dealt just little damage to...

Together with boring maps, rivers and bridges so unimportant (and rare) it made the GDI Hovertank cry and things like a cheap undoable terrain deformations it really was dull and I think I also only finished the Nod campaign...

Personally with this title C&C ended for me. While I didn't play Generals they turned Red Alert into a colorful comic parody and C&C3 while being quite reasonable gameplay wise and somewhat balanced turned into a stupid wannabe showing "high class actors" in 50 $ outfits in front of cheap backgrounds or greenscreens while trying to fool people that there actually is a story to be told. If you still want to play it at some time look away now because e.g. the story for Nod goes like this: Nod as the underdog does some surprise attacks after doing pretty much nothing (yet again) -> meaningless battles about fancy locations in the US -> Kane deploys tiberium bomb -> aliens arrive -> aliens build towers -> GDI / NOD try to destroy / capture the towers before their completion rendering them invulnerable -> you achieve that goal -> Kane welcomes you to be his new child in his inner circle, invites you to the latest meeting and the game ends - it FUCKING ends letting you hang at the point where there actually might begin some story at all about tiberium, Kane and the aliens in general...

well none of the earlier iterations of the C&C series were really balanced because online play was rare.

in C&C original it was GDI > NOD

in C&C Red alert 1 it was Soviet > Allied so hard (probably the most imbalanced of C&C's but one of my faivs)

in tiberian sun NOD > GDI

Master-Athmos wrote:I also was very sad when I for the first time built the mighty GDI Mammoth MKII walker.

Haha, also if you ever faced it uphill and north at the same time it would shoot itself in the foot with it's railguns. Which, since they were anti-vehicle weapons would do a pretty good job of self-destruction.

To be honest, while Red Alert 1 (and maybe even 2) and C&C 1 had amazing single player campaigns, Generals Zero Hour was excellent in multiplayer.

yes, i really enjoyed zero hour as well for multiplayer; used to run big FFAs at the local net cafe.

the balance seemed good... granted, i was crap at playing GLA, but one of my friends always seemed to make those armies work.

my favourites were the china infantry general, and the USA laser general.

some of the subgenerals (china nuke for instance) seemed to revolve a bit more around a single strategy (kill them and take the abandoned vehicles) but most of the armies were general purpose enough and interesting enough to do well in any scenario.

i think im remembering the right game... i hated red alert because of those commando missions... what a pain in the ass

Seems like good way to get myself interested in the series ... thanks for the link! Will check out previous installments too.

Still, a have a feeling it won't beat my good, old Sudden Strike (sequels sucked so much pfff)

the various mods for it still make it worthwhile, some fixing balance while some other fix the shitty voxels and sprites as well.

Get 3 to play 1 I guess:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-t ... a-110-full

http://www.moddb.com/mods/rise-of-omniu ... leviathan1
etc.

this shit is awesome, despite obvious kit bashery

Otherside wrote: in tiberian sun NOD > GDI

So not true. If you were any active in MP you would know that even before some important tweaks GDI was still the preferred side for top ladder players.

But back to the topic of the game itself. TS was rushed, as i recall the expansion "Firestorm" actually contained most of what was planned for the original release but since EA was sadistic and very evil back then they forced the TS release from Westwood. Still a fun game back then and easily modded and a nice community for user created content.

red alert 1 was sweet
red alert 2 was shit
zero hour was awesome
c&c 3 was a greasy abortion

anyone on the c&c 4 beta?

Everything after Zero Hour is like the new Need for Speed titles. Shit.

Liked first c&c games because they were something new and a good rts at the time. Also cool cutscenes & music.
Nowadays I just can not play them anymore, the buildings just feel like bitmaps pasted on some tilemap taken off a gamecoding tutorial, only train one unit at a time, etc.

Tiberian Sun is my favorite C&C for obvious reasons:
Everything just looks so apocalyptic, the lightning, the scorched ground, the few remaming buildings.
The landscapes have a real cool atmosphere to them, they really feel alive. And with growing tiberium and other monsters, bridges blowing up, tanks breaking through ice and fallen in frozen rivers, they really are.

Most rts just feel like a tournament: You are here, there is the enemy, now fight him on a symetrical arena like map. In TS it really feels like a battle in a choas. (wtf emmanuel sentence)
All the blabla of tiberium changing the world, here you can actually experience it. It turns your infantry into monsters, the blue tiberium explodes, the red fungus thing eats your tanks and spews poison gas and NOD harvests it for chemical missles.
Thats pure evil!

And then they are lifeforms that really feel like monsters and not like some creeps you kill to level your gay hero (warcraft 3 lol)

Units smoke, spray sparks and shatter in debris when killed.
BOUNCING TIRES FUCK YEAH!

But yes, balance is questionable at best, even with the Firestorm addon. At least GDI finally gets their own (imo weaker) artillery.

Top 5 WTF:
1) Underground transporters with enginers caputure your base & flame tanks burn it up - wtf? It can somewhat help, to emp your own base and kill them with infantry. Still ultra gay.
GDI Carryall transports and hover tanks can be used for mean attacks too, but its much harder.

2) NOD Cyborgs - Can not be run over by vehicles. Heal on tiberium. GDI infantry+medics does not compare, although in masses they are stronger than one might think at first.

3) NOD Banshees - Faster than the GDI Orca bombers a hand full of those kills every building in one or two passes. For example the construction yard. And then the warfactory. Even with massive AA they will at least bomb once, due to speed.

4) Jagdspäher / "hunterseeker:"
A superweapon that kills anything with one hit. Literally anything, it can hit one infantry or your warfactory, totally random targetting. WTF.
At least both sides have it

5) NOD has a repair vehicle that is much better than the GDI service depot because its mobile. (orly?)
Should have been swaped imo.

And than "they" laugh at balance tweaks.

you guys still got copies of C&CZH? wouldn't mind getting a game together