[C&C3]Welcome Back, Commander

[Stark]

I use 'openVPN', which is hardly the easiest thing to set up (open-source standard terrible documentation) but very easy to use once it's configured and very, very lightweight. I game across it all the time, and I even bothered to set up key pairs, encryption, all that jazz which add overhead.

I can see why devs would slap in Gamespy instead of wasting time building their own server browser etc, but there's no reason for Gamespy to be so fucking awful.

[Darth Wong]

Is it my imagination, or are snipers less effective in the open than when they're in a foxhole that was vacated by GDI riflemen?

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Is it my imagination, or are snipers less effective in the open than when they're in a foxhole that was vacated by GDI riflemen?

No, I noticed the fire considerable slower than when garrisoned...

(Which I think it really sad, since they're the only way to really make use off Juggernaughts... which I also wasn't impressed with... It's a walking battleship turret, it's supposed to have to deploy to shoot, and it does so very slowly and not particularly that well for virtually requireing snipers to spot for them... Ah well, at least the story feels like a Command and Conquer again. *flips RA2 & Generals campaigns the bird*)

[Howedar]

GDI's Zone Trooper strike is brutal. If I hit an enemy base with an Ion Cannon, sending one of those in at ground zero finishes the game.

That's a filthy lie. My computer buddy apparently likes to keep fanatics all the hell around his base, because as soon as I ion cannoned his ass, he ran a bunch of those bastards into the blast zone. They ate the disembarking Zone Troopers alive.

[Walsh]

I'm a bit below the requirements, but the game still runs well. Unfortunately the FMV sequences have massive audio synch issues. The video still runs for about 20 seconds after the sound has finished . No fix for it yet.

[PainRack]

One thing I found is fun. Zone troopers in APCs gives them enough mobility to hit and run really well, since the APC outruns anything that the Zone's cant destroy in one volley. If you use air-pickup, they even fire from the air! They make fun gunships that way, since the range seems farther than AA rocket range. just get three zone filled APCs and airlift them, then start devastating enemy ground formations. Unlimited ammo too.

They're highly vulnerable to attack bikes and other AA units though. But yeah, an airlifted APC horde is extremely amusing.

Against a human, they'd of course start shooting mine down with Venoms or Firehawks, but it seems nasty. Grenade Troops look more attractive to me now, as they make excellent all purpose attack units when in APCs. Suicide bombers also seem killable with light infantry squads inside of APCs...

Zonetroopers as well as snipers in APCs do the trick better. Is it me, or does anyone else find that grenadiers in APCs are better AT than Rocket soldiers in APCs?

Against Mammoths, it seems that some tricks will need to be employed. Aside from fanatics, what else is useful versus them? Vertigos seem to work, as those guys are nearly invincible to anything except an air-defense in depth. Avatars don't really do that bad against them, since the avatar's small size and increased speed lets a group of three or four concentrate fire, while a mammoth horde needs several seconds to get each tank into firing range, in a formation that tends to disperse as the group moves. To beat Mammoths in a shooting fight, you need to micro it seems.

You can try flanking them...... They are the only unit that's slow enough to make facing a vulnerability. Stealth tanks and walkers....... although the horde makes this extremely difficult. The AI can produce a 3 mammoth with 1 or 2 predator/APC rush, much less a human player.

[Nephtys]

Vertigo Bombers utterly slaughter mammoth tanks, as do rear-attacking Stealth volleys. A pair of vertigo bombs can knock a mammoth to bare red health, and all of it's neighbors. They also fly fast enough and have enough health not to be bothered by the mammoth's AA Ability.

Seriously. There is no way to get mammoths near the enemy base if they use vertigoes, except heavy air cover with firehawks set to air superiority.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Finally finished all three campaigns. The endings left much to be desired. I don't want to have to wait for an xpack to get any kind of resolution, damn it!

[Nephtys]

Meeting the Scrin for the first time is terrifying. You have no idea what does what, and the missions are nicely arranged to have them utterly trash you with shock and awe.

Damn, I hate Devastators.

[Howedar]

Holy God, Venoms are worthwhile. I never built any until this evening, assuming they were worthless in the same vein as Red Alert's Hinds and Yaks, TS's Orca Fighters, and so on. They're not. They're flying tanks.

No reload == love.

[Chris OFarrell]

Meeting the Scrin for the first time is terrifying. You have no idea what does what, and the missions are nicely arranged to have them utterly trash you with shock and awe.

Damn, I hate Devastators.

But damn if you don't fall in love with your Commando by the end of it.

He has the TD Commando's attitude, the firepower to match and in the second and third missions against the Scrin as he runs around the city gathering up GDI units for a counter attack...he racks up one hell of a kill count. Blasting away crap loads of Scin units 'left handed' every second, C4ing their tripods with as much contempt as he does any Mecha scum on the battlefield...

I love that guy

[PainRack]

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong about the Temple campaign timeline?

GDI as part of their general counter-offensive gathers a large force in Sarajevo, incidently taking out the transport carrying the liquid T bomb. NOD player deploy from Brazil to the theater and is tasked with recapturing the transport. And GDI is aware of the contents, although they fail to move it from the crash site(awaiting hazmat teams perhaps? Or tiberium scientists?)
NOD player convenes in an abandoned NOD base, then breaks through surrounding GDI forces to reach Temple Prime. He, along with renegade NOD forces from Australia wipe out the invading GDI taskforce and purifies the fold. GDI player is retasked to rescue GDI units from the initial attack, salvaging the situation in Croatia. By this time, the NOD player, despite concerns has redeployed to Australia to salvage Killian forces. 3 days after the initial taskforce as been defeated, GDI defeats NOD on the field and launches an Ion Strike at the Temple, thus starting the Scrin campaign(Phase III) a day or so later.

[Velthuijsen]

@Painrack:
Yes that is the timeline in a nutshell.

Damn, I hate Devastators.

If you hate Devastators you are going to curse the day you run into a planetary assault carrier horde (with appropriate fighter escort).

Each carries 8 fighters which regenerate if shot down, the thing can have a shield upgrade as well. But that is not their strong point. Those things can generate an ion storm at their location. This has two effects. First it turns the unit into a localized weather control spire and secondly an ion storm regenerates their health.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Meeting the Scrin for the first time is terrifying. You have no idea what does what, and the missions are nicely arranged to have them utterly trash you with shock and awe.

Damn, I hate Devastators.

But damn if you don't fall in love with your Commando by the end of it.

He has the TD Commando's attitude, the firepower to match and in the second and third missions against the Scrin as he runs around the city gathering up GDI units for a counter attack...he racks up one hell of a kill count. Blasting away crap loads of Scin units 'left handed' every second, C4ing their tripods with as much contempt as he does any Mecha scum on the battlefield...

I love that guy

Man, I remember that mission with your commando building up an army I had a kill-ratio of 72. Most of that was all the passive air units my missile squads were busy smoking, but still, I thought it was pretty impressive.

Though of course, in the end I never needed the army. I had a bunch of predator tanks on stand-by, but I just kept dive-bombing the Scrin base with my commando and letting my sonic emitters tear up any units that chased me.

[Nephtys]

That mission with the Commando was indeed awesome. That guy just eats up everything thrown at him. I totally trashed that mission by salvaging 3 Tripods to use on the base.

But yeah, it seems that against the Scrin, it's mandatory to have air-air interceptors. Venom squadrons and Firehawks set for air patrol seem the only way to reliably take out large groups of enemies... though the usually crappy-as-hell GDI AA Machine Gun is hideously effective vs Devastators and Stormriders.

[Velthuijsen]

That mission with the Commando was indeed awesome. That guy just eats up everything thrown at him. I totally trashed that mission by salvaging 3 Tripods to use on the base.

Reminds me of the take out Temple Prime mission for GDI.
Wiping out the place using only Avatars (and pitbulls for airdefense) is just

[Siege]

All these improvised "capture this then capture that then blow up x with a sneak attack" NOD missions really make me long for the days when I could just roll over people with an unstoppable army of Mammoth Tanks... The campaign is fairly engrossing, but the NOD style of play just isn't mine. I constantly just end up teching for three squads of Vertigo's so I can systematically bomb the crap out of everything. NOD vs. Scrin is a recipe for annoyance IMO. Their stuff constantly outranges mine, and their air superiority -even after the laser capacitor upgrade- really gets on my nerves. Die you damned alien scum!

[Nephtys]

NOD really does poorly against Scrin air it seems, while they ruin GDI Air. Meanwhile, GDI seems to utterly trash Scrin air! Interesting, eh?

Nod's SAM Sites really just aren't effective versus a lot of targets. Meanwhile, the GDI AA gun utterly annhiliates any Scrin aircraft in seconds. Especially stormriders, which one gun can take out 8 or so of them before they even can get a shot off.

It seems the Venom are really bad for air superiority, while firehawks are pretty decent if it wasn't for their idiotic friendly fire blast radius missiles.

The main AA Platform of use for Nod probably should be the stealth tank. Those own. Recon bikes are only alright.

[PainRack]

NOD really does poorly against Scrin air it seems, while they ruin GDI Air. Meanwhile, GDI seems to utterly trash Scrin air! Interesting, eh?

Nod's SAM Sites really just aren't effective versus a lot of targets. Meanwhile, the GDI AA gun utterly annhiliates any Scrin aircraft in seconds. Especially stormriders, which one gun can take out 8 or so of them before they even can get a shot off.

It seems the Venom are really bad for air superiority, while firehawks are pretty decent if it wasn't for their idiotic friendly fire blast radius missiles.

The main AA Platform of use for Nod probably should be the stealth tank. Those own. Recon bikes are only alright.

The venom just can't take damage... Placing them behind SAMs or Buggies allows them to take out enemy air units.

Its not as effective as the GDI AA cannons/Mammoth tanks line with Firehawk interceptors, but then again, NOD air pawns GDI.

[phongn]

GDI AA is outranged by Devestators, though, so you need to have some mobile assets (ideally Firehawks) to deal with 'em.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Okay, I'm beginning to really like this game now that I patched up to 1.4, since it just made the campaign playable. It used to be that the video of the cinematics was jumping between playing fast and not playing at all, and it always ended up nearly a minute behind the dialogue. Now the two are generally synchronised with the occasional hiccup.

Also, I noticed that some of the suggestions people brought up in the RTS thread a month or so ago seem to be in here. Chaingun turrets seem to try to wipe out infantry before they even look at vehicles, and I noticed that if I set my troops to attack-move, any weapons that took some time to get to their targets would automatically divide themselves up so as to not waste shots, such as my rocket infantry blowing up both Venoms simultaneously instead of simply attacking the closer one with everything.

[Laughing Mechanicus]

Also, I noticed that some of the suggestions people brought up in the RTS thread a month or so ago seem to be in here. Chaingun turrets seem to try to wipe out infantry before they even look at vehicles, and I noticed that if I set my troops to attack-move, any weapons that took some time to get to their targets would automatically divide themselves up so as to not waste shots, such as my rocket infantry blowing up both Venoms simultaneously instead of simply attacking the closer one with everything.

Yes, I noticed that too. It's a great addition, not to mention a complete surprise. I'm hoping to open the ini files (or their new xml equivalents) and have a look to see how thoroughly it is implemented throughout the game.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

Finished all three campaigns, and I have to say I was really thrilled to see that all the three campaigns have interwoven storylines. In order to understand it all, you just have to play through all three. Awesome. Anyway, the Second Scrin mission was insane. Took me some 3 hours to finish, not to mention whole doublewide buttload of saves/loads. Its not impossible, just really friggin hard.

Interesting to see all these ideas about how to deploy the Zone Troopers. Personally I've always just sent them in several large units with Mammoth support and they have done their job admirably, apart from a single case where I had some 20 squads of Zone's attacking a Nod base after I waxed most of it with the Ion Cannon. Briefly, I forgot the importance of "dont bunch up" and my Zone Troopers were in a more or less big furball. Well, the Nod AI then decides to drop a fucking minefield on top of their heads and after a brief but painful moment of death, I have 7 badly maimed Zone Trooper squads left. Suffice to say, I was slightly pissed.

[Xon]

Anyway, the Second Scrin mission was insane. Took me some 3 hours to finish, not to mention whole doublewide buttload of saves/loads. Its not impossible, just really friggin hard.

This is the one where you have a mastermind and need to flatten a GDI base?

I did most of that mission with just the Mastermind and using thier own unit's against them, taking out 1/3 of the base was hard with just the mastermind + 1 mindcontrolled unit.

And I didnt lose my Mastermind either.

[Lord Pounder]

Just got into it today. So far i'm unimpressed. The first 4 GDI missions seem to lead you by the nose. If they're gonna make an extrnded tutorial you should have the option of skipping them. Plus whats with all the actors from cult sci-fi. I think they're trying too hard.