What's the chronology of these games?

[Malkavian American]

Just bought 'em recently, and was wantin' to know what order to play them all in, basically.

[Nyerguds]

You mean the original order of release? That would be exactly the order in which they are listed on the bundle info. This is that same list with the expansion packs shown as sub-items:

• Command & Conquer (also known as "Tiberian Dawn")
  
  • Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
  
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Counterstrike
    
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert: The Aftermath
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
  
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: Firestorm
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
  
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge
• Command & Conquer: Renegade
  
• Command & Conquer: Generals
  
  • Command & Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  
  • Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Kane's Wrath
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
  
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising
• Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

If you mean in terms of timelines / universes, well, Red Alert is kind of a time travel mess, so that's not so easy to answer. Red Alert 1 was originally made as prequel to the first Command & Conquer game, but they later decided to make it its own universe, so that idea kind of got thrown out of the window a bit.

Overall, the best playthrough order in my opinion is the order of release; sure, you'll be thrown into the early 90s game controls at first, but as you play on, you will only see the improvements made in the game engines over the years.


Note that "The Covert Operations", "Counterstrike" and "The Aftermath" are just mission packs, not actual full storyline addons. They can be accessed from a separate menu item on the main menu.

But while the Red Alert menu items are simply named like the expansion pack, the one in C&C1 is just called "New Missions". So don't confuse that with the "Start New Game" button; these are some of the toughest official missions in the game, and definitely not what you want to start with.

[Malkavian American]

Thanks.

[Malkavian American]

Any tips for the first game? Started with the Nod campaign and I keep gettin' stuck every now-and-then. Currently stuck trying to steal a nuke from the GDI or something.

[Nyerguds]

You can very often simply rush through these fetch missions with a single recon bike.

If all else fails, look up the map to see where your objective and end points are:
http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstuff/mappics/campaign-nod/
You can find the mission's id code in the bottom right corner of the in-game main menu.

For the rest, some pieces of advice:

• In classic build-and-conquer missions, don't try to starve the AI. It doesn't work, and attacking their harvesters just makes them extremely angry. (This can be used tactically, though, to make them rush all units out of their base.)
  
• Airstrikes in the original game may look scary, but they are extremely dumb. Once you figure out how they target stuff, they will rarely ever bother you again.
  
• The main goal in any mission where you just need to destroy everything is to take out their Construction Yard. If they have multiple (in later missions), you need to destroy them all simultaneously, since the AI can rebuild Construction Yards as buildings from other Construction Yards. (This is a technical limitation; the AI is too primitive to build, position and deploy MCVs.) Once you take out their building capabilities, any building you destroy is permanent progress.
  
• In missions where your objective is not to destroy everything, generally you don't have to bother trying that, either, especially if you have limited troops. Though do be aware that Seth is a jealous bastard who gets increasingly more antagonistic as you progress, and who might not always be telling you everything.

Besides that, I wrote a guide for beating the Covert Operations expansion, and while that's not quite where you are yet, the general hints at the start are still useful in any case.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2417529525
Additionally, I wrote a guide on infantry micromanagement, which can vastly improve your ability to take out much stronger enemies with just a few soldiers. The described techniques are the same in the base game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2757302516

[Malkavian American]

Read through 'em yesterday. Dunno if I understand 'em but my best guess is I should probably try to control each guy individually and spready 'em out. Also never attack from the North. I'm also wondering are the extra missions necessary? Just kinda wantin' to beat the first game then go on to the second to beat that then the third. Same with the Red Alert games.

Edit: Feel I should also mention my experience in RTS games is mainly Dawn of War, Total War Warhammer, and Iron Harvest. Controls with the first game in this series, are a bit weird to me. Used to left-click being to select units (which it is) and right-click to command 'em. Having both be on left-click's kinda just annoying, cause I'll select units to move and then click an area and if there's others of my units in that general area it selects them instead, or if there's no units in the area the game sometimes thinks for whatever reason I'm holding left-click.

[Cat]

The expansion missions of the first 2 games are extra levels that explores more about the game design and mechanics not covered in the campaign. The main campaign is where the main story is being told.

Also, this is one of the earliest RTS games. It was released long before games with right click orders were made. Having played this first, I feel right click orders is weird.

[Nyerguds]

You can always use [alt] force-move if you're selecting or deselecting stuff when trying to move it.

The main principle in C&C is that you don't have anything selected unless you need to. So you select stuff, give orders, and deselect. If you want to keep control of an army, just assign a team number to them so you can easily reselect them.

[Malkavian American]

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

You can always use [alt] force-move if you're selecting or deselecting stuff when trying to move it.

The main principle in C&C is that you don't have anything selected unless you need to. So you select stuff, give orders, and deselect. If you want to keep control of an army, just assign a team number to them so you can easily reselect them.

Assign a team number?

[Nyerguds]

Yea, press [ctrl] plus a number, and it assigns the selected units to that number. Then you can press the number to reselect them easily, or [alt] + the number to select and center them. Starcraft has this exact same system too, in fact.

Red Alert 1 actually shows the number on all units in a team, but neither C&C1 nor Starcraft have that feature.

You know there's a manual in this game, right? It's in the game folder, in a "Manuals" folder.


Note that due to a bug in C&C95 specifically (the old DOS version didn't have it), group #0 can't be assigned, but will still act as selectable group slot, meaning pressing 0 will just deselect everything.

[Cat]

Hmmm I used to think group #0 was a feature to delete group numbers from units.

[Nyerguds]

No, it's definitely a bug; "0" is explicitly mentioned in the manual as being a valid number for a team.

The bug was most likely introduced when converting keyboard input logic from DOS to Win95. Since a lot of things on keyboard level work on the order that keys appear on the keyboard, someone probably assumed that 0 was the last one (or, mabe in DOS that was the case), but in the current code, if you look at the underlying values, this isn't actually true.

In RA they fixed this by specifically checking for all the different number keys, rather than just taking a range. And because of that, RA actually assigns the number 0 to the last team in the list.

There's in fact another bug in the teams logic; when it checks if it needs to deselect the currently selected things, it goes over all selected objects to see if all of them are already in the team. But when doing that, it only checks for the types that can be included in teams; units, infantry and aircraft. Buildings can't be put in teams, so they forgot to add them to that check.

This means that if you got a building selected, and press a team number, it'll add the team units to the selection, but you'll still have the building selected too. Oddly, this bug never got fixed, and is even still in Yuri's Revenge.

[Malkavian American]

Finally got pass the mission where I gotta' steal that damn detonator. There any way on the war map to back outta' selected choices rather than go right in so I can look at another choice for attack? I at least wanna know what I'm in for for each 1 there.

By the way, how I stole that detonator is basically by just rushing my guys into the enemy base to distract the enemy, and snuck a scout bike in during all the chaos to snatch the detonator and get the hell outta' there.

[Nyerguds]

Originally posted by Malkavian American:

Finally got pass the mission where I gotta' steal that damn detonator. There any way on the war map to back outta' selected choices rather than go right in so I can look at another choice for attack? I at least wanna know what I'm in for for each 1 there.

Nope. Simplest way around that is to save at the end of each mission, or to find savegame packs online.

Originally posted by Malkavian American:

By the way, how I stole that detonator is basically by just rushing my guys into the enemy base to distract the enemy, and snuck a scout bike in during all the chaos to snatch the detonator and get the hell outta' there.

A viable tactic, yea. The thing to remember about crate missions is that they are kind of simpler than they look (in scripting, that is); your objective isn't really to pick up the crate and bring it to the pickup point; the scripting engine isn't advanced enough for that. Your real objective is to have a unit move onto the cell where the crate is, and to move a unit on the cells around the pickup point.

The order of these events doesn't even matter, and it doesn't have to be the same unit. You can perfectly suicide a unit into that crate, and move a completely different unit to the pickup point, and it'll still count.

Bizarrely enough, the game contains a "Capture The Flag" mode that does indeed attach a flag to the unit that picked it up, and requires you to physically drop it off at a designated pickup point, with that carrying unit, with a whole system that the flag is dropped if the unit dies, and can be picked up by another one then. So I'm not sure why they didn't use that same concept for these missions.

[Malkavian American]

I figured it didn't really matter which unit reaches the chopper whether they were the 1 that picked the package up or some other random unit, but I also figured scout bike's fast enough, might as well keep him goin' long as he ain't dead.

Edit: Also, think the most recent mission I've done is where you blow up those double Barrel tanks.

[Malkavian American]

So quick update on where I'm at with the Nod Campaign. Believe I've done 2 missions where I'm given a commando, maybe 3 I don't remember, but I know that the commando is so far my favorite unit. I don't like how squishy he is for a unit I can't make more of, but I love how far away he can shoot from, makes pickin' off those damn grenadiers of the GDI a hell of a lot easier, and not only that, but I also have to make sure I have other soldiers near by to clear out evacuees of any buildings I have him destroy, else he might get shot dead.