How frustrating is the Campaign?

[Double Down]

Are you reaching for the heart pills when you're playing this sucker?

[kakiss4]

Play it on easy and it is easy.

[Mati_Lublin]

There're some missions requiring savescumming and/or knowing the map, but on Casual there should be no problem.

[lucent]

GDI is easy enuff, Nod is trial and error.

[Double Down]

any tips for hard, or is it a case by case basis for each mission?
I attempted GDI mission 4 (poland village defense) about 10 times, finally figuring out a decent strategy, then the tanks ran down the troops...barely cheesed it with 3 grenade men left.
I haven't played this game since the 90's so I can't remember if I ever attempted hard mode, but even normal sometimes takes the piiss

[Nyerguds]

I breeze through it on Normal. I need hard mode to give me a decent challenge.

Originally posted by Dr. ♥♥♥♥ Butcus:

any tips for hard, or is it a case by case basis for each mission?
I attempted GDI mission 4 (poland village defense) about 10 times, finally figuring out a decent strategy, then the tanks ran down the troops...barely cheesed it with 3 grenade men left.
I haven't played this game since the 90's so I can't remember if I ever attempted hard mode, but even normal sometimes takes the piiss

There's a sneaky trick in that one. Don't enter the bridge to the south, and the tanks will never even come. Just make sure no Noddies cross the bridge, and wipe out everything in the north, and you win. Simple as that.

Besides that... if you do face tanks... face them with minigunners. Not with grenadiers.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2757302516
Minigunners will beat the heck out of tanks as long as you know what you're doing. Grenadiers, on the other hand, will make the tanks constantly move around trying to evade grenades, and this will inevitably end with them crushing your soldiers.

And on Hard mode, enemy tanks will always attempt to crush soldiers that attack them from too close by. On Casual mode they never do that at all, and on Normal they only do it starting from level 8.

[Double Down]

I likewise want to sharpen my skills up, and hard mode seems to provide the most engaging experience.
Ah "sub-cell", kudos man. And that was my exact frustration with the grenadiers vs tanks. I also did take note of proximity, where tanks will automatically try rolling over soldiers who are within range and I guess if grenadiers are making them reposition they are more likely to make some fodder.

[The C&C Strategist]

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

I breeze through it on Normal. I need hard mode to give me a decent challenge.

Originally posted by Dr. ♥♥♥♥ Butcus:

any tips for hard, or is it a case by case basis for each mission?
I attempted GDI mission 4 (poland village defense) about 10 times, finally figuring out a decent strategy, then the tanks ran down the troops...barely cheesed it with 3 grenade men left.
I haven't played this game since the 90's so I can't remember if I ever attempted hard mode, but even normal sometimes takes the piiss

There's a sneaky trick in that one. Don't enter the bridge to the south, and the tanks will never even come. Just make sure no Noddies cross the bridge, and wipe out everything in the north, and you win. Simple as that.

I learned how to play on hard by taking it on a case by case basis.

I wouldn't form any general opinions over the GDI mission (Reinforce Bialystok I believe?) you just played. The briefing kind of misleads you and if you've played the other two options (Stolen Property) before, you'll naturally want to get to the village ASAP which as you've seen can be your undoing. As Nyerguds said, don't cross the bridge at the south part of the map and the mission should be easier.

If you're hitting a wall with that mission, I found the left option on the selection map to be the easiest of the three.

[Double Down]

Originally posted by The C&C Strategist:

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

I breeze through it on Normal. I need hard mode to give me a decent challenge.



There's a sneaky trick in that one. Don't enter the bridge to the south, and the tanks will never even come. Just make sure no Noddies cross the bridge, and wipe out everything in the north, and you win. Simple as that.

I learned how to play on hard by taking it on a case by case basis.

I wouldn't form any general opinions over the GDI mission (Reinforce Bialystok I believe?) you just played. The briefing kind of misleads you and if you've played the other two options (Stolen Property) before, you'll naturally want to get to the village ASAP which as you've seen can be your undoing. As Nyerguds said, don't cross the bridge at the south part of the map and the mission should be easier.

If you're hitting a wall with that mission, I found the left option on the selection map to be the easiest of the three.

I managed all of the missions/options up to 5 for both GDI/Nod on hard . But I definitely cheesed it, with me forcing victory conditions with like 2 or 3 units left. But I'm starting to understand that I have to really get better at the game, and only resolve to look up the select strategies when I'm really up against a wall.

[Cat]

Originally posted by Dr. ♥♥♥♥ Butcus:

I haven't played this game since the 90's so I can't remember if I ever attempted hard mode, but even normal sometimes takes the piiss

Hard mode was only introduced in the remaster. I played this game a lot and got used to the normal balance before the remaster release so playing on hard kinda made me wanna unlearn whatever I know about the game and relearn because the stats change heavily changed the game's balance.

If I'm playing for a challenge, I usually play normal and try to win with 0 casualties which is more fun and doable. I did win all Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert remastered missions on hard and what I remember was throwing bodies at the enemy while barely making income until I was ahead. It was a long grind and I won after the tiberium on maps have finished. It's just two steps forward and one step back. It's a lot easier if you know the AI behavior and mission scripts.

[Sir Fluffykins]

Just spent 4 hours of the final GDI mission C&C, Normal, not because it was hard but because opponent ai is built on old school cheats, so no sooner destroyed everything ai has and it's rebuilt it and your attack force is in pieces

When I finally found where the second command centre was it rebuilt the first, etc. Got most of my money sending engineers in apcs to camp by their silos and every time their harvester docked I got around 5k.

I don't know how I finished these as a kid because watching most of the enemy base get rebuilt in seconds and having to use cheese and engineers is hardly "challenge" it's frustrating and bad design.

[Nyerguds]

Originally posted by Sir Fluffykins:

Just spent 4 hours of the final GDI mission C&C, Normal, not because it was hard but because opponent ai is built on old school cheats, so no sooner destroyed everything ai has and it's rebuilt it and your attack force is in pieces

Anyone playing the C&C campaign missions for even a moderate amount of time should figure out that the primary objective of any build and conquer mission is simply to locate all of the enemy's construction yards, and take them all out simultaneously. Nothing else matters. In most missions with multiple CYs there's at least one remote one you can capture for yourself, too.

Additionally, in the GDI campaigns, destroy each SAM Site once (regardless of rebuilding) and you will get access to Airstrikes. And in all Nod missions, destroy their Communications Center and the airstrikes stop. These are basic rules that are scripted into all missions, and which you can pretty much always rely on.

Note that some of these "stop enemy airstrike" scripts were broken in the original game. But given the fact this mechanic is specifically mentioned in the manual,[i.imgur.com] it was absolutely intended, and the Remaster fixed all such broken scripts to make it a reliable mechanism as it should be. In fact, the same rule applies in one Covert Ops mission where Nod has Airstrikes.

[Double Down]

I'm glad you guys are commenting cause I get to learn a lot.
It would be a grievous misstep for petroglyph to release a difficulty mode that isn't possible to beat, so it's good to know that Hard is achievable...just not without absolutely knowing victory conditions and enemy placements.

[Nyerguds]

Originally posted by Dr. ♥♥♥♥ Butcus:

It would be a grievous misstep for petroglyph to release a difficulty mode that isn't possible to beat, so it's good to know that Hard is achievable...just not without absolutely knowing victory conditions and enemy placements.

They um. Kinda did. Originally. As mentioned, the Hard Mode was an entirely new thing added to Tiberian Dawn in the Remaster. Red Alert already had difficulty levels, but TD did not. And they didn't exactly get it right from the start; the Hard Mode that the TD remaster released with was insanely hard. It was toned down in a later patch.

See, here's a funny story. I was in the community council during development (I made the unofficial patch for C&C95, so I have a ton of knowledge on the internals and bugs in the game. We gave feedback on development and helped beta test the game), and during beta testing, we were asked to look into Nod mission 8A and see if it was beatable, because apparently the EA testers had issues with that mission.

And. Um.

Let's just say that people who have literally been playing the game for 27 years straight might not have been the best people to ask. It was nail-bitingly, face-meltingly difficult, but to Tore and me, well... after all that time, we finally had a real challenge. So we both reported back that yes, we did in fact manage to beat the mission, and the game shipped with that ultra-hard Hard Mode in place. We never even considered elaborating that we had to save scum to hell and back to get through, and duck our harvester into the refinery to avoid it getting airstriked; to us, that was just what we expected from 'Hard Mode'.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2796039815
So yea. They had to tweak that in a later patch

[Double Down]

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

Originally posted by Dr. ♥♥♥♥ Butcus:

It would be a grievous misstep for petroglyph to release a difficulty mode that isn't possible to beat, so it's good to know that Hard is achievable...just not without absolutely knowing victory conditions and enemy placements.

They um. Kinda did. As mentioned, the Hard Mode was an entirely new thing added to Tiberian Dawn in the Remaster. Red Alert already had difficulty levels, but TD did not. And they didn't exactly get it right from the start; the Hard Mode that the TD remaster released with was insanely hard.

I was in the community council during development (we gave feedback on development and helped beta test the game), and during beta testing, we were asked to look into Nod mission 8A and see if it was beatable, because apparently the EA testers had issues with that mission.

And. Um.

Let's just say that people who have literally been playing the game for 27 years straight might not have been the best people to ask. It was nail-bitingly, face-meltingly difficult, but to Tore and me, well... after all that time, we finally had a real challenge. So we both reported back that yes, we did in fact manage to beat the mission, and the game shipped with that ultra-hard Hard Mode in place. We never even considered elaborating that we had to save scum to hell and back to get through, and duck our harvester into the refinery to avoid it getting airstriked; to us, that was just what we expected from 'Hard Mode'.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2796039815
So yea. They had to tweak that in a later patch :crtstressed:

Wow, now I understand why you're such a fixture of this community. That's a pretty funny story too, considering how many people probably popped a blood vessel playing this remaster. C&C was my first and most fondly remembered strategy game, but I'm not very good at these kinds of games I guess..likely a common experience to someone coming back to this game after 27 years

[Nyerguds]

I know what you said about "only looking up select strategies when you're really up against a wall", but, my guide for the Covert Operations goes over a bunch of generally handy hints. The infantry guide kind of grew from that; it just became too big so I migrated it to its own thing.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2417529525
So yea, even if you don't want to go into specific mission guides, that first part might still be really useful.